Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997)
Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from a New York Times ‘liberal’ perspective, he remains – in contrast to Chomsky, Cockburn and Hitchens – very much the critical insider. In keeping with this stance, however, Hersh has an almost visceral aversion to anything suggesting ‘conspiracy’ – as evinced in his take on KAL 007 – and it is this bias which leads to an ultimately flawed, if highly readable work.
Like Hitchens et al, he is no fan of the Camelot myth and, despite opening disclaimers, sets out to comprehensively dish the Boston dynasty. This he clearly succeeds in doing – at least in his own terms. It is essentially a moral tale. From the days of Boston Mayor ‘Honey Fitz’ Kennedy onward, the Kennedys are presented as virtually a paradigm case of routine corruption in US public life. There is much interesting material on Fitz and Bootlegger Joe’s umbilical relations with the mob, a good accounts of the Tyler Kent affair and Joe Kennedy and FDR’s mutual blackmail. For the Kennedy administration itself, it is the mob-Cuba-CIA interface which receives most attention, weaving in and out of graphic depictions of JFK’s colourful personal life. And Hersh presents a compelling picture of an almost seamless milieu of machine politics, off-the-wall intelligence operations and organised crime.
So what’s new, then? The Castro assassination plots, for one, are viewed as actively driven by the Kennedys – Bobby in particular. Notable here is the revelation of Bobby’s own CIA liaison – Charles Ford – seconded from the Task Force W (the Agency’s Cuba task force) to keep in direct contact with the Mafia (p. 286), in the belief, apparently, that mob intelligence on Cuba was better than the CIA’s. It is this that provides for a revisionist account of Bobby’s climactic May 7 1962 meeting with CIA General Council Lawrence Houston and Sheffield Edwards. Bobby’s famous ‘if you ever try to do business with organised crime again’ putdown – cited in the Church Committee and declassified 1967 CIA/IG reports and in the mainstream Schlesinger/Sorenson accounts as confirming the Kennedy’s ignorance of the Castro assassination planning – is shown to be, at the least, disingenuous.
With his usual diligence, Hersh has unearthed a rich seam of original interviews with some of the supporting cast of the Kennedy White House – secretaries, secret service personnel etc. There are, however, problems with the three main sources, Judith Exner, Sam Halpern and Robert Maheu. Exner was an admitted perjurer at the Church Committee Hearings; Halpern, Task Force W Executive Officer, freely admits to loathing the Kennedys (p.369); and Maheu, who had previously worked on behalf of Jimmy Hoffa,(1) was an enthusiastic backer of the Bay of Pigs and long-time friend of Johnny Rosselli.
Nonetheless, a suggestive picture emerges: continuing White House enthusiasm for the assassination efforts of Desmond Fitzgerald’s CIA ‘special activities staff’ (which took over from Task Force W); support for the exile’s ‘autonomous groups’ of hit-and-run raiders; and claims that Bobby was ‘privately socialising with Cuban exile leaders’ (p.379). In Hersh’s view, ‘the President seemed not to understand, as did his brother, the extent to which some exile groups were out of control’ (p.381). This certainly chimes in with the overall picture of recklessness in the administration’s Cuba policy. However, aside from Halpern, the main source cited here (2) is newspaper interviews with now deceased exile leader Manuel Artime, a protege of Howard Hunt and sponsor of would-be Castro assassin, Rolando Cubela (AM/LASH).
Selection bias
The author’s selection bias also emerges in the claim that, by early spring 1963, former Task Force W chief and sworn Kennedy opponent William Harvey was ‘sipping his martinis and taking his naps in Rome’ (as CIA station chief) (p.381) and thus was out of the loop as far as Cuba operations were concerned. Anthony Summers has Harvey in Florida for much of July of that year,(3) allegedly visiting clandestine training camps that the White House had ordered closed down. Hersh does not cover the administration’s tentative moves toward rapprochement with Castro after the 1962 missile crisis and closedown of ‘Operation Mongoose’. But evidence of deep disagreement with Kennedy’s emerging detente with both Cuba and the USSR in the CIA and Pentagon can be found in the bizarre Life Magazine effort of June 7 1963 to prove that the missiles were still there.(4)
Hersh’s reading of JFK’s November 18 1963 speech to the Inter-American Press Association is, again, supportive of the continuing ‘get Castro’ thesis. But it is by no means conclusive. According to Arthur Schlesinger, the pejorative ‘small band of conspirators’ reference – admittedly placed there by the CIA – cited by Hersh as coded encouragement for Cubela (p. 441) was, rather, designed to encourage Castro himself away from more uncompromising, neo-Maoist elements in the Havana leadership (5) and toward the diplomatic opening taking tentative shape at the UN. The text of the speech itself is fairly ambiguous, and certainly, from the mass of evidence in Hersh’s book and elsewhere, the Kennedys were not particularly phased by contradiction. However, given the record of emerging US/ Soviet detente at this time, the apparent sincerity of the UN effort and JFK’s growing preoccupation with developing a joint strategy with the USSR toward the Chinese military threat (p. 441), having wound down the supporting military infrastructure of Operation Mongoose and explicitly ruling out the invasion option, the killing of Che, Moscow’s favourite revolutionary, might be seen as somewhat short-sighted.
