The Posthumous Assassination of JFK Part II
Sy Hersh and the Monroe/JFK Papers:
The History of a Thirty-Year Hoax
By James DiEugenio
On September 25, 1997, ABC used its news magazine program 20/20 to take an unusual journalistic step. In the first segment of the program, Peter Jennings took pains to discredit documents that had been about to be used by its own contracted reporter for an upcoming show scheduled for broadcast. The contracted reporter was Seymour Hersh. The documents purported to show a secret deal involving Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana, and President John F. Kennedy. They were to be the cornerstone of Hersh’s upcoming Little, Brown book, The Dark Side of Camelot. In fact, published reports indicate that it was these documents that caused the publisher to increase Hersh’s advance and provoke three networks to compete for a television special to hype the book. It is not surprising to any informed observer that the documents imploded. What is a bit surprising is that Hersh and ABC could have been so naive for so long. And it is ironic that ABC should use 20/20 to expose a phenomenon that it itself fueled twelve years ago.
What happened on September 25th was the most tangible manifestation of three distinct yet overlapping journalistic threads that have been furrowing into our culture since the Church Committee disbanded in 1976. Hersh’s book would have been the apotheosis of all three threads converged into one book. In the strictest sense, the convergent movements did not actually begin after Frank Church’s investigation ended. But it was at that point that what had been a right-wing, eccentric, easily dismissed undercurrent, picked up a second wind—so much so that today it is not an eccentric undercurrent at all. It is accepted by a large amount of people. And, most surprisingly, some of its purveyors are even accepted within the confines of the research community.
The three threads are these: 1) That the Kennedys ordered Castro’s assassination, despite the verdict of the Church Committee on the CIA’s assassination plots. As I noted last issue, the committee report could find no evidence indicating that JFK and RFK authorized the plots on Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, or Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. 2) That the Kennedys were really “bad boys,” in some ways as bad as Chicago mobsters or the “gentleman killers” of the CIA. Although neither JFK nor RFK was lionized by the main centers of the media while they were alive, because of their early murders, many books and articles were written afterward that presented them in a sympathetic light, usually as liberal icons. This was tolerated by the media establishment as sentimental sop until the revelations of both Watergate and the Church Committee. This “good guy” image then needed to be altered since both those crises seemed to reveal that the Kennedys were actually different than what came before them (Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers) and what came after (Nixon). Thus began a series of anti-Kennedy biographies. 3) That Marilyn Monroe’s death was somehow ordained by her “involvement” with the Kennedy “bad boys.” Again, this was at first a rather peculiar cottage industry. But around the time of Watergate and the Church Committee it was given a lift, and going back to a 1964 paradigm, it combined elements of the first two movements into a Gothic (some would say grotesque) right-wing propaganda tract which is both humorous and depressing in its slanderous implications, and almost frightening in its political and cultural overtones. Egged on by advocates of Judith Exner (e.g. Liz Smith and Tony Summers), this political and cultural time bomb landed in Sy Hersh’s and ABC’s lap. When it blew up, all parties went into a damage control mode, pointing their fingers at each other. As we examine the sorry history of all three industries, we shall see that there is plenty of blame (and shame) to be shared. And not just in 1997.
As we saw in Part One of this article, as the Church Committee was preparing to make its report, the Exner and then Mary Meyer stories made headlines in the Washington Post. These elements—intrigue from the CIA assassination plots, plus the sex angles, combined with the previous hazing of Richard Nixon over Watergate—spawned a wave of new anti-Kennedy “expose” biographies. Anti-Kennedy tracts were not new. But these new works differed from the earlier ones in that they owed their genesis and their styles to the events of the mid-seventies that had brought major parts of the establishment (specifically, the CIA and the GOP) so much grief. In fact we will deal with some of the earlier ones later. For now, let us examine this new pedigree and show how it fits into the movement outlined above.
