PROBE                           From the November-December, 1997
                                            issue (Vol. 5 No. 1)

           The Posthumous Assassination of JFK - Part II

               Sy Hersh and the Monroe/JFK Papers:
                The History of a Thirty-Year Hoax

                       By James DiEugenio

  (c) 1997 Citizens for Truth in the Kennedy Assassination - All
          Rights Reserved.  Reprinted with permission.

     Re-posting of this article allowed, only if done without
          alteration, including links and this notice.

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.)

Davis must know he's on shaky ground, because he fishes for
substantiation outside of the Church Committee report. Davis
states that his quest for this led him to the home of none other
than Richard Helms (Ibid, p. 289). Helms told Davis, "that he
believed Bissell was correct, that, knowing him, he would not
commit perjury before a Senate committee." (Ibid). Davis leaves
out the fact that perjury is precisely what Helms committed
before a Senate committee in 1973 about CIA involvement in Chile.

He also fails to tell the reader anything about the Helms-Bissell
relationship, which makes his "vouching" for Bissell almost
humorous. When the two were in the CIA, there were few rivalries
more pronounced and few resentments more public than the one
between Bissell and Helms, who resented his boss because Bissell
kept him out of the loop on some operations. Helms, according to
Evan Thomas' The Very Best Men, was happy to see the Bay of Pigs
capsize because it meant Bissell would be out and that Helms
would move up ( p. 268). So, to most objective readers, if Helms
has now switched to endorsing Bissell, there must be some
extenuating circumstances involved. There are, and again, Davis
does not tell the reader about them. As the Inspector General's
report tells us, when Dulles and Bissell began cleaning out their
desks, a new team took over the Castro plots, namely Bill Harvey
and Ted Shackley. The man they reported to was Helms, the highest
link in the chain (Alleged Assassination Plots pp. 148-153). In
other words, the alchemy of John Davis with Bissell helps get
Helms off the hook for responsibility for the continuing
unauthorized plots. And Helms needs all the help he can get. When
John McCone (Kennedy's replacement CIA Director) expressly
forbade any assassination plots, Helms said he couldn't remember
the meeting (Ibid, p. 166). When evidence was advanced that, in
direct opposition to Bobby's wishes, Helms continued the Castro
plots and allowed an operative to use RFK's name in doing so,
Helms said he didn't remember doing that either (Ibid p. 174). On
the day that RFK met with CIA officials to make it clear there
would be no more unauthorized plots against Castro, Kennedy's
calendar reads as follows: "1:00-Richard Helms." Helms could not
recall the meeting (Ibid p. 131). With this much to explain away,
Helms must have poured coffee for Davis the day they met.

But Davis is not done. He also writes the following:
  Kennedy also met on April 20 with the Cuban national
  involved in the unsuccessful underworld Castro assassination
  plot, a meeting that was not discovered until the Senate
  Committee on Intelligence found out about it in 1975. That
  Kennedy could have met with this individual, whose name has
  never been revealed, without knowing what his mission had
  been, seems inconceivable. (Davis p. 297.)

Imagine the images conjured up by this passage to a reader who
has not read the report. I had read the report and I thought I
had missed something. How did I forget about Kennedy's private
meeting with Tony Varona in the Oval office? JFK asks Varona why
he couldn't get at Castro and then pats him on the head and says
try it again. When I turned to page 124 in the report, I saw why
I didn't remember it. The meeting, as described by Davis, did not
occur. At the real meeting are Kennedy, Robert McNamara, General
Lyman Lemnitzer "and other Administration officials." Also in the
room "were several members of Cuban groups involved in the Bay of
Pigs." The report makes clear that this was the beginning of the
general review of the Bay of Pigs operation that would, within
three weeks, result in the Taylor Review Board which would then
recommend reforms in CIA control of covert operations. There is
no hint, so pregnant in Davis' phrasing, that anything about
assassination was discussed.

Womanizer and Warmonger?

One of the more startling sections of the Davis book is his
treatment of Judith Exner. From the above, one would guess that
he thoroughly buys into the 1977 Exner-Demaris book. He does and
he mentions her name quite often. What is surprising is that he
goes even further. Apparently, Davis realizes his jerry-built
apparatus of Bissell-Helms, and adulteration of the record will
not stand scrutiny. So he calls up Ovid Demaris, coauthor of
Judith Exner: My Story (p. 319). From this phone call, Davis is
informed that Exner lied in the book. She did tell Kennedy about
her affair with Sam Giancana and JFK got jealous. From this,
Davis builds another scaffolding: he now postulates that Exner
was Kennedy's conduit to the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro (Ibid
p. 324). What is breathtaking about this is that this is
something that not even Exner had uttered yet, at least not for
dissemination. And she won't until her get-together with Kitty
Kelley in the February 1988 cover story for People. This curious
passage leads one to think that Davis may have planted the seed
from which the Kelley story sprouted.

To go through the entire Davis book and correct all the errors of
fact, logic, and commentary would literally take another book.
But, in line with my original argument about anti-Kennedy
biography, I must point out just two parts of Davis' discussion
of JFK's Vietnam policy. The author devotes a small chapter to
this subject. In his hands, Kennedy turns into a hawk on Vietnam.

Davis writes that on July 17, 1963, Kennedy made "his last public
utterance" on Vietnam, saying that the U.S. was going to stay
there and win (p.374). But on September 2, 1963, in his interview
with Walter Cronkite, Kennedy states that the war is the
responsibility of "the people of Vietnam, against the
Communists." In other words, they have to win the war, not
Americans. Davis makes no mention of this. Davis similarly
ignores NSAM 111 in which Kennedy refused to admit combat troops
into the war, integral to any escalation plan, and NSAM 263,
which ordered a withdrawal to be completed in 1965. This last was
published in the New York Times (11/16/63), so Davis could have
easily found it had he been looking.

In light of this selective presentation of the record on Vietnam,
plus the acrobatic contortions performed on the Church Committee
report, one has to wonder about Davis' intent in doing the book.

I question his assertion that when he began the book he "did not
have a clear idea where it would lead." (p. 694) So I was not
surprised that in addition to expanding Exner's story, he
uncritically accepted the allegations about Mary Meyer and
Marilyn Monroe (pp. 610-612). As the reader can see, in the three
areas outlined at the beginning of this essay, Davis hit a
triple. In all the threads, he has either held steady or advanced
the frontier. It is interesting in this regard to note that Davis
devotes many pages to JFK's assassination (pp. 436-498). He
writes that Kennedy died at the "hands of Lee Harvey Oswald and
possible co-conspirators" (p. 436). Later, he will write that
Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy (p. 552). Going even further, he can
state that:
  It would be a misstatement, then, to assert that Deputy
  Attorney General Katzenbach and the members of the Warren
  Commission...consciously sought to cover up evidence
  pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (P. 461)

As the declassified record now shows (Probe Vol. 4 #6 "Gerald
Ford: Accessory after the Fact") this is just plain wrong. Davis
then tries to insinuate any cover-up was brought on by either a
backfiring of the Castro plots (Davis p. 454) or JFK's dalliance
with Exner (p. 498). As wrongheaded and against the declassified
record as this seems, this argument still has adherents, e. g.

Martin Waldron and Tom Hartman. They refine it into meaning that
the Kennedys had some kind of secret plan to invade Cuba in the
offing at the time of the assassination. This ignores the Church
Committee report, which shows that by 1963, Kennedy had lost
faith in aggression and was working toward accommodation with
Castro. It also ignores the facts that JFK would not invade Cuba
under the tremendous pressures of either the Bay of Pigs debacle,
or the Cuban Missile Crisis in which Bobby backed him on both
occasions. Reportedly, like Davis, Waldron likes to use CIA
sources like Bill Colby (Mr. Phoenix Operation) on JFK's ideas
about assassination. Just as Newman corrected the Vietnam record
in 1992, his long-awaited book Kennedy and Cuba will do much to
correct these dubious assertions.

"Liberal" Turncoats:
Collier and Horowitz

The same year that the Davis book appeared, another anti-Kennedy
book was published. It was entitled The Kennedys: An American
Drama, and was written by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. These
two were both former editors at the liberal Ramparts publication.

