Ever since the political demise of Gary Hart ten years ago, when a photograph on the front page of the National Enquirer showed Donna Rice sitting on his lap on a pier in Bimini, the tabloid tail of American journalism has increasingly been wagging the mainstream dog. Once the supermarket gossip sheets expose sex and other seamy scandals about national political figures, the major newspapers and newsmagazines feel obliged sooner or later to report them, if only to deplore the resort to sleaze.

The same thing happened in 1992, when The Star launched its reports of Bill Clinton's alleged womanizing. As the rumors and accusations mounted in the context of his campaign for the presidential nomination, they were quickly injected into the journalism mainstream. In the process the once-distinct line between gossip tabloids and the "responsible" press was blurred almost beyond recognition, as the character of political figures came to undergo as much scrutiny and assessment as their policies and proposals, or even more.

Many major newspapers and newsmagazines still strive to avoid being lumped in with the supermarket and other flashy tabloid publications, declining to publish unfounded rumors, at least until they are dragged kicking and screaming into publication by the lead of the gossip sheets. Once an issue surfaces in the context of a campaign, such as reports this year of marital difficulties between Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York and his wife, local TV reporter Donna Hanover, the mainstream press finds it hard to leave it alone.

In book-writing, there has not been the same sort of delineation of mainstream and gossip publishers. For the most part, highly regarded publishing houses have both high-brow and low-brow books on their lists each season, and there seldom is any widespread criticism, outside the publishing fraternity anyway, of those houses that turn out trash and garbage along with scholarly tomes. One explanation is that authors, in my experience at least, are treated by their publishers much more as independent storytellers, responsible for the veracity and tone of what they write, than are reporters for newspapers and magazines, whose product must run an editorial gauntlet before it is published.

While book publishers do have editors and fact-checkers, and manuscripts in many houses undergo line-by-line review, if an author chooses to make an allegation with weak attribution or none at all, that usually is considered his business, within the bounds of libel laws. The stronger the attribution the better, of course, but many accounts of celebrity hijinks make it into hard covers that would never get by the green-eyeshade types around the copydesk rim at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.

 Now comes the much-analyzed book on the late President John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, by investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, whose hard-hitting newspaper copy in earlier years survived the Times's esteemed screening process for accuracy, fairness, and propriety. Perhaps because Hersh has been such an esteemed reporter himself for his Pulitzer-Prize-winning exposŽ of the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese villagers in 1970 and other investigative books including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, he is being held to the sorts of high standards that are more customary for mainstream newspapering than for book publishing.

 The book as a whole is a very ambitious exercise in debunking, and Hersh straightforwardly at the outset says it is not about Kennedy's "brilliant moments, and his brilliant policies," but about "a man whose personal weaknesses limited his ability to carry out his duties as president." In marshaling his case, Hersh assembles some impressive raw material, especially about Kennedy's dealings with Cuba, which unfortunately is overshadowed by the accounts of his sexual antics. But Hersh's attributions generally fall short of normal journalistic yardsticks. More important, many of his conclusions are weakly substantiated by his research and highly questionable.

Among the claims that leap out at the reader are Hersh's charge that Kennedy stole the 1960 presidential election with help from organized crime boss Sam Giancana in Illinois, and that he chose Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate in 1960 under a threat of blackmail regarding his womanizing. In neither case does Hersh present anything approaching a "smoking gun" in support of his allegation.

Particularly arguable are the the innuendoes in which he indulges and the conclusions to which he jumps on the basis of his raw material. He cites, for example, "a high-ranking military officer" as the source of his report that Kennedy as determined by the autopsy on his body suffered from venereal disease. Then he cites "incomplete handwritten notes" of a Washington urologist who treated Kennedy, the late Dr. William P. Herbst Jr., showing "that Kennedy was being repeatedly infected -- and, presumably, infecting his partners." (Italics mine.)

At another point, Hersh strongly suggests that reckless romping by Kennedy with a female partner in a swimming pool, reported to him second-hand by Time columnist Hugh Sidey, indirectly contributed to the president's assassination.

"Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price . . . for his sexual excesses and compulsiveness," Hersh writes. "He severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast trip in the last week of September 1963. The pain was so intense that the White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace that locked his body in a rigid upright position. It was far more constraining that his usual back brace, which he also continued to wear. The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.

"Those braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald's first successful shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president remained erect -- and an excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the head."

Hersh observes ominously that the "groin brace" is "now in the possession of the National Archives in Washington" but "was not mentioned in the public autopsy report, nor was the injury that had led to his need for it."

Elsewhere in the book, Hersh implies that Kennedy's womanizing was responsible for the delay in advising him of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba at the outset of the Cuban missile crisis. He cites how Kennedy's national security adviser McGeorge Bundy learned of the missile buildup one night but didn't tell the president until the next morning because, as Bundy later wrote, "I decided that a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparations you could have." Then Hersh adds: "As we have seen in this book, there were many times in the Kennedy White House, according to the Secret Service, when the president could not be disturbed, even for the most urgent of matters."