Looking for Mr. Kennedy
(And Not Finding Him)
The first anti-Kennedy book in this brood, although not quite a perfect fit into the genre, is The Search for JFK, by Joan and Clay Blair Jr. The book appeared in 1976, right after Watergate and the Church Committee hearings. In the book’s foreword, the authors are frank about what instigated their work:
During Watergate (which revealed to us the real character of President Richard M. Nixon—as opposed to the manufactured Madison Avenue image), our thoughts turned to Jack Kennedy....Like other journalists, we were captivated by what was then called the “Kennedy mystique” and the excitement of “the New Frontier.” Now we began to wonder. Behind the image, what was Jack really like? Could one, at this early date, cut through the cotton candy and find the real man? (p. 10)
In several ways, this is a revealing passage. First of all, the authors apparently accept the Washington Post version of Watergate—i.e. that Nixon, and only Nixon, was responsible for that whole range of malfeasance and that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got to the bottom of it. Second, it seems to me to be a curious leap from the politically misunderstood shenanigans of Watergate to the formative years of John Kennedy’s college prep days and early adulthood, which is what this book is about. It takes JFK from his days at the exclusive Choate School in Connecticut to his first term as a congressman i.e. from about 1934 through 1947. I don’t understand how comparing the political fallout from Watergate with an examination of Kennedy’s youthful years constitutes a politically valid analogy. Third, the Blairs seem a bit behind the curve on Nixon. If they wanted to find out the “truth” about Nixon all they had to do was examine his behavior, and some of the people he employed, in his congressional campaign against Jerry Voorhis, his senatorial campaign against Helen Douglas and, most importantly, his prosecution of Alger Hiss. These all happened before 1951, two decades before Watergate. Nothing in JFK’s political career compares with them.
The book’s ill-explained origin is not its only problem. In its final form, it seems to be a rush job. I have rarely seen a biography by a veteran writer (which Clay Blair was) so poorly edited, written, and organized. The book is nearly 700 pages long. It could have been cut by a third without losing anything of quality or substance. The book is heavily reliant on interviews which are presented in the main text. Some of them at such length—two and three pages—that they give the volume the air of an oral history. To make it worse, after someone has stopped talking, the authors tell us the superfluous fact that his wife walked into the room, making for more excess verbiage (p.60). And on top of this, the Blairs have no gift for syntax or language, let alone glimmering prose. As a result, even for an interested reader, the book is quite tedious.
The Blairs spend much of their time delving into two areas of Kennedy’s personal life: his health problems and his relationships with the opposite sex. Concerning the first, they chronicle many, if not all, of the myriad and unfortunate medical problems afflicting young Kennedy. They hone in on two in order to straighten out the official record. Previous to this book, the public did not know that Kennedy’s back problem was congenital. The word had been that it came about due to a football injury. Second, the book certifies that Kennedy was a victim of Addison’s disease, which attacks the adrenal glands and makes them faulty in hormone secretion. The condition can be critical in fights against certain infections and times of physical stress.
Discovered in the 19th century, modern medication (discovered after 1947) have made the illness about as serious as that of a diabetic on insulin. I exaggerate only slightly when I write that the Blairs treat this episode as if Kennedy was the first discovered victim of AIDS. They attempt to excuse the melodrama by saying that Kennedy and his circle disguised the condition by passing it off as an “adrenal insufficiency.” Clearly, Kennedy played word games in his wish to hide a rare and misunderstood disease that he knew his political opponents would distort and exaggerate in order to destroy him, which is just what LBJ and John Connally attempted to do in 1960. The myopic authors save their ire for Kennedy and vent none on Johnson or a potentially rabid political culture on this issue.
The second major area of focus is Kennedy’s sex life. The authors excuse this preoccupation with seventies revelations, an apparent reference to Exner, Meyer, and perhaps Monroe (p. 667). Kennedy seems to have been attractive to females. He was appreciative of their overtures. There seems to me to be nothing extraordinary about this. Here we have the handsome, tall, witty, charming son of a millionaire who is eligible and clearly going places. If he did not react positively to all the attention heaped on him, I am sure his critics would begin to suggest a “certain latent homosexual syndrome.” But what makes this (lengthy) aspect of the book interesting is that when the Blairs ask some of Kennedy’s girlfriends what his “style” was (clearly looking for juicy sex details), as often as not, the answer is surprising. For instance, in an interview with Charlotte McDonnell, she talks about Kennedy in warm and friendly terms adding that there was “No sex or anything” in their year long relationship (p. 81). Another Kennedy girlfriend, the very attractive Angela Greene had this to say:
Q: Was he romantically pushy?
A: I don’t think so. I never found him physically aggressive, if that’s what you mean. Adorable and sweet. (p. 181)
In another instance, years later, Kennedy was dating the beautiful Bab Beckwith. She invited Kennedy up to her apartment after he had wined and dined her. There was champagne and low music on the radio. But then a news broadcast came on and JFK leaped up, ran to the radio, and turned up the volume to listen to it. Offended, Beckwith threw him out.
Another curious observation that the book establishes is that Kennedy did not smoke and was only a social drinker. So if, as I detailed in the Mary Meyer tale, Kennedy ended up a White House coke-sniffer and acid head, it was a definite break with the past.