After the magazine folded, both began to write biographies of
famous American families while on their way from the left to the
extreme right. In order, the pair examined the Rockefellers, the
Kennedys, the Fords, and the Roosevelts. As with Davis, it is
interesting to note the difference in their treatments of the
Rockefellers (1976) and the Kennedys (1984). In the earlier book,
the authors note toward the end that they had access to the
Rockefeller family archives (p. 636). In another book of theirs,
Destructive Generation, they write that the Rockefeller book
began when the pair were soliciting funds to keep Ramparts afloat
(p. 275). This is how they got in contact with the younger
generation of that clan. So when the magazine fell, they went to
work on the family biography with access to people and papers
that no outside, nonofficial authors had before. It is
interesting that, in 1989, the authors wrote that when they
started the Rockefeller book, they were expecting to excavate an
"executive committee of the ruling class" and thereby unlock the
key to the American power elite. But they found that they only
ended up writing about American lives (Ibid). They ended up with
that result because that seems to have been the plan all along.

Towards the end of the book, the authors strike a rather wistful
note, a sort of elegy for a once powerful family that is now
fading into the background (The Rockefellers, p. 626). This is
extraordinary. Consider some of the things the Rockefellers
accomplished in the seventies: they were part of the effort to
quadruple gasoline prices through their oil companies; David
Rockefeller took part in the effort to get the American
government to intervene in Chile in 1973; the Trilateral
Commission, which the Rockefellers sponsored, funneled many of
its members into the Carter administration; in 1979, Henry
Kissinger and David Rockefeller convinced Carter to let the Shah
of Iran into the country for medical treatment. The reaction in
Iran helped give us Reagan-Bush. The rest, as they say, is
history.

In comparing the two books, one is immediately struck by a
difference in approach. Whatever the shortcomings of the
Rockefeller book, there is a minimal reliance on questionable
sources. And the concentration on individual lives very seldom
extends into a pervasive search for sex and scandal. This
difference extends to even the photos chosen for the two books.
The Rockefeller book is fairly conventional with wide or half
page group shots or portraits. In the Kennedy book, even the one
page of group shots are tiny prints. The rest are wallet-sized
head shots that when leafed through, give the impression of mug
shots.

The accompanying text is suitable to the photo layout. There
seems to me to be both a macro and micro plan to the book. The
overall plan is to make Joe Kennedy a sort of manipulating
overseer to his sons and, at the same time, make him into a
status-seeking iconoclast whose beliefs and sympathies are contra
to those of America. The problem with this is dual. First, it is
the typical "like father, like son" blanket which reeks of guilt,
not just by association, but by birth. Second, the blatant ploy
does not stand scrutiny because what makes John and Robert
Kennedy so fascinating is how different their politics and
economics were from Joe Kennedy's and how fast the difference was
exhibited. To use just two examples from JFK's first term in the
House, Kennedy rejected his father's isolationist Republican type
of foreign policy and opted for a more internationalist approach
when he voted for the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan. Second,
Kennedy voted to sustain Truman's veto of Taft-Hartley which
would weaken unions and strengthen American big
businessmen-people like his father. From there on in, the splits
got wider and wider. It is this father-son dichotomy that none of
these books cares to acknowledge let alone explore-which reveals
their intent. (An exception is the Blairs' book, which does
acknowledge the split on pp. 608-623.)

In their approach to JFK, Collier and Horowitz take up where the
Blairs left off. In fact, they play up the playboy angle even
more strongly than the Blairs. When Kennedy gets to Washington in
1947, this note is immediately struck with "women's underthings
stuffed into the crevices of the sofa" (p. 189) and a "half-eaten
hamburger hidden behind books on the mantel" (Ibid). The problem
here is there is no source given for the first observation and
the hamburger is sourced to none other than CIA-Washington Post
crony Joe Alsop, the man who, as Don Gibson pointed out, talked
LBJ into forming the Warren Commission (Probe Vol. 3 #4 pp. 28-
30).

This is typical of the book's low scholarly standard. Both
authors have advanced degrees from Cal Berkeley. Both had done
some solid academic work in their Ramparts days. Yet neither has
any qualms about the Exner or Mary Meyer stories. In fact they
both jump on the Timothy Leary addition to the latter ( p. 355).

This tabloid approach allows them to use none other than Kitty
Kelley on Jackie's reaction to Kennedy's supposed White House
affairs. Consider the following excerpt based on Kelley:
  She knew far more about these goings-on than he ever
  suspected and dealt with them through hauteur, as when she
  disdainfully handed him some panties she'd found in her
  pillow slip, saying, "Here, would you find out who these
  belong to. They're not my size. (Ibid)

With this kind of standard I'm surprised the authors did not use
that other ersatz Kelley "bombshell" about Jackie, namely that
JFK's affairs drove her to electroshock therapy.

Many of the sexual anecdotes go unsourced, but there is one that
is footnoted that is quite revealing. The authors use it as a
coda to a chapter on Jack's early years in the House. This
passage synthesizes the image they wish to depict: Kennedy as the
empty vessel of his father who had his role as politician forced
on him after Joe Junior's death and who now uses sex as a release
from his own vacuity. It deserves to be quoted at length:
  The whole thing with him was pursuit. I think he was
  secretly disappointed when a woman gave in. It meant that
  the low esteem in which he held women was once again
  validated....I was one of the few he could really talk
  to....During one of these conversations I once asked him why
  he was doing it-why he was acting like his father...why he
  was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal.... He
  took awhile to formulate an answer. Finally he shrugged and
  said, "I don't know, really, I guess I just can't help it."
  He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a
  little boy about to cry (p. 214)

Pretty strong stuff. What else could the authors ask for but
young Jack confessing to their charge? But perhaps a little too
perfect? After contemplating the words, I thought to myself that
JFK was never this open to his girlfriends. Perhaps maybe Inga
Arvad, who he wanted to marry, but very few others. So I flipped
back to see who the source was. The footnote read "Authors'
interview with Priscilla McMillan." I then remembered that, by
this time, Priscilla had been classified by the CIA as a "witting
collaborator." I also recalled that years later, Priscilla
changed her "Platonic" relationship with JFK for the National
Enquirer. She was now saying that young Jack had actually made a
pass at her.

With this in mind, it is instructive to note that in Destructive
Generation, Collier reveals that in 1979 he started lecturing for
the United States Information Agency (p. 275). The USIA has a
long, involved association with the CIA and actually disseminated
propaganda for the Warren Commission. The date of Collier's work
approximates the time when the Kennedy book idea was originated.

Ignoring the shoddy approach and scholarly standards of the work,
the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Republic all gave
the book prominent and glowing reviews. In the latter case,
Martin Peretz placed the book on the August 27, 1984 New Republic
cover under the title "Dissolute Dynasty." He then got longtime
Kennedy basher Midge Decter to write a long review that branded
the saga "a sordid story." Right after this ecstatic reception,
in 1985, Horowitz and Collier landed a feature story in the
Washington Post as "Lefties for Reagan." Two years later, the
pair went on a USIA-State Department sponsored tour of Nicaragua.

This was at a time when the CIA was dumping millions into that
country in a huge psychological and propaganda war effort. That
same year, with lots of foundation money, the pair arranged a
"Second Thoughts" conference in Washington. This was basically a
meeting of "reformed" sixties liberals bent on attacking that
decade and anyone who wished to hold it up as an era of
excitement and/or progressive achievement. Peretz attended that
conference. Later, they sponsored another conference entitled
"Second Thoughts on Race in America." This might have been called
the Washington Post take on race in the eighties since it
featured such Kay Graham-Ben Bradlee employees as Richard Cohen,
Juan Williams, and Joe Klein. Today, these two see themselves as
armed guards protecting America from any renaissance of sixties
activism after Reagan. They are quite open about this and
Kennedy's role in it in Destructive Generation: "Just as
Eisenhower's holding action in the Fifties led to JFK's New
Frontier liberalism in the Sixties...so the clamped-down
Reaganism of the Eighties has precipitated the current radical
resurgence...." Is one to conclude that Clinton is a radical? Was
the Kennedy book a put-up job to place them over the top with
their right-wing sponsors? Or do they really find Kitty Kelley
credible? Could they really not have known that Priscilla Johnson
McMillan was doing the same thing with Kennedy that she had
recently done with Oswald in her book Marina and Lee? To put it
another way: if your function is to discredit a decade, what
better way to do it than to smear the man most responsible for
ushering it in?

