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In his new book, "The Dark Side of Camelot," Seymour M. Hersh, a prize-winning investigative reporter, attempts to radically revise the history of John F. Kennedy. Soon after an assassin's bullets cut short the JFK presidency, books by his former aides and speech writers, notably "A Thousand Days" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and "Kennedy" by Theodore Sorenson, painted a glowing picture of the young president as a heroic and honorable man, dedicated to advancing the interests of America, aided in this quest by the best and brightest men and women in the realm and who, in his finest moment, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, courageously confronted and faced down the Soviet foe.....
Hersh sets out to remedy this unfortunate over-romanticization and help, as he puts it, "the nation reclaim some of its history." In its place, he substitutes a far more sinister vision, depicting Kennedy as a sex maniac, marital cheat, bigamist, speed freak, liar and corrupt politician who employed in his covert service Mafia chiefs, panderers, Communist spies and political fixers and engaged in stealing national elections, shaking down corporations for contributions, plotting assassinations and, in the very same Cuban missile crisis, secretly caving in to Soviet conditions. What is such a radical revision based on? Hersh claims his evidence is both new and substantiated. But, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, much of what can be substantiated in this book is not new, and much of what is new, including his most sensational findings, cannot be substantiated......
Consider, for example, Hersh's finding that JFK was a bigamist. The rumor began circulating in the extreme right-wing press in 1961 that in 1947, JFK, then a congressman, had secretly married Durie Malcolm, a Palm Beach socialite. Both JFK and Malcolm denied the story, and when it persisted, JFK asked Ben Bradlee, then at Newsweek, to investigate it. Bradlee determined it was a false story emanating from an error in a flawed book of genealogy (which even spelled Malcolm's name incorrectly). Some 35 years later, Hersh resurrected the story, not on the basis of any witness or document to the alleged marriage but on the basis of a piece of conversation that he managed to elicit from a 79-year-old Palm Beach resident, Charles Spalding. Spalding, who, though interviewed many times before over 50 years, never before claimed a role, now told Hersh that he knew about the supposed first marriage because he had himself eliminated the record of it ! at the Palm Beach County Courthouse, saying, according to Hersh! , "I went out there and removed the papers." Presumably, in previous interviews after JFK's death, he had not remembered this extraordinary (and criminal) act.
But how reliable is Spalding's new 1997 memory of this incident that supposedly happened in 1947? Before Hersh interviewed him, Spalding had problems with his ability to recall routine information, which Hersh generously describes as an "impairment of his short-term memory." Such a deficiency notwithstanding, this piece of recovered memory about JFK stands or falls on a simple test. If the 1947 marriage registry in Palm Beach County, which was then handwritten and bound, was marred or missing a page, Spalding's story could be valid. If on the other hand the registry was intact and the entries consecutive, Spalding's memory of removing the papers could not be any more valid than the forged archive of Monroe letters. As it turned out, Hersh and his investigators were unable to find any such gap in the marriage records nor, for that matter, any record of a marriage application, which had to be made three days before the ceremony. Nevertheless, on this piece of recovered memory ! from a person who Hersh knew suffered memory lapses and whose recollection was impeached by an investigation of the records, he asserts in "The Dark Side of Camelot," as established fact, that both JFK and his brother Robert "had lied in their denials to newspapermen and the public about Jack Kennedy's long-rumored first marriage to a Palm Beach socialite," that JFK's marriage to Jackie was not a legal union and that his children were born out of wedlock.
www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/hersh.htm
I know that there's more to JFK than "Camelot." (Although Arthur's Camelot had its share of dark secrets.) But this book is a hatchet job.
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