Word: hersh
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...which is a big if. Hersh's book amplifies some of the most radioactive stories of the Kennedy era. It also promises to nail down more than it does. Even that eyebrow-raising first chapter is a tease. If those dirty files exist, Hersh didn't get them. Don't look here either for a nuanced portrait of Kennedy's presidency. This isn't the kind of book that has much to say about the space program or the Alliance for Progress. And if the Kennedy name already has a cloud over it, Hersh's book comes to market...
...Hersh has repudiated the Monroe papers, saying that while he may have been duped at first, what matters is that he realized his mistake in time. Meanwhile, he has been promising that what remains of the book will still rock what remains of the Kennedy legend. The legend survives because it was more than that. Kennedy was a turning point in American life, a President who restarted the nation's psychic engines and successfully brought the U.S. through some of the worst predicaments of the cold war. All the immensities of the later 1960s--Vietnam, the racial transformation of America...
...which is Hersh? Despite the pre-publication hype, most of his claims have been reported before. To many of them Hersh adds some further bit of substantiation or at least some suggestive new tidbit. If anyone still doubts that Kennedy was a one-man Roman orgy, Hersh's chapter on his most reckless adulteries will be useful reading. And although historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was a member of Kennedy's inner circle, insist that it is "an exercise in political fantasy," Hersh helps elaborate stories that Chicago Mob leader Giancana helped deliver Illinois to the Democrats...
...Hersh is also willing to put testimony, hearsay and speculation into close proximity to one another, then declare that they add up to fact. So Hersh says Joe Kennedy clandestinely poured $2 million into the West Virginia primary that clinched the Democratic nomination for his son. The entire Democratic outlay for the national campaign in 1960 has been estimated at around $10 million. But while Hersh tells a number of stories about money being handed around--all of them interesting, some of them plausible--he never explains how he arrived at that whopping figure. Charles Peters, editor in chief...
...become the self-evident conclusions of a few pages later, large leaps of judgment--on the 1960 election, Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs--are made from shaky perches. And while it's true that muckrakers have to find a lot of their informants in the muck, some of Hersh's most sensational claims come from sources who have had trouble with the law or, like Exner, have told different versions of the same stories in the past. He sometimes acknowledges those problems in his text but nonethelesss doesn't hesitate to put faith in what those people tell...