A Question of Character,
But Not Kennedy's

Which brings us to Thomas Reeves. By the nineties, the negative
literature on the Kennedys had multiplied so much that it was
possible just to put it all together and make a compendium of it.
In 1991, Reeves did just that with his book A Question of
Character. It obediently follows the path paved by its noted
predecessors. In fact, many of his footnotes are to Davis and to
Collier and Horowitz. Although Reeves is another Ph. D., he never
questions the faulty methodology I have pointed out. On the
contrary, by ignoring the primary sources, he can actually state
that JFK authorized the Castro plots, and that John Davis is
especially authoritative on the issue (p. 463). Predictably, he
completely buys into Exner's book and, like Liz Smith, tries to
portray her as a victim of the Kennedy protecting "liberal media"
(p. 424). He even endorses the Kitty Kelley 1988 People update of
Exner's story, finding no inconsistencies between that and the
1977 installment. And, like Collier and Horowitz, scholar Reeves
has no problems using Kelley's book on Jackie Kennedy as a
source, although he does add that the tabloid queen's works "must
be approached cautiously" (p. 440).

Any scholar who compromises this much, must have an axe to grind.
So how ideological is Reeves? He can actually call the Washington
Post a liberal newspaper (p. 151). He can use veteran right-wing
hit man and Rockefeller agent Victor Lasky as a frequent source.
He tries to imply that Lasky's book on JFK, published in 1963,
was banned shortly after Kennedy's death by the "liberal media"
(p. 3). What he doesn't say is that it was reprinted in 1966.

Reeves' method here is to basically combine the Davis book with
the Collier-Horowitz book. From the latter we get ladles of sex
and women; from the former the notion that Kennedy was a Cold
Warrior no different than Eisenhower or Nixon. Like Davis, Reeves
performs gymnastics with the Cuba and Vietnam record in order to
proffer this. In fact, Reeves is so intent on pommeling JFK that,
at times, he reverses field and actually uses Bruce Miroff's
Pragmatic Illusions, a leftist critique of the New Frontier, as a
source.

But there can be little doubt about where Reeves stands. This is
the man who once wrote a quite sympathetic book about Joe
McCarthy (The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy). In his anthology
of essays on the foundation system (Foundations Under Fire) his
uncritical opening essay is by far the longest piece in the book.
A fierce critic like Fred Cook gets only three pages. In his
anthology of essays on McCarthy (McCarthyism), editor Reeves has
to label critics of the champion Red baiter as "liberals." Yet
when people like Bill Buckley or Brent Bozell take the floor, no
such label is necessary. In his latest book, The Empty Church,
Reeves unremittingly pillories liberals for weakening the main
Protestant churches in America. What is the cause of their
shrinking numbers? The liberalism of the sixties of course. One
long chapter is entitled "Stuck in the Sixties." This last book
was published four years after his Kennedy hatchet job, and was
sponsored by something called the Wisconsin Policy Research
Institute which sounds suspiciously like Horowitz's Center for
Popular Culture, which makes me wonder if Reeves followed an
established course of career advancement.

Reeves certainly did all he could to promote the Marilyn Monroe
tale. Of course, he had an advantage. By 1991, when A Question of
Character was published, the Marilyn Monroe thread of the

movement outlined above was in full bloom. As if by design, this
literature assimilated appendages from the other two threads: a
distinct anti-Kennedy flavor, and the idea that the Kennedys
ordered political assassinations. If one follows the pedigree of
this lineage, the reasons for this become clear. The man who
created the RFK/Monroe business, as we will see, was an
incontinent Kennedy hater.

In the Collier-Horowitz book, the authors allude to the pamphlet
that started the industry. Describing Bobby's 1964 campaign for a
Senate seat in New York, they write:
  Meanwhile, right-wingers were circulating a pamphlet
  entitled "The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe," charging
  that Bobby had been having an affair with the film actress
  and, when she threatened to expose some of his dealings in
  appeasing the Castro regime, had her killed by Communist
  agents under his control. (p. 409)

The authors fail to note the man who penned this work. His name
was Frank Capell. Capell is usually described as an extreme right-
winger associated with the John Birch Society. This is apt, but
incomplete. As Jim Garrison once noted, the more one scratches at
these Minutemen types, the more their intelligence connections
appear.

Swallowing Frank Capell

Capell had worked for the government in World War II, but was
convicted on charges of eliciting kickbacks from contractors for
the war effort. After the war, in the Red Scare era, Capell began
publishing a Red baiting newsletter, The Herald of Freedom. He
was highly active in attempting to expose leftists in the
entertainment industry. It was this experience that put him in a
good position to pen his McCarthyite, murderous smear of Bobby
Kennedy.

But there is another element that needs to be noted about Capell:
his ties to the FBI. As Lisa Pease noted in her watershed article
on Thomas Dodd (Probe Vol. 3#6), Capell was one of the sources
tapped by the Bureau in the wake of the assassination in order to
find out who Oswald really was. His information proved remarkably
penetrating, considering it came in February of 1964. Capell said
Oswald was a CIA agent. Even more interesting, Capell stated in
his FBI interview that this information came from "a friend of
his...with sources close to the presidential commission" i. e.,
the Warren Commission. To have this kind of acute information and
to have access to people around the Commission (which was sealed
off at the time) strongly indicates Capell was tied into the
intelligence community, which of course, is probably why the
Bureau was consulting him in the first place.

This is revelatory of not just the past, i.e. the origins of this
myth, but of the present, i.e. why it persists. For as Donald
Spoto reveals in his book Marilyn Monroe, one of the people who
relentlessly pushed Capell's fabricated smear was fellow FBI
asset, Hoover crony, and Hollywood Red baiter Walter Winchell
(Spoto p. 601). (For a full discussion of former ONI operative
Winchell's service in Hoover's employ see Neal Gabler's
Winchell.) As William Sullivan has noted, the dissemination of
Capell's invention was encouraged by Hoover. Sullivan called
Bobby a near-Puritan and then added:
  The stories about Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were just
  stories. The original story was invented by a so-called
  journalist, a right-wing zealot who had a history of
  spinning wild yarns. It spread like wildfire, of course, and
  J. Edgar Hoover was right there, gleefully fanning the
  flames. (The Bureau p. 56)

The Capell/Winchell/Hoover triangle sowed the seeds of this
slander. But the exposure of this triangle does more. In the
Vanity Fair article in which Judith Exner dumped out the latest
installment of her continuing saga, Liz Smith revealed that she
apprenticed at the feet of Walter Winchell in New York (January
1997 p. 32). This may explain why she took up her mentor's
cudgel.

Capell's work is, as Spoto notes in his Afterword, a frightful
piece of reactionary paranoia. But there are two details in his
pat anti-Kennedy tract that merit mention. First, Capell is
probably the first to propagate the idea that RFK was indirectly
responsible for his brother's murder. He does this by saying (p.
52), that commie sympathizer Bobby called off the investigation
of the shooting of General Edwin Walker in April of 1963, thus
allowing that crazed Communist Oswald to escape and later kill
JFK. This piece of rant has been modified later to fit into the
stilted mosaics of people like Davis and Waldron. What makes it
so fascinating is that, through the FBI's own files, we now have
evidence that Capell was deliberately creating a fiction: he had
information that Oswald was not a communist, but a CIA agent.

