SMASHING CAMELOT

By Richard Lacayo

If you ever happen to get your own presidential library, here's the kind of scene you won't want in the archives:

April 6, 1960. Senator John F. Kennedy, the wealthy and magnetic sex machine whom the Democrats will soon make their candidate for the presidency, is at home in Georgetown having dinner with his friend Bill Thompson and the delectable Judith Campbell, later to be known as Judith Campbell Exner. Kennedy's wife Jacqueline, pregnant with John Jr., is out of town.

After dinner Kennedy turns to Campbell and asks her to help him set up a meeting with an acquaintance of hers, "Sam Flood," who is actually the Mafia boss Sam Giancana. "I'd be happy to," she tells him. "Why?" Kennedy's reply is wonderfully straightforward. "Well, I think he can help me with the campaign." Next he asks if she would mind conveying a little package to Giancana in Chicago. It turns out to be a satchel full of cash, maybe $250,000, in hundred-dollar bills. Would it be safe to transport so much money? asks the awestruck young woman. The next President of the United States of America is both cryptic and to the point: "You're better off without knowing."

Toto, I don't think we're in Camelot anymore. Where we are is in The Dark Side of Camelot, a warts-and-more-warts portrait of Kennedy by Pulitzer-prizewinning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. This time Hersh has tackled a Kennedy mystique that for years has been subject to intense demystification. One after another, the books have grown nastier and dug deeper into J.F.K.'s extramarital affairs, his concealed health history, his suspected dealings with mobsters and the ways in which his father's money and connections smoothed his path to the top. All the same, The Dark Side of Camelot is the most unrelenting compendium of accusations against him ever assembled by a prominent writer.

Hersh opens the book with a description of Robert Kennedy, his brother's keeper, in the first hours after the President's assassination, ordering someone to scour the White House for incriminating files and secret tape recordings before they fall into the hands of Lyndon Johnson. What does he want to keep secret? In Hersh's book, it's Jack's long-rumored first marriage, the Mob contacts that helped him steal the 1960 election, and his history of health problems, including years of venereal disease. Then there was his real role in the murder of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and in CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro--there's the Mob again--as well as his inflated victory over Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis. Mob leader Giancana was Bobby's first suspect in his brother's assassination, says Hersh. He knew the Mafia felt betrayed because Bobby's Justice Department had targeted them even after they had done favors for the government.

Uncovering dirt is the job that made Hersh's name. He won the Pulitzer in 1970 for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Later he detailed the CIA campaign of domestic spying against Americans. He gained a best seller and a National Book Critics Circle Award with The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Now comes the book he hopes will be the capstone of his career. His publisher, Little, Brown--a subsidiary of Time Inc., the publisher of this magazine--is rolling out a sizable first printing of 350,000 copies. Hersh is bracing for the backlash from Kennedy loyalists--and not just from them. "I've had people I've known for 30 years be cold and angry," he says. "It's going to be very tough." If Dark Side can withstand close scrutiny, its portrait of J.F.K. as a mendacious, Mobbed-up sex addict will be the crown jewel of Kennedy pathographies--the unmaking of the President, 1997.

All of which is a big if. Hersh's book amplifies some of the most radioactive stories of the Kennedy era. It also promises to nail down more than it does. Even that eyebrow-raising first chapter is a tease. If those dirty files exist, Hersh didn't get them. Don't look here either for a nuanced portrait of Kennedy's presidency. This isn't the kind of book that has much to say about the space program or the Alliance for Progress. And if the Kennedy name already has a cloud over it, Hersh's book comes to market the same way. Before publication he had to remove what would have been its most titillating assertion--that the President signed a contract agreeing to pay Marilyn Monroe $600,000 in hush money to keep quiet about their alleged (but much, much rumored) affair. Hersh acted after document experts warned him that the "contract" showed signs of being a counterfeit manufactured years after both Monroe and Kennedy died.

Hersh has repudiated the Monroe papers, saying that while he may have been duped at first, what matters is that he realized his mistake in time. Meanwhile, he has been promising that what remains of the book will still rock what remains of the Kennedy legend. The legend survives because it was more than that. Kennedy was a turning point in American life, a President who restarted the nation's psychic engines and successfully brought the U.S. through some of the worst predicaments of the cold war. All the immensities of the later 1960s--Vietnam, the racial transformation of America and the erstwhile youth revolution--were set in motion during his presidency. That same complicated stature makes him a legitimate target for the grinding inquiries of real historians. It also makes him a natural one for the mud balls of less scrupulous commentators.

So which is Hersh? Despite the pre-publication hype, most of his claims have been reported before. To many of them Hersh adds some further bit of substantiation or at least some suggestive new tidbit. If anyone still doubts that Kennedy was a one-man Roman orgy, Hersh's chapter on his most reckless adulteries will be useful reading. And although historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was a member of Kennedy's inner circle, insist that it is "an exercise in political fantasy," Hersh helps elaborate stories that Chicago Mob leader Giancana helped deliver Illinois to the Democrats in 1960. He says the support came largely by helping get out the vote among the rank-and-file in Mob-controlled unions and through "campaign contributions from the corrupt Teamsters Union pension fund." G. Robert Blakey, a Mafia expert and former federal prosecutor, confirmed to TIME what he told Hersh--that FBI bugs picked up Mob conversations about the deal. "The substance of it was that money went to the campaign through [Joe Kennedy]," says Blakey. "There was an expectation [by the mobsters that] life would be better because of it."

