The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  15. Secret Service

  Along with Tony Sherman and Larry Newman (see notes for Chapters One and Two, respectively), two other Secret Service agents agreed to be extensively interviewed for this book. William "Tim" McIntyre was interviewed in Phoenix, Arizona, in March 1995, and interviewed again by Lancer Productions at his home in May 1997. Joseph Paolella was interviewed in Los Angeles in May 1995, and by Lancer Productions in Los Angeles in March 1997. Hugh Sidey's account of Kennedy's speed-reading appeared in Life magazine, March 17, 1961, "The President's Voracious Reading Habits." Blair Clark was interviewed by telephone from New York in October 1994; he was interviewed by Lancer Productions in New York in June 1997. Fred Holborn was interviewed in Washington in January 1995. Some of Jack Kennedy's medical files, including the notes taken by Dr. William P. Herbst, Jr., were kindly shared with me by Richard Reeves, the author of President Kennedy. Dr. Sidney Wolf was interviewed in his Washington office in April 1995. For an excellent newspaper discussion of chlamydia and its implications for women, see "It's Called Chlamydia," by Susan Okie, in the health supplement to the Washington Post, June 24, 1997. Dr. Manfred Wasserman was interviewed by telephone from his home in New Mexico in April 1995. Dr. Max Jacobson's unpublished manuscript was supplied through the courtesy of Richard Reeves. A thorough account of Jacobson's high-risk treatment was written by Boyce Rensberger in the New York Times on December 4, 1972, "Amphetamines Used by a Physician to Lift Moods of Famous Patients." The writer Gore Vidal, cited in a footnote, was interviewed many times for this book beginning in December 1994. Judge William Orrick of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco was interviewed in his chambers in June 1996. For a review of the General Aniline & Film Corporation dispute, see Robert A. Schmitz v. Société Internationale et al., case number 85--47 on the civil docket of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Mary Gallagher's My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy was published by Van Rees in 1969. The upgrading and remodeling of the White House pool was innocently reported in Time magazine on December 7, 1962.

  16. Crisis in Berlin

  Morton Halperin was interviewed in Washington in July 1995. The cited Joseph Alsop comment can be found in The Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency and Foreign Policy, by Montague Kern, Patricia W. Levering, and Ralph B. Levering, published in 1983 by the University of North Carolina Press. David Herbert Donald was interviewed from Boston by telephone in June 1996. The CIA's David E. Murphy was interviewed by telephone in July 1997; his book, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War, written with Sergei A. Kondrashev and George Bailey, was published by Yale University Press in 1997. Raymond Garthoff's important article on Checkpoint Charlie, "Berlin 1961: The Record Corrected," appeared in the Fall 1991 issue of Foreign Policy. Bobby Kennedy's tough television talk was reported on September 25, 1961, in the New York Times, "Robert Kennedy Says U.S. Would Use A-Bombs," by Robert F. Whitney. Jack Kennedy's policies are fully described in the New York Times edition of the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 by Bantam. Tim Weiner's New York Times dispatch on Cheddi Jagan appeared on October 30, 1994, "A Kennedy-C.I.A. Plot Returns to Haunt Clinton."

  17. Target Castro

  Peter Wright's memoir, Spycatcher, was published by Viking in 1987. For a good account of the Taylor study group and its recommendations, see Operation Zapata, edited by Paul L. Desaris and published in 1981 by University Publications of America, Inc. Gerry McCabe described life in the White House in an interview in Washington in September 1995. The transcript of the Burke-Lemnitzer conversation was provided for this book by Lionel Krisel.

