Trading In a Hard-Won Reputation
BRINKLEY, DOUGLAS
Trading In a Hard-Won Reputation The Dark Side of Camelot By Seymour M. Hersh Little, Brown. 498 pp. $26.95. Reviewed by Douglas Brinkley Director of the Eisenhower Center and...
...Each time someone comes to her door waving dollar bills in her face for yet another tell-all exclusive, she embroiders a new yarn...
...Her notorious affair with JFK is well known, so the issue is how much credence to accord the new tale she tells Hersh, to wit: that JFK handed her a bag filled with cash—for delivery to "Sam Flood" (i.e...
...he tried to have Fidel Castro assassinated...
...The most damning aspects of The Dark Side of Camelot are its triviality, sensationalism and the failure to connect those portions that are true to any larger context...
...It is a potent myth, as the fabulous prices paid for Jacqueline Kennedy's memorabilia in 1996 showed...
...It is a compendium of speculative accusations, many of which have been the central themes of nearly 100 previous scandal-mongering books on IFK...
...Hersh's exposé is a way station on the Road to Watergate...
...His cynical portrayal of the Kennedy brothers as reckless is belied by the detailed account of the missile crisis in The Kennedy Tapes...
...His treatment of Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis is so vapid it verges on the sophomoric...
...With the President's assassination on November 22,1963, a cottage industry of Kennedyana grew up...
...Although doubts about the authenticity of the Monroe-JFK letters had circulated for months, he only repudiated them publicly at the 11th hour...
...Like a relentless prosecuting attorney, Hersh has abandoned civility and good judgment for the modus operandi of an attack dog...
...Perhaps the roots lie partially in the Kennedy success at creating the myth of Camelot, blasted permanently into American consciousness by the gunshots in Dallas...
...What remains that is new, believable and enlightening...
...Briefly enumerated, they are, in rough chronological order: Kennedy was a bigamist who stole the Presidency from Richard M. Nixon with the help of Chicago mobsters...
...the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, with whom the very affectionate Exner was also having an affair) to help buy the 1960 election in Chicago...
...The affair was a low moment in Kennedy's Presidency...
...Flashforward to the present: With his latest book, The Dark Side of Camelot, Hersh trades his hard-won reputation as a reliable investigative reporter for a mess of pottage and the chance to jump on the celebrity journalist bandwagon alongside Geraldo, Maury Povich and the denizens of Hard Copy...
...close attention was instantly paid...
...What's left of Hersh's gossipy volume once the most newsworthy documents have been shown to be forgeries...
...The attacks on Camelot began while Kennedy was in the White House...
...Despite not being able to find a shred of documentary confirmation ora corroborating source for Spalding's story, Hersh then slyly writes: "No evidence of a divorce could be found during research for this book...
...and, with the assistance of brother Robert, he was a veritable Job Corps for the nation's prostitutes...
...Hersh has unearthed the testimony of four Secret Service agents who earnestly attest to sexual goings-on at a pace that leaves one wondering when JFK ever had time to make fund-raising phone calls...
...Exner has been telling her romance saga with some regularity during the past two decades— among other places, in her autobiography My Story...
...Now we have Hersh accepting as conclusive evidence the say-so of a low-rent Mafia stooge and of Judith Campbell Exner...
...Most Americans are grateful to him, and to correspondents like Bernard Fall and David Halberstam, beacons of truth and justice, for also exposing the CIA's spying on American opponents of the Nixon-Kissinger war in Southeast Asia...
...It's an old story, the tale ofttimes told...
...The answer is not much...
...But here came Hersh with supposedly incriminating new evidence of JFK's debauchery...
...Hersh made international headlines, painting him primarily as a dupe...
...and Theodore C. Sorensen...
...As for the 1960 Presidential race, from the moment John F. Kennedy was declared the winner rumors flew that his scant margin of victory was gained by fraud involving Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley's political machine...
...A corrosive immorality permeates our government as the Administration tries, in vain, to justify its continuation of the killing in Cambodia and Laos...
...Granted, these were all the President's men, but their narratives are viewed as valuable historical contributions because they are issue-oriented...
...It is a sorry spectacle when tabloid standards can claim so distinguished a convert...
...If The Dark Side of Camelot had been written by someone of lesser stature, it would have been dismissed as merely another in a long line of tawdry disclosures of John F. Kennedy's sex life, mob connections, and anti-Castro obsessions...
...Hersh's declaration that he wrote the book so America could "reclaim some of its history," is disingenuous, put to the lie by Chapter Notes that merely serve to obfuscate sources...
...The first wave included moving testimonies from such devoted acolytes as Robert F. Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...The answer is no...
...Reeves, in President Kennedy, captures the essence of the adulterous liaison and its historical significance in apt proportion to its effect on policymaking...