But Hersh is also willing to put testimony, hearsay and speculation into close proximity to one another, then declare that they add up to fact. So Hersh says Joe Kennedy clandestinely poured $2 million into the West Virginia primary that clinched the Democratic nomination for his son. The entire Democratic outlay for the national campaign in 1960 has been estimated at around $10 million. But while Hersh tells a number of stories about money being handed around--all of them interesting, some of them plausible--he never explains how he arrived at that whopping figure. Charles Peters, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, who chaired the Kennedy campaign in West Virginia's Kanawha County, says he was interviewed five times for the book. He says that when he tried to argue that the $2 million figure made no sense, "Hersh just kept yelling, 'Bullshit, bullshit!' He just wasn't listening."

As the "what ifs" of one page become the self-evident conclusions of a few pages later, large leaps of judgment--on the 1960 election, Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs--are made from shaky perches. And while it's true that muckrakers have to find a lot of their informants in the muck, some of Hersh's most sensational claims come from sources who have had trouble with the law or, like Exner, have told different versions of the same stories in the past. He sometimes acknowledges those problems in his text but nonethelesss doesn't hesitate to put faith in what those people tell him.

In a few cases, credible sources for his book who were contacted by TIME say Hersh's account of their stories differs from what they recall telling him. Hersh writes that during Kennedy's presidency, a Secret Service agent brought "sexually explicit photographs of a naked President with various paramours" to be framed at the Washington art gallery of Sidney Mickelson. In some pictures, Hersh says, J.F.K. appears among a group of people wearing masks. But Mickelson now insists that what he described to Hersh was just two pictures of three masked figures in a bed with the covers pulled up to their neck. He never told Hersh that the President was among them, he says, and in any case, none of the shots were sexually explicit. "Absolutely not," he told TIME. "There wasn't any picture of anybody naked there."

Then there's Charles Spalding, a longtime friend of Kennedy's who told Hersh that J.F.K.'s long-rumored first marriage to Palm Beach socialite Durie Malcolm was a fact. Though stories surfaced in the press in 1961, reporters could find no record of the marriage then. The Kennedy camp denied that it had happened. Malcolm continues to do the same. Spalding told Hersh that the ultra-brief marriage, perhaps an overnight sensation, did indeed take place, in early 1947. At Kennedy's request, says Hersh, Spalding, with the help of a lawyer, removed records of the marriage, presumably from Palm Beach County courthouse.

Spalding reconfirmed for TIME that the marriage, which he calls "a childish scamp," actually took place. He disputes a significant detail in another part of the book, the now much reduced portion dealing with Marilyn Monroe. Hersh writes that in 1960, on an occasion when Monroe was binging on alcohol and pills, Spalding went to Los Angeles at J.F.K.'s request "to make sure she was O.K.--that is, to make sure that Monroe did not speak out of turn." Spalding confirms the trip but emphatically denies that it was in any way intended to keep her quiet. "I don't think I would have gone on that basis," he says.

Most of Hersh's notes for those interviews, examined by TIME, closely match the accounts he offers in his book. He warns in his book that Spalding suffers from "short-term-memory loss," which was apparent in his interview with TIME. Hersh now says he has sources beyond Mickelson for the photograph story, though he doesn't explain why those sources are not identified in the book.

Hersh's methods and conclusions have been controversial. He's a volcanic man, one who doesn't flinch at shouting through the phone at a reluctant informant. Hersh has had second thoughts about some of his sources. For his book The Samson Option, about Israel's nuclear-weapons program, he depended on Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer with a penchant for intricate tales. But a story in the November Vanity Fair quotes Hersh as now saying that Ben-Menashe "lies like people breathe."

Hersh's chapter on Exner is typical of the book. Most of the Georgetown dinner scene with her and Kennedy appeared in a 1988 PEOPLE magazine story by Kitty Kelley, a piece acknowledged by Hersh in his frustratingly brief notes on sources at the end of his book. (Kelley's story was even headlined "The Dark Side of Camelot.") But that big bag of money seems like a new touch. Exner told TIME she did not reveal it to Kelley because Kelley became irritated with her during an interview and walked out. Hersh supplies a corroborating witness, Martin E. Underwood, "a political operative for [the late Chicago mayor] Richard Daley," who says he was assigned to watch over Exner from a distance during her train trip to Chicago, and saw her hand the money over to Giancana.