The second point worth examining about Capell's screed is the
part where he begins laying out the "conspiracy" to kill Marilyn,
specifically, RFK's motive for murder. Capell writes:
  But what if she were helped along into the next world by
  someone who would either benefit financially or who feared
  she might disclose something he wished to conceal. Suppose,
  for example, a married man were involved, that he had
  promised to marry her but was not sincere. Suppose she had
  threatened to expose their relationship (p. 28)

This is as specific as Capell gets in outlining his reason for
the "conspiracy." I wondered where he got the idea of Monroe's
"going public" about an affair. As many writers have pointed out,
this would have been quite out of character for her. Something
that Jim Marrs recently sent me may help explain it. He sent me
the full text of a memo that he references in his current book,
Alien Agenda. The memo supposedly reports on information gleaned
from an FBI wiretap of Dorothy Kilgallen's phone. The document
went from the FBI to the CIA, where it was signed by James
Angleton. In it, a man named Howard Rothberg is quoted as saying
that Monroe had conversations with the Kennedy brothers on top
secret matters like the examination of captured outer space
creatures, bases inside of Cuba, and of President Kennedy's plans
to kill Castro. He also said that she was talking about a "diary
of secrets" (quotes in original) that she had threatened RFK with
if he brushed her off. When I got this memo, I was struck by its
singular format. I have seen hundreds of CIA documents, maybe
thousands, and I never saw one that looked like this. (We can't
reproduce it because the copy sent to us is so poor). I forwarded
it to Washington researcher Peter Vea. He agreed it was highly
unusual. To play it safe, I then sent a copy to former
intelligence analyst John Newman. He said that he had seen such
reports. What he thought was wrong with it was that there were
things in it that should have been redacted that weren't and
things exposed that should have been blacked out. For instance,
there is a phrase as follows, "a secret air base for the purpose
of inspecting [things] from outer space." Newman notes that the
brackets around the word "things" denote that it had been
previously redacted. It should not have. The words "outer space"
should have been redacted and they never were. On the basis of
this and other inconsistencies, he decided it was a "good"
forgery from someone who knew what they were doing. He told PBS
this four years ago when they showed it to him. The fact that
this document purportedly revealing sensitive information was
exposed in 1993 when he saw it, before the JFK Act when into
effect, justifies even more suspicion about its origin and
intent.

Spoto's book adds more to the suspicion about the document, and
perhaps the information in Capell's pamphlet. Spoto notes that on
August 3, 1962, the day the above memo was distributed, Kilgallen
printed an item in her column saying that Marilyn was "vastly
alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe
DiMaggio" (p. 600). Spoto notes the source for Kilgallen's story
as Howard Rothberg, the man named in the memo. This is
interesting for more than one reason. First, Spoto writes that
Rothberg was "a New York interior designer with no connection at
all to Marilyn or her circle." (Ibid.) This means that he was
likely getting his "information" through a third, unnamed source.
Second, Rothberg's name, and this is part of the sensitive
information referred to above, is exposed in the document. This
is extraordinary. Anyone who has jousted with the FBI or CIA
knows how difficult it is to get "sources and methods" revealed.
In fact this is one of the big battles the ARRB had to fight with
the FBI. Yet in this document, both the method and the source are
open. Third, to my knowledge, Kilgallen never printed anything
specific from the document. Why? Assuming for a moment that the
document is real, probably because she could not confirm anything
in it. But interestingly, right after Kilgallen printed her vague
allusion, Winchell began his steady drumbeat of rumors until, as
Spoto notes, he essentially printed Capell's whole tale (p. 601).
From this, one could conclude that the Angleton memo could be
viewed in two ways. Either it was, as in Newman believes, a
"good" fake, or a false lead planted to begin an orchestrated
campaign. More specifically, Rothberg was either a witting or
unwitting conduit to the media for either Hoover or Angleton (or
both). The quick Winchell follow-up would argue for Hoover. The
Director would want someone else to lead the story before his man
Winchell pushed it to the limit. The "diary of secrets," so
reminiscent of Mary Meyer (discussed in Part One of this article)
would suggest Angleton.

Capell was drawn up on charges in 1965. The charges were rather
fatal to the tale told in his RFK pamphlet: conspiracy to commit
libel. One would have thought this discreditation was enough to
impale the tale. And it probably would have been had it not been
for Norman Mailer. In 1973, Mailer published a book, Marilyn,
(really a photo essay) with the assistance of longtime FBI asset
on the Kennedy assassination Larry Schiller. He recirculated the
tale again, inserting a new twist. He added the possibility that
the FBI and/or the CIA might have been involved in the murder in
order to blackmail Bobby ( p. 242). In 1973, pre-Rupert Murdoch,
the media had some standards. Mailer was excoriated for his
baseless ruminations. In private, he admitted he did what he did
to help pay off a tax debt. He also made a similar confession in
public. When Mike Wallace asked him on 60 Minutes (7/13/73) why
he had to trash Bobby Kennedy, Mailer replied "I needed money
very badly."

Swallowing Slatzer

The worst thing about Mailer's money-grubbing antics was that it
gave an alley to run through to a man who had actually been at
work before Mailer's book was published. In 1972, Robert Slatzer
approached a writer named Will Fowler. Slatzer had been at work
on an article which posited a conspiracy to murder Monroe. Fowler
read it and was unimpressed. He told Slatzer that had he been
married to Monroe, now that would make a real story. Shortly
after, Slatzer got in contact with Fowler again. He said he
forgot to tell him, but he had been married to Monroe. The
"marriage" was a short one: 72 hours. It happened in Mexico on
October 4, 1952. Unfortunately for Slatzer, Spoto found out that
Monroe was in Beverly Hills that day on a shopping spree and she
signed a check dated October 4th to pay for the articles she
purchased (Spoto p. 227). Since Slatzer says that the pair left
for Mexico on October 3rd and stayed for the following weekend,
this demolishes his story.

But despite his fabrications, in 1974 Slatzer turned his article
into a book entitled The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn
Monroe. It went through at least three printings, including a
mass paperback sale. Besides his "marriage" and his "continuing
friendship" with Monroe, the other distinguishing aspect of the
book is its similarity to Capell's work. The first line is:
"Bobby Kennedy promised to marry me. What do you think of that?"
Slatzer, as if reading the Hoover/Angleton memo, saw her "diary."
One of the things in it is a mention of "Murder, Incorporated."
When Slatzer asks his "ex-wife" what that meant, Marilyn replies
on cue: "I didn't quite understand what Bobby was saying. But I
remember him telling me that he was powerful enough to have
people taken care of it they got in his way." Another entry is
about the Bay of Pigs. Slatzer says that Marilyn told him that
Jack let Bobby handle "the whole thing" because JFK's back was
sore that day etc. etc. etc. The whole book is a continuation and
refinement of the Capell hoax.

But Slatzer got away with it. Today he still appears on talk
shows and videos (e.g. Marilyn, the Last Word ) as Marilyn's
former spouse. In 1991, he actually sold his story to the ever
gullible ABC. They made a film of his tall tale: Marilyn and Me.

Slatzer's book set a precedent in this field. Later, volumes by
the likes of Milo Speriglio (whom Slatzer hired as an
investigator), Anthony Scaduto, and James Haspiel, took their
lead from Slatzer. They all follow the above outlined formula:
the Kennedys were a rotten crowd (Collier and Horowitz); they
were involved in political assassinations (John Davis); and both
were having affairs with Monroe (Slatzer).

Tony, How Could You?

In the Monroe/Kennedys industry, 1985 was a pivotal year. Anthony
Summers dove into the quagmire-head first. He published his
Marilyn biography, Goddess.

