Interviews & Essays

On Thursday, December 18th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Seymour M. Hersh to discuss THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT.

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Moderator: Welcome, Seymour Hersh! Thank you for taking the time to join us online tonight.

Seymour M Hersh: I'm delighted to be here.

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Kate from Concord, MA: All of your books have met with a good degree of controversy. Do you revel in that sort of spotlight?

Seymour M Hersh: Sure. I like to make noise. This has been worse than usual, I think because I'm going after an icon. And also, if what I'm saying about JFK is right, then at this point we're looking at 35 years of reporters and historians [who] have been wrong. Which doesn't make a lot of historians and journalists happy.

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Eve from Vermont: On a personal note, what was your perception of JFK in the early '60s? Did you vote for him?

Seymour M Hersh: I voted for him. It was my first vote in a presidential election. I was working for the AP out of Chicago. Like many people, I adored him. I thought it was wonderful to have a young man with a beautiful young wife and children as President. I wept when he was murdered. The point is, I really had no idea that things were as bad as they were when I started writing this book.

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Kristyn from Atlanta: Few historians have ever covered JFK's maternal grandfather, Honey Fitz. Why do you think the Kennedy saga begins there?

Seymour M Hersh: Well, I was stunned. The point of my book was not to rewrite about what's old, what we know. I constantly try to find what's new. One of the things I was surprised to learn was that he had been kicked out of Congress in 1919 after having won in 1918 for vote fraud. The house of elections set up a special election committee that met for 10 months to determine his guilt. The files were sealed for 50 years. Under the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get those files. They showed that Honey Fitz was making money on the expansion of Army bases in the Boston area in WWI. Like father, like son-in-law.

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Duane from Maine, NY: Have you rethought your possition on JFK, now that the papers found on Marilyn Monroe have proved to be forgeries? Is Judith Exner still dying of terminal cancer?

Seymour M Hersh: One, the papers were false and I did not publish them. Nor were they part of the ABC documentary on my book. I believed the papers at one point and found them not to be real. This happens often in the newspaper business. I acknowledge that this is a high-visibility case, though. Judith Exner is very, very ill. I think it's cancer of the spine now. It's been terminal for a few years now, I think. She's very, very tough. She's alive, but she's not well.

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Matt from San Diego: If JFK had been alive today, would he have run for reelection in 1964 in place of Johnson? How do you think the campaign would have played out?

Seymour M Hersh: I think JFK was in trouble in '64. The scandals were getting closer, and some members of the press, such as Walter Winchell the gossip columnist, were getting bolder and bolder in hinting about JFK's reckless private life. I thinkg the Republicans may have gone after him. Maybe not, but I think so.

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Paul from Nashville: I think the nation first got a glimpse of Kennedy's Hollywood-size wattage during the televised debate in 1960. Nixon looked like death warmed over, and Kennedy seized the moment with his movie-star smile and hence won the election. America seems to fall in love with charismatic leaders -- like Clinton vs. Dole. Why do you think that is?

Seymour M Hersh: That's a great question. We love beauty. We adore beauty. JFK's father, Joe, the old bootlegger, who owned Hollywood studios in the late '30s, understood spin control 30 years before anyone else did. He spun his senator son as a movie star in 1960 and won. Among those who watched the debate, Kennedy won, but polls show that radio listeners of the debate thought Nixon had won. That fits your point exactly.

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Farris from Dallas, Texas: With much respect, I would like to ask perhaps a different question regarding "sourcing" in your book. I am curious to know what documentable actions the former USS agents took to properly report their witnessing/participation of "unexcusable behavior" to their superiors within the Department of the Treasury, and if not, why should we give them any merit or honorable recognition when in fact their reputation and character is as egregious as they have attributed the late president's to be. (Especially since they are making accusations against someone who cannot defend themself.) Lastly, Judith Campbell-Exner has been reported to be "dying of cancer" for the last 20 years. Could you please inform us of her current medical state? With much appreciation!

Seymour M Hersh: For the record, USS are Secret Service agents. Just this week they put out a circular telling all USS men not to talk. The problem is they were junior officers. Their senior officers did not tell them in advance what to expect. They were on duty a week or two when they [saw] this reckless behavior. The correct thing to do would be for the senior men, in charge, [to] have gone to the President and said, "We don't care what you do, we're not making judgments, but we must know who you're with. We must check them for a criminal background. You cannot be with a prostitute unless we check them out." But that's not for the junior officers to say. They couldn't say that! Your point is well taken and totally appropriate, but for the supervisors, not the junior agents.

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Craig Harvey from Bakersfield, California: Do you think [Kennedy's] extramarital activities affected his job as president?

Seymour M Hersh: The point I make in writing about his personal life is simply that there was an extreme amount of recklessness there, and that is why the USS's [willingness] to go on the record with their names is so important. Because it's my contention in the book that you cannot limit recklessness in one area of life. There was a good deal of recklessness in his foreign policy. His obsession with Fidel Castro and his reckless intent from the day he was sworn in to the day he was assassinated with the murder of Castro. In my telling, it led into the missile crisis, which in my account was not a great victory for America.

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Richard from Ithaca, NY: Do you have the support of your newspaper and journalism colleagues? Do they stand behind you?