The Blairs’ book established some paradigms that would be followed in the anti-Kennedy genre. First, and probably foremost, is the influence of Kennedy’s father in his career. In fact, Joe Kennedy’s hovering presence over all his children is a prime motif of the book. The second theme that will be followed is the aforementioned female associations. The third repeating pattern the Blairs’ established is the use of Kennedy’s health problems as some kind of character barometer. That because Kennedy and his circle were not forthright about this, it indicates a covert tendency and a penchant for covering things up.
It would be easy to dismiss The Search for JFK as a slanted book, and even easier to argue that the authors had an agenda. Clay Blair was educated at Tulane and Columbia and served in the Navy from 1943-1946. He was a military affairs writer and Pentagon correspondent for Time-Life from 1949 to 1957. He then became an editor for the Saturday Evening Post and worked his way up to the corporate level of that magazine’s parent company, Curtis Publications. Almost all of his previous books dealt with some kind of military figure or national security issue e.g. The Atomic Submarine and Admiral Rickover, The Hydrogen Bomb, Nautilus 90 North, Silent Victory: the U.S. Submarine War Against Japan. In his book on Rickover, he got close cooperation from the Atomic Energy Commission and the book was screened by the Navy Department. In 1969 he wrote a book on the Martin Luther King murder called The Strange Case of James Earl Ray. Above the title, the book’s cover asks the question “Conspiracy? Yes or No!” Below this, this the book’s subtitle gives the answer, describing Ray as “The Man who Murdered Martin Luther King.” To be sure there is no ambiguity, on page 146 Blair has Ray shooting King just as the FBI says he did, no surprise since Blair acknowledges help from the Bureau and various other law enforcement agencies in his acknowledgements.
The Ray book is basically an exercise in guilt through character assassination. This practice has been perfected in the Kennedy assassination field through Oswald biographers like Edward Epstein and Priscilla Johnson McMillan. Consider some of Blair’s chapter headings: “A Heritage of Violence,” “Too Many Strikes Against Him,” “The Status Seeker.” In fact, Blair actually compares Ray with Oswald (pp. 88-89). In this passage, the author reveals that he also believes that Oswald is the lone assassin of Kennedy. He then tries to imply that Ray had the same motive as his predecessor: a perverse desire for status and recognition. Later, Blair is as categorical about the JFK case as he is about the King case:
In the case of John F. Kennedy the debate still rages. Millions of words have been written—pro and con. Yet no one has produced a single piece of hard evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was anything more than a psychopath acting entirely on his own. (p. 106)
I could continue in a similar vein with excerpts from this book and I could also go on with more questionable aspects of Clay Blair’s background. And I could then use this information, and the inferences, to dismiss The Search for JFK. I could even add that Blair’s agent on his Kennedy book was Scott Meredith, who was representing Judith Exner at the time. But I won’t go that far. I may be wrong, but in my opinion I don’t think the book can be classified as a deliberate distortion or hatchet job. Although the authors are in some respects seeking to surface unflattering material, I didn’t feel that they were continually relying on questionable sources or witnesses, or consistently distorting or fabricating the record. As I have mentioned, the book can be criticized and questioned—and dismissed—on other grounds, but, as far as I can see, not on those two.
Dubious Davis
Such is not the case with John Davis’ foray into Kennedy biography. The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster 1848-1983, was published in 1984, before Davis became the chief spokesman for the anti-Garrison/Mob-did-it wing of the ramified assassination research community. In its very title, his book is deceptive in a couple of interesting ways. First, from the dates included, it implies that the book will be a multigenerational family saga tracing the clan from Joe Kennedy’s parents down to youngest brother Teddy. But of the book’s 648 pages of text, about 400 deal with the life and death of John F. Kennedy. And more than half of those deal with his presidency. In no way is the book an in-depth family profile. Secondly, as any school boy knows, the word dynasty denotes a series or succession of at least three or more rulers. So Jack Kennedy’s two years and ten months as president constitute the shortest “dynasty” in recorded history. In reality, of course, it was not a dynasty at all and the inclusion of the word is a total misnomer.
