The Last Empire (30 page)

Typical of the critics is Evan Thomas, in
Newsweek
, who notes skeptically that Hersh’s sources include a “mob lawyer” who allegedly brokered a meeting in Chicago between Sam Giancana and Joe Kennedy at which Joe is supposed to have enlisted organized-crime support within Chicago’s labor unions, providing much of the hundred-and-nineteen-thousand-vote margin by which Jack won the 1960 election. Another Hersh source is “Tina Sinatra, who says her father Frank acted as a go-between for the Kennedys and Giancana.” Although daughters are not taken too seriously, by and large, in the still sexist shady cellars of public life, let me attest that Tina Sinatra is a most intelligent woman who knows a great deal about what went on in those days. The writer does concede that: “All [this is] possible—but Hersh never stops to ask why the Kennedys needed Giancana to fix the Chicago election when they had Mayor Richard Daley’s machine to stuff the ballot box.” “What’s
still missing,” he writes more in anger than in sorrow, “is the kind of solid proof that would rewrite history.” Well, it would be nice, but where would you find such proof? Truman’s National Security State, still in place as of this morning, has seen to it that miles of our history, archives, and “secrets” have been shredded, deep-sixed, made over into frog princes, for the delectation of the dummies we are, collectively, taken to be.

In the tangled weave of human events, there is no
solid
proof. Particularly when governments, with everything to hide or distort, can do so with electronic ease, scattering their misinformation like confetti all over, as well as under, the Internet. At best, what we get are self-serving tales from survivors, not to mention the odd forger of genius. And spin.

Predictably, one of Hersh’s chief attackers is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (
sic
—the Jr., that is). Ever eager for distinction like that of his father, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, young Arthur bestowed on himself his father’s middle name so that he could call himself “Junior,” thus identifying himself with an already famous brand name in academe. Later, his infatuation with the Kennedys earned him the sobriquet “the tenth Kennedy,” the brilliant if pudgy child that Joe and Rose Kennedy had never had.

“I
worked
at the White House,” Junior told
The New York Times
. “No doubt, some things happened, but Hersh’s capacity to exaggerate is unparalleled.” This is curiously and carefully phrased. In a sense, as the weight of the evidence mounts, it is already quite plain to all but the most enthralled that Hersh’s case, slapdash as it often is, is essentially true, if not Truth. Although “I worked at the White House” sounds as if Schlesinger were in on everything, he was not; he was neither a policymaker nor an intimate. Kennedy made a cold division between the help and his friends—“his white-trash friends,” as Schlesinger observed bitterly and, I fear, accurately to me. Schlesinger amused Jack, who liked to call him “the film critic from
Show
magazine,” his other job. But should Arthur ever say that he had no idea about the Kennedy brothers’ dalliance, let us say, with Marilyn Monroe, one has only to look at the photograph from the night
of the birthday gala for the President. The two Kennedy lads are leaving Monroe, while off to one side stands swinger Arthur, glass in hand, beaming like Emil Jannings in
The Blue Angel
, only he has two male Marlene Dietrichs, the Kennedy brothers, to be demoralized by.

Not all of the press has been trash. In
Slate
, a mysterious apparition of a paper edited by “On the left, I’m Michael Kinsley,” as he used to say on the wondrously silly program
Crossfire
, Jacob Weisberg zeroes in on one of the most interesting bits of news Hersh has brought us, demonstrating the power—and corruption—of the fabled military-industrial complex that Kennedy did so well by.

In August 1962, the Los Angeles apartment of a beautiful young woman, Judith Campbell Exner, was broken into. She had been having the usual off-and-on couplings with JFK, as well as with Sam Giancana, and there was an FBI stakeout on her apartment. The break-in was observed by the agents on watch, and they identified the perpetrators as the two sons of the head of security for General Dynamics, which a few months later received an “otherwise inexplicable” six-and-a-half-billion-dollar defense contract. Hersh concludes that General Dynamics used the information about Exner to blackmail Kennedy into giving it the contract. Hersh admits that he can’t
prove
this: despite five years’ effort, the two intruders into Exner’s apartment would not talk to him. Hugh Sidey, once
Time
’s White House correspondent, said on Larry King’s television program that Hersh, in effect, is making it all up for his “evil book.” But then the good Sidey never met a President he couldn’t
worship. On the other hand, I tend to believe this story. First, it is the way our world works. Second, it is the way the Kennedys operated. Third, defense contractors will do anything when billions of dollars are at stake, and, finally, in a well-run world the President involved should have been found out, impeached, and tried.