Relentless revisionism
Thus, from machine politics to geopolitics, Hersh’s relentless revisionism has at least the virtue of logical coherence. However, as I am primarily an historian rather than a Kennedy buff, it is the reading of the administration’s international relations that first drew me to this book and it is here that my doubts most arise about the whole slant of Hersh’s analysis. The Cuba and wider international coverage draws heavily on recently available Soviet documentation – notably from the excellent Cold War International History Project Bulletin – and Fursenko/ Naftali’s similarly sourced One Hell of a Gamble (reviewed in the last Lobster 37). It also quotes extensively from John Lewis Gaddis’ authoritative We Now Know.(6) The trouble is, in his eagerness to sustain his thesis, Hersh comes to diametrically opposite conclusions. Certainly, JFK was far better informed about the Bay of Pigs than he later put about. But a similar streak of pure pragmatism can be seen in the abandonment of the rag-tag exile army: ‘It is much better to dump them in Cuba than the United States’ Kennedy observed, ‘…especially if that is where they want go’ (p. 210).
And while the administration clearly put its full weight behind ousting Castro after the Bay of Pigs in Ed Lansdale’s massive ‘Mongoose’ programme – including, as before, integral plans for the assassination of Cuban leaders – the historians cited above differ with Hersh’s insistence that it was this activity which led directly to the October 1962 missile crisis. As recent scholarship makes clear, Khrushchev’s motivation was only partially related to Mongoose – it was largely dictated by rivalry with the Chinese.(7) Hence the risky covert missile deployment, rather than the open deployment of Russian conventional forces as originally requested by Castro.(8) Hersh’s claim that Kennedy ‘could have come clean with Gromyko’ about US intelligence on the missiles (p.353) and sought a diplomatic solution at the October 18 meeting with the Soviet foreign minister, but wilfully went out on a limb and ‘played a terrifying game of nuclear chicken’ (p.345) is also seriously open to question. As historian Raymond Garthoff observes, Khrushchev had an option to change tack after the ‘public’ US warning of September 4 (when US suspicions were as yet unconfirmed by hard intelligence) but continued his deception even in the private ‘back channel’.(9) At this stage of planning for operation ANADYR, to back down would have been as politically unacceptable for Khrushchev as for Kennedy to reject the Bay of Pigs; and the trade-off, US withdrawal of the 15 obsolete Jupiter IRBM’s deployed in Turkey, which is made much of here, was essentially a side issue.(10) The assertion that, with their inclusion in the settlement, ‘the brothers had been forced to negotiate a last minute compromise’ which represented, ‘the true import of the missile crisis’ (p.3) is simply wrong.(11)
On Vietnam, the record is clear of JFK’s knowledge of the Diem assassination planning – as of the use of ‘executive action’ itself as a political tool: vide Lumumba, Castro and Trujillo – but whether this necessarily committed him to expanding the war remains an open question. Here we begin to touch on Oliver Stone territory. What is clear is that Kennedy could have withdrawn – as he allegedly told Mike Mansfield he would – in a way that Johnson could not. One thing that does stand out in the dark glass of Hersh’s Camelot is a sustained picture of White House control freakery; and what is also striking is the total loyalty of JFK’s staff who would unquestionably have carried out such a reversal of policy. Ruthless as they were in deploying US military power, the Kennedys were equally insistent on pulling the plug on failed military operations. Maxwell Taylor and his confident COIN projections could have easily met the same fate as the self proclaimed ‘man eating shark’ of the CIA’s plans directorate, Richard Bissell.
Moves towards detente
Kennedy’s moves towards detente in his June 10, 1963 ‘peace for all time’ speech, the opening of a new back channel between Bobby Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, the accelerating pace of negotiations at the UN with Cuban delegate Carlos Lachuga (and indirectly, with Cuba’s ‘Maximum Leader’) are, perhaps legitimately, not explored in a work considering the ‘dark side’ of JFK’s administration. In keeping, though, is the assertion that ‘Jack’s luck began running out in the fall of 1963’ (p. 387). Hersh is convinced that sooner rather than later the sheer weight of scandal would have burst through and that JFK’s reputation has only been posthumously preserved by his assassination.
