Word: hersh
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reinforce the plan," as the late CIA official Richard Bissell coolly put it in a 1984 article in the quarterly Diplomatic History. Was Kennedy one of the planners who were in on the murder plot? Perhaps, but to be sure of that, it helps to be persuaded by Hersh's attempts earlier in the book to prove that Kennedy "must have" been in communication with Giancana--or at least that he was briefed before the 1960 election by Bissell or CIA Director Allen Dulles about the covert operations in Cuba approved by Dwight Eisenhower. Like Richard Nixon, Hersh believes Kennedy...
...Hersh argues that the Kennedy brothers were the U.S. government's "strongest advocates" of CIA plans to kill Castro, not merely dispassionate judges of tough-guy talk from the spy shop. After the Bay of Pigs, Hersh writes, "the necessity of Castro's death became a presidential obsession." Former CIA Director Richard Helms told much the same story in 1975 to the Church committee, the Senate body investigating CIA shenanigans. Samuel Halpern, onetime executive officer of the CIA's Task Force W, an enterprise charged with the single mission of killing Castro, says the Kennedy brothers wanted Castro dead...
...Hersh suggests that Kennedy deserves some of the blame for triggering the Cuban missile crisis because of his secret plotting against Castro, which the Cuban leader knew about, even if most Americans did not. "The overriding deceit--one that still distorts the history of those 13 days--was the absolute determination of Jack and Bobby Kennedy to conceal their campaign to assassinate Castro and destroy his regime," Hersh writes. "Kennedy did not dare tell the full story of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, because it was his policies that brought the weapons there." This is an interesting theory...
Swinging to the other side of the globe, Hersh alleges that J.F.K. knew that South Vietnam's President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother would be assassinated as a consequence of the Washington-approved coup that toppled Diem in 1963. Hersh's smoking gun is the fact that Kennedy summoned former Air Force General Edward G. Lansdale, an ex-CIA operative who had been involved in the U.S. assassination plots against Castro, and asked if he would go to Saigon and help "get rid" of Diem. Lansdale says he turned down the President's invitation. Was Kennedy making a thinly...
Journalism is often called the first, rough draft of history. In some ways The Dark Side of Camelot is just that. Hersh has done the spadework that the writing of history requires, but it also requires judgment, prudence and a willingness to be satisfied sometimes with ambiguous conclusions when human nature (and the best-seller list) prefers the comfort of certainties...