Weisberg is confused by “minor inconsistencies”: “Hersh relates one anecdote about a Secret Service agent having to prevent the first lady from finding out for herself what she suspected was going on in the White House swimming pool. Later in the book, Hersh describes Jackie Kennedy’s strenuous efforts to
avoid
catching JFK in action” (my italics). But this is not a contradiction, only sloppy writing. Jackie knew all about Jack’s sex life in the White House and before. What she did not want was any sort of confrontation with his playmates. The Kennedys were an eighteenth-century “amoral” couple, together for convenience. They would have fitted, with ease, into
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. I mean this very much as praise, though others affect shock. Paradoxically, toward the end of their marriage they actually established something very like a friendship. She said to me, as early as their first year in the White House, “We never actually got to know each other before
the election. He was always off somewhere campaigning. Then, when we did get to this awful place, there we were, finally, just the two of us.” His sexual partners were to her simply anonymous physical therapists. I suspect that’s what they were to him, too.

In December 1959, Jackie asked me to a charity costume ball at the Plaza. “I’ll put you at Jack’s table, so he’ll have someone to talk to. Just ignore what I’m placing between you. She’s very beautiful. Very stupid. She’s also just arrived from England, so Jack will have first crack at it.” “It,” not “her.”

We sat at a round table with eight or so other guests. Jack’s costume was a holster with two six-shooters and a bandanna around his neck. He puffed a cigar and gazed intently at the blond girl between us. She was very beautiful. “You’re in politics, aren’t you?” Thus she broke the ice. I was curious to see Jack in action. “Uh . . . well, yes, I am. I’m . . . uh, running for President.”

“That’s so fascinating!” she exclaimed. “And will you win?”

“Well, it won’t be easy . . .”

“Why not?”

“Well, you see, I’m . . . uh, Catholic . . .”

“But what’s that got to do with anything?”

“Oh, Gore,
you
tell her.” I did, and then he and I talked politics across her: not a woman’s court, Camelot.

To this day, Kennedy loyalists point to the missile crisis as a sign of JFK’s superb statesmanship, when it is obvious that even to have got oneself into such a situation was hardly something you’d want to write mother, much less Rose, about. Certainly you don’t pre-pare invasions of Cuba and repeatedly try to kill Castro without encouraging Castro to egg on the Soviets to what proved to be a mad adventure.

Incidentally, those Kennedy apologists who deny that JFK knew anything about the various CIA-Mafia plots to murder Cas-tro are nicely taken care of by Robert Scheer in the
Los Angeles Times
. “The entire nefarious business is documented in excruciating detail,” he writes, “in ‘Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,’ a 133 page memorandum prepared in 1967 by CIA Inspector General J. S. Earman for Director Richard Helms.” The report was so hot that all copies were destroyed except one “ribbon copy,” which was declassified in 1993. Scheer also notes “that Giancana was a key player in the effort to overthrow Castro and that the President’s brother, the country’s top law-enforcement official, knew all about it.”

The Kennedy brothers put a lot of pressure on the CIA to take care of Castro. When—and how—these callow young men got it into their heads that to them belonged the power of life and death over others is more of a metaphysical than a political question. We all know by heart their story: crook pro-Nazi father makes fortune; drives boys to a political peak unavailable to him. But there was always something curiously brittle about the two murdered sons. They were physically fragile. Hence, the effort of will to drive themselves hard, politically and sexually. As their nonadmirer Eugene McCarthy, former senator and forever poet, observed, “Isn’t it curious that they always played touch football and never football.”

Currently, the heirs to Camelot are pointing to the just released tapes that JFK made of himself during October of 1962. When he was ready to address his council, he would secretly switch on a recording machine. The others did not know they were being immortalized, and the nuke-’em-all military men are chilling. JFK is cautious: on the record. Robert Manning, in the international edition of
Newsweek
, gently made fun of the way the whole situation is now being depicted. “As one who sat in on some of those White House deliberations in the President’s cabinet room, I believe that the case can be made that the dangers of that 13-day interlude in October 1962 have been greatly exaggerated.” Manning was an assistant secretary of state; later the
Atlantic Monthly
editor. His case is simple. Whatever Khrushchev might want to do in extremis, we had five thousand nuclear warheads ready to erase the Soviet Union; and they had only between seventy-five and three hundred. “All those factors dictated
a peaceful settlement.” The Russian general who recently said that Moscow had given the commanders in Cuba permission to use nuclear weapons
at will
“was a pompous windbag, and his claim proved to be patently untrue.” So much for the iron nerve, cool wisdom of Sidey’s hero.