But there is a method to the misnoming. For Davis, it is necessary to suggest a kind of “royal family” ambience to the Kennedys and, with it, the accompanying aura of familial and assumed “divine right.” One of the author’s aims is to establish the clan as part of America’s ruling class, with more power and influence than any other. He is clear about this early on, when he writes that Joe Kennedy Sr. was richer than either David or Nelson Rockefeller (p. 133). As any student of wealth and power in America knows, this is a rather amazing statement. In 1960, according to John Blair’s definitive study The Control of Oil, the Rockefeller family had controlling interest in three of the top seven oil companies in America, and four of the top eight in the world. They were also in control of Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the biggest in the nation then and the largest today. They also owned the single most expensive piece of real estate in the country, Rockefeller Center in New York City. The list of private corporations controlled by them could go on for a page, but to name just two, how about IBM and Eastern Airlines. I won’t enumerate the overseas holdings of the family but, suffice it to say, the Kennedys weren’t in the same league in that category. JFK knew this. As Mort Sahl relates, before the 1960 election, he liked to kid Kennedy about being the scion of a multimillionaire. Kennedy cornered him once on this topic and asked him point blank how much he thought his family was worth. Sahl replied, “Probably about three or four hundred million.” Kennedy then asked him how much he thought the Rockefellers were worth. Sahl said he had no idea. Kennedy replied sharply, “Try about four billion.” JFK let the number sink in and then added, “Now that’s money, Mort.”
Throughout the book, Davis tries to convey the feeling of a destined royalty assuming power. So, according to Davis, Kennedy was thinking of the Senate when he was first elected to the House. Then, from his first day in the Senate, he was thinking of the Vice-Presidency (p. 147). Epitomizing this idea, Davis relates a personal vignette about the Kennedy family wake after JFK’s funeral. Davis, a cousin of Jackie Kennedy, was leaving the hall and paused to shake hands with Rose Kennedy to offer his condolences (p. 450). Mother Kennedy surprised him by saying in a cool, controlled manner: “Oh, thank you Mr. Davis, but don’t worry. Everything will be all right. You’ll see. Now it’s Bobby’s turn.” Such coolness differs greatly from what is revealed in the recently declassified LBJ tapes in which, after the assassination, Rose could not even speak two sentences to the Johnsons without dissolving into tears. But the portrait is in keeping with the ruthless monarchy that Davis takes great pains to portray.
As I said above, the main focus is Kennedy’s short-lived “dynastic” presidency. And this is where some real questions about Davis’ methodology and intent arise. As he does in his assassination book Mafia Kingfish, Davis proffers a long bibliography to create the impression of immense scholarship and many hours quarrying the truth out of books, files, and libraries. But, like the later book, the text is not footnoted. So if the reader wishes to check certain facts, or locate the context of a comment or deduction, he is generally unable to do so. But fortunately, some of us have a background that enables us to find out where certain facts and deductions came from. This is crucial. For in addition to his wild inflation about the prominence of the Kennedy family in the power elite, another of Davis’ prime objectives is to reverse the verdict of the Church Committee and place Kennedy in the center of the CIA plots to kill Castro.
Pinning the Plots on Kennedy
As I said in Part One of this article, there is no evidence of such involvement in either the CIA’s Inspector General report of 1967, or in the Church Committee’s report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, issued in late 1975. In fact, both advance evidence and conclusions to indicate the contrary. So how does Davis propagate that the Kennedy brothers knew about, authorized, and encouraged the plots? The first method is by performing minute surgery on the 1975 report. Davis states that Allen Dulles briefed JFK on the plots at a November 27, 1960 meeting with the President-elect. He uses Deputy Director Dick Bissell as his source for this disclosure (Davis, p. 289). I turned to the committee report that dealt with Bissell’s assumptions on this matter (Alleged Assassination Plots p. 117). Here is the testimony Davis relies on:
Bissell: I believe at some stage the President the President and the President-elect both were advised that such an operation had been planned and was being attempted.
Senator Baker: By whom?
Bissell: I would guess through some channel by Allen Dulles.
The Chairman: But you’re guessing aren’t you?
Bissell: I am, Mr. Chairman, and I have said that I cannot recollect the giving of such briefing at the meeting with the President in November....
Even thought Bissell does not remember any briefing at this November meeting, Davis writes as if he does and uses him as a source. Yet the report goes on to say (Ibid p. 120): “Bissell surmised that the reasons he and Dulles did not tell Kennedy at that initial meeting were that they had ‘apparently thought it was not an important matter’.” (p. 120.) When Frank Church asked Bissell if that was not rather strange, Bissell replied, “I think that in hindsight it could be regarded as peculiar, yes.” (Ibid, p. 121.) Davis leaves these last two Bissell quotes out, probably because they would vitiate his “conclusion” that Dulles and Bissell informed JFK of the plots. Incredibly, Davis builds on this foundation of sand by postulating that the reason Kennedy decided to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs was that he knew the CIA would kill Castro by then and it would therefore be an easy victory! (Davis, p. 292.)
...
The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.
http://www.ctka.net/pr1197-jfk.html