  (Admiral Burke, and his unflinching integrity, was a source of concern for the president. On February 15, 1961, dozens of newspapers in America and around the world published a tough-talking interview in which Burke asserted that the U.S. Navy had the right to "go where we please in international waters"---including the Black Sea. It seemed to be a direct violation of an early administration directive barring such interviews, but, as it turned out, the interview, by prominent Greek journalist Elias Demetracopoulos of the Athens Daily Post, had been conducted on January 12, 1961, and cleared for publication by the outgoing Eisenhower administration. Kennedy got a big laugh, nonetheless, at a news conference on February 15 when he remarked that Burke's interview "makes me happier than ever that such a directive has gone out." The public rebuke of the admiral, who became famed as "Thirty-One-Knot Burke" while commanding a successful destroyer flotilla in the Pacific during World War II, created instant enmity among the Pentagon's senior officer corps and also led to extensive hearings by a Senate Armed Services subcommittee into what became known as Kennedy's "muzzling" of the military. The hearings received significant press attention at the time but little since then from the many Kennedy biographers, although the enmity between the military men in the Pentagon and the White House may have played a role in the military's docile acceptance of the poorly planned, and thus doomed, Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy's distrust of the military became clear during the Bay of Pigs, as reported earlier in this book, when the White House overrode the normal chain of command and gave direct orders to the Atlantic Fleet. Demetracopoulos suffered for publishing his interview with Burke: a State Department notice eventually was sent to all American embassies in NATO countries cautioning senior officials against the granting of any interviews to him. He also was investigated for years by the CIA, at the request of Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary.)

  Walter N. Elder was interviewed twice at his suburban Virginia home, in November 1993 and October 1994; he was interviewed by Lancer Productions in June 1997. Thomas Parrott was interviewed in Washington in June 1995. Robert Hurwitch was interviewed many times by telephone from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, beginning in November 1993; his privately published memoir is entitled Most of Myself. For more on Edward Lansdale (but not Cuba), see his autobiography, In the Midst of Wars: An American's Mission to Southeast Asia, published in 1972 by Harper and Row. For more on Maxwell Taylor, see his The Uncertain Trumpet, published in 1959 by Harper and Row. The vast majority of Mongoose documents have been declassified and are available in the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961 series. Tad Szulc was interviewed in Washington in March and May 1994. Angie Novello's brief telephone conversation with me took place in December 1994. The quotation from John Lewis Gaddis appears in We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, published in 1997 by Clarendon Press-Oxford.

  18. Judy

  Judith Campbell Exner was interviewed at length at her home in Newport, California, in July 1994; there were many subsequent telephone calls. She was interviewed in nearby Newport Beach for Lancer Productions in August 1997. The most important published works on her, along with My Story (Grove Press, 1977), include "The Dark Side of Camelot," by Kitty Kelley, People magazine, February 29, 1988; "Kennedy, the Mafia and Me," London Sunday Times magazine, by Anthony Summers, October 6, 1991; and "The Exner Files," by Liz Smith, Vanity Fair magazine, January 1997. For a typical mid-1950s movie magazine spread on Judy Campbell and her husband, see "New Men in Town," Movie Stars magazine, August 1955. Gail Laird, the daughter of Bill Thompson, was interviewed in Miami, Florida, in January 1995. William R. Carter was interviewed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in February 1997. Jane Leahy was interviewed by telephone from her home on Cape Cod in November 1995. The FBI communications about the August 1962 breakin at Exner's apartment were released under the Freedom of Information Act. For a good account of the TFX issue, as known at the time, see The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military, by Robert J. Art, published in 1968 by Little, Brown; see also The Pentagon: Politics, Profits, and Plunder, by Clark R. Mollenhoff, published in 1967 by Putnam's. Tommy Hale was interviewed by telephone from his home in Fort Worth, Texas, in June 1996. George Spangenberg was interviewed in his suburban Virginia home in March 1997. Johnny Grant was interviewed in Los Angeles in November 1994; he was interviewed for Lancer Productions in Los Angeles in July 1997.

  19. First Ma
rriage

  The British press has written widely in recent years about Durie Malcolm and her alleged marriage to John F. Kennedy. See "JFK's EX File," by Tim Carroll, London Sunday Times magazine, January 26, 1997. Father James J. O'Rourke was interviewed by telephone from his parish in Boston in June 1997; he was interviewed in Boston by Lancer Productions later that month. Frances Howe was interviewed by telephone in June 1997. Morton Downey, Jr., was interviewed by telephone in August 1997. Clark Clifford's memoir, Counsel to the President, with Richard Holbrooke, was published by Random House in 1991. Sue Waite was interviewed by telephone for this book from her home in Marietta, Georgia, by Ed Gray of Lancer Productions in December 1996. Maxine Cheshire was interviewed by telephone from Houston, Texas, in February 1995.

