Presswatch

...Many news stories and book reviews have called this implausible...

...Hersh takes it all down...

...S ex, of course, is the real topic of Hersh's book: How many times can he catch Kennedy flagrante delicto...

...Anyway the affair lasted from 1959 to 1962, although before it was over she suspected that Kennedy was being unfaithful...

...For all the chest-thumping Hersh does about his reporting, too often it is mere speculation and surmise...

...Exner also says she carried bribes to Kennedy from California businessmen, which seems even more implausible, although few journalists seem to have noticed it...

...But the owner of the art gallery insisted to Time that he had told Hersh only about two pictures, and that while they did show three masked figures in a bed, the covers were pulled up to their necks, and anyway the pictures were not sexually explicit...

...Hersh may have terrible judgment, but his quotes are attributed, and he seldom uses anonymous sources...

...She remembers "how intensely he had focused on their winning...

...Then, one page later, Hersh writes about "the extraordinary series of interviews" he had with one of Kennedy's old lovers...

...He made his bones by exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, for which he won a Pulitzer JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...

...Where were Sorensen and Schlesinger when Hersh wrote about Kissinger...

...Jack always wanted to know where I was at all times," she told him...

...11 but he had no trouble finding stuff to replace it...

...In The Dark Side of Camelot, Hersh is doing what he always has done, although this time he is being penalized...

...an exercise in political fantasy," says Schlesinger) you can hear the sound of liberal self-interest...

...So, how could Hersh be such a good reporter then, and such a lousy reporter now...

...On the other hand, when Hersh once wrote that the Reagan administration had sent planes over Libya expressly to kill Colonel Qaddafi, hardly a journalist anywhere protested, even though the evidence Hersh marshaled was porous...

...Just as she says, when she was 20 she "did not have the foggiest idea of any consciousness of solidarity with other women...

...Prize...

...they were the plot's prime movers...

...Hand it to the city editor of the Dog-patch Gazette and it would bounce back so heavily blue-penciled that scarcely a word would remain...

...It seems he shoots from the hip, makes wild surmises, and recycles old rumors...

...This time it is his mother who pushed him to be a success...

...Yardley was right at least about the chest-thumping...

...Clearly Hersh is some hard worker...

...Hersh is the investigative reporter as left-wing avenging angel...

...deplore Hersh's findings ("a pathetic collection of wild stories," according to Sorensen...

...Some adult at Newsweek should have killed his column...

...Perhaps there was a connection, although Hersh never quite proves it, but it still is unlikely that's why he put in all the sex stuff...

...On the other hand, you may prefer to believe what the Palm Beach lady once told the London Sunday Times: "I wouldn't have married Jack Kennedy for all the tea in China...

...In some of the pictures, he also wrote, Kennedy appears among a group of people wearing masks...

...Then, when the Washington Post was beating the New York Times's brains out on Watergate, a distraught A. M. Rosenthal, the Times's great editor, hired Hersh to help the Times get even...

...Everything we know about the two Kennedys suggests that they were forever attempting to demonstrate to themselves and to others their toughness...

...The old left-wing avenger just believed everything he was told...

...At the bottom of the page, however, Hersh quotes a man who, in turn, quotes Kennedy...

...As he now admits himself, his principal source for The Sampson Option, his book about Israel's nuclear-weapons program, turns out to have been a liar...

...The Dark Side of Camelot, however, just doesn't have many ladies who sound like that...

...He is widely criticized now for listening to Judith Exner, who told him, among other things, that Kennedy once gave her a bag full of cash to deliver to mobster Sam Giancana...

...It is permissible to claim, as the New York Times did recently in what was supposedly a straight news story, that Nixon "set a standard for political corruption never since equaled," but it is very bad manners to prove, as Hersh does in his book, that Jack Kennedy was a boor...

...I'll tell you why, if you want to know...

...The culture takes care of its own, and much of the criticism now of Hersh is specious...

...Hersh even won a National Book Critics Circle Award...

...In other words, there was a connection between Kennedy's sexual behavior and his conduct of domestic and foreign policy...

...If a government is going to assassinate someone, however, it ought not to talk about it, and Stephanopoulos, once a high White House official, has provided Iraq with a provocative new propaganda topic...

...That sounds like a real woman speaking, of course...

...The Dark Side ofCamelot is full of "interviews for this book," things "made public for the first time in this book," things "long suspected and assumed but not confirmed until this book," and things that, "until this book, had not been known...

