Word: hersh
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...Hersh's chapter on Exner is typical of the book. Most of the Georgetown dinner scene with her and Kennedy appeared in a 1988 PEOPLE magazine story by Kitty Kelley, a piece acknowledged by Hersh in his frustratingly brief notes on sources at the end of his book. (Kelley's story was even headlined "The Dark Side of Camelot.") But that big bag of money seems like a new touch. Exner told TIME she did not reveal it to Kelley because Kelley became irritated with her during an interview and walked out. Hersh supplies a corroborating witness, Martin E. Underwood...
Kennedy's compulsive womanizing is of consequence not only for what it says about his character but also because it could have made him vulnerable to blackmail. Hersh suggests that it did, but never produces convincing proof. Why did Kennedy name Johnson as his running mate, despite Robert Kennedy's distaste for Johnson? Many historians have concluded that it was pure political calculation: Johnson could deliver Texas. Hersh thinks it was blackmail. He says that during a closed-door meeting with Kennedy, Johnson may have threatened to disclose J.F.K.'s dirty laundry, though Hersh doesn't know which laundry...
Raskin's claim is seconded by Clark Clifford, the longtime Washington power broker, who tells Hersh he served as Kennedy's go-between with Symington. Later, says Clifford, Kennedy told him he was forced to accept Johnson. But blackmail is a badly stretched conclusion for an author who has so little hard evidence to go on--and who paints Johnson in other parts of the book as ignorant of Kennedy's hidden undertakings...
...When Hersh takes on Kennedy's foreign policy, he runs into the same kind of problems. Kennedy loyalists argue that J.F.K. was no more than an interested bystander in the CIA campaign to murder Castro. But during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Hersh writes, Kennedy was in fact expecting that Castro would be quickly assassinated by Giancana's men. His fateful decision to abandon the whole thing was the abrupt consequence of his getting the news that the Cuban leader was still alive...
...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...