  20. Missile Crisis

  Of the many books on the missile crisis, a few stand out: "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958--1964, by Fursenko and Naftali, published in 1997 by Norton; The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960--1963, by Beschloss, published in 1991 by HarperCollins; Eyeball to Eyeball, by Dino A. Brugioni, published in 1991 by Random House; In Confidence, by Anatoly Dobrynin, published in 1995 by Times Books; Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Raymond L. Garthoff, published in 1989 by the Brookings Institution; The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited, edited by James A. Nathan, published in 1992 by St. Martin's (see especially the chapter "Reconsidering the Missile Crisis," by Barton J. Bernstein); and Thirteen Days, by Robert F. Kennedy, published in 1969 by Norton. Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days and Theodore Sorensen's Kennedy also include long sections on the missile crisis. The view from the Soviet and American military is presented in Operation Anadyr, by General Anatoli I. Gribkov and General William Y. Smith, published in 1994 by Edition Q. The account of DEFCON 2 comes from Brugioni. The first details about Project Mongoose and its implications for the Soviet planning for Cuba were declassified in early 1989, just as an international conference in Moscow on the missile crisis was scheduled to get under way. See "Document Details '62 Plan on Cuba," by Michael Dobbs in the Washington Post for January 27, 1989. Two days later came the first detailed reports of Soviet nuclear preparations in 1962. See "Missiles Aimed at U.S. in '62," by Dobbs, in the Washington Post for January 29, 1989. For an excellent account of the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, see The Other Missiles of October, by Philip Nash, published in 1997 by the University of North Carolina Press. The first volume fo Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs, Khrushchev Remembers, was edited and translated by Strobe Talbott, and published by Little, Brown in 1970. The CIA's extensive intelligence reporting on the extent of the Soviet missile deployment can be found in volume XI of the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States series, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath. Walter Lippmann's problems with Jack Kennedy and his later capitulation is described in Walter Lippmann and the American Century, by Ronald Steel, published in 1980 by Atlantic-Little, Brown. Kennedy's role in the public attacks on Adlai Stevenson after the crisis is described in The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, volume VIII, edited by Walter Johnson et al. (Little, Brown, 1979).

  21. Deceptions

  Alexander Haig's memoir, Inner Circles, was published by Warner Books in 1992. The testimony from Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, and the letter to Bundy from Raymond Aron, were cited in Philip Nash's The Other Missiles of October. Elie Abel's The Missile Crisis was published in 1966 by Lippincott. General Charles Johnson's interview with the Church Committee was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; it was not published in the committee's report. Jack Kennedy's meeting in Miami with the exiles can be found in The Bay of Pigs, by Haynes Johnson, published in 1964 by Norton. The Very Best Men, by Evan Thomas, was published in 1995 by Simon and Schuster. Some documents describing the ad hoc exile group were declassified in late 1996 and published as part of the ongoing series Foreign Relations of the United States: Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, volume XI. The best account of the Kennedy administration's secret maneuverings behind the 1963 test ban treaty can be found in the cited I. F. Stone essay, "The Test Ban Comedy," published on May 7, 1970, by the New York Review of Books. Stone's essay was the third of a four-part series on the arms race since the early 1800s.