In it, he reveals (shockingly) that he bought into Slatzer.
Slatzer is profusely mentioned in both the index and his
footnotes. So are people like Haspiel and Jeane Carmen. Carmen is
another late-surfacing intimate of Monroe. Carmen professes to
have been Monroe's roomie when she lived on Doheny Drive, before
she bought her famous home in Brentwood. She began circulating
her story after Slatzer did his bit. Of course, Marilyn's
neighbors at Doheny, and her other friends, don't recall her
(Spoto p. 472). But Summers welcomes her because she provides
sexy details about Marilyn's torrid romance with Bobby. A third
peg in Summers' edifice is Ralph de Toledano. Summers describes
him as a "Kennedy critic" in the paperback version of his book
(p. 453). This is like saying that Richard Helms once did some
work for the CIA. De Toledano was a former OSS officer who Bill
Donovan got rid of because he was too much of a rabid
anticommunist. After the war, he hooked up with professional Red
baiter Isaac Don Levine of the publication Plain Talk. Levine was
another spooky journalist whom Allen Dulles, while he was on the
Warren Commission, considered using to write incriminating
articles about Oswald (Peter Scott, Deep Politics and the Death
of JFK p. 55). Later on, de Toledano found a home at former CIA
officer and E. Howard Hunt pal Bill Buckley's National Review. If
one were to translate the Summers trio of Slatzer, Carmen, and de
Toledano to the JFK case, one could say that he wedded Ricky
White to Beverly Oliver and then brought in a journalist like,
say Hugh Aynesworth, to cinch his case. And the things Summers
leaves out are as important as what he puts in. For instance, he
omits the facts that her psychiatrist did not know the drugs that
her internist was prescribing; the weird nature and background of
her house servant Eunice Murray; and her pending reconciliation
with Joe DiMaggio which, of course, makes her "torrid romance"
with Bobby even more incredible. The reconciliation makes less
credible Summers' portrait of an extremely neurotic Monroe, which
he needs in order to float the possibility that she was going to
"broadcast" her relationship with the Kennedys.

Summers' book attracted the attention of Geraldo Rivera at ABC's
20/20. Rivera and his cohort Sylvia Chase bought into Goddess
about as willingly as Summers bought Slatzer. They began filing a
segment for the news magazine. But as the segment began to go
through the editors, objections and reservations were expressed.
Finally, Roone Arledge, head of the division at the time, vetoed
it by saying it was, "A sleazy piece of journalism" and "gossip-
column stuff" (Summers p. 422). Liz Smith, queen of those gossip-
columnists, pilloried ABC for censoring the "truth about 1962."
Rivera either quit or was shoved out by ABC over the controversy.
Arledge was accused by Chase of "protecting the Kennedys" (he was
a distant relative through marriage). Rivera showed his true
colors by going on to produce syndicated specials on Satanism and
Al Capone's vaults (which were empty). He is now famous for
bringing tabloidism to television. Arledge won the battle. Rivera
and Liz Smith won the war. Until 1993.

The Truth About Marilyn

In 1993, Donald Spoto wrote his bio of Monroe. After reading the
likes of Haspiel, Slatzer and Summers, picking up Spoto is like
going back into one's home after it has been fumigated. Spoto is
a very experienced biographer who is not shy about controversy.

His biographies of Alfred Hitchcock and Laurence Olivier reveal
sides of their personalities that they, and other writers, tried
to conceal. Spoto is also quite thorough in obtaining and then
pouring over primary sources. Finally, he respects himself and
his subject, which allows him to question sources before arriving
at a judgment on someone's credibility. This last quality allowed
him to arrive at what is the most satisfactory conclusion about
the death of Monroe (Spoto pp. 566-593). The Kennedys had nothing
to do with it. I have no great interest or admiration for Monroe
as an actress or a personality. But I do appreciate good
research, fine writing, and a clear dedication to truth. If any
reader is interested in the real facts of her life, this is the
book to read.

Sy Hersh's "Truth"

Seymour Hersh apparently never read it. And in fact, as Robert
Sam Anson relates in the November 1997 Vanity Fair, Hersh never
thought there was a conspiracy in the JFK case (p. 108). But in
1993, a friend at ABC proposed an investigative segment for the
network on the 30th anniversary of the murder. Apparently, the
idea fell through. But by that time, Hersh had hooked up with an
old pal, Michael Ewing. Hersh then decided that a book on the
Kennedys-not necessarily the assassination- would bring him the
big money that he craved. Through big-time talent agency ICM, the
project was sold to Little, Brown for the Bob Woodward type of
money that Hersh was so envious of: a cool million.

Although Ewing appears to have been a major source for Hersh,
Anson misses his true significance. Ewing was one of the people
brought into the House Select Committee by Bob Blakey after Dick
Sprague was forced out. Ewing has never complained in public
about the failures of that inquest. There is a reason for this:
he is a Blakey acolyte. Blakey liked him so much that he gave him
a key assignment in 1978: close down the New Orleans
investigation. The HSCA had found too much corroborating evidence
supporting Jim Garrison's allegations about certain people
involved with Oswald in the summer of 1963. One of these
witnesses described elements of a conspiracy in New Orleans which
included David Ferrie and Clay Shaw. He also said that Shaw knew
Ruby. He then passed a polygraph with flying colors. That was
enough for Blakey. He switched investigating teams. Some of the
people Blakey brought in knew nothing about New Orleans: they
were actually pulled off the Martin Luther King side of the HSCA.
The man brought in to actually bury Garrison was Ewing. Two of
the people Ewing consulted with before dismissing Garrison were
Bill Gurvich and Aaron Kohn, two men strongly connected to the
FBI and whose credibility on Garrison is quite suspect.

At the beginning of his project, Hersh declared that Ewing had
"an I.Q. of about 800 and government documents coming out of his
ears." (Anson p. 120) It is questionable whether Hersh was ever
going to do a book about the Kennedy murder. But if he was, Ewing
would give him several advantages: 1) He was anti-Garrison. As
has been shown by Summers, Davis, and David Scheim, being anti-
Garrison is always a plus for media exposure. 2) If they found a
conspiracy, Ewing's history would guarantee it would be mob-
oriented. Another plus for media exposure. 3) As Anson reveals,
Ewing has now broadened his character assassination talents from
Garrison to the Kennedys (p. 110). Like John Davis, and against
the record, Ewing believes RFK was not only in on the Castro
plots but controlled them to the point of choosing which mobsters
to use. His source on this? A "senior CIA official" (Anson p.
115). Did Ewing follow the Davis example and lunch with Richard
Helms?

Not since Gerald Posner has a book on the JFK case been as touted
as Hersh's. It started in Esquire with a teaser article in its
September 1996 issue. In July and September of this year, Liz
Smith kept up the barrage of pro-Hersh blurbs in her column. The
September 23rd notice stated that Hersh's book would focus on the
Kennedys and Monroe and how RFK had Monroe killed.

As everyone knows by now, the whole Monroe angle blew up in
Hersh's face. When Hersh had to reluctantly admit on ABC that he
had been had, he did it on the same spot where Rivers, Summers,
and Sylvia Chase had played martyrs for the tabloid cause, namely
20/20. On September 25th, Peter Jennings narrated the opening
segment of that program. With what we know in November, Jennings
approach reveals much by what was left out. Hersh appeared only
briefly on the segment. He was on screen less than 10% of the
time. The main focus was on the forensic debunking of the
documents (which we now know was underplayed by ABC.) Jennings
cornered Lex Cusack, the man who "found" the papers in the files
of his late father who was an attorney. From published accounts,
the documents were supposedly signed by five people: JFK, RFK,
Monroe, Janet DesRosiers (Joe Kennedy's assistant) and Aaron
Frosch (Monroe's lawyer). They outline a settlement agreement
between JFK and Monroe signed at the Carlyle Hotel in New York on
March 3, 1960. The documents set up a $600,000 trust to be paid
by contributions from the individual Kennedy family members to
Monroe's mother, Gladys Baker. In return for this, Monroe agrees
to keep quiet about her relationship with JFK and any underworld
personalities she observed in Kennedy's presence. The latter is
specified as being Sam Giancana. Kennedy had a lawyer out of his
usual orbit, Larry Cusack of New York, do the preparation.

Just from the above, one could see there were certain problems
with the story. First, its details could have been culled from
reading the pulp fiction in the Monroe field: the idea that JFK
had a long, ongoing affair with Monroe; that she had threatened
to go public with it; that the Kennedys were in league with
Giancana; that the family would put up money to save JFK's career
etc. All this could have been rendered from reading, say two
books: Slatzer's and Thomas Reeves'. Even the touch about the
Carlyle Hotel-Kennedy's New York apartment-is in the Reeves book.
In other words, it is all too stale and pat, with none of the
twists or turns that happen in real life. Secondly, are we to
truly believe that the Kennedys would put their name to a
document so that a woman blackmailing them would have even more
power to blackmail them in the future? Or was that to lead into
why the Kennedys had her killed?
Hersh has leapt so enthusiastically into the "trash Kennedy"
abyss that these questions never seem to have bothered him. Anson
depicts him as waving the documents over his head at a restaurant
and shouting, "The Kennedys were...the worst people!" Lex Cusack
showed them to Hersh a few at a time, wetting his appetite for
more at each instance. Hersh then used the documents to get
Little, Brown to give him $250,000 more and to sell ABC on a
documentary.