Seymour M Hersh: I'm laughing. Not derisively. No, not particularly. I of course have my personal friends, but for example, The New York Times, who I worked for for 10 years, has had one favorable review, accompanied by numerous scathing articles. The Washington Post and The New York Times have been particularly hostile. But I understand their point. Who am I to rewrite history? At the same time, I didn't have their support in 1969 when I wrote about the My Lai massacre, so I've been there before.

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Seamus from Lansing, MI: Tons of books have been written about the Kennedys. Why were you motivated to write this book? Why now?

Seymour M Hersh: The answer is very mundane. I had a wonderful editor at Little Brown, who had published me before -- Jim Silberman had been nagging me for years. His point was no hard look had been taken by an investigative journalist on Kennedy. So it was like an assignment from an editor or an instructor. Once I started, I was astonished to find that things were a lot different -- and a lot darker -- than I thought. It's my belief that the dark side may be more important than the other side.

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Mark from Hoboken: News today is often composed of metastories; stories based on speculation and possibility rather than fact. As a former member of the news media, what's your opinion on the present state of reporting?

Seymour M Hersh: Well, I think there's one dominant thread that always troubled me -- pack reporting, which is that everybody reports everything the same way. It takes a heroic move to break with the general consensus. That's what's made me famous. But having said that, I think it's very good to be skeptical of the presidency and the Congress, like the press is. I wish the skepticism was more informed, though. I have this simple aphorism: Read before you write. Very often I find that journalists don't do their homework. I do think we're better off than we were 30 years ago. Bill Clinton could not get away with what John F. Kennedy did.

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Nick from Allentown, PA: Are you on speaking terms with your original coauthor, Ewing? Why or why not?

Seymour M Hersh: Ewing and I started off doing a book together to see if there was something new to be said about the assassination. We parted ways over two years ago now. We are not speaking to each other. He's terrific, nobody knows more about the assassination than he does, but I don't think there is any evidence of a conspiracy and he does.

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Parker from Ipswich, MA: THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT has taken a lot of criticism (like the New Yorker article, which described how you were duped on phony correspondence between JFK and Marilyn Monroe). There could be a book called DEBUNKING SEYMOUR HERSH -- how do you reply to your naysayers?

Seymour M Hersh: I find very few of them have read the book. One of the advantages of having so many naysayers so early is that when people do read the book they're sort of shocked. I did this book exactly the same way I wrote about the My Lai massacre and the CIA in the '70s for The New York Times. I won all sorts of prizes for that work. For this I'm getting a brick bath. It goes with the territory. Having said all that, historians hate this book. Journalistans and historians are like oil and water.

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James from South Boston: Vanity Fair writer Robert Sam Anson clearly doubted your research for THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT. You've known him for years. If you saw him today, how would you set him straight?

Seymour M Hersh: Robert Sam Anson, his goal was to get details of my book in advance. That was his purpose for doing the story. We disputed about that. He published an allegation that Jacqueline was having an affair with Aristotle Onassis, an allegation that was simply not in my book. He cited things in a New York Post story that were simply not in my book. So I would just hope I don't see him. The point is I didn't set him straight. I wouldn't tell him what he wanted to know.

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Clint Bradford from Mira Loma, CA: Neither the Church Committee nor the Nixon Administration could prove JFK was behind any illegal actions against Cuba. Why should we believe you?

Seymour M Hersh: Because I got a number of people who worked on Chile in the early '60s in the CIA to speak about what happened and who was responsible. You've got to look carefully. I went out of my way to find people to put on the record. I didn't use them if they didn't want their names included. I was also given documents that had been made available to the CIA Senate Intelligence Committee but not published. I had access to documents whicb had never seen the light of day and sources who were speaking out for the first time!

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Peter from MIT: Your book goes into great detail about Robert Kennedy's prosecution of the Mafia shortly after they had "helped" his brother win the presidential election in Illinois, as well as JFK's refusal to order an airstrike to support the CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Although you avoid actual discussion of assassination conspiracy theories, THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT seems to reinforce the popular belief that a Mob-CIA conspiracy was responsible for killing John F. Kennedy. Do you have any opinions on who was behind the murder of JFK?

Seymour M Hersh: Um. It's impossible, difficult to read this book and not conclude that we don't know enough about Jack and his father and brothers' involvement with organized crime to know if they played a part. Sam Giancana was clearly a major player in the early months of the Kennedy presidency. But it does seem to me this: that Kennedy wanted to kill Castro, from the day he began to the day he died. If that had happened, a new government would have been formed in Cuba, and the chances for organized crime -- hotels, gambling, clubs -- would have opened up. It seems to me that as long as Kennedy wanted to kill Castro, there was no incentive for the mob to kill Kennedy. The old adage, Don't kill the goose that may lay the golden egg. So again, I leave more riddles than there are answers. But we clearly need to know more about our American history than we know so far.

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Moderator: Thank you, Mr. Seymour Hersh, for joining us this evening for such an interesting chat. Any closing comments?

Seymour M Hersh: No, but I must say I liked the questions, I love skepticism, and I think this medium is great because it makes us all focus more than in a usual interview. So it makes us focus, and hence the conversation is more poignant. Let me close with this: I'm aware that there is no truth, it's just history.

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