  22. Ellen

  Ellen Rometsch has been ignored by the media since the mid-1960s, when she briefly came into prominence as part of the Bobby Baker scandal. The final report on the Baker case was filed on July 8, 1964, in the Senate: Financial or Business Interests of Officers or Employees of the Senate, published by the Committee on Rules and Administration. A good early article on the Baker scandal was published on November 22, 1963, by Life magazine, "The Bobby Baker Scandal," by Keith Wheeler; also see Baker's 1978 memoir, Wheeling and Dealing, for a self-serving but very readable account. The Profumo affair caused a sensation in the United States as well as Great Britain in mid-1963; see "The Crisis over Christine," by Edward Behr, in the Saturday Evening Post for July 13, 1963, for a sense of the story. Beschloss and Reeves have good summary accounts of the scandal and its impact on the Macmillan government and British diplomacy. Two books have been published on the Profumo affair: Honey Trap, by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril, published in 1987 by Coronet, and An Affair of State: The Profumo Case and the Framing of Stephen Ward, by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, published in 1987 by Atheneum. Cleveland Cram was interviewed in Washington in July 1997 and for Lancer Productions in Washington a month later. Brian Horan was interviewed by telephone from his home in New Jersey in August 1997; his brother, Gary, was interviewed by telephone from his office in Brooklyn a few days later. Warren Rogers was interviewed by telephone in February 1994 and again in August 1997. The footnoted intervention of James McInerney in the Los Angeles newspaper suspensions was not publicly known at the time. George Miron was interviewed in his Washington office in February 1996. The delayed publication of the Congressional hearings on the newspaper closings can be found as The Failing Newspaper Act, before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, March and April 1963, published in 1968 by the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. Pat Holt was interviewed in his suburban Maryland home in October 1994. Courtney Evans was interviewed at his office in Washington in May 1994, May 1995, and April 1997. Evans's FOIA document was made public in the 1980s, as were other Justice Department memoranda relied upon in this chapter. The full import of those documents, in terms of the direct concern of President Kennedy, was not clear until this book. Raymond Wannell was interviewed at his home in suburban Maryland in March 1994, and by telephone in August 1997. Wayne Duffy was interviewed four times by telephone from his home in southern California in July and August 1997. Georgia Liakakis was interviewed by telephone from her home in suburban Maryland in April 1997. The cited Mollenhoff article was "U.S. Expels Girls Linked to Officials," October 26, 1963, in the Des Moines Register. Mike Mansfield was interviewed by telephone from his Washington office in September 1997. Burkett Van Kirk was interviewed many times in Washington for this book, beginning in December 1993; he was interviewed in his home in Sea Pines, Georgia, by Lancer Productions in June 1997. Adam Walinsky was interviewed in his New York office in May 1993. Frank Harrington was interviewed three times by telephone from his home on Cape Cod, beginning in February 1994. Grant Stockdale was interviewed in Washington in April 1996.

  23. Vietnam

  The best account of the events leading up to Diem's murder can be found in A Death in November, by Ellen J. Hammer, published in 1987 by Dutton. The book attracted much less attention than it deserved. For a good overview of the Kennedy administration's policies in South Vietnam, see The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam's classic, published in 1972 by Random House; The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, by Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, published in 1979 by the Brookings Institution; and An International History of the Vietnam War: The Kennedy Strategy, by R. B. Smith, published in 1987 by St. Martin's. Also see Noam Chomsky's brilliant essay on the Kennedy impact
in Vietnam, Rethinking Camelot, published in 1993 by Verso. Michael Forrestal's testimony was cited (at page 138) in The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part II, 1961--1964, published in 1984 by Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The volumes were written by Dr. William Conrad Gibbons of the Research Service. For a critical review of Henry Cabot Lodge's service in Vietnam, see Lodge in Vietnam: A Patriot Abroad, by Anne E. Blair, published in 1995 by Yale University Press. The Kennedy family's early history with Ngo Dinh Diem was reported in Part I, published in April 1984, of the previously cited Library of Congress history of American involvement in Vietnam. Lucien Conein was interviewed at his suburban Virginia home in January 1996. General Paul Harkins's praise for Diem can be found in the Pentagon Papers. William Manchester was interviewed in his office in Middletown, Connecticut, in July 1995, and by telephone thereafter. Henry Cabot Lodge's papers and unpublished memoir are on file at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. Mieczyslaw Maneli's cited op-ed article in the New York Times was "Vietnam, '63 and Now," January 27, 1975. One American scholar who has extensively researched the issue of neutralism in South Vietnam in the early 1960s is Robert K. Brigham of Vassar College. His forthcoming book is The NLF's Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War, to be published by Cornell University Press. Richard Smyser was interviewed in Washington in July 1995. Allen Whiting was interviewed in Washington in September 1995. Tom Hughes was interviewed in Washington in December 1994, and by telephone from New Delhi, India, in September 1997. Rufus Phillips was interviewed in his suburban Virginia home in December 1995; he provided the author with a copy of an unpublished memoir of his service in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg was initially interviewed in December 1995 about his conversations with Edward Lansdale; he wrote a detailed summary of those talks for this book in April 1997. Senator Mike Mansfield's recollection about Kennedy's plan for a pullout in South Vietnam has been widely quoted; see "LBJ and the Kennedys," by Kenneth O'Donnell, Life magazine, August 7, 1970. Joe Croken was interviewed by telephone from Boston in September 1997. Herbert Parmet kindly supplied the author with tape recordings of his 1977 interviews with Eleanore Carney. Torbert Macdonald, Jr., was interviewed by telephone from his home in Cape Neddick, Maine, in December 1994 and September 1997. Tran Van Dinh was interviewed at his home in Washington in June 1995.