Jennings said on the 20/20 segment that the flaw in the documents
was in the typing part of them and not the actually penmanship.
As subsequent facts have shown, this is not actually true. Linda
Hart, one of the handwriting analysts hired by ABC (who was
slighted on the program) later said that there were indications
of "pen drops" in John Kennedy's signature, i.e. someone stopped
writing and then started up again, a sure indication of tracing.
Also, when I talked to Greg Schreiner, president of a Monroe fan
club in Los Angeles, he told me that the moment he saw Monroe's
signature, he knew it was not hers. Interestingly, he had met
with Hersh this summer. Hersh had told him about the documents
and Greg asked to see them. Hersh refused.

Another interesting aspect of the exposure of Hersh's "bombshell"
was aired in the New York Times on September 27th. In this story,
Bill Carter disclosed that there were doubts expressed about the
documents by NBC to Hersh many months ago. Warren Littlefield, an
NBC executive, said that Hersh had tried to peddle a documentary
to them based on the documents. After NBC sent their experts to
look at them in the summer of 1996, he told Hersh that in their
opinion the documents were questionable. He said that NBC's
lawyers were more specific with Hersh's lawyers. This was backed
up by David Samuels' article in The New Yorker of 11/3/97. So
Hersh's denials on this point, mentioned by Carter, ring hollow.

What makes the hollowness more palpable is one of the typing
inconsistencies in the documents. On the Jennings segment, former
FBI expert Jerry Richards showed one of the most blatant errors
in the concoction. The typist had made a misspelling and had gone
back to erase it. But the erasure was done with a lift-off ribbon
which was not available in 1960 and was not sold until the
seventies. This erasure is so clear it even shows up in photos in
the Samuels article. Hersh has been a reporter since the early
sixties. For at least two decades (before computers came in), he
made his living with a typewriter. Yet, in all the hours he spent
looking at these papers, this anachronism never jumped out at
him?

That Hersh could be such an easy mark, that he was so eager to
buy into the Summers-Haspiel-Slatzer concoction tells us a lot
about what to expect from his book. As Anson notes, Hersh has
been talking not only to CIA officials, but also to Secret
Service people and, especially to Judith Exner. The reasons for
the CIA to lie about the Castro plots have already been
explained. At the beginning of part one of this piece, I
mentioned that many in the Secret Service hated Kennedy, realized
they were culpable in a security breakdown, and, like Elmer
Moore, worked hard to cover up the true circumstances of
Kennedy's murder. About Exner's motives, I can only speculate.

Will Hersh have her now say that she saw Marilyn with Kennedy and
Giancana in Hyannis Port on a sail boat eating pizza? From
Anson's description of panting-dog Hersh, delivering Exner to him
was a little like giving Geraldo copy of Goddess.

Mega-Trasher, or Just Mega-Trash?

Hersh's book promises to be the mega "trash Kennedy" book. And,
like any hatchet man, Hersh tries to disguise his mission. In the
Vanity Fair article, his fellow workers on the ABC documentary
say, "there have been moments when, while recounting private acts
of kindness by JFK, Hersh has broken down and wept." (Anson p.
122) This from a man who intimidated witnesses with his phony
papers and waved them aloft while damning the Kennedys with them.
I believe his tears as much as I do the seance that Ben Bradlee
and Jim Angleton attended to speak with the spirit of Mary Meyer
(see Part One). At the end, Hersh joins in the con job: "I would
have been absolutely devoted to Jack Kennedy if I had worked for
him. I would have been knocked out by him. I would have liked him
a lot." (Ibid) With what Anson shows of Hersh, I actually believe
him on this score. He would have loved his version of Kennedy.

Anson's article begs the next question: who is Hersh? As is
common knowledge, the story that made Hersh's career was his
series of articles on the massacre of civilians at the village of
My Lai in Vietnam. Hersh then wrote two books on this atrocity:
My Lai 4 and Cover Up. There have always been questions about
both the orders given on that mission and the unsatisfactory
investigation after the fact. These questions began to boil in
the aftermath of the exposure of the Bill Colby/Ted Shackley
directed Phoenix Program: the deliberate assassination of any
Vietnamese suspected of being Viet Cong. The death count for that
operation has ranged between twenty and forty thousand. These
questions were even more intriguing in light of the fact that the
man chosen to run the military review of the massacre, General
Peers, had a long term relationship with the CIA. In fact, former
Special Forces Captain John McCarthy told me that-in terms of
closeness to the Agency-Peers was another Ed Lansdale.

By the time Hersh's second book on the subject appeared, the
suspicions about the massacre, and that Peers had directed a
cover up, were now multiplying. Hersh went out of his way to
address these questions in Cover Up. On pages 97-98 the following
passage appears:
  There was no conspiracy to destroy the village of My Lai 4;
  what took place there had happened before and would happen
  again in Quang Ngai province-although with less drastic
  results. The desire of Lieutenant Colonel Barker to mount
  another successful, high enemy body-count operation in the
  area; the desire of Ramsdell to demonstrate the
  effectiveness of his operations; the belief shared by all
  the principals that everyone living in Son My was staying
  there by choice because of Communists...and the basic
  incompetence of many intelligence personnel in the Army-all
  these factors combined to enable a group of ambitious men to
  mount an unnecessary mission against a nonexistent enemy
  force, and somehow to find the evidence to justify it all.

I won't go into all the things that must be true for Hersh to be
correct. I will add that in the definitive book of the subject,
The Phoenix Program, My Lai is described as part of the
Colby/Shackley operation.

After My Lai, the New York Times assigned Hersh to the Watergate
beat. The paper was getting scooped by Woodward and Bernstein at
the Washington Post. For a "crack" reporter, Hersh did not
distinguish himself, especially in retrospect. He basically
followed in the footsteps of the Post. i.e. the whole complicated
mess was a Nixon operation; there was no real CIA involvement;
whatever Hunt and McCord did, no matter how weird and
questionable, they did for the White House. As late as the
December 12, 1992 edition of The New Yorker, Hersh was still
hewing to this line in his article entitled "Nixon's Last Cover
Up." In spite of this, at times Hersh actually did favors for the
White House. As Ron Rosenbaum describes in Travels with Dr.
Death, Hersh circulated some dirt on Dan Ellsberg (p. 294).

Anson mentions a famous anecdote about Hersh's reporting on
Watergate (p. 107). Hersh got wind of a man involved in the
Watergate caper by the name of Frank Sturgis. Sturgis was getting
ready to talk during the early stages of the unfolding Watergate
drama. Sturgis was working with Andrew St. George, a good,
relatively independent journalist. The pair were going to write a
book about Sturgis' experience in Watergate, but Hersh threatened
to expose them first if they did not cooperate with him. In
return, Hersh promised not to name St. George and to run the
completed article by them first. St. George kept his side of the
deal. Hersh broke his. St. George was named in the piece twenty-
three times.

But there is another aspect to this story not mentioned by Anson.
When St. George did publish a piece on Watergate in Harper's, it
was based on his talks with another Watergate burglar, Eugenio
Martinez. It gave strong indications of the CIA's role in
Watergate, and that Howard Hunt was a double agent inside the
Nixon camp. A few years later, in High Times (April 1977) sans
Hersh, Sturgis now spoke. He depicted Watergate as a war not with
Sam Ervin and the Post on one side and Nixon on the other; but as
the CIA versus Nixon. None of this was in Hersh's piece, which
presented the typical White House-funneling-"hush money"-to-the-
burglars story which could have been written by Woodward.

