FAKING KENNEDY:

Hersh-It Journalism

Harold Weisberg

© 1997, 1998

Table of Contents

Foreword — The My Lai- ing of "Camelot" and of Our History	iii

1	How To "Make a Score" and "Retire"	1

2	Hersh Does Not have To Be "Objective" — And He Isn't	21

3	Hersh "Represses" The Truth To Make Up His Smear	49

4	Hersh Cranks Up His Imagined Model T Ford	69

5	Hersh's "Professional Reputation in Tatters"	89

6	"Learn To Live In His Own Slop"	119

7	The CIA Created Its Own Assassination "Authority"	135

8	"History Corrupted As The CIA Corrupts History"	155

9	One Example of Hersh's Omission of What Proves Hersh Untruthful	177

10	Exner: "Distortions and Inconsistencies" Only?	193

11	Hersh As His Own Exner	211

12	"A Man Whose Personal Weaknesses Limited His Ability": Sy Hersh	233

13	Hersh Shows How Kennedy Assassinated Diem — By Trying to Save Him	249

14	The Pulitzer Prize Reporter And Some of What He Suppresses	263

15	"Fortunate . . . Kennedy Was The President Charged With Managing The Crisis"	285

16	The CIA And The Lumumba Assassination	299

17	What There Is In The CIA For Hersh To Trust	315

18	Conclusions	335

Epilogue	341

Bibliography	369

Foreword:

The My Lai- ing of "Camelot" and of Our History

Beginning with the war in Viet Nam, Seymour M. Hersh was, for some years, one of the country's most important, most respected and most able and competent reporters. He earned the Pulitzer Prize he was awarded for his work. The prize is considered by most the highest honor that can be paid a reporter. But it was an entirely different Sy Hersh who conceived and then wrote and then promoted his mistitled book, The Dark Side of Camelot. After I decided, before it appeared, that it was really the dark side of Sy Hersh, I was sent newspaper and magazine clippings by friend and learned that one or two others saw it the same way, referred to the book as Hersh's dark side.

The book that is truly the very dark side of what had been an outstanding journalist is disgusting in its concept, disgraceful in its lack of professionalism, degenerate in is lack of standards, depraved morally and intellectually and it is as intendedly dishonest a book as I can recall.

In Hersh's own words, this book was to make him enough money so that he could retire and not have to write for a livelihood. Largely because of the scandals created by and involving the book and Harsh, the book may have made him that much money. Scandals, controversies of any kind, have the effect of increasing the sale of books. They can, and with this thoroughly disgusting disgrace by Hersh they did, create Page-One stories across the land.

The first of the scandals was when it was disclosed that Hersh had adopted and was using in his book what were palpable forgeries all aimed at debasing the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. There were also what would be, for any self-respecting writer, scandalous exposés of the book once it was out. Almost no reviewer or interviewer thought other than ill of it and most said so forcefully and emphatically. The condemnations of Hersh and of his book included those who had anti-Kennedy records of their own and even some of the politically extreme right.

That Hersh was going with frauds become known when NBC-TV, having paid in seven figures for the rights to use what would be in the book, gave all that money up once it had some of the alleged Hersh documentation examined by experts, who were convinced that those documents were fakes.

Some should have raised questions in the minds of bright high-school students, and they were of a nature guaranteed to make headlines. One was a forged contract allegedly between Marilyn Monroe and the President in which, in return for Monroe's silence about their alleged (but unproven) affair he agreed to pay her mother a large sum of money for her declining years. No reasonably intelligent teenager would have believed that the President would have put his name on any such document and risk having it ruin him and his political life and reputation.

Anything about Marilyn Monroe makes headlines and this fake did.

Any President is legitimate news. Kennedy by polls the most popular of presidents, was more newsworthy. Then there were the reports, all unproven, linking him and his also assassinated brother both romantically with the Hollywood sex goddess. All of this magnified the attention the fakes got and greatly enhanced interest in the coming Hersh book.

When that book appeared, as we see in sufficient but less than the fullest possible detail, it was largely a rehash of what the supermarket tabloids had been hawking for years along with Hersh's exaggerations of some of them. For his exaggerations and outright lies he depended on the most undependable sources, and he treated all of them as the most solid and dependable, as beyond question.

