Book Review
The Dark Side of Camelot
November 29, 1997

Extracted from our Internet discussion pages regarding TWA Flight 800 and Princess Diana's accident and death

Seymour Hersh's book was published
several months after publication of Recapturing America.
As you will be able to conclude for yourself,
the book offers many details in support of the
story dynamic presented in Chapter 2 of
Recapturing America.

We have shown the link between TWA Flight 800 and Diana's accident and death. The importance of the Kennedy Assassination can be stated in one sentence: if the truth were disclosed, Bill Clinton would not be President. The importance of that reality is that our children, their parents, our government, and those therein wouldn't be subject to his corruptive influence, and odds are we wouldn't be faced with TWA Flight 800 or Diana's accident and death.

Seymour Hersh's book, The Dark Side of Camelot, is proof of what we proffer. This is an important book. Hersh offers details, as seen below, which supports many of the propositions proffered by Recapturing America. The book proffers proof in support of the following major contentions:

John F. Kennedy bought his election in 1960. Joe Kennedy dealt with the mob and corrupt union officials to achieve victories in two key states, which resulted in the Kennedy victory over Nixon.

John F. Kennedy brought a new meaning to the word promiscuous. He didn't have occasional affairs, he had constant affairs with numerous women, many of them party girls and open prostitutes. Sexual trysts routinely occurred in the White House swimming pool. John F. Kennedy had venereal disease which he spread through an undeterminable number of women. These swimming pool trysts included the president naked with his brothers Robert and Teddy with up to twelve naked women in the White House pool. Jackie Kennedy knew about her husband's infidelities, including the activities taking place in the White House pool.

John F. Kennedy and his immediate family recklessly but consistently served their own individual interests over those of their own families and friends, and clearly over the interests of the country and the world. Kennedys consistently double crossed and used people including the mob.

Some excepts warranting analysis in terms of what we proffer in these Diana web pages and within Recapturing America:

When FBI agents first became aware of the problem of Kennedy's flippant and frequent affairs, they were repulsed, as reflected by FBI agent Carter. Hersh writes(311):

"The agents wanted to throw up" after they discovered the Exner-Kennedy liaison, Carter said. "They could not understand that type of behavior of a top official of the United States. It's demoralizing, really."

However, once JFK's promiscuous behavior became routine and institutionalized, the dynamic and scope of the danger becomes more apparent, as reflected by the material below (all emphasis supplied ours):

Bobby Kennedy knew, as did many of the men and women in the White House, that Jack Kennedy had been living a public lie as the attentive husband of Jacqueline, the glamorous and high-profile first lady. In private Kennedy was consumed with the almost daily sexual liaisons and libertine partying, to a degree that shocked many members of his personal Secret Service detai1(10).

McIntyre said he and some of his colleagues on the White House detail felt abused by their service on behalf of President Kennedy. "Each agent is, after all, a sworn law enforcement officer," he told me. "When you see some type of criminal offense, whether it's a misdemeanor or a felony, occurring in your presence, blatantly, that makes you feel a little bit used" - especially if it's done by the president.(240)

[Tony Sherman Secret Service Agent]: "I'm serious in my job. I don't want a part of it. It's difficult to talk morally about other people, but we aren't talking about other people. We are talking about the president of the United States. We're talking about my country. And we're talking about people my age with wives and children who were willing to give their lives."(240)

Agents acknowledged that the Secret Service's socializing intensified each year of the Kennedy administration, to a point where, by late 1963, a few members of the presidential detail were regularly remaining in bars until the early morning hours. Larry Newman said in one of his interviews with me that an "honest snapshot" of the Secret Service's partying in the months before the president's death would have triggered much public anger. The irony, Newman added, was that the fault may have been Jack Kennedy's. "It's not like he ruined you [as an agent]," Newman said, "but you get the tone of the way the detail works from the top. It was loose."(244)

It wasn't only a question that Kennedy was seriously promiscuous but that he was reckless and mean spirited about it. One of the many stories in the book best reflects JFK's truly detestable amoral character. Hersh writes:

Kater became even more obsessed as Kennedy neared the democratic nomination, and she continued sending out scores of letters complaining that the senator was a hypocritical womanizer who was morally unfit to be president. Kater was not taken seriously by the national press corps but she came close to attracting media attention. On May 14, 1960, just four days after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, she approached him at a political rally at the University of Maryland carrying a placard with an enlarged snapshot of the early-morning scene outside Pamela Turnure's apartment. Kennedy ignored her, but a photograph of the encounter was published in the next afternoon's Washington Star, along with a brief story describing her as a heckler. Kennedy's aides denounced the photograph on her placard as a fake, Kater later wrote, and no questions were ever asked of the candidate, although Kennedy's ongoing relationship with Turnure was no secret to the reporters covering his campaign or to campaign aides.(108)

Kater's story was credible, Clark told me, because it was not just a question of her word against Kennedy's: Kater told Clark that she and her husband had secretly planted two tape recorders in the upstairs apartment while Turnure was spending nights there with Kennedy. The landlords overheard the senator in both the living room and the bedroom. Kater invited Clark to return later to listen to the recordings.(109)

Despite her obvious eccentricity, Clark told me, he was persuaded that it was one hell of a story. He telephoned his editor, Charles Seib, and - as all reporters do - told him what he had…..He was put on hold, while Seib checked with his superiors. A few moments later, Seib returned to the telephone and ordered him "to drop the story," Clark said. "He wouldn't even let me go back to listen to the tapes."(109)

After his election Kennedy showed his disdain for Kater by appointing Pamela Turnure press secretary to his wife.(109)

The slap was to his wife. Not only do you see an infantile response but a reckless and amoral one by one who sits in the most powerful and revered chair in the world. You see the total lack of respect and regard for his wife. Kennedy liked to slap many faces with a single stroke. While The Dark Side of Camelot offers unlimited support for how unfaithful and disrespectful a husband JFK was to his wife; Jackie liked and admired by all, including the Secret Service agents who had to look her in the eye, we always knew that it was the Marilyn Monroe episode which took Jackie over the top. Nonetheless, if anyone has any questions about JFK's reckless and disrespectful behavior while in office, or that his wife was aware of it, The Dark Side of Camelot will surely give you enough details to close the issue.