To further undo JFK’s delicate physical balance, along with the cortisone that he took regularly, there was his reliance on—addiction to, in fact—the amphetamines that the shady drug dispenser Dr. Max Jacobson regularly injected him with. It was through Chuck Spalding that Max entered JFK’s life. Max made more than thirty recorded visits to the White House; traveled with the President; provided him with shots that he could give himself. So, in addition to cortisone, which can have dangerous side effects—a sense of misplaced, as it were, euphoria—the President was now hooked on speed. According to Jacobson’s memoirs, Bobby was sufficiently concerned to want the medicine analyzed. “ ‘I don’t care if it’s horse piss,’ ” Jacobson quoted Kennedy as saying. “ ‘It’s the only thing that works.’ ” In 1975, Max’s license to practice medicine was revoked.

In Hersh’s interviews with the Secret Service men, sex and drugs to one side, one is struck by how little actual work Jack got done. There were many days when Kennedy “didn’t work at all. He’d come down late, go to his office. There were meetings—the usual things—and then he had pool time before his nap and lunch. . . . We didn’t know what to think.” My own impression, reading this, was how lucky we were that he wasn’t busy all the time, because when he did set his hand to the plow Cuba got invaded and Castro was set up for assassination, while American troops were sent to fight in Vietnam, and the Diem brothers, our unsatisfactory viceroys in that unhappy country, were put to death in a coup, with White House blessing if not direct connivance.

In a way, the voices of the Secret Service men are the most damning of all, and I was prepared for what I call the Historians’ Herndon Maneuver. William Herndon was for seventeen years Lincoln’s law partner and shared an office with him. Herndon is the principal historical source for those years, except when Lincoln told Herndon that he had contracted syphilis in youth and had a hard time getting rid of it. Herndon wrote this after the President’s death. The Lincoln priesthood’s response to the syphilis charge is Pavlovian: Herndon was a disreputable drunk and not to be relied on—except when he is. As I read Hersh, I knew that the Kennedy zealots would say the same about the Secret Service man who mentions Jack’s nongonorrheal urethritis and all the rest of it. On Larry King, a professor appeared along with Hugh Sidey. He conceded that JFK had a “squalid covert life.” Then, when one of the Secret Service men was named, it was Sidey who executed the Herndon Maneuver:
the agent later had a problem with “alcohol.”

I think Hersh comes to some wrong conclusions, inevitable considering his task. Incidentally, it is ridiculous to accuse him of not being a serious, sober historian, careful to footnote his way through a past that very few American academics could even begin to deal with. After all, if they were competent to do the job, what effect would it have on those powerful entities and personages who endow universities? Hersh is an old-style muckraker. The fact that he’s found more muck in this particular Augean stable than most people want to acknowledge is hardly his fault.

I don’t believe, however, that Lyndon Johnson blackmailed Jack into taking him as Vice-President, which is what Hersh suspects. Although I certainly was not in the allegedly uncrowded room when the decision was made, I was a member of the New York State delegation, and I was present in Los Angeles as the candidates came around, one by one, to work us over. (Tammany Hall had already committed us to Kennedy—the highest form of democracy.) Johnson entered the room in a blaze of TV lights. He was no more manic than usual. Very tall, with a huge head, and a gift for colorful invective, he had taken to calling Kennedy, more or less in private, “that spavined hunchback.” He discussed his own recent heart attack—before any of us could. He was good as new now. But in the hospital he
had
wondered if he should go ahead and buy this blue suit he had ordered just before the attack. “Finally, I told Lady Bird, O.K., go buy it. Either way, I’ll be using it.” As he was leaving, he
stopped to speak to several delegates. I was too far away to hear him. Later, I was told that he had mentioned something about Jack’s “illness.” He had been vague, but by evening Addison’s disease was being talked about. If Johnson had gone there to take second place, he would certainly not have mentioned Jack’s health. In any case, none of us could imagine why the omnipotent majority leader of the Senate would want to be a powerless Vice-President. Certainly, in the normal actuarial course of things, Jack was bound to outlive him. In those matters, it is wise to strop Occam’s razor. Jack had to carry Texas to win and with Johnson on the ticket he did, barely.

Finally, a correction for Hersh and his readers: He writes, “There was some talk from inside the family of having a Kennedy-Kennedy ticket in 1964”—Robert to replace Lyndon as Vice-President—“most of it, Gore Vidal told me in an interview, coming from Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s wife.” Actually, it was Hersh who told me this story last year. As for Ethel Kennedy, I’ve only met her once. She wanted to know if I was writing a new dirty play, like Edward Albee.