Next for Hersh were his exposures in the New York Times of CIA
counter intelligence chief James Angleton's domestic operations.
Domestic ops were banned by the CIA's original charter, although
they had been done ever since that Agency's inception. But at
Christmas, 1974, Hersh's stories were splashed all over the
Times. Hersh won a Pulitzer for them. One would think this would
be a strong indication of Hersh's independence from, even
antagonism for the CIA. One would be wrong. As everyone familiar
with the Agency's history knows, in 1974 there was a huge turf
war going on between Angleton and Colby (formerly of the Vietnam
Phoenix program). Angleton lost this struggle, largely through
Hersh's stories. But the week before Hersh's stories were
printed, on December 16, 1974, Colby addressed the Council of
Foreign Relations on this very subject and admitted to the
domestic spying (Imperial Brain Trust p. 61). Why? Because their
selective exposure could be used to oust Angleton. Many now
believe that Hersh's stories were part of Colby's campaign to
oust Angleton, sanctioned by the CIA Director himself.

Next up for Hersh was the story of the downing of KAL 700. This
was the curious case of the Korean Air Liner shot down over
Russian air space after having drifted off course. Many suspected
that, as with the My Lai case, there was more here than met the
eye. The long length of time that the plane had been off course,
as well as its failure to respond to signals, led some to believe
that the Russians had no choice but to shoot down the plane. In
fact, many articles appeared, for example in The Nation, to
support that thesis. The Reagan administration wanted to portray
the incident as an example of Soviet barbarity (shades of
Basulto's Brothers to the Rescue). They, and specifically Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, treated the downing as a great propaganda victory.
In his book, The Target Is Destroyed, Hersh ended up siding with
the administration.

Which brings us to the nineties. Everyone knows that the broad
release of Oliver Stone's JFK in 1992 put the Kennedy
assassination back into play. The pre-release attack against the
film was unprecedented in movie history. That's because it was
more than just a movie. It was a message, with powerful political
overtones that dug deeply into the public psyche: a grand
political conspiracy had killed the last progressive president.

That Vietnam would have never happened if Kennedy had lived. That
JFK was working for accommodation with Castro at the time of his
death. That the country has not really been the same since.
The preemptive strike was successful in slowing up the film's
momentum out of the starting block. But the movie did increase
the number of people who believe the case was a conspiracy into
the ninety-percent range. The following year, in anticipation of
the 30th anniversary of the murder, Gerald Posner got the jump on
the critics with his specious book on the case. The media hailed
him as a truth-teller. The critics were shut out. No nonfiction
book in recent memory ever received such a huge publicity
campaign-and deserved it less.

Looming in the Background

After Jim Marrs debated Posner on the Kevin McCarthy show in
Dallas, he chatted with him. Marrs asked him how he came to do
the book. Posner replied that an editor at Random House, one Bob
Loomis, got in contact with him and promised him cooperation from
the CIA with the book. This explains how Posner got access to KGB
turncoat Yuri Nosenko, who was put on a CIA retainer in the late
seventies. At the time of Posner-mania, Alan Houston wrote Mr.

Loomis, who also edited the Posner book. In a reply dated
10/27/93, Loomis revealed much about himself:
   I have no doubt that you really believe what you are saying, but
   I must tell you that your letter is one of the best indications
   I've seen yet as to why the American public has been misled by
   ridiculous conspiracy theories.

   You have proved nothing insofar as I can see, except for the fact
   that you simply can't see the truth of the situation. My feeling
   is that it is you and others like you who have perverted the
   historical record and, in an inexcusable way, pardoned the
   murderer.

Readers of Probe know that Loomis is not a new pal of the CIA. In
our Watergate issue (Vol. 3#2), we wrote about the long,
controversial career of journalist James Phelan, a strong
supporter of the Warren Commission and harsh critic of Jim
Garrison and his "wacky conspiracy theories." Phelan always
strongly denied he was compromised in any way. Even when
confronted with documents showing connections to government
agencies (like the FBI) he still denied it. When Phelan did his
book on Howard Hughes-which completely whitewashed the ties of
the eccentric billionaire to the CIA-that "instant" book was a
top secret project of Random House, handled by Bob Loomis.

Needless to say, Loomis was Hersh's editor at Random House on
both his My Lai books. David Halberstam, in The Powers That Be,
noted that it was Loomis who put Hersh in contact with St. George
and Sturgis during Watergate (p. 681). According to his
secretary, Loomis worked closely with Hersh on The Target Is
Destroyed. Certainly, one of the most ridiculous statements made
by Hersh would be music to Loomis' ears. Hersh's Holy Grail on
the assassination conspiracy, the cinching piece of the puzzle,
would be "a reel of tape of Oswald getting briefed by Giancana"
(Anson p. 120). With what serious people have learned about
Oswald today, through work by Phil Melanson, John Newman, and
John Armstrong, this is preposterous. The Blakey-Davis whim about
the Mafia hiring a "hit man" who couldn't hit the side of a barn
and used a $12.95 bolt action rifle to do the job, went out the
window when the HSCA closed down. But "crack" reporter Hersh
still buys into it. As he does the idea that Sirhan killed Bobby
Kennedy, proven by the fact that he wrote a blurb praising Dan
Moldea's 1995 whitewash of that case.

Behind all the sordid details of these articles there is a bigger
picture to be outlined. One of the main parts of it is the
increasing ascendancy of tabloid journalism into the major media
outlets, and with it, its concomitant attachment to the lives of
celebrities. More often than not, that translates into the
endless search for sleaze and scandal. This chain on the lives of
the Kennedys has been well described in these articles. The
overall tendency has become so prevalent that, as many have
noted, tabloid sales in the U.S. have declined of late because
the mainstream media have now bowed to these tendencies so much
that much of their news has seeped over, thereby blurring the
lines between the two. In my view, some of the milestones in this
trend have been examined in this article: in the nonfiction book
field it would be the Collier-Horowitz book; in magazine
journalism, the Kitty Kelley article on Exner; in television, the
1985 Rivera controversy about Summers' book.

This blurring of tabloid and journalistic standards inevitably
leads to a blurring of history. With people like Kelley, Rivera,
and Exner commenting, the Kennedys get inserted into a giant
Torbitt Document of modern history. With people like Davis
translating for them, RFK does not pursue Giancana, they are
actually pals in MONGOOSE. The Kennedys agree with the Joint
Chiefs: we should invade Cuba. And then escalate in Vietnam.
Disinformation feeds on disinformation, and whatever the record
shows is shunted aside as the tabloid version becomes "accepted
history," to use Davis' phrase (p. 290). The point of this
blurring of sources is that the Kennedys, in these hands, become
no different than the Dulles brothers, or Nixon, or Eisenhower.
In fact, Davis says this explicitly in his book( pp. 298-99). As
I noted in the last issue, with Demaris and Exner, the Kennedys
are no different than Giancana. And once this is pounded home,
then anything is possible. Maybe Oswald did work for Giancana.
And if RFK was working with Sam, then maybe Bobby unwittingly had
his brother killed. Tragic, but hey, if you play with fire you
get burned. Tsk. Tsk.

But beyond this, there is an even larger gestalt. If the Kennedys
were just Sorenson-wrapped mobsters or CIA officers, then what
difference does it make in history if they were assassinated? The
only people who should care are sentimental Camelot sops like
O'Donnell and Powers who were in it for a buck anyway. Why waste
the time and effort of a new investigation on that. For the CIA,
this is as good as a rerun of the Warren Commission, since the
net results are quite similar. So its no surprise to me that the
focus of Hersh's book has shifted between Oswald did it for the
Mob, and an all out trashing of the Kennedys.

The standard defense by these purveyors is that they go on the
offense. Anyone who objects to their peculiar blend of
misinformation, or questions their sources or intent is labeled
as "protecting the Kennedys," or a "disappointed Kennedy fan," or
a "hagiographer." Tactically, this is a great cover to avoid the
questionable credibility of people like the Alsops, Priscilla
Johnson McMillan, or a flimflam man like Slatzer. It also avoids
acknowledging their descent into the ranks of Hoover and
Angleton. When Summers' book on Hoover came out, which followed
much the same line on the Kennedys as Goddess, he got a guest
spot on The Larry King Show. There, Hoover aide Cartha De Loach
called his book a collection of "sleaze." Summers fought back by
saying that Hoover and De Loach were peddling "sex tapes" about
Martin Luther King to the press. At that point, if Larry King
weren't such a stiff, he would have stepped in and noted, "But
Tony, we expect that kind of thing from a guy like Hoover. What's
your excuse?"

