The Last Empire (29 page)

Richard H. Rovere wrote the much read and admired Letter from Washington for
The New Yorker
. “The Washington Letter as mailed from vital Rhinebeck, New York,” Jack used to chuckle. “That shows real dedication. Endless tracking down of sources. In-depth analyses on the spot . . .” But Dick was now on to something that could cost Jack the nomination.

Rovere lived in a gingerbread frame house on a tree-lined street in Rhinebeck. He had a large, nearly bald head with patchy red skin and a scarred neck. Jack had asked me if he was a drinker. I said no, I thought it was eczema. Thick glasses so magnified his eyes that he seemed like some rare aquatic specimen peering back at you through aquarium glass. In youth, Rovere had been a Communist. Later, when he saw that the Marxist god had failed, he left the Party; he also must have made some sort of inner vow that never again would he be taken in by anyone or anything that required mindless loyalty. As of spring 1959, Rovere was inclined to support Stevenson, who had not yet made up his mind about running for a third time.

I began, to the point, “Kennedy does not have Addison’s disease.”

Rovere insisted that he did. He had acquired the journalist’s habit of always being, no matter what the subject, more knowledgeable than anyone else in the room. I asked him how
he
knew. “A friend’s wife has Addison’s, and they took her to the Lahey Clinic in Boston where they have all the latest procedures, including one that was cooked up for Kennedy. They put a pellet under your skin and it’s supposed to drip adrenaline into you for a week or so and then you get another pellet.”

I used Jack’s arguments. How explain his tremendous energy? How could he have been campaigning so furiously ever since 1956 if he was ill, etc.? Dick was unimpressed. He had the doctor’s name; he had a lot of clinical data. He was already writing the piece.
Esquire
had been advertising it. No turning back.

Question for today: Did I suspect that the story was true? I suppose, in court, I’d say I’m not a pathologist and so how could I know? Jack had had, all his life, numerous mysterious illnesses. Four times, he had been given the last rites. The yellow-gold complexion (typical of Addison’s) was explained as the result of wartime malaria. I suppose now, with hindsight, I had already made up my mind that if he thought he could survive four years of the Presidency “vigorously”—his key word that season—as well as he had survived four years of campaigning, then whatever was wrong with him was under control. Thus one embraces, so painlessly, falsity.

Dick’s piece duly appeared with no mention of Addison’s disease. I did bet him a hundred dollars, even money, that Jack would be nominated and elected. Dick was cheerfully condescending. “At those odds, I can get you a lot more bets.” In November, he paid off. Oddly—well, not so oddly—Dick and I never again alluded to our business.

Point to story: How easily so many people—best and brightest as well as worst and dullest—got caught up in the Kennedy bandwagon. The amount of lying that went on in that era was, the ineffable Nixon to one side, unique in our homely history.

Three years later, Rovere and I had a row that pretty much put an end to our friendship. Again the subject was Kennedy lying. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was resolved between Kennedy and Khrushchev with a secret deal: we would remove our missiles from Turkey if the Soviets withdrew theirs from Cuba. Neither side would give the game away. No gloating. No publicity. But, as always, there was a leak. To plug it, Jack got his old friend the journalist Charles Bartlett to write a
Saturday Evening Post
article declaring that the bold macho leader of the free world could never have backed down on anything. JFK had simply ordered the Russians off the premises, and they had slunk away. In a fit of thoughtful malice, Jack decided that this would be a good moment to knife his ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, and he added that “that old woman Adlai” had wanted the President to make a deal. Bartlett wrote that the resolute Jack never made deals with darkness.

I learned what had happened from Bartlett’s assistant: my half sister, Jackie’s stepsister, who had heard Bartlett discussing details of the article with Kennedy over the telephone. I repeated the matter to Rovere. “No!” he said, which was his response to whatever anyone said. Dick got very red. A heavy smoker, he almost vanished in a blue-white cloud. To my amazement, he was, by now, so much a Kennedy loyalist that not only could he not believe so vicious a tale but if it was by any chance even remotely true he was done with Kennedy forever, presumably as he had finished with that other god that failed him.

Now I read in
One Hell of a Gamble
, a fascinatingly detailed narrative of the Cuban missile crisis (by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali; Norton; $27.50), that an aide to McGeorge Bundy was sent round to Bartlett to tell him that Stevenson “had angered the President by suggesting that the United States pull out its missiles in Turkey in an exchange for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. . . . Poor Adlai Stevenson, the two-time failed Democratic Presidential nominee . . . was being hung out to dry.” Later, “Bartlett had a private dinner with the President. He handed over the draft of the article. . . . As Bartlett recalls today, the President ‘marked it up.’ ”

“I told you so,” I muttered to myself, in lieu of the now dead Rovere, when I read the confirmation of Jack’s lively malice.

This is a deliberately roundabout way of getting to Seymour Hersh (
The Dark Side of Camelot,
Little, Brown; $26.95) and his current collision with what I have just been describing: the great disinformation apparatus put in place forty years ago, a monster that even now continues to metastasize within academe and the media to such a degree that myth threatens to overthrow history. Spin is all. Spin of past as well as present.

For some reason, Hersh’s “revelations” are offensive to many journalists, most of whom are quick to assure us that although there is absolutely nothing new in the book (what a lot they’ve kept to themselves!), Hersh has “proved” nothing. Of course, there is really no way for anyone ever to prove much of anything, short of having confessions from participants, like the four Secret Service men who told Hersh about getting girls in and out of Jack’s bed. But when confronted with these smoking guns the monkeys clap their hands over their eyes and ears and chatter, “Foul allegations by soreheads.” The responses to Hersh’s book made me feel as if I were in a deranged time warp. Since there is not, in any foreseeable future, a Kennedy candidate for President, why is there so much fury and fuss at Hersh’s attempt to let daylight in on old, old black magic? Sufficient, surely, to the day is the blessed martyr Paula Jones, small potatoes, perhaps, but our
very own tuber rose.

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.