Hersh does not take his book where it is logically headed from the beginning, the murder in Dallas, and what looks to be a Mob killing. Too many lunatics have already checked in on that subject; and Hersh is wise to leave it alone. But it is also frustrating, since the inventors of our official history are forever fetched by that lone mad killer, eaten up with resentment and envy, the two principal American emotions, if our chroniclers are to be believed. Yet the gunning down in public view with wife to one side and all the panoply of state fore and aft is purest Palermo sendoff. Some years ago, the head of the Italian national police, General dalla Chiesa, was similarly killed—at the center of a cortège of police as he drove triumphantly down the main street of Palermo shortly after taking command of the “war” against the Sicilian Mafia.

What, then, as movie producers like to say, is the “take-away” of Hersh’s book? This means, what is the audience supposed to think at the end? First, for me, the dangerous inadequacy of the American press. We are seldom, if ever, told what we need to know about how Presidents get elected and then, once in office, what they do of a secret and often unconstitutional nature, particularly abroad. That the political system doesn’t work is no news. Whoever can raise the most corporate money by providing services once in office will be elected, or at least get to be on offer. Clinton and Dole spent, it is said, more than half a billion dollars on the last Presidential election. The press accepts all this as just the way things are. On the rare occasions when a journalist does have a specific smoking-gun complaint, he will find few outlets available to him. Soreheads need not apply for space in the mainline press, much less hope for a moment on the Koppel hour of charm.

In retrospect, it has always been incredible that someone as thoroughly disreputable as Joe Kennedy should have been allowed to buy his sons major political careers. So—could that happen today? Yes. It is even worse now, as anyone can attest who has so much as gazed disbelievingly upon Steve Forbes or Michael Huffington, empty suits with full wallets. We all agree, monotonously, that a change in the campaign-financing laws would be helpful, but no Congress or President elected under the present corrupt system could bear to kick over the ladder that got him and his tools to the second floor.

Quite as serious is the danger of electing someone totally dependent on all sorts of mind-altering drugs to enhance mood, not to mention simply stay alive. Curiously, on April 9, 1961, I published a piece about Jack in the London
Sunday Telegraph
. Rereading it, I can see that, subliminally at least, my knowledge of his Addison’s disease was bothering me then, just as not having gone public with it in 1959 bothers me now. I wrote that because of the “killing” job of the Presidency, “despite his youth, Kennedy may very well not survive.” This is a pretty peculiar thing to write of a “vigorous” man of forty-three. I go on: “Like himself, the men Kennedy has chosen to advise him have not reached any great height until
now
. They must prove themselves now. Government service will be the high point of their lives.” Alas, this turned out to be true. Between the second-rate cronies who made up the Irish Mafia—only Larry O’Brien was outstanding—and the
“efficient” managers, like McNamara, with no conception of the world they had been set loose in, one wishes that he had taken on a few more aides and advisers who had made their mark elsewhere. But, as he said, plaintively, at the time, “I don’t know
anybody
except politicians. Who the hell is Dean Rusk?” So it came to pass, and even now the photogenic charm of the couple at the center of so much corruption and incompetence still casts its spell, and no harsh Hersh? light let in upon them can ever quite dissolve their magic until time itself places Jack in history’s oubliette, alongside another handsome assassinated President, James Abram Garfield.

The New Yorker

1 December 1997

* 
N
IXON
R.I.P.

On April 23 I was awakened early in the morning by a call from BBC radio. Richard Milhous Nixon had met his terminal crisis peacefully in the night. Sternly the program’s host told me that both former Prime Minister Edward Heath and Henry (never to be former, alas) Kissinger had referred to the thirty-seventh President as a “towering figure.” I said to the host that the first would have had a fellow feeling for another leader driven from office, while Kissinger’s only claim to our attention was his years in service as Nixon’s foreign policy valet. Otherwise, Henry would now be just another retired schoolteacher, busy at work on
Son of Metternich
.

So John Kennedy and Richard Nixon (Congress, class of 1946) are now both gone—paladin and goblin, each put back in the theatrical box of discarded puppets and, to a future eye (or puppet-master), interchangeable. Why not a new drama starring Jack Goblin and Dick Paladin? In their political actions they were more alike than not if one takes the longest view and regards the national history of their day as simply a classic laboratory example of entropy doing its merry chilly thing. In any case, as I wrote in 1983, “We are Nixon; he is us.”

Much is now being made, among the tears for a man whom only a handful of Americans of a certain age remember, of Nixon’s foreign policy triumphs. He went to Moscow and then détente. He went to Beijing and then saw the Great Wall. Other Presidents could have done what he did, but none dared because of—Nixon. As pictures of Johnson and Mao come on the screen, one hears that solemn baritone: “I am not saying that President Johnson is a
card
-carrying Communist. No. I am not even saying that his presence on that wall means that he
is
a Communist. No. But I question . . .” As Nixon had been assigned the part of
the
Nixon, there was no other Nixon to keep him from those two nice excursions, ostensibly in search of peace.

After I heard the trumpets and the drums, and watched our remaining Librarians—the high emeritus rank that we bestow on former Presidents (a witty one because now no one does a whole lot of reading)—I played a film clip of Nixon in his vice presidential days. For some reason the soundtrack is gone. A silent movie. An official banquet of some sort. Nixon remembers to smile the way people do. Then a waiter approaches him with a large, corruptly sticky dessert. At that moment, Nixon leans over to speak to his partner on the left, frustrating the waiter’s effort to serve him. The waiter moves on. Nixon sits back; realizes that his dessert has been given to the man on his right. He waves to the waiter, who does not see him. Now the Nixon face is beginning to resemble that of the third English king of his name. Eyes—yes, mere slits—dart first left, then right. The coast is clear. Ruthless Plantagenet king, using his fork like a broadsword, scoops up half the dessert on his neighbor’s
plate and dumps it on his own. As he takes his first taste of the dessert, there is a radiance in his eyes that I have never seen before or since. He is happy. Pie in the sky on the plate at last. R.I.P., R.M.N.

The Nation

16 May 1994

* 
C
LINTON
–G
ORE
I: G
OIN’
S
OUTH

As I write these lines, nothing less than earthly intervention (by Perot?) can prevent the Clinton–Gore team from assuming, as the Chinese say, the mandate of Heaven come November.

They are, at first glance, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the sight of them in shorts, like a pair of ducks waddling down rustic lanes, reminds us that they are not natural athletes, like the ancient, long-limbed Bush. Also, attractive Huck seems to have Tom’s conniving character, while Tom seems to have no specific character at all. But at least we will be rid of Ichabod Crane (Bush) and his little pal Penrod (Quayle), who can now go home to Indiana.

In many ways, this has been the most interesting election of my lifetime because, unexpectedly, the people at large have become aware that the political system functions no better than the economic one, and they are beginning to suspect, for the first time, that the two are the same. When this awful connection is made, we will be seeing many more Perots and Dukes and worse, if possible, crawling out from under the flat rocks of the republic as the tremors grow more violent.

Since what is wrong with us is no longer cyclic but systemic, I suspect that more than half the electorate won’t vote in November [it was four years later that they didn’t vote] even though, paradoxically, they are more than ever worried about the economy. Yet they are bitterly aware that if there are solutions, no candidate has mentioned even one. Certainly the record and rhetoric of such a highly conventional, professional team as Clinton–Gore do not suggest that there will be a new dawn. Worse, the potential Clinton Cabinet, as guessed at by the press, lacks all vitality, much less new ideas. [It proved to be a gorgeous ethnic-sexual mix or mess, a sinking Noah’s Ark of correctness.]

Even so, for the next hundred or so days after the election, we shall be reading in the press about the vigorous new team in Washington. Hopeful notes will be struck. The Sunday electronic zoo will honk and twitter over who is the
real
number three at State; meanwhile, a tax bill will be sent to Congress. Slightly higher taxes will be requested for the rich (Congress will say no: too little too late, if not too much too early). There will be no increase in the tax rate on corporate profits because, for all practical purposes, corporations are tax-exempt. In 1950, 38 percent of federal revenues came from a tax on corporate profits. Today, corporations provide only 10 percent. Corporations will not be taxed because they don’t want to be taxed, and so they are not taxed, thanks to the Congresses and presidents that their political contributions have bought. After all, 90,000 lawyers and lobbyists are in place in Washington, D.C., not only to exempt their corporate employers from taxation but also to make sure
that they can “legally” avoid those frivolous federal regulations that might require them, let us say, to cease poisoning their customers. Meanwhile, the Vice-President is the head of something called the President’s Council on Competitiveness, which sees to it that any corporation can evade any disagreeable governmental regulation or standard in the interest of “competitiveness.”