Kennedy's compulsive womanizing is of consequence not only for what it says about his character but also because it could have made him vulnerable to blackmail. Hersh suggests that it did, but never produces convincing proof. Why did Kennedy name Johnson as his running mate, despite Robert Kennedy's distaste for Johnson? Many historians have concluded that it was pure political calculation: Johnson could deliver Texas. Hersh thinks it was blackmail. He says that during a closed-door meeting with Kennedy, Johnson may have threatened to disclose J.F.K.'s dirty laundry, though Hersh doesn't know which laundry or even whether Johnson had anything on Kennedy at all. His main source? The late Hyman Raskin, a little-known Chicago lawyer and Democratic political operative. In interviews and an unpublished memoir, Raskin says that Kennedy had settled on Missouri Senator Stuart Symington as his running mate until Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn pulled him into that mysterious meeting.

Raskin's claim is seconded by Clark Clifford, the longtime Washington power broker, who tells Hersh he served as Kennedy's go-between with Symington. Later, says Clifford, Kennedy told him he was forced to accept Johnson. But blackmail is a badly stretched conclusion for an author who has so little hard evidence to go on--and who paints Johnson in other parts of the book as ignorant of Kennedy's hidden undertakings.

When Hersh takes on Kennedy's foreign policy, he runs into the same kind of problems. Kennedy loyalists argue that J.F.K. was no more than an interested bystander in the CIA campaign to murder Castro. But during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Hersh writes, Kennedy was in fact expecting that Castro would be quickly assassinated by Giancana's men. His fateful decision to abandon the whole thing was the abrupt consequence of his getting the news that the Cuban leader was still alive.

It has long been known that some of the invasion planners were plotting to have Castro killed. "Assassination was intended to reinforce the plan," as the late CIA official Richard Bissell coolly put it in a 1984 article in the quarterly Diplomatic History. Was Kennedy one of the planners who were in on the murder plot? Perhaps, but to be sure of that, it helps to be persuaded by Hersh's attempts earlier in the book to prove that Kennedy "must have" been in communication with Giancana--or at least that he was briefed before the 1960 election by Bissell or CIA Director Allen Dulles about the covert operations in Cuba approved by Dwight Eisenhower. Like Richard Nixon, Hersh believes Kennedy must have been, but Dark Side never proves it.

Hersh argues that the Kennedy brothers were the U.S. government's "strongest advocates" of CIA plans to kill Castro, not merely dispassionate judges of tough-guy talk from the spy shop. After the Bay of Pigs, Hersh writes, "the necessity of Castro's death became a presidential obsession." Former CIA Director Richard Helms told much the same story in 1975 to the Church committee, the Senate body investigating CIA shenanigans. Samuel Halpern, onetime executive officer of the CIA's Task Force W, an enterprise charged with the single mission of killing Castro, says the Kennedy brothers wanted Castro dead "for personal reasons--because the family name was besmirched by the Bay of Pigs."

Hersh suggests that Kennedy deserves some of the blame for triggering the Cuban missile crisis because of his secret plotting against Castro, which the Cuban leader knew about, even if most Americans did not. "The overriding deceit--one that still distorts the history of those 13 days--was the absolute determination of Jack and Bobby Kennedy to conceal their campaign to assassinate Castro and destroy his regime," Hersh writes. "Kennedy did not dare tell the full story of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, because it was his policies that brought the weapons there." This is an interesting theory, but it's plucked out of thin air. Hersh goes on to argue that amid the "fanaticism" exhibited by both J.F.K. and Castro, only Khrushchev had the level-headedness to end this game of nuclear chicken by offering to pull the missiles from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy's pledge not to invade. In fact, as recently released tapes reveal, Kennedy was very level-headed himself and pushed the strategy of trading in Jupiter missiles in Turkey in order to defuse the crisis. In the book, Hersh turns this around and treats this deal (which, by the way, was acknowledged in 1987 by Kennedy's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk) as shocking.

Swinging to the other side of the globe, Hersh alleges that J.F.K. knew that South Vietnam's President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother would be assassinated as a consequence of the Washington-approved coup that toppled Diem in 1963. Hersh's smoking gun is the fact that Kennedy summoned former Air Force General Edward G. Lansdale, an ex-CIA operative who had been involved in the U.S. assassination plots against Castro, and asked if he would go to Saigon and help "get rid" of Diem. Lansdale says he turned down the President's invitation. Was Kennedy making a thinly veiled request for Diem's head? Historian Schlesinger makes the pertinent point: "When politicians talk about getting rid of someone, this does not mean they want to murder them."

Journalism is often called the first, rough draft of history. In some ways The Dark Side of Camelot is just that. Hersh has done the spadework that the writing of history requires, but it also requires judgment, prudence and a willingness to be satisfied sometimes with ambiguous conclusions when human nature (and the best-seller list) prefers the comfort of certainties.

Hersh writes with the passion and single-mindedness of an investigator. He wants us to believe that he reached to the hidden heart of the matter with just about every thrust he made into Kennedy territory. To a reader who gets to his last page, it doesn't often feel that way. The full story of John Kennedy is still being built out of intricate pieces. Dark Side adds a few more of them. But both the man and the book should come with a label that reads FURTHER ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.

--Reported by Adam Cohen, Ratu Kamlani, Elizabeth Rudulph/New York and Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by ADAM COHEN, RATU KAMLANI, ELIZABETH RUDULPH/NEW YORK AND MICHAEL DUFFY AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON