Word: hersh
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hersh writes with the passion and single-mindedness of an investigator. He wants us to believe that he reached to the hidden heart of the matter with just about every thrust he made into Kennedy territory. To a reader who gets to his last page, it doesn't often feel that way. The full story of John Kennedy is still being built out of intricate pieces. Dark Side adds a few more of them. But both the man and the book should come with a label that reads FURTHER ASSEMBLY REQUIRED...
...Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and there Kennedy is the serene leader who guides the nation away from nuclear conflict. He is the man with the best grasp of how wars arise from miscalculation and weakness, the man who turns aside his bellicose warriors. Now we have Seymour Hersh and his book The Dark Side of Camelot, an exhausting catalog of Kennedy's alleged sexual indulgences, cover-ups and unlicensed use of family wealth to buy his office. But there has been--and there is in the Hersh account--something incomplete and unsettling. Kennedy was President in a dangerous time...
Efforts to expose what Seymour Hersh calls the dark side of Camelot began even before the idea of an American Camelot was born. On the day John Kennedy died, the best-selling nonfiction book in the U.S. was, as it had been for several months, Victor Lasky's J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth, a withering attack on the character and competence of the President. The attacks have continued, and escalated, ever since--in books by historians; in memoirs of friends, associates and acquaintances of Kennedy and his family; in gossip columns and tabloids; and at times in official documents...
Somewhere between these two images lies the truth. But no one should expect to find it in Hersh's embarrassing book, which recycles virtually every accusation ever leveled at Kennedy, adds very little of consequence to what we already know, and presents it all with a heavy-handed sensationalism that the contents of the book fail to justify. From beginning to end Hersh makes dramatic claims ("They have kept their silence--until now"; "Until this book it has not been known..."), only to present either modestly amplified versions of familiar stories or inflammatory disclosures for which he has no adequate...
...life, his reckless association with men and women tied to organized crime, his father's uninhibited use of family money to oil Jack's political career, his family's extraordinary efforts to hide the truth about themselves and manipulate the press into cooperating with them in that effort. Hersh adds some significant new detail to all these stories and many others. But he also offers a larger justification for returning to this sordid and oft-trod ground: "Kennedy's private life and personal obsessions--his character--affected the affairs of the nation and its foreign policy far more than...