IN KENNEDY'S SHADOWS

SEYMOUR HERSH DIGS UP TALES FROM `THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT'

Author: By Sam Tanenhaus

Date: SUNDAY, November 23, 1997

Page: E1

Section: Books

Well, he's done it, at least on the salacious terms he seems to have set for himself. ``The Dark Side of Camelot'' delivers, as promised, a backstairs tour of the Kennedy White House, reviving every allegation, seamy and steamy, from the vast literature on the 35th president and adding some new ones for good measure. The only area of speculation Hersh skirts, curiously, is the one that has preoccupied most of his predecessors in the field -- that is, the contentious issue of Kennedy's assassination. Hersh barely touches on it in nearly 500 pages. Then again, some may find that in Hersh the late president has met his true hitman.

Thematically, much in this book is familiar. Kennedy's herculean philandering, his cult of virility, his recklessness that pushed the nation to the brink of nuclear war -- all this has been covered exhaustively elsewhere and been presented more cogently, particularly in Garry Wills's ``The Kennedy Imprisonment'' (1982). But Hersh builds on the existing lore, adding a wealth of detail, and he extends the case against Kennedy in a truly ambitious way. Until now Kennedy's detractors have depicted him as a kind of James Bond, his moral license derived from a well-documented fixation on the English upper class and its libertinism. Hersh alters this interpretation by arguing that the entire Kennedy clan operated for many years on the model of an organized-crime family. Though the parallel is drawn with melodramatic exaggeration, it nonetheless goes far toward explaining the peculiar aura of the Kennedys -- their ruthlessness, their appetite for coldblooded vengeance exacted in the name of the family honor, their strictly enforced code of silence, their contempt for all outsiders. ``You had a group of people who pursued personal and political ambitions,'' says one of Hersh's many interviewees, Tran Van Dinh, an intimate of the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, whose execution JFK may or may nor have authorized. ``It was like the Mafia. No disloyalty was permitted.''

To Hersh the mob connection is more than a metaphor. One of the driving themes of his book is the longstanding collaboration he alleges between the Kennedys and organized crime. According to Hersh, the president's father -- Joseph P. Kennedy, the swashbuckling financier and ambassador to England in the 1930s -- had dealings with the mob dating to his days as a liquor importer during Prohibition and continuing up through JFK's victory in 1960, which Joe secured with the connivance of Chicago mobsters. Once in office, President Kennedy strengthened the nexus, recruiting crime lord Sam Giancana to ``eliminate'' Fidel Castro and ferrying payoffs to Giancana via Judith Campbell Exner, the Hollywood ``party girl'' whose favors the president and the mobster both enjoyed.

No previous chronicle of the Kennedy years has gone as far as ``The Dark Side of Camelot'' in weaving ingenious skeins of corruption in which sex, money, crime, and geopolitics mesh so tightly. But then no one before Hersh has approached the project with such single-minded diligence, and to the exclusion of all other related topics. There is next to nothing here on the broad issues, or even the basic outlines, of Kennedy's presidency, let alone on the ambient glitter most of us associate with Camelot -- the gala events, the public displays of elegance and chic, and of course the glamorous First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, here relegated to a walk-on role. This book has instead the feel of a James Ellroy novel or an Oliver Stone film, an exercise in acute paranoia informed by cabalistic quasi-logic. In Hersh's drama, Kennedy, the evil romantic prince, exploits star-struck intellectuals imported from Harvard Yard even as he carouses with go-fers and procurers whose primary function is to keep the chief executive supplied with ``girls,'' sometimes two and three at once, for clandestine romps in the White House swimming pool. Meanwhile conspirators plot the deaths of Castro, Diem, and other enemies around the globe and toy with nuclear war.

And yet ``The Dark Side of Camelot'' is a rather drab and mechanical read. Hersh possesses neither wit nor style, and as a scenarist of dark fantasy is competent at best. The book's claim to our interest rests on Hersh's contention that Kennedy's private debauchery not only spilled over into the conduct of his presidency but underlay its ethos and modus operandi. ``The central finding that emerged from five years of reporting,'' Hersh declares, ``is that Kennedy's private life and personal obsessions -- his character -- affected the affairs of the nation and its foreign policy more than has even been known.''