However, given the extraordinary deference in which Kennedy was still held and the evident popularity of a peace platform, I think it is likely that he would have secured reelection: the Republican front-runner was, after all, Barry Goldwater. And here a great many of JFK’s erstwhile mob interlocutors would clearly have had cause to worry, given a renewed mandate for the gang-busting activities of Bobby Kennedy and the strong probability of the Attorney General himself succeeding to the White House. The question of whether the early help of the mob had compromised Bobby’s (massively expanded) law enforcement programme misses the point. The mob may well have been bitterly resentful by the failure to observe the conventions of Mafia ‘omerta’, but as Hersh himself amply demonstrates, the Kennedys were determined to be the only game in town. Bobby, it should be remembered, didn’t simply proceed against Mafia leaders, he went out of his way publicly to humiliate them. That a whole slew of policies could change began to dawn simultaneously on a number of figures in the mob-Cuba-CIA interface.
The assassination is not covered in any detail, save the claim that a surgical neck brace – the result, naturally, from over energetic physical exertion – was a primary cause of JFK’s death by preventing forward movement. Fair enough, but here, though, I must weigh in on the side of over-determination. Given the catalogue of insouciant lawbreaking detailed in this book,(12) the political volte face from cold war to detente, the accumulation of enemies at every turn, Hersh’s overall conclusion that ‘Oswald and Ruby acted alone’ (p.451) is explicable only in terms of the near elemental fear that the subject evokes in the American journalistic psyche. If anything, the mountain of evidence on the administration’s flaws and contradictions which Hersh has captured – and his stance of avowed scepticism – only serves the opposite conclusion. The taboo around the presidential office had been comprehensively broken.(13) In journalism, the search for a simple, monocausal explanation for events has always predominated; for historical analysis, privilege should extend to multicausality. This would suggest, for the events of November 22 1963 as for the era as a whole, that here the burden of proof lies with the monists.
Cui bono indeed!
Notes
- See, David E. Scheim, The Mafia Killed President Kennedy (London: W.H.Allen, 1988), p.193.
- Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1995) apparently provides some circumstantial corroboration of Bobby’s Cuban exile socialising from interviews with relatives of Desmond Fitzgerald, although I haven’t personally seen it.
- Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy (London: Warner, 1993), p. 529.
- Ibid. p.425 – the plan, involving a clandestine landing on Cuba, was organised by the CIA and Claire Booth Luce’s Life Magazine, apparently in the hope of a massive scoop embarrassing the administration.
- Arthur Schlesinger, interview with Anthony Summers, cited in ibid., p.400
- John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know (London: OUP, 1997). Gaddis, generally accepted as the doyen of cold war historians, actually thinks Kennedy deserves more credit for resolving the missile crisis.
- See M.Y. Prozumenschikov, ‘The Sino-Indian Conflict, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Sino-Soviet Split, October 1962: New Evidence from Russian Archives’, Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Bulletin,. Issues 8-9, (Winter 1996-7), pp.251-7.
- See Georgy Shackhnazarov, ‘Fidel Castro, Glasnost and the Cuban Crisis’ CWIHP Bulletin, Issue 5, (Spring, 1995), pp.83-9.
- See Raymond L. Garthoff, ‘New Evidence on the Cuban Missile Crisis: Khrushchev, Nuclear Weapons and the Cuban Missile Crisis’ CWIHP Bulletin, Issue 11, (Winter, 1998), pp.251-4.
- See Paul H. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost (London: Weidenfeld, 1989), pp.219-20, 233. Nitze, an uncompromising hardliner, naturally opposed the trade-off, but admits the administration had been seeking ways to both avoid and reverse the Jupiter deployment since May 1961.
- See James Hershberg, ‘New Evidence on the Cuban Missile Crisis: More Documents from the Russian Archives’ CWIHP Bulletin, Issue 8-9 (Winter, 1996-97), pp.270-6. In Hershberg’s view, ‘One dog that did not bark in [the] New York City [UN negotiations] was that of US withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey’; and indeed, the Soviet delegation was under strict instructions to ‘not in any circumstances’ make an issue of the Jupiters.
- Also uncovered for what is claimed to be the first time is an account of the TFX scandal (pp.317-23). Again via Judith Exner, Hersh claims that JFK was regularly in receipt of payoffs from arms industry lobbyists. Here, of perhaps wider significance than Hersh allows, was the break-in at Exner’s LA apartment by I. B. Hale, head of General Dynamics corporate security on August 7, 1962, which was observed by the 24 hour FBI surveillance on the president’s mistress. Hersh admits being unable to establish how the ailing arms corporation had come across this information which, it is claimed, enabled pressure in favour of the flawed TFX combat aircraft against the wishes of much of the defence community. Given Hale’s FBI background, a likely source would have been the Bureau. Hale’s prominence in Texan law enforcement circles (he lived in Fort Worth) is suggestive of perhaps a further Texan connection.
- From the perspective of the currently favoured ‘ideas and identity’ school of International Relations (IR) theory, the force of such intangible factors as beliefs and taboo has considerable causal salience. For a sampling, see, Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security (NY: Columbia, 1996).