So Where are the Kennedys?

In a deeper sense, it is clear now that no one in the major media
was or is "protecting the Kennedys." The anti-Kennedy genre has
now become self-sustaining. Summers used the Collier and Horowitz
book for Goddess. He even uses Priscilla McMillan to connect JFK
with Monroe! (p. 244) Will Liz Smith call him on this? Will Ben
Bradlee? Far from "protecting the Kennedys" the establishment
shields these writers from potentially devastating critiques. The
reason being that the Kennedys were never part of that
establishment. No one protected JFK in Dallas. No one protected
RFK in Los Angeles. The ensuing investigations did everything
they could to protect the true murderers; to hell with the
victims. And since the Church Committee showed in public that the
Kennedys were not business as usual, there has been an intense
and incessant effort to reverse that verdict; in essence to
rewrite history. People like Slatzer, Davis, and now Hersh have
made their living off of it.

The Kennedys themselves deserve part of the blame. In Samuels'
article in The New Yorker, Kennedy family lawyer Myer Feldman
says that he advised the Kennedys not to even comment on Hersh,
let alone sue (p. 69). If I were advising, I would have urged a
lawsuit as far back as 1984 with both the Collier-Horowitz book
and the Davis book. I would have loved to hear how the two former
leftists had no idea that Priscilla Johnson was associated with
the CIA, had tied up Marina Oswald for years, and then issued a
tract on both Oswald and the assassination that James Angleton
himself would have written. I would have also loved to hear Davis
explain how he could have completely misrepresented the Church
Committee report to his readers. I would also like to ask him how
many people he thought would read the actual report versus how
many would pick up the paperback version of his book (which
features a blurb by Liz Smith). To me what these authors have
done at least suggests the "reckless disregard" rubric of the
libel statute.

To be fair to the Kennedys, it is hard to castigate a family
which has sustained so many tragedies. Andy Harland called up
Steve Jones after reading his article in The Humanist (Probe Vol.
4 #3 p. 8). He was an acquaintance of Peter Lawford's who talked
to him a few times about the assassination. Jones' notes from
that phone call includes the following:
  Lawford told him that Jackie knew right away that shots came
  from the front as did Powers and O'Donnell. He said shortly
  after the funeral the family got together.... Bobby told the
  family that it was a high level military/CIA plot and that
  he felt powerless to do anything about it.... the family
  always felt that JFK's refusal to commit to Vietnam was one
  of the reasons for the assassination....Lawford told him
  that the kids were all told the truth as they grew up but it
  was Teddy who insisted that the family put the thing to
  rest.

Evidently, Teddy wanted to preserve his career in the political
arena and knew that any airing of the case would jeopardize it.
Which was probably true. Under those circumstances, the Kennedys
can't even protect themselves.

This is understandable in human terms. But the compromise allows
the likes of Reeves, de Toledano, and Hersh to take the field
with confidence. The Kennedys are silent; they won't sue; it must
be true. As a corollary, this shows that the old adage about
history being written by the victors stands. In this upside down
milieu, all the Kennedys' sworn enemies can talk to any cheapjack
writer with a hefty advance and recycle another thrashing.
Mobsters and those in their employ, CIA officers and their
assets, rabid right-wingers et. al. Escorted by these writers,
they now do their dances over the graves of the two men they
hated most in life and can now revile in death. There is
something Orwellian about this of course.

The converse of this thesis is also true. The voices the Kennedys
symbolized are now squelched. Collier and Horowitz are intent on
never letting the ghost of the sixties reappear. The poor, the
weak, minorities, and the left's intelligentsia must not be
unsheathed again. (As Todd Gitlin notes in his book The Sixties,
on occasion, the Kennedy administration actually had SDS members
in the White House to discuss foreign policy issues.) The image
of JFK on national television giving hell to the steel companies;
of Kennedy staking out his policy for detente at American
University; of RFK grilling Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa; of
Bobby going through the personnel list at the State Department to
be sure there was no Dulles still on the payroll; these images
have to be erased. Most of all, the RFK of 1965-68, angry at the
perversion of his brother's policies, must be subverted. Who of
the elite would want people to remember RFK saying these words:
  What the Alliance for Progress has come down to then is that
  [the native rulers] can close down newspapers, abolish
  Congress, fail religious opposition, and deport your
  political enemies, and you'll get lots of help, but if you
  fool around with a U.S. oil company, we'll cut you off
  without a penny. Is that right?

It was no day at the beach answering that kind of question with
Bobby staring a hole through you.

By 1963, after the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis and the cries
for escalation in Vietnam, Kennedy was moving toward the Sorenson-
Schlesinger side of the White House. By 1968, RFK was further to
the left than that, being hooked up with labor leaders like
Walter Reuther and Cesar Chavez. As Otis Chandler, a firm member
of the establishment, said after Bobby's death: "I guess there's
no one to stand up for the weak and the poor now." That memory is
now being replaced by those of RFK cavorting with Monroe on the
beach; of JFK drinking martinis with Monroe's buddy Giancana; and
the Kennedys trying to take her life as they tried with Castro.

In the Anson piece, Hersh talks about changing the way people
think about the Kennedys. Talk about reversing the Church
Committee. That was just the beginning. These people could teach
Orwell something.

What will the future bring? Will Exner, still dying of cancer,
demand a DNA sample from John Kennedy Jr. to prove Jackie was
really his mother? Will Summers file a lawsuit demanding the
government turn over RFK's private snuff film of Monroe's murder?
Will Hersh now say that he was duped on the Monroe docs but now
he has the real McCoy: it was Jayne Mansfield all along. With Liz
Smith as the moderator, satire is impossible in this field.

But down deep, submerged but still present, there is a resistance
to all this. The public knows something is wrong. Two years ago,
CBS and the New York Times conducted a poll which asked the
respondents: If you could pick a President, any President, which
one would you choose to run the country today? The winner, in a
landslide, was John F. Kennedy who doubled the tally of the
second place finisher. In 1988, Rolling Stone surveyed the
television generation, i.e. the below forty group, on their
diverse opinions and attitudes. Their two most admired public
leaders were Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, dead twenty
years before, when many of those polled were infants or not even
born. This holds not just in America. In Pete Hammill's 1995 book
Piece Work, he relates an episode in his life when his car broke
down in the Mexican countryside. He walked to a poor, Third World
style hut which had no amenities except a phone. Before he left,
he thanked the native Mexicans who lived there and took a look
around the dilapidated, almost bare interior. The only
decorations he saw were a plaster figurine of Che Guevara, and
near it, a photo of John Kennedy.

It's that international Jungian consciousness, however bottled
up, ambiguous, uncertain, that must be dislodged. In a sense,
this near-maniacal effort, and all the money and effort involved
in it, is a compliment that proves the opposite of the position
being advanced. This kind of defamation effort is reserved only
for the most dangerous foes of the status quo, e.g. a Huey Long
or a Thomas Jefferson. In a weird sort of way, it almost makes
one feel for the other side. It must be tough to be a security
guard of the mind, trying to control any ghosts rising from the
ashes. Which, of course, is why Hersh has to hide his real
feelings about his subject. That's the kind of threat the
Kennedys posed to the elite: JFK was never in the CFR (Imperial
Brain Trust p. 247); Bobby Kennedy hated the Rockefellers (Thy
Will be Done pp. 538-542). For those sins, and encouraging others
to follow them, they must suffer the fate of the Undead. And
Marilyn Monroe must be thrown into that half-world with them. At
the hands of Bob Loomis' pal, that "liberal" crusader Sy Hersh.

As Anson says, he must just want the money.


             Probe Magazine. The Truth Is In Here. (r)
                                
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