Is this claim justified? This is the big question the book poses, and it will not be settled soon. In the course of preparing this review, I spoke with scholars well-versed in a few of the areas Hersh explores. I asked the espionage expert Thomas Powers to assess the accuracy of Hersh's discussion of Kennedy intrigues against Castro. Powers told me Hersh has got the story right. What about Hersh's assertion that Robert Kennedy was his brother's ``most influential foreign affairs adviser'' and that RFK's ``enthusiasm for the assignment'' to liquidate Castro and determination to see the project through made him ``the most feared, and despised, official in the government -- especially at the CIA''? I consulted historian Ronald Steel, who is completing an important study of Robert Kennedy. Hersh's description is more speculative than factual, said Steel, but the portrait is not outlandish.

But did JFK really engineer the Nov. 2, 1963 assassination of Diem, an event with incalculable consequences for the Vietnam debacle? I spoke with Stanley Karnow, the author of an authoritative history of the Vietnam War. Karnow himself has conducted exhaustive interviews with one of Hersh's chief sources, former CIA agent Lucien Conein. Karnow said Conein gave him a version of events that contradicts what Hersh has reported. Other features of Hersh's book -- for instance, his claim that Lyndon Johnson blackmailed his way onto the 1960 ticket -- require similar checking and cross-checking.

Why? Because of Hersh's pattern of overstatement and his weakness for melodrama. The first chapter on Kennedy's presidency begins, ``Murder was in the air at the CIA and at the White House.'' Some will appreciate this mood-setting. Others will wonder about the objectivity of the scenarist, particularly when he advances his more daring allegations.

This is not to accuse Hersh of false reporting: Amid all the recent furor, very few of those interviewed by Hersh have come forward to recant their testimony or to challenge his record of their recollections. But how reliable are those recollections in the first place? Hersh, who seems bored by printed documents (to a historian, his endnotes seem disturbingly thin), evinces an almost religious faith in spoken remembrace. This is not surprising in one who built a career by getting reluctant insiders to talk. But, in writing about a bygone period, Hersh has recast himself, at least to some degree, as a historian, and historians learn quickly that interviews can never be taken at face value, not because people habitually lie but because memory itself is elusive and grows ever more so as the years accumulate. One can't help noticing how many of Hersh's revelations come from bit players whom time long ago passed by -- former Secret Service agents, former FBI and CIA officers, political fixers, some of them embittered, along with a stream of voluble JFK mistresses -- in sum, just the sort to be flattered by the attentions of a famous journalist and to enrich their memories for his benefit. The reader is always conscious of Hersh in the background, egging his ``sources'' on, even as they wander onto topics they know nothing about.

Thus, a ``longtime lover'' of JFK, who was planted in a nondescript White House job, is quoted on the character of Kennedy's presidency and on the chief executive's relationship with the likes of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. ``Bundy didn't know from dirty hands or what Jack knew from street fighting,'' says this unnamed girlfriend. ``These men were merely picking up the worst aspects of Jack; they felt they had to be more tough, more Catholic than the Pope.'' What value has this speculation? Absolutely none. Yet Hersh sets it forth as revealed truth. The backbone of his book, he says, is the more than 1,000 interviews he conducted. But his approach appears to have been that of the equal-opportunity gossip-monger whose ears are open to any allegation so long as it comes tinged with sensationalism.

In his headlong rush to expose Kennedy, Hersh can't be bothered with basic questions. If the Kennedy clan cut a Faustian bargain with the mob, how then do we explain Robert Kennedy's monomaniacal prosecution of organized crime figures once he became attorney general? If John Kennedy was willing to risk all in a macho showdown with Khrushchev, why do the newly published transcripts of White House tapes give us a Kennedy admirable in his restraint while those around him lost their composure? Hersh can't be expected to reply to evidence he had no opportunity to examine. But his book teems with questions he apparently did not ask, let alone try to answer.

Going overboard is the occupational hazard of the crusading investigator. Convinced in his righteousness that every official account is a lie, he will swallow any fiction, embrace any chimera, to prove his larger Truth. The world already knows how Hersh was strung along for two years by forgers of documents purporting to link Kennedy with Marilyn Monroe, even as cooler heads warned him the documents being offered were almost certainly fakes. Hersh caught on in time and deleted from his book a chapter that might have discredited the entire enterprise. In the days ahead, as detailed analyses of ``The Dark Side of Camelot'' continue to emerge, we will learn how much else Seymour Hersh ought to have left unsaid in his quest to ``make a score.''