Book review
The Dark Side of Camelot
By Seymour Hersh, published by Little, Brown and Co.; 498 pages, $26.95
Shame on you, Sy, for that awful book on JFK
By David R. Wrone, January 16, 1998
In an interview given on publication of his alleged expose of John F.
Kennedy's private life and public policies, the famed investigative reporter Sy
Hersh said he wanted to "make a big score'' and retire.
To this end the Pulitzer prize winner has prostituted his nation's
history and, at the same time, sustained the intelligence and military forces
that bitterly opposed JFK -- those who among other infamies sunk us in Vietnam
and who tried and failed to initiate nuclear war over Cuba. Hersh does it with a
corruption of scholarship perhaps unparalleled in recent times.
He uses not a single source note, but employs caption notes that
refer to many books and no pages, so a reader cannot easily check his
truthfulness. Hersh has corrupted the facts. On major issues he is coy, strongly
using suggestive language with a statement of fact where none exists. Sources
are often made up to fit his perceived beliefs. In addition he relies on
interviews with people bitterly opposed to JFK's policies and usually not
identified as such.
Hersh reviews JFK's rise to power and then largely concentrates on
the foreign policies of his presidency, alleging that the crude principles of
his reckless and corrupt personal life -- astutely masked during his lifetime by
his power and friends -- led the United States into one series of disasters
after the other.
Hersh suffuses the book with putative accounts of JFK's sex scampers
but these are a honey trap to snare a reader into accepting Hersh's false
presentation of his foreign policy -- which is the true intent of the book.
How bad is Hersh's scholarship? Consider the section of "The
Dark Side of Camelot'' in which Hersh states that JFK "endorsed'' the CIA
assassination of Lumumba of the Congo. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Since CIA thugs beat Lumumba to death on Jan. 17 and JFK was sworn in on Jan.
19, Hersh must overcome a serious chronological problem. He does this by baldly
asserting Kennedy vigorously supported and emphatically agreed to Eisenhower's
policy to kill the African leader.
Hersh carries this subterfuge off by only quoting former CIA men who
were ideologically opposed to JFK's policies, by refusing to cite the copious
well-known record affirming an opposite interpretation, and by not interviewing
the numerous individuals who would have provided a true picture.
Early in January 1961, Kennedy's staff and special Congo study group
had alerted the CIA that American reactionary policies in the Congo would change
and a JFK emissary had warned Belgium intelligence services not to
"liquidate'' Lumumba. By Feb. 2, Kennedy had devised a plan for a new Congo
policy that included Lumumba. He did not learn of the murder of Lumumba until
Feb. 13; a famous photograph depicts him receiving the news, his head bowed in
anguish.
Hersh also devotes much attention to "proving'' JFK tried to
assassinate Castro using the CIA and Mafia. In the course of this effort, he
asserts that JFK used Judy Exner, a sex partner, to carry cash to the mob bosses
to pay for making the hit.
A key document of the Castro murder attempts is a 1962 Department of
Justice memorandum by the CIA's inspector general Sheffield Edwards. Hersh uses
parts of the document in other contexts but when he comes to the attempts on
Castro's life he carefully omits what it says about them, since the document's
contents would destroy Hersh's framing of JFK.
The CIA-Mafia attempts on Castro began in August 1960 and ended in
November 1960, before JFK took office in 1961. Only six people knew of it, all
CIA men, and they only orally. No one else knew -- not Ike, and not JFK -- until
many months after the fact when the FBI stumbled onto a bungled CIA phone tap
for a mobster and it exposed the affair. A shocked Robert Kennedy ordered a
complete explanation.
As it turns out, the CIA had set aside $150,000 for the job, but the
Mafia said no and refused to accept any money. Exner could not have carried
money, as she told Hersh; there was none to carry. There were, in fact, no JFK
directed or encouraged attempts on Castro's life.
Hersh frequently castigates JFK for using private back channels to
negotiate a secret deal with Khrushchev to end the Cuba missile crisis -- a deal
Hersh suggests Kennedy pursued in order to improve his standing with the
American people. Again, Hersh falsifies the reality. The fact is back channels
worked and after the crisis the executive branch institutionalized it with
direct phone lines and other systems, which later presidents have found to be
quite useful.
The real reason JFK kept the pact secret was spelled out in
Khrushchev's memoirs, "Khrushchev Remembers'' and in Robert Kennedy's
writings on the subject. It had nothing to do with self-promotion. The Kennedys
were intensely afraid of an American military coup d'etat and overthrow of the
U.S. government accompanied by a launching of a massive nuclear strike against
the whole of the communist world. Only through this private method could and did
JFK hold the irate military in check.
It can be argued today that nuclear war was avoided by President
Kennedy's unparalleled action.
Even in the minor themes of "The Dark Side of Camelot,'' Hersh
perverts our history. He states a high-ranking Navy officer told him that
"at the request of Robert Kennedy,'' the notes containing vital information
about JFK's postmortem were not published. By exclusively resting on that
prejudiced source, Hersh sustains the generation-old effort of many federal
officials to blame the failed inquiry into JFK's death upon his brother's
refusal to give them access to key medical records.
But in well-known sources, which were spurned by Hersh, we know RFK
by letter gave explicit permission to use all autopsy materials. The same
definitive sources also show it was the FBI that, after realizing the materials
might hold data incompatible with its invented lone assassin theory,
manufactured the libel that Robert Kennedy denied access.
Significantly, prosecutors did take the critical notes. They were not
destroyed and were, in fact, placed in Navy hands. They were supposed to be part
of Exhibit 397 of the Warren Commission but it does not contain them. They are
not in any archive or known agency files. On this serious issue -- which
genuinely is worthy of discussion -- Hersh is embarrassingly silent.
David R. Wrone taught history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for 30 years, before retiring in 1994. One of his primary areas of academic specialty was the presidency and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
(http://www.thecapitaltimes.com/jfkbook.htm )