‘The Dark Side of Camelot’: Looking for the Worst in Kennedy

Richard Bernstein

Thursday, Nov. 13, 1997 | 4:14 a.m.

The times have not been good to John F. Kennedy, whose image in the years immediately after his assassination was that of shining and noble idol of youth. Many writers in recent years have depicted him as deeply flawed, a sexual adventurer and manipulator who assumed that the rules applying to other people did not apply to him. Nobody, however, has trashed the image of Kennedy as thoroughly or as savagely as investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh does in his already much discussed new book, "The Dark Side of Camelot."

Hersh's vision of Kennedy in this sense represents a watershed. He amplifies on Kennedy's sexual voraciousness and extends the theme of reckless ambition into virtually every aspect of his presidency, arguing, among other things, that Kennedy stole the election of 1960 with the help of organized crime, that he directly supervised attempts to assassinate several foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro, and that his policy on Vietnam was dictated by a powerful need to prove his manliness.

Hersh argues in addition that Kennedy's sexual indiscretions had historical consequences. Knowing about them, Lyndon B. Johnson was able to blackmail Kennedy into choosing him as his running mate in 1960, Hersh says.

Many of Hersh's conclusions claim our attention if only because his information comes in most instances from sources who are clearly named and who therefore could protest if they believe Hersh had misrepresented them. And yet, Hersh's book, closely examined, is far less persuasive then it appears at first glance. Indeed, in some respects it appears to be downright deceitful.

In many instances, especially regarding Kennedy's sexual liaisons, Hersh basically adds details to what has already come to be widely known, including his affairs with Marilyn Monroe and various others, his bouts with venereal disease, even his dependence on the mysterious "feel good" shots administered by the man known in the inner circle as Miracle Max Jacobson, a doctor whose medical license was later revoked for suspected misuse of amphetamines.

It would take weeks of research to evaluate all of the conclusions that Hersh reaches in his book. Where they are true, they would require a considerable reassessment of Kennedy's stature as president. The serious problem is that at least some of Hersh's allegations derive from a technique in the writing of history that calls for a powerful sense of skepticism and mistrust.

Hersh stitches together skeins of circumstantial evidence with suggestive but ambiguous quotations; then he ignores contrary evidence in order to reach the darkest conclusion that the material appears to allow. His conclusion that Johnson threatened Kennedy into making him his running mate in 1960, probably by using information he had about his sexual misbehavior, is an example of this dubious technique.

Hersh begins with a well-known fact: that there was a tense night of complicated and secret negotiations the night after Kennedy's own nomination during which Johnson, who had not been a strong candidate earlier, suddenly emerged as the choice.

"What made Johnson more attractive than the other candidates?" Hersh asks. His answer is that Johnson, in cahoots with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, blackmailed Kennedy into giving him the nomination. To support this thesis, Hersh relies on interviews with and an unpublished memoir by a Kennedy adviser named Hyman Raskin, whom Hersh identifies, without much support, as "more of an insider than was publicly known."

Raskin says that Kennedy, in a meeting with Johnson and Rayburn, "was made an offer he could not refuse." Raskin himself does not seem, in Hersh's account, to explain exactly what that offer was. Nonetheless, Hersh goes on to explain in his own words, "In other words, Raskin assumed, Johnson blackmailed his way into the vice presidency."

In this way, Hersh, the only figure in this tale to use the explosive term blackmail, moves from ambiguous on-the-record remarks made by his sources to dark, dramatic, ironclad conclusions of his own. In the case of the Johnson vice presidential nomination, millions of words have been written by historians and memoirists, and while they do not all agree, none has explained events as a matter of blackmail.