Word: hersh
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...cases, credible sources for his book who were contacted by TIME say Hersh's account of their stories differs from what they recall telling him. Hersh writes that during Kennedy's presidency, a Secret Service agent brought "sexually explicit photographs of a naked President with various paramours" to be framed at the Washington art gallery of Sidney Mickelson. In some pictures, Hersh says, J.F.K. appears among a group of people wearing masks. But Mickelson now insists that what he described to Hersh was just two pictures of three masked figures in a bed with the covers pulled up to their...
Then there's Charles Spalding, a longtime friend of Kennedy's who told Hersh that J.F.K.'s long-rumored first marriage to Palm Beach socialite Durie Malcolm was a fact. Though stories surfaced in the press in 1961, reporters could find no record of the marriage then. The Kennedy camp denied that it had happened. Malcolm continues to do the same. Spalding told Hersh that the ultra-brief marriage, perhaps an overnight sensation, did indeed take place, in early 1947. At Kennedy's request, says Hersh, Spalding, with the help of a lawyer, removed records of the marriage, presumably from...
Spalding reconfirmed for TIME that the marriage, which he calls "a childish scamp," actually took place. He disputes a significant detail in another part of the book, the now much reduced portion dealing with Marilyn Monroe. Hersh writes that in 1960, on an occasion when Monroe was binging on alcohol and pills, Spalding went to Los Angeles at J.F.K.'s request "to make sure she was O.K.--that is, to make sure that Monroe did not speak out of turn." Spalding confirms the trip but emphatically denies that it was in any way intended to keep her quiet...
...Most of Hersh's notes for those interviews, examined by TIME, closely match the accounts he offers in his book. He warns in his book that Spalding suffers from "short-term-memory loss," which was apparent in his interview with TIME. Hersh now says he has sources beyond Mickelson for the photograph story, though he doesn't explain why those sources are not identified in the book...
...Hersh's methods and conclusions have been controversial. He's a volcanic man, one who doesn't flinch at shouting through the phone at a reluctant informant. Hersh has had second thoughts about some of his sources. For his book The Samson Option, about Israel's nuclear-weapons program, he depended on Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer with a penchant for intricate tales. But a story in the November Vanity Fair quotes Hersh as now saying that Ben-Menashe "lies like people breathe...