Concerning Kennedy's victory over Hubert Humphrey in the 1960 West Virginia Democratic primary, Hersh reports as fact that "the Kennedys spent at least $2 million (nearly $11 million in today's dollars), and possibly twice that amount -- much of it in direct payoffs to state and local officials." He notes that The Wall Street Journal thereafter had a team of investigative reporters check out whether it was true and it "collected enough information to write a devastating exposŽ" shortly before the Democratic nominating convention.

"As with many investigative newspaper stories," Hersh then writes, "there was no smoking gun; none of the newspaper's sources reported seeing a representative of the Kennedy campaign give money to a West Virginian." He quotes Alan Otten, a Journal correspondent who covered the campaign, as telling him that "we knew they were meeting but we had nothing showing the actual handing over of money." Hersh reports that "the Journal's top editors asked for affidavits from some of the sources who were to be quoted in the exposŽ" but "when the journalists could not obtain them, the editors ruled that the article could not be published." Hersh quotes one of the reporters on the team, Roscoe C. Born, saying "the story could have been written, but we'd have to imply, rather than nail down, some elements. I really wanted to do it, but I can see that the editors would be nervous about doing it practically on the eve of the convention."

Such caution, after all, is standard practice in responsible news operations. Hersh goes on to say that "the Journal's reporting team was far closer to the truth than its editors could imagine." He reports that "in interviews for this book, many West Virginia county state officials revealed that the Kennedy family spent upward of $2 million in bribes and other payoffs" before the primary. But the few West Virginia sources he names merely speculate on how much was spent.

Hersh also quotes the late Theodore H. White as writing in his 1978 memoir, In Search of History, "what he had not written in his book on the 1960 campaign -- that both Humphrey and Kennedy were buying votes in West Virginia," and that White acknowledged that "his strong affection for Kennedy had turned him, and many of his colleagues, from objective journalists to members of the loyal claque." Accordingly, Hersh notes, White claimed in his memoir "without any apparent evidence (italics mine) that 'Kennedy's vote-buyers were evenly matched with Humphrey's.'" Hersh's dismay at White making the observations without proof is amusing under the circumstances.

Hersh suggests at another point that Kennedy's relationship with Judith Campbell Exner may have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars because it "apparently became known" to the General Dynamics Corporation, which "may have used that knowledge" to win a government contract to build a new generation of fighter planes known as the TFX. He reports a break-in of Exner's apartment in west Los Angeles by two men later identified by the FBI as the twin sons of I.B. Hale, who "was in charge of security for General Dynamics." At the time of the break-in, Hersh says, the corporation's chances of landing the contract "were precarious," and "the Hale family's criminal entry into Judith Campbell Exner's apartment, which has never been reported before, raises an obvious question: Was Jack Kennedy blackmailed by a desperate corporation?" Hersh leaves little doubt that he thinks the answer is in the affirmative, but offers mainly the rationale that General Dynamics "was in bad shape" at the time and on the merits w not competitive with its chief rival for the contract, the Boeing company.

In publicity material accompanying the book, Hersh says he "conducted more than a thousand interviews with people who knew and worked with Kennedy . . . and virtually all of those interviews were conducted 'on the record.' These are not 'unnamed sources.'" His prodigious work habits lend credence to the number of interviews, and his ability to get four Secret Service agents who protected Kennedy inside the White House to testify by name and on the record to his sexual indulgences is impressive, as is his collection of other attributed sources.

But many of his stories and allegations either are very loosely attributed or not at all, as he relies on such vague phrases as "published reports" . . . "by all accounts" . . . "published speculation" . . . "was no secret" . . . "did not wish to be identified" . . . "reported in gossip columns" . . . "was credited in one biography" . . . "many historians have said" . . . "it was common knowledge" . . . "may have had irrefutable evidence" . . . "although no paper trail exists" . . . "probable advance knowledge of," and so on. In his acknowledgments, Hersh thanks his editor for his "unyielding standards"; maybe he meant thanks for going easy on him.

Also, Hersh's chapter notes at the back of the book are hardly what scholars would find adequate. There is no line-by-line, page-by-page identification of sources and attributions as is now customary in serious works. Instead, the author offers long summary paragraphs for each chapter merely listing titles of books he has drawn from and interviews conducted. As for his interviews, he repeatedly -- even maddeningly -- informs the reader that a source has spoken "in an interview for this book" or has produced information "not confirmed until this book" or "unpublished until this book." It is as if he wants to make absolutely sure that the reader doesn't miss what he says are the scoops he has unearthed.