...Even if these stories are true, and they might well be, it is my old-fashioned opinion that we do not pay taxes for Secret Service agents to be loose-lipped when they retire...
...Sad to say, Seymour Hersh no longer qualifies for the honorable profession of journalist—"a person who writes about factual events for a living...
...How did we arrive at this dismal state of affairs...
...Before publication, excitement was abuilding among the media illuminati, for, like a Hollywood mogul prior to a movie opening, the author was busily trying to create a buzz by flashing "documents" around Washington and New York...
...These men were sworn to secrecy to protect the President, not gleefully sing like canaries when a muckraker comes along...
...History, I predict, will relegate The Dark Side of Camelot to the dustbin alongside the rants of Victor Lasky...
...Lasky was regarded as a crackpot by most commentators, and his moneymaker was roundly dismissed by scholars as conspiratorial claptrap for one simple reason: He failed to provide credible evidence...
...Malcolm has consistently maintained that there wasn't any marriage, and there is no credible reason to doubt her veracity...
...Hersh, by contrast, buys whole hog the story this woman with a 20-year record of imaginative embellishment sold him...
...There has never been proof of the allegation that could hold up in a court of law...
...The rare substantive material he brings to the general public, such as the confession of CIA officer Richard Bissell that the Kennedy Administration considered having Fidel Castro assassinated, first appeared nearly 13 years ago in the quarterly Diplomatic History...
...Just as the book was to be published, however, fate—and truth—intervened...
...Even the gossipmonger Kitty Kelley walked out of an interview with her fora 1988 People magazine article, also titled "The Dark Side of Camelot," because she deemed the woman incapable of keeping her story straight...
...It is difficult enough for any First Family to live in the White House fishbowl without having the additional worry that every marital spat or dysfunctional moment will be retold later for a fistful of cash by a Secret Service snitch...
...Until this book, Hersh clearly fell under the "serious writer' rubric, a "just-the-facts" investigator, but the man has inexplicably fallen into the cesspool of deliberate debunkers...
...Let's examine Exner's record for credibility...
...Instead of taking him to the woodshed, though, both Time and the New York Times Book Review rewarded him with cover reviews, insuring that Little, Brown would not have to eat a big advance and that the aura of Hersh's journalistic reputation earned 25 years ago would slosh over to his new work, whether merited or not...
...If there was no marriage, there certainly would be no evidence of a divorce...
...The "documents," notably a purported agreement by JFK to pay Marilyn Monroe $600,000 dollars inhushmoney, were exposed as forgeries...
...Reviewed by Douglas Brinkley Director of the Eisenhower Center and Distinguished Professor of History, University of New Orleans Flashback to 1970: Seymour Hersh, a freelance reporter, wins the Pulitzer Prize and every other journalistic accolade imaginable for uncovering an American slaughter of innocents, the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam...
...In 1963 Victor Lasky's JFK: The Man and the Myth, a scathing attack on the President's character, was a mainstay of the New York Times bestseller list...
...What does that prove...
...Over the years Exner, whose only stock in trade is her sexual liaison with JFK, has sought to expand her role and importance...
...But Hersh chooses to accept the word of Charles Spalding, a JFK friend now 79 years old—with an admitted short-term memory impairment at the time of the author's interview—who alleged that he was asked to remove the evidence of said wedding from a Palm Beach courthouse...
...Yet there is a third category: the serious writer—like journalist Richard Reeves or historian Michael R. Beschloss—who serves up only the truth and whose goal is providing deeper insights into the Kennedy era...
...Today, Schlesinger's A Thousand Days is still taught in colleges, and is considered an illuminating source on the JFK era despite its solidly pro-Kennedy bias...
...If anything, what he has produced may be pointed to as an exemplar of that wayward era of American journalism when innuendo was coughed up as a gospel, when ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings became indistinguishable from Hard Copy, and when on-line "chat rooms" fleeting across the Internet were mistaken for sound scholarship...
...If the mantra in Jerry Maguire was "Show me the money," Seymour Hersh had to satisfy the mantra of his journalistic peers: "Show me the documents...
...Thus for every Camelot hagiographer bom, an equally enthusiastic debunker arises...
...Such mythmaking is bound to generate a reaction, and the mentality that you are either for em or against'em (that is, the Kennedys...
...His stories reveal that the rot at the core of our Vietnam policy has spread from the White House to GI grunts on the battlefield...
...Americans, it seemed, were prepared to fork over big bucks for Jackie Kennedy's fingernail clippings...
...At no time until Hersh came knocking did she ever mention her role as a bag woman to the President, so we must ask, Is Exner a fully reliable witness...
...Which brings us to another unavoidable question: If Hersh is willing to believe a suspect source like Exner, why does he disbelieve Durie Malcolm, who insists she was never married to JFK in 1947...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
