Word: hershe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SEYMOUR HERSH J.F.K.-Marilyn papers turn out to be about as real--and as journalistic--as the Hitler diaries...
When he first caught a glimpse of the papers in an Atlanta document dealer's office in December 1994, "my tongue was out to my knees," recalls reporter Seymour Hersh. And why not? It looked like one of the juiciest discoveries yet in the epic journalistic deconstruction of the Kennedy presidency. The documents purported to show that Kennedy had set up a trust fund of $600,000 for Marilyn Monroe's mother, supposedly to buy the actress's silence over her alleged affair with the President...
That startling revelation was on track to make headlines--MARILYN BLACKMAILED J.F.K.!--for the book that Hersh had spent more than four years working on, The Dark Side of Camelot (due in November from Little, Brown), as well as for a two-hour ABC documentary timed to coincide with publication. But last week Hersh and the network made an extraordinary pre-emptive strike--against themselves. In a segment of the magazine show 20/20, the network asserted that the documents are, almost certainly, fake...
...documents had been authenticated, Cusack claimed, by handwriting experts (and many had been sold to collectors for a total of some $4 million), the more the journalists looked at them, the more the papers began to look fishy. Last spring Mark Obenhaus, the free-lance producer working with Hersh on the TV documentary, noticed that one letterhead dated 1961 carried a ZIP code--before ZIP codes had been introduced. Experts subsequently brought in to examine the typewritten documents, moreover, concluded that they could not have been written during the period claimed. (The typewriters had self-correcting tape, for example, which...
...Hersh has removed the chapter in his book that was based on Cusack's documents and rewritten portions of the rest to reflect that omission, and the book is still scheduled to come out in November. ABC News president David Westin says he still "hopes and expects" to air the documentary later this year but won't make a final decision until it is completed. Hersh says he considers the excision only a minor blow to his wide-ranging examination of Kennedy's public and private life, and claims he felt "tremendous relief" at no longer having to deal with...