...Hersh inexplicably ignores Ben Bradlee's late sister-in-law, by all accounts a very niceperson, although he does give us a woman who may or may not have been running a call-girl ring—it's a little unclear—and who tells him that Kennedy loved her until he died, but she did not want to marry him because she did not like his father...

...Journalists, though, do not necessarily read everything in a book when they write about it...

...He even seems to prove that Kennedy was briefly married, to a Palm Beach lady in 1947, before he met Jackie...

...Hersh told the Times he "put in all the sex stuff because it goes right to [Kennedy's] character, his recklessness, his notion of being above the law...

...Hersh has been doing it for years...

...In an utterly irresponsible Why did the libs turn on their onetime favorite...

...Hours at dinner, or in long conversations...

...If Hersh is right, Kennedy was also calling Judith Exner every night...

...This time Hersh was on the wrong side...

...Hersh is also under attack for making what his critics say are unfounded charges, in particular the charge that John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy not only knew of a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro...

...Moreover, he has urged other reporters to check out what his sources have told him...

...You may see a similar compulsion now in the otherwise sprite-like George Stephanopoulos...

...When Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...Hersh wrote that during the Kennedy presidency a Secret Service agent brought "sexually explicit photographs of a naked President with various paramours" to be framed at a Washington art gallery...

...Meanwhile, pace Jonathan Yardley, but as investigative journalism goes these days, The Dark Side ofCamelot is top of the line...

...And she is breaking her silence in the extraordinary series of interviews because now she feels guilty about having carried on with a married man...

...Hersh did indeed help, and then he left the Times, although he went back later to write about the CIA and domestic spying...

...He is, in fact, a very good reporter, and he ferrets out mountains of information, but there is some information the culture would rather not know...

...Time took up the challenge, and found that "in a few cases" Hersh's sources said that his "account of their stories differs from what they recall telling him...

...As Time said, "Sy Hersh's tell-all is short on evidence," even though it was the "most unrelenting compendium of accusations" against John F. Kennedy ever assembled by a big-shot reporter...

...The tell-all, of course, was The Dark Side of Camelot, Hersh's new book, and, hard as Hersh tried, apparently he just couldn't deliver...

...He also wrote a best seller, The Price ofPower: Kissinger in the Nixon White House...

...Exner, the old girlfriend of both Kennedy and Giancana, apparently makes up things...

...He bullies sources, and screams into telephones, and is full of his own indignation...

...She was a 20-year-old Radcliffe student, and he was President of the United States, and "she spent hours, after making love with him, at dinner, or in long conversations in bed...

...You understand this early on...

...And the answer is that it is one thing to write about Kissinger or Nixon, and another to write about Kennedy...

...Wham-barn Jack Kennedy and a Cliffie...

...On page 17, or one page after he has misspelled the last name of one of Kennedy's early romances (it's McDonnell, not MacDonald), Hersh quotes a woman who tells him that Kennedy's father wanted his children "to be number one...

...Actually it is hard to see how she could have thought otherwise...

...He had to excise the part about Kennedy paying Marilyn Monroe $600,000 in hush money when it was found that the evidence for it was bogus,44 It is one thing to write about Kissinger or Nixon, and another to write about Kennedy...

...40 January 1998 • The American Spectator column in Newsweek, he has urged the Clinton administration to assassinate Sad-dam Hussein...

...Time, however, seemed able to find only one account that had an appreciable difference...

...Different standards apply in the dominant media culture...

...Oki The American Spectator • January 1998 41...

...Uh huh...

...Hersh, it seems, had written a very bad book, and what was worse, he was a really rotten reporter...

...The Dark Side of Camelot had a first printing of 350,000, and as Hersh has also said, he wanted to write "a big, big book...

...Sure, Sy...

...Nonetheless Hersh has often used suspect sources before...

...Most ordinary readers, though, are likely to agree with Hersh and not his critics about the plot to kill Castro...

...Kissinger, of course, came off very badly, and the book was widely praised...

...And there were many others, of course...

...According to Newsweek, he had been telling other reporters for years that "he was going to expose the darkest secrets of the Kennedy family," but everything he ended up exposing was stuff we already knew...

...Or, as Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Washington Post, "The Dark Side of Camelot can and should be read as a case study in how not to do investigative journalism...

...Hersh, for example, always has had a weakness for sources who tell him what he wants to hear...

...I don't care for those Irish micks, and old Joe was a terrible man...