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

part of the effort to
quadruple gasoline prices through their oil companies; David
Rockefeller took part in the effort to get the American
government to intervene in Chile in 1973; the Trilateral
Commission, which the Rockefellers sponsored, funneled many of
its members into the Carter administration; in 1979, Henry
Kissinger and David Rockefeller convinced Carter to let the Shah
of Iran into the country for medical treatment. The reaction in
Iran helped give us Reagan-Bush. The rest, as they say, is
history.

In comparing the two books, one is immediately struck by a
difference in approach. Whatever the shortcomings of the
Rockefeller book, there is a minimal reliance on questionable
sources. And the concentration on individual lives very seldom
extends into a pervasive search for sex and scandal. This
difference extends to even the photos chosen for the two books.
The Rockefeller book is fairly conventional with wide or half
page group shots or portraits. In the Kennedy book, even the one
page of group shots are tiny prints. The rest are wallet-sized
head shots that when leafed through, give the impression of mug
shots.

The accompanying text is suitable to the photo layout. There

to
be such a friend to the Post. Related to that, in his 1991
reflections on the 1976 article, and in the article itself, he
tries to insinuate that these people - Bradlee, the Truitts, the
Angletons - are actually friends of Kennedy. In addition,
Rosenbaum and others never seemed to ask why those involved all
seemed so eager to violate Mary's privacy by reading the diary.

In no version I have read was that ever part of Mary's
instructions. And Angleton, the man who the Truitts seem to side
with against Bradlee, supposedly went through them like an
archivist.

The Truitts' trust for and seeming loyalty to the Angletons is
particularly interesting. In Rosenbaum's 1976 piece, the
following passage appears:
The Truitts were still in Tokyo when they received word of
the towpath murder, and the responsibility for the diary was
communicated to their mutual friend James Angleton through
still uncertain channels.

With the quiet skill of a cardsharp, Rosenbaum avoids an
important detail. Namely, how the Truitts found out about Mary's
death in the middle of the night halfway around the world.

Someone must have either called or wired them. Why is this matter
never addressed in any version? The logical choice as contacts
wo