At least one major attributed source, seemingly solid when first mentioned, seems less so by the time Hersh presents a caveat. On page three, he quotes old Kennedy friend Charles Spalding as reporting that "it was Jack who asked me if I'd go get the papers" from the Palm Beach courthouse that allegedly chronicled a first Kennedy marriage, later denied by Kennedy and the woman mentioned. Much later, returning to the same story, Hersh reports that Spalding "was seventy-nine years old when interviewed, and suffering from impairment of his short-term memory." But, Hersh points out, his account of a first marriage was "directly supported in subsequent interviews and indirectly confirmed by the late Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, who functioned as a parish priest to the Kennedy family."

Cushing, Hersh writes, in a late-night drinking session with a missionary priest in Bolivia in 1964, spilled the beans that, according to the priest, Father James. J. O'Rourke, "Kennedy was married before, but it got taken care of." Hersh observes elsewhere that it is "possible" that Kennedy and thrice-married Durie Malcom "were bigamists" because "no evidence of a divorce was found during research for this book."

It may be unfair, just because Hersh is a veteran journalist of exceedingly impressive record and credentials for this aggressive and dogged investigative work, to take note that in writing this book he has enjoyed the greater freedom in presenting and speculating about information than would be permitted if he still were a reportorial grunt in the trenches of a grubby newsroom. But any writer deserves to be judged on his work product, and that is what is happening in the critiques of this book.

One of the likely byproducts of Hersh's book is that it will reinforce a widespread impression that has long existed among the public -- that the Washington press corps at the time knew all about the dark side of John Kennedy but covered up for him, so enthralled were reporters with his charisma and personality. Hersh feeds this impression by painting the press corps as "starstruck" and having dummied up about his sexual and other antics.

He quotes Time's Sidey telling about one time he went skinny-dipping with Kennedy in the White House pool and Kennedy started talking about a favorite biography of Lord Melbourne, with Kennedy relating how the "young aristocracy of Britain . . . when they went to their country estates, it was broken-field running through the bedrooms. I mean they swapped wives, they slept with others. But the code of that period was nobody talked about it." Thereafter, Sidey is quoted as saying, he and the president "had a shared secret."

 If Sidey knew about Kennedy's loose life-style, he never let his readers in on it at the time. In his column in Time about Hersh's book, Sidey writes that "while there was plenty of circumstantial evidence that he [Kennedy] was busy with extramarital adventures, he was also busy" with major affairs of state. And Sidey asks of the latest allegations: "Can the presidency be that depraved and it go unnoticed?"

As a younger reporter myself at the time who covered Kennedy only peripherally but had friends who were closer to him, I never heard stories about Kennedy's sexual antics. But the impression continues that they were well known and covered up. Yet the only reporters quoted by Hersh as claiming to have known anything about them are Sidey in his slim comment about his "shared secret" with Kennedy, and a brief remark from old Kennedy friend Charles Bartlett. A former Washington correspondent for TheChattanooga Times and later a syndicated columnist, Bartlett observed that another old friend, Bill Thompson, "was a pimp for Jack."

More serious in terms of the relationship between Kennedy and the press are Hersh's accounts of the president's friendships with Bartlett and another prominent and favored reporter, Ben Bradlee, then Washington bureau chief for Newsweek and later executive editor of The Washington Post. Hersh, drawing from interviews with Bartlett and others and memorandums Bartlett wrote to Kennedy at the White House, paints a picture of the columnist as diplomatic conduit as well as presidential friend while still plying the journalistic trade. The author quotes a Cuban defector from Castro, Ernest Betancourt, who says he tried to warn Kennedy through Bartlett "about the folly of the exile invasion" at the Bay of Pigs because "talking to him was like to talking to Kennedy."

Hersh quotes Bartlett as saying he didn't pass on the warning that "everybody in Havana knows an invasion is coming" because "I didn't want to burden Jack," and instead told Allen Dulles, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who phoned back reporting, "He'd checked out my story," and dismissed it.

On another occasion, Hersh writes, Bartlett was the intermediary for a message from Aleksandr Zinchuk, the Soviet minister in Washington, prior to the Cuban missile crisis saying "Khrushchev wants the president to know that he understands he is busy with the elections coming up and he will not in any way interfere with the election."

Bartlett and co-author Stewart Alsop, Hersh reports, submitted a magazine article to Kennedy on the events of the Cuban missile crisis before publication and, according to Alsop later, "Kennedy read the piece for accuracy, and proposed a couple of minor changes."

Hersh writes that Bartlett also told him that in the spring of 1963 Paul Corbin, an abrasive political operative close to Robert Kennedy, alleged to Bartlett that John Kennedy aide and friend Kenneth O'Donnell and two others had been skimming campaign contributions from questionable sources for their private use. Bartlett wrote a note about it to Kennedy, quoted by Hersh, but Kennedy merely brushed it off.