Hersh holds President Kennedy to be responsible for three assassinations of heads of state, those that did kill Diem of South Viet Nam, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic plus the failed efforts to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro. Dependable, readily available and thoroughly official information that Hersh ignored proved him wrong on this but with the truth not likely to earn his retirement to a life of ease without writing, he went with what were often obvious lies. With the CIA's plots to assassinate Castro, Hersh had and used an official, high-level CIA prepared memorandum on its plot with the Mafia. This memorandum was prepared for the Attorney General and disclosed to me by the Department of Justice, with the CIA clearing it and sending it to me. It stated unequivocally that the plot was of the Eisenhower administration. It did not attribute that plot to Eisenhower but it did date its origin to August, 1960, which was before Kennedy was even elected. That CIA record states, also unequivocally, that only six people were aware of that plot and that all six were high CIA officials. This alone, of course, eliminated the Kennedys.

That same CIA record discloses that it had allocated $150,000 for the Mafia, with which it connived at the Castro assassination, and that those Mafia people involved refused to accept a penny of it.

Hersh had that memo, misuses parts of it, and what he suppresses of it includes what is stated above.

He had to suppress that not to discredit what he used from the most undependable of sources, a former "party girl", Judith Campbell Exner. In her fabrications she was the courier, the one person President Kennedy used, to send vast sums of money to the Mafia, to its Chicago don, Sam " Momo " Giancana, the same mobster the President's brother, the Attorney General, was bending every possible effort to throw in jail and lose the key on him.

In this Hershification of history, the Mafia that would not take money from the CIA demanded it of the President, who had nothing to do with that plot, did not even know about it, and of all the people available to him this woman, who slept around quite a bit, including allegedly with both the President and Giancana, was the only person he knew and could trust with all that money for that criminal activity.

She traveled without any guard and delivered the money to him, in this Hersh fantasy, in public, at the Chicago terminal that teemed with people.

Hersh even includes her yarn that some of the messages she claims to have carried from the President to Giancana were given to her unsealed by the President and, of course, she read none of them.

Arming Giancana to make it impossible for his brother, the attorney general, to convict and jail him, was what the President would have done?

Impossible as this is to believe, this Hershification for the dirtiest kind of money, has Exner pregnant, with the President allegedly making her pregnant, and if that had been true, of all the people in the world the President knew, of all the many doctors he knew so well, of all those with whom he had the most intimate and political relationships, none would do for getting Exner her abortion she says, without any proof at all, that she had. Only that same Mafia don, Giancana, that same Attorney General brother was, to the President's knowledge, bending every effort to make a criminal case against.

Of course this has no credibility at all, this added ammunition to prevent the indictment and trial of Giancana, but it is a major one of the fabrications in the fabricated case against the President that did enrich Hersh.

Who in his earlier day would have is split a gut laughing if any such preposterous stories had been told him. They are absurd, so absurd they would have been laughed at in a freshman journalism course.

Those who were really the to-be assassins were the CIA. Yet with this their clear record, with them having this to play down and attribute to others, Hersh uses without question those of the CIA, with all they had to hide, to try to shift responsibility for what they did to Kennedy. They would assassinate, therefore he, who knew nothing about it, was responsible.

When Soviet missiles capable of desolating a major part of the United States were proven to be in Cuba and Kennedy was methodical and careful in figuring out what to do to get them removed without going to war, Hersh makes up a flimsy case of dishonesty on Kennedy's part to obscure the fact that Kennedy created the situation in which Khrushchev was willing to withdraw his missiles, bombers and most of his people. It was a great accomplishment, one respected and admired throughout the world, one in which Kennedy was virtually alone in his correct understanding of Khrushchev and how to bring that, the crisis of greatest potential danger in the history of the world, to a peaceful conclusion.

Hersh could hardly treat with this real achievement in realistic terms so he created a fiction that he could then, with consummate dishonesty, misrepresent to make it appear that Kennedy's great accomplishment was a failure!

There is nothing too preposterous, nothing too ridiculous, nothing too impossible for Hersh not to corrupt, misrepresent, invent and seem to make out of it what it was not so that, with this corruption that permeates, all of his book, he can make up a nonexisting case against the Kennedy Presidency.

Of all the books I have read about the Kennedys, their assassinations and the investigations of their assassination, most of which are disgracefully bad and ignorant, books of what it praises them to call of speculation, as I look back over all those years, this literary atrocity of Hersh's is the most intendedly dishonest of them all, and my were there many ! ! !

If Hersh were not the excellent reporter he has been, if he were not the accomplished writer of his record, if he did not have his record for clear thinking in what he put on paper, it might be possible to believe that the permeating dishonesty of this book and his promotions of it were other than the most deliberate, conscious, thought-through and decided — on dishonesty. The only possible alternative is that he lost contact with reality.

Hersh was frank in saying that he planned the book to make him enough money for him to retire on it. The reporter in him knew that would get attention and could lead to the controversy that sells more books. This is true of all the outlandish and outrageous attention-getters in his book and in those appearances.

The more one gets into the book the more difficult it gets to believe that his efforts to crucify all the Kennedys was only to make money. The more one gets into his fabrications and those of others he credits fully, for all the world as though they were true where they were not obviously impossible, the more it became apparent that whatever his reason, Hersh has the additional motivation of hatred.

He hates the Kennedys and he is going to get them, whatever that requires.

And, whatever that requires, he is up to it.

Dishonest, depraved, disgusting as it is.

In many ways this is tragic.

It is tragic because of the vast number of people reached and influenced by this intended corruption of our history, the efforts and the corruption not those of Hersh alone. He was joined in it by Little, Brown, which did not submit the manuscript for competent peer review, once the tradition of nonfiction book publishing that too many of the super-rich book publishers that are part of vast conglomerates have abandoned for such books. Hersh was joined by ABC-TV, which reached more people than the book, any book, could hope to reach, with its two-hour TV rendition of the lies and fabrications of the book. And ABC-TV did that after NBC-TV, which had a large investment in it, wasted that investment by dropping out when it was satisfied what it was offered was not honest — was forged!

It is tragic in that it means the end of Hersh as a respected writer, as a writer who can be trusted, as a writer who would seek to inform the people truthfully about issues popular understanding of which is necessary for our political system to work the way intended.

It is tragic because it adds to disillusionment, to disenchantment with government. In recent years this disenchantment was accelerated beginning with the assassination of the President. It was added to by the assassinations that followed, by dissatisfaction with their official solutions, and by the wide-spread unpopularity of the Viet Nam war. While government must earn respect to have it, it is tragic that some of the remaining respect is lost because of the commercialization of lies about; it and about our history.

It is not unreasonable to regard anything that discourages popular involvement with government in a society like ours as a kind of subversion.

If Hersh had set out to undermine confidence in government he could not have succeeded better than he did with it.

What he did was use sex, which always sells, to attract attention to his determined effort to destroy the assassinated President's reputation with falsehood, distortion and exaggeration and from the combination get his money and his renewed fame.

When in Canada promoting his book, Hersh's jaws, usually slack, loosened up a bit more, as we see. He told one Toronto reporter that he used this rehash of the sexual allegations as bait. He referred to it, his word, as a "sideshow" in his book.

He told another Toronto reporter that there was "rough justice" in the President's assassination. This was to say that he believes the President deserved assassination. The Toronto story does not quote Hersh on why he thinks the President deserved to be assassinated, but the inference is because he was responsible for some of our assassinations and attempted assassinations.

As we see, this is a lie Hersh exploited and whether or not he came to believe it, it is a lie — as a basis for attempting to destroy the President's reputation. That it is a proven lie was in the official information he had and suppressed and in other readily available information he ignored. Which for a book like this means suppressed,

It means that his book is a lie.

Ordinarily the use of this word is avoided. There are ways of saying the same thing with less pointedness, less vigor. However, with Hersh having used the word with regard to what the President said and what his brother, the Attorney General said, Hersh justifies the use of the most pointed, the most forceful reference to and description of what he did, for money and without truth.