[CTRL] [2b] The Posthumous Assassination of JFK

[Kris Millegan]

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The Posthumous Assassination of JFK�</A>
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>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

--[2b]--

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 (Foundation
s 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 Vo
l. 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 (Im
perial 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.


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