"Bartlett never wrote a newspaper story about the scandal, which died with the murder of his good friend," Hersh writes. "Like Ben Bradlee and others who covered the White House, he found himself trapped in the gray area between friendship and professionalism. Bartlett remained troubled enough by what he knew and, perhaps, by what he did not do at the time, to make his letters to the president available for this book."

As for Bradlee, Hersh quotes a letter from him to Kennedy now in the John F. Kennedy Library in which he reported to Kennedy after covering a 1959 speech by Lyndon Johnson, a prospective rival for the 1960 Democratic nomination, that LBJ did not seem to him to be much of a threat because his image, accent, and Texas background did not give him "the requisite dignity . . . . He's somebody's gabby cousin from Fort Worth . . . . He's to be feared not as a potential winner but as a game-player who might try to maneuver you right out of the contest in Los Angeles."

More notably, Hersh tells how Bradlee wrote a story for Newsweek in 1962 debunking the story of Kennedy's first marriage with the help of FBI files provided by Kennedy insiders, and how he cleared it personally with the president before it was printed. (Bradlee never made a secret of his mixed relationship with Kennedy and in his own book, Conversations with Kennedy, written after Kennedy's death, speaks freely about it as well as Bartlett's similar association. Bradlee wrote later in his memoir, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures: "At issue, then and later, was the question that plagued us both: What, in fact, was I? A friend or a journalist? I wanted to be both. And whereas I think Kennedy valued my friendship . . . he valued my journalism most when it carried his water".)

Hersh hammers at the Washington press corps for covering up for Kennedy the brutal treatment he received from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in their stormy 1961 meeting in Vienna. "A few favored members of the Washington press corps learned how thoroughly rattled President Kennedy had been by his confrontation with Khrushchev at Vienna," he writes, "but they did not share that information with their readers -- as Kennedy knew they would not." He cites the case of James Reston, The New York Times Washington bureau chief at the time, being given an exclusive interview with Kennedy right after the meeting in which a bullying Khrushchev delivered an ultimatum on resolving the status of divided Germany. Reston wrote thereafter that the meeting was "apparently more cordial than had been expected" and that there were "no ultimatums and few bitter or menacing exchanges," although Kennedy had told him otherwise. (Reston in his own memoir, Deadline, reported the true climate of that meeting.)

None of these examples, however, support a notion that the Washington press corps in general knew all about Kennedy's foibles and went in the tank for him. At the same time, it is true that a much different code of conduct governed the press corps at that time, and had reporters known, they probably wouldn't have reported it. The accepted attitude was that a political figure's private life was his own business unless it affected the performance of his public duties, and therefore reporters did not go out of their way to learn about that private life. Only if a senator fell down drunk on the floor of the Senate might that fact be reported. If another senator had a mistress on the side and continued to do his job, the press figured -- so what?

To this point, Hersh reports an interview with longtime Hollywood reporter James Bacon of The Associated Press in which he said of Marilyn Monroe: "She was very open about her affair with JFK. In fact, I think Marilyn was in love with JFK." Asked by Hersh "why he didn't file a story about the affair," Bacon told him that in those days "before Watergate, reporters just didn't go into that sort of thing. I'd have to have been under the bed in order to put it on the wire for the AP. There was no pact. It was just a matter of judgment on the part of the reporters."

That tolerant attitude began to change in a sense with two historical events that had nothing to do with the bedroom gymnastics of politicians -- the war in Vietnam and the Watergate affair mentioned by Bacon. Each bred disillusionment with America's leaders -- with Johnson for lying about his future escalation of the war and with Nixon and his whole crowd for their various crimes. At the same time, Washington reporters focused greater attention on the "character" of the nation's leaders, including personal conduct. An additional incentive for young reporters was the desire to emulate Watergate sleuths Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and win fame and glory, giving new impetus to "gotcha" journalism.

In this environment, perhaps it was inevitable that the old line between mainstream newspapers and the gossip sheets would blur. And in the same environment, it should not be surprising that a solid investigative reporter like Seymour Hersh says in the publicity accompanying the release of his book: "It's essential that we know more about the character of the person leading the country. That doesn't mean we have to be prudes. JFK was entitled to a private life. But he also was operating with no dignity or respect for the office that he held. That's something we've got to know and something we can't allow to happen again. Does that mean you go and look at everything a presidential candidate has done in his private life? Obviously not, but I do know that I've moved the line over in my head . . . ."

The prime journalistic question posed by Hersh's book is not, however, whether the dark corners of any presidency should be explored. The question is, in the exploration, whether standards applied in presenting the information learned, in terms of sourcing, attribution, and above all making assumptions from the raw material gathered, should be just as high for a hot book, with an obviously huge potential commercial market, as they are for any obscure newspaper or magazine story that has to pass by traditional editorial requirements to get into print.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe