Sy Hersh Can't Help Himself

Seymour Hersh never got over his fall from grace: his long ago  halcyon days when he was the darling of the liberal establishment. You know back in the sixties and seventies. As I noted in a long two part article about him last year, those days are gone. (See my article at Kennedysandking.com entitled “Sy Hersh Falls on His Face Again, and Again, and Again” March 12, 2023)

Hersh wore out his welcome at The New Yorker and with editor David Remnick.  To the best of my knowledge that was about the time he was trying to sell Remnick on his wild, bizarre revisionist history about the death of Osama bin Laden. Since Remnick would not bite, in 2015 Hersh published his version in The London Review of Books. He then released a brief volume on the subject in 2016, The Killing of Osama bin Laden. As I noted in the first part of my article, writers like Max Fisher and Peter Bergen found holes so wide in this story that you could drive the proverbial truck through them.

Fisher concluded his May 11, 2015 article in Vox by writing that the bin Laden story was only the latest in a line of other outlandish ideas that Hersh had reported.  But I countered Fisher by saying that for people familiar with the JFK case, Hersh had lost his credibility before the new millennium.  That had happened with the publication of his 1997 hatchet job on John Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot.

In that book, Hersh had fallen on a banana peel even before the volume was published.  This was the infamous Cusack/Monroe  document hoax. These papers, being marketed by a New York paralegal named Lex Cusack, purported to be a trust agreement between Marilyn Monroe, and her attorney, Aaron Frosch on one side, and on the other, John Kennedy, his father, and his assistant Janet DesRosiers.  The idea was that Monroe would keep quiet about their relationship and any Mob figures she observed in his presence. In return the Kennedys would pay $600,000—six million today-- for the upkeep of her institutionalized mother. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 365-66)

Even though Hersh was rendered a rather large advance for the book, he failed to have the documents forensically tested. This, in spite of the fact that, reportedly, two people had told him that they were fraudulent; based upon forged signatures. Janet DesRosiers, the last living signee, told him that 1.) That was not her signature, and 2.) She never met Monroe. (Newsweek, 10/5/97, story by Mark Hosenball) ABC’s new president David Westin was unwise enough to OK the purchase of the book without doing any testing.  When he finally did, the documents blew up in his and Peter Jennings’ faces. As DesRosiers and Monroe expert Greg Schreiner had predicted, the papers were phony. Schreiner told me that he instantly knew it was not Monroe’s signature and, according to him, he told Hersh that.

Journalist David Samuels wrote a long article on this travesty which shows how obvious the fraud was. (New Yorker, Nov. 3, 1997) For example, the typing corrections in the papers were made in a liftoff ribbon, one which was not available at the time the documents were allegedly executed.  As I asked at the time of this three ring circus: How could Hersh--a man who had made his living with a typewriter--have missed something like that? (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 366)

As I noted in my earlier two part essay, Hersh also fell for another JFK prevaricator, namely the late Judith Exner. This whole idea that he, and subsequently Jennings were pushing, that somehow Exner was really acting as a messenger between Chicago Mafia ringleader  Sam Giancana and the White House was so incredible that it defied description. Well, predictably this also blew up.  In a truly preposterous scenario, Hersh said that Bobby Kennedy—the guy who was trying to place Giancana in prison—would tap Exner on the shoulder and ask, “Are you still comfortable doing this? We want you to let us know if you don’t want to.” (Hersh, pp. 307-08)

Even for Hersh, this was shocking. He and his research team--and ABC--somehow missed the fact that on February 4, 1992 Exner appeared on Larry King’s show. King asked her about any communications or relationship with Bobby Kennedy. She replied with a one word answer: “None.”

So why was Hersh so determined to use a witness as bad as Exner?  Because he was hellbent on implicating JFK in the CIA/Mafia plots to eliminate Castro. This matter had been settled before Hersh published his book in 1997.  First by the Church Committee in 1975, and then by the declassification of the CIA’s internal Inspector General Report in 1994. I showed in detail how Hersh did a magic act on this issue with not just Exner, but CIA Director of Plans Richard Bissell and his testimony before the Church Committee—testimony which no one believed.

Well, Hersh is at it again.  In a June 12^th  article on his Substack site he penned a rather pointless article about Lt. General Samuel V. Wilson. Why do I say “rather pointless”? Because Wilson passed away in 2017, yep, seven years ago. In this otiose piece, Hersh manages to take two swipes at JFK, one dealing with the Vietnam War and one dealing with Operation Mongoose. Let us take them up in that order.

In the context of Indochina, Hersh actually refers to Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy’s “fellow war-loving vice president and successor.”  LBJ sent American combat troops into two theaters: the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam. These were both reversals of Kennedy policies. In the former case, Johnson sent in the Marines to stop Juan Bosch, the deposed democratically elected president, from retaking power from a military coup that had overthrown him.  Kennedy had supported Bosch. (Battling Wall Street, by Donald Gibson, pp. 78-79)

In the case of Vietnam, since 1991 there has been a veritable avalanche of new information unleashed on the subject. In large part because of the releases of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Today, there are now about seven books that prove beyond doubt that, not only did Johnson knowingly reverse Kennedy’s withdrawal program, but he then lied about what he did. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310). As John Newman showed us, Kennedy was pretexting his withdrawal plan around the 1964 election; Johnson was using that election to conceal his escalation plan. And recall, Newman’s first edition of JFK and Vietnam was published five years before The Dark Side of Camelot.

 Hersh also seems to obliquely compare America’s involvement in Vietnam with the same “reportial cat-and-mouse game [that] is going on now”, with what President Biden is doing in Israel and Ukraine. This suggestion sidesteps three important matters. First, as stated above, the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965—which he refers to-- would not have happened if Kennedy had lived. Secondly, unlike Biden, Kennedy was the last president who actually tried to balance American relations with Israel and the Arabs, particularly through Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. (See for example, Betting on the Africans, by Philip Muehlenbeck, pp. 122-29; also Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, by Robert Rakove, pp. 152-59). 

Third, Kennedy was trying to forge a détente with Moscow at the time of his death. His brother Robert knew about this. And about a week after Kennedy’s murder his brother sent a message to Moscow saying that a large domestic conspiracy had taken JFK’s life.  Lyndon Johnson was too beholden to big business to carry on his brother’s quest for détente. But RFK said that he would soon resign, run for office, and then run for the presidency and, at that time, the relationship would be resumed. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 380-81) On the other hand, I think most of us know that the continuing war in Ukraine is at least partly caused by the NATO attempt—led by the USA--to weaken Russia. And let us not forget, Kennedy tended to work through the UN.  Hillary Clinton actually used NATO to bomb Africa.

Then, out of the blue, Hersh says this about Wilson:

But I did not know until after his death that he had joined [Gen. Edward] Lansdale in running the ill-fated Operation Mongoose, a secret Kennedy-authorized program of November 1961 run by the CIA.  Its intent was to accomplish what the Bay of Pigs invasion failed to do the previous April—the assassination of Fidel Castro and the end of communist control of Cuba.  Multiple failed attempts were made on Castro’s life, and preparations for another are known to have taken place in Paris on the day of Kennedy’s assassination.

Let us unpack this. If anyone can find a JFK authorization to assassinate Castro in the plans for the Bay of Pigs, I would like to see it. In doing months, maybe years, of work on that operation, neither I  nor Larry Hancock have located it. And I have read  reams about it, including the Taylor Commission report and the Lyman Kirkpatrick authored CIA Inspector General report.  Such an assassination plan likely was included in the CIA’s ultra secret Operation Forty, but that was never mentioned to Kennedy. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 50-51; email communication with Hancock 6/14/24) And, of course, Hersh does not disclose that CIA Director Allen Dulles and Bissell both later admitted they knew the invasion would fail, but they were counting on Kennedy to send in the Navy. Which he declined to do. (ibid, p. 47)

The same fallacies apply to Mongoose. Again, there was not any John or Robert Kennedy approved plan to assassinate Castro. (RFK served as a kind of ombudsman over that operation.) And the object was not to overthrow Castro.  If that had been the intention then Kennedy would have approved Operation Northwoods, which designed provocations that would then allow for an American invasion of the island. (ibid, p. 61) When Joint Chiefs Chair  Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer persisted in arguing for direct American intervention to overthrow Castro, Kennedy first rebuked him and then terminated him. (John Newman, Into the Storm, pp. 391-94) Mongoose, of course, only lasted ten months. After the Missile Crisis, when Kennedy began to seek a rapprochement with Castro, it dribbled away to basically nothing. (DiEugenio, p. 70)

In its internal Inspector General Report on the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro, the Agency admits openly that no president ever had any knowledge of the plots. (pp. 132-33). As per the incident in Paris that Hersh refers to, that was part of the Agency’s last leg to eliminate Castro.  It was called operation AM/LASH. It was not done in cooperation with the Mafia, but with a Cuban national named Rolando Cubela. Richard Helms and Desmond Fitzgerald had arranged to supply Cubela with weaponry to do away with Castro. Cubela also wanted assurances the mission was approved by Robert Kennedy. Helms told Fitzgerald they should not tell RFK. So when the CIA met with Cubela on November 22^nd, they were lying to him about being envoys for Robert Kennedy. (Church Committee, Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 174; David Talbot, Brothers, p. 227) How anyone could leave that out is unfathomable.

It appears that Hersh never got over the public flogging he took for The Dark Side of Camelot.  When it was published it was broadly and justifiably panned. Gary Wills, no fan of JFK, wrote in the New York Review of Books:

It is an astonishing spectacle, this book.  In his mad zeal to destroy Camelot, to raze it down, dance on the rubble, and sow salt on the ground where it stood, Hersh has, with precision and method, disassembled and obliterated his own career and reputation.

Hersh is still trying to erase that obliteration. It’s a sorry symptom of our times that people pay to read this junk.