by Gore Vidal
Incidentally, how our masters the synergists must be tied in knots. Remember, back in the Eighties: wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could own a network and a studio that made films to show on it as well as magazines and newspapers to praise them in and a publishing house for source material and . . . ? Well, now we have the marvelous comedy of Hersh’s book being published by Little, Brown, which is owned by Time Warner, and reviewed negatively-nervously, nervously-negatively by Time (same ownership), while Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post Company and still, perhaps, influenced by Kennedy’s old friend Ben Bradlee) denounces Hersh, while ABC (owned by Disney) prepares a TV documentary that is tied in with . . . Many years ago, there used to be something called “conflict of interest.” No longer, I’m afraid. Today, we all bathe in the same river. It will be a relief when Bill Gates finally owns everything and there will be just the one story.
Now let me declare my interest. I got a second telephone call thirty-six years after the one from Jack. This was from Seymour Hersh, whom I’d never met. He told me about the book he was writing and why he was ringing me. He had just read my memoirs, Palimpsest. “You have some new stuff on Kennedy in your book,” he said, “and I wondered why I hadn’t heard about it before. I got curious. I got a researcher to check your American reviews, and I found that not one mentioned all the new things you’d come up with. Why did nobody write about you spending a couple days with Kennedy at Hyannis Port during the Berlin crisis and keeping notes?” I gave him my theory. Few American reviewers actually read an entire book, particularly if the author is known to hold opinions that are not those of the conglomerate for which the reviewer is writing. Also, since I’m a novelist, my books are given to English teachers to review, rather than to history teachers, say—which is possibly no great improvement if they serve the empire too well or, worse, grow misty-eyed when they hear “If Ever I Would Leave You.”
“Well,” said Hersh, “I’m glad I got to you.” Hersh is brisk and bumptious. “I got some questions for you. That detail in your book about how he was having sex in the tub with this girl on top of him and then, as he’s about to come, he pushes her head underwater. Why?”
Now, I think that I am one of the few Americans who honestly don’t want to know about the sex lives of real people as opposed to fictional ones, as in pornography. Like Kennedy, I came out of the Second World War, where a great promiscuous time was had by just about all who could hack it sexually. Most of us were not into warm, mature, meaningful relationships. We were cool, “immature,” meaningless. Getting laid as often as possible was the name of our game, and I don’t regret a moment so spent. Neither, I am sure, does Jack’s ghost. But this is hardly the right attitude at century’s end, when the dull heirs and heiresses of Cotton Mather are like Seventh-Day Adventists with St. Vitus’ dance, darting about with scarlet “A”s in one hand and, in the other, emblematic rosy curved cocks as big around as a—quarter?
I explained to Sy that the shock of the head being shoved underwater would cause vaginal contractions, thus increasing the pleasure of a man’s own orgasm. “Crazy,” he said. “So how do you know this?” I said I’d been told the story years ago by an actress Jack and I both knew. Sy was exuberant. “Well, I got four retired Secret Service men—serious guys—and one of them told me how he would bring the President a hooker when he was lying on his back in the tub and then she’d get on top of him and then when he was ready the Secret Service guy standing behind her would shove her head underwater. Well, I couldn’t really believe this. But now you tell the same story. You both can’t be making it up.” A bit irritated, I said not only did I have no reason to make the story up, I could never have thought it up.
Predictably, the press frenzy over Hersh’s book has centered on JFK’s promiscuity. This is believed to sell newspapers. But then no other country, save our edgy adjunct the U.K., bothers with the sexual lives of its public men, on the ground that their official lives are sufficiently dispiriting, when not downright dangerous, to occupy what small attention the average citizen of the average country can force himself to give to political figures.
This was the case in the United States before mid-century. Private lives were dealt with by gossip columnists, often in what were called “blind” items (principals unnamed), while public matters were kept to the news columns. The blurring of the two began when vast amounts of money were suddenly required to fight the Second World War and then, immediately after, to pay for our ever-expanding and still ongoing empire, set in place in 1950. The empire requires huge expenditures for more and more bombers that do not fly in the rain, as well as the maintenance, with secret bribes and threats, of our NATO-ASEAN axis, which girdles the thick rotundity of the globe itself. With that much money being wrung from the taxpayer, the last thing that those who govern us want is any serious discussion of what is actually happening to all “our” money.
Put bluntly, who collects what money from whom in order to spend on what is all there is to politics, and in a serious country should be the central preoccupation of the media. It is also a very interesting subject, at least to those who pay taxes, which in this country means the folks at home, not the conglomerates that own everything. (Taxes on corporate profits once provided the government with more than 40 percent of its revenues—almost as much as the personal income tax provided—but taxes on corporate profits today contribute barely 12 percent.) During Kennedy’s three-year Administration, he increased the defense budget of the Eisenhower years by seventeen billion dollars. This was one of the biggest, quickest increases in our history. That was—is—the story that ought to have been covered. Unfortunately, politics is the last thing a government like ours wants us to know about. So how do they divert us from the delicate subject?
Until recently, anyone who questioned the Pentagon budget, say, was apt to be labeled a Communist, and that would be that: he could lose his job; become unemployable. This is diversionary politics at its crudest. When Communism went away, sex came into its lurid own as the diversionary smear of choice—a peculiarly American specialty, by the way. Once the imaginary teams, straight and fag, had been established at the start of our century, the fag smear was an irresistible means of destruction. It was used, unsuccessfully, against Adlai Stevenson, while Jack and Bobby would giggle as they argued over which of them first thought to call James Baldwin “Martin Luther Queen.”
Basically, misuse of tax money is the interesting scandal. Much of the expensive imperial changeover started by Truman was in-stitutionalized by Kennedy’s policy of constant overt and covert foreign confrontation. But Hersh, aware that this is pretty much a nonsubject for mass media and most academics, must first get the folks into his sideshow tent. Hence the highlighting of Jack’s sexual shenanigans. Later, Hersh does get around to politics—Cuba, Vietnam—and though he has new insights and information, his critics generally fail to respond coherently. They rehash such weighty matters as whether or not JFK briefly married a Palm Beach girl and did his friend Chuck Spalding remove the records from the Palm Beach courthouse. A Camelot court joke circa 1961: Anyone married in Palm Beach in the year 1947 is now no longer married, since Joe Kennedy, while destroying Jack’s records, tore out a whole year’s worth of marriage registrations.
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 He
rsh 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 footb
all 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.