picked it up. There
had been an apparent falling out between Truitt and Bradlee and
Truitt said that he wanted to show that Bradlee was not the
crusader for truth that Watergate or his book on Kennedy had made
him out to be. In the National Enquirer, Truitt stated that Mary
had revealed her affair with Kennedy while she was alive to he
and his wife. He then went further. In one of their romps in the
White House, Mary had offered Kennedy a couple of marijuana
joints, but coke-sniffer Kennedy said, "This isn't like cocaine.
I'll get you some of that."

The chemical addition to the story was later picked up by drug
guru Tim Leary in his book Flashbacks. Exner-like, the angle grew
appendages. Leary went beyond grass and cocaine. According to
Leary, Mary Meyer was consulting with him about how to conduct
acid sessions and how to get psychedelic drugs in 1962. Leary met
her on several occasions and she said that she and a small circle
of friends had turned on several times. She also had one other
friend who was "a very important man" who she also wanted to turn
on. After Kennedy's assassination, Mary called Leary and met with
him. She was cryptic but she did say, "They couldn't control him
any more. He was changing too fast

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

published in the New York Times (11/16/63), so Davis could have
easily found it had he been looking.

In light of this selective presentation of the record on Vietnam,
plus the acrobatic contortions performed on the Church Committee
report, one has to wonder about Davis' intent in doing the book.

I question his assertion that when he began the book he "did not
have a clear idea where it would lead." (p. 694) So I was not
surprised that in addition to expanding Exner's story, he
uncritically accepted the allegations about Mary Meyer and
Marilyn Monroe (pp. 610-612). As the reader can see, in the three
areas outlined at the beginning of this essay, Davis hit a
triple. In all the threads, he has either held steady or advanced
the frontier. It is interesting in this regard to note that Davis
devotes many pages to JFK's assassination (pp. 436-498). He
writes that Kennedy died at the "hands of Lee Harvey Oswald and
possible co-conspirators" (p. 436). Later, he will write that
Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy (p. 552). Going even further, he can
state that:
It would be a misstatement, then, to assert that Deputy
Attorney General Katzenbach and the members of the Warren
Commission...consciously sought to cover up evidence
pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (P. 461)

As the declassified record now shows (Probe Vol. 4 #6 "Gerald
Ford: Accessory after the Fact") this is just plain wrong. Davis
then tries to insinuate any cover-up was brought on by either a
backfiring of the Castro plots (Davis p. 454) or JFK's dalliance
with Exner (p. 498). As wrongheaded and against the declassified
record as this seems, this argum

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.


Current events, most notably a past issue of Vanity Fair, and the
upcoming release of Sy Hersh's new book, extend an issue that I
have dealt with in a talk I have done several times around the
country in the last two years. It is entitled "The Two
Assassinations of John Kennedy." I call it that because there has
been an ongoing campaign of character assassination ever since
Kennedy was killed.

In the talk to date, I've dealt primarily with the attacks on
Kennedy from the left by Noam Chomsky and his henchman Alexander
Cockburn which occurred at the time of the release of Oliver
Stone's JFK. But historically speaking, the attacks on the
Kennedys, both Jack and Robert, have not come predominantly from
the left. The attacks from the right have been much more
numerous. And the attacks from that direction were always harsher
and more personal in tone. As we shall see, that personal tone
knows no limits. Through papers like the New York Times and
Washington Post, the attacks extend into the Kennedys' sex lives,
a barrier that had not been crossed in post-war mainstream media
to that time. To understand their longevity and vituperativeness,
it is necessary to

been cut by a third without losing anything
of quality or substance. The book is heavily reliant on
interviews which are presented in the main text. Some of them at
such length-two and three pages-that they give the volume the air
of an oral history. To make it worse, after someone has stopped
talking, the authors tell us the superfluous fact that his wife
walked into the room, making for more excess verbiage (p.60). And
on top of this, the Blairs have no gift for syntax or language,
let alone glimmering prose. As a result, even for an interested
reader, the book is quite tedious.

The Blairs spend much of their time delving into two areas of
Kennedy's personal life: his health problems and his
relationships with the opposite sex. Concerning the first, they
chronicle many, if not all, of the myriad and unfortunate medical
problems afflicting young Kennedy. They hone in on two in order
to straighten out the official record. Previous to this book, the
public did not know that Kennedy's back problem was congenital.
The word had been that it came about due to a football injury.

Second, the book certifies that Kennedy was a victim of Addison's
disease, which attacks the adrenal glands and makes them faulty
in hormone secretion. The condition can be critical in fights
against certain infections and times of phys

" (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 s

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. Thro

note toward the end that they had access to the
Rockefeller family archives (p. 636). In another book of theirs,
Destructive Generation, they write that the Rockefeller book
began when the pair were soliciting funds to keep Ramparts afloat
(p. 275). This is how they got in contact with the younger
generation of that clan. So when the magazine fell, they went to
work on the family biography with access to people and papers
that no outside, nonofficial authors had before. It is
interesting that, in 1989, the authors wrote that when they
started the Rockefeller book, they were expecting to excavate an
"executive committee of the ruling class" and thereby unlock the
key to the American power elite. But they found that they only
ended up writing about American lives (Ibid). They ended up with
that result because that seems to have been the plan all along.

Towards the end of the book, the authors strike a rather wistful
note, a sort of elegy for a once powerful family that is now
fading into the background (The Rockefellers, p. 626). This is
extraordinary. Consider some of the things the Rockefellers
accomplished in the seventies: they were part of the effort to
quadruple gasoline prices through th

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
th

Texas Monthly which in turn
got him a guest spot on Nightline.) This is also when Leary began
hooking up with Gordon Liddy, doing carnival-type debates across
college campuses, an act which managed to rehabilitate both of
them and put them both back in the public eye.

There is another problem with Leary's book: the Phil Graham
anecdote. In his book, Leary has Mary tell him that the cat was
out the bag as far as her and JFK were concerned. The reason was
that a well-known friend of hers had blabbed about them in
public. This is an apparent reference to Post owner Phil Graham's
outburst at a convention in Phoenix, Arizona in 1963. This famous
incident (which preceded his later alleged mental breakdown)
included - according to Leary - a reference to Kennedy and Mary
Meyer. The story of Graham's attendance at this convention and
what he did and said has been described in different ways in
different books. Unfortunately for Leary, his dating of the
convention does not jibe with any that I have seen. In 1986, Tony
Chaitkin tracked down the correct date, time, and place of the
meeting. No one had done it correctly up to that time. But
Chaitkin and his associates went one step further. They
interviewed people who were there. None of the attendees recalled
anything said about Mary Meyer.

To me, this apocryphal anecdote and Leary's book seem ways to
bolster a tale that needed to be recycled and souped up before
its chinks began to show. Leary's reason for being a