As to our remaining central characters in the assassination, Hersh's book early on establishes that FBI Director Hoover was no fan of Joe Kennedy. He knew all about Joe Kennedy's corruptive and questionable dealings, and he saw the same behavior passed down to his sons.

Hoover was troubled by the files, DeLoach said, because "he did feel that the presidency should be a very dignified office, representing the people of the United States, the strongest nation in the world. Jack Kennedy and his constant acts of immorality certainly offended Hoover."(147)

Hersh also details how the Kennedy's double crossed the mob. Hersh writes quoting Tina Sinatra:

[The Kenndys] did use the underworld to put their Golden Boy over the top - conduit, Frank Sinatra. They [didn't] hesitate to task for favors; the Kennedys were very able to ask for anything they needed. And I think they were accustomed to getting it. Everybody was duped." She added, when Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, targeted organized crime as eagerly as he had done for the Senate Rackets Committee."

Hersh also details the how and why they were going to get rid of Lyndon Johnson:

The vice-president stood between the attorney-general and any realistic chance of his succeeding his brother as the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 1968. Johnson had to be knocked off the ticket in 1964 to make way for the president's younger brother.(406)

While Jackie, Hoover, the mob and Johnson all had more than enough personal incentive to putatively conspire against JFK, it would seem that an argument that it was meritorious for them to do so in the interests of the nation could be in order. This, in one respect, legitimately supports the Warren Commission's secrecy and obfuscation for a number of years. However, we have explained that the failure to have revealed the full truth by now, acts against the interests of the nation itself. Hersh writes about how Kennedy's amoral character jeopardized the nation in 1963.

But Kennedy remained obsessed with Cuba, and so it became Kruschev's turn to be humiliated. Over the next thirteen days, the president eschewed diplomacy and played a terrifying game of nuclear chicken, without knowing all of the facts. For the first time in his presidency, Kennedy publicly brought his personal recklessness, and his belief that the normal rules of conduct did not apply to him, to his foreign policy…..Jack Kennedy's deceits about his personal life and the corruption of the 1960 presidential election pale beside the false legacy he and his brother manufactured in the days and weeks after the missile crises. Kennedy brought the world to the edge of nuclear war to gain apolitical victory: to humble an adversary who had humbled him before.(345)

Jack Kennedy was planning to stay in office six more years, and to be followed by his brother for two four-year terms. For perhaps the next fourteen years, therefore, the men running the Soviet Union, with or without a formal letter would have the means to publicly devastate the Kennedys by putting the lie to their inspiring victory in the missile crisis. The president and his brother were true existentialists at that moment, bargaining their way out of an immediate crisis by putting their future credibility in the hands of the Soviet leadership.(367)

Now, in line with the proposition that evil men deserve their due, the facts presented by The Dark Side of Camelot are a compelling and must read. First, in line with our proposition that Jackie's warmness toward the President was reflective of her putative involvement:

The usual Kennedy glamour was heightened by the presence of the first lady, who accompanied her husband on a political trip for the first time since the 1960 campaign.(439)

White House aides could see that the president had moved closer to the first lady n the months since the death of Patrick, their newborn son. One immediate result was her agreement to go with him to Texas. She and the president sat together on the Air Force One flight, "talking and just chitchatting together," Malcolm Kilduff, the deputy press secretary, told me in a 1996 interview for his book. "It was different than I had seen them before - you know, they were laughing and being like husband wife. It was very nice." (440)

Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price, nonetheless, for his sexual excesses and compulsiveness. He severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners….in September 1963….Those braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald's first successful shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president remained erect - and an excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the head. (12)

The brace would keep the president upright for the bullets of Lee Harvey Oswald.(440)

While Hersh never seems to feel comfortable in reaching conclusions from the facts, and seems battered by what he was about to reveal in his book, his wordings and perspective do support our propositions clearly. Regarding the assassination and Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover in particular, Hersh wrote confirming the closeness expressed in RA concerning Hoover and Johnson:

"The only Kennedy insider to discuss the vice presidential nomination publicly over the next thirty five years was Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's personal secretary, who told the British journalist Anthony Summers that she was convinced in mid-1960 that J. Edgar Hoover and Johnson had conspired. Hoover was known to be personally close to Johnson - they lived on the same street in northwest Washington - and had for years provided Johnson withh information about Kennedy's private life."(129)

FYI, we have known about this fact since the late 60s and reported it in RA. Johnson lived in a yellow house without air conditioning, across the street from Hoover. It was believed that Hoover had an escape tunnel built underground leading into Johnson's home.

Kennedy found a way to make the best of it after the imbroglio over the vice presidency. He explained to Kenny O'Donnell, a longtime Johnson-hater, as O'Donnell wrote in his memoirs: " I'm forty-three years old. I'm mot going to die in office. So the vice-presidency doesn't mean anything…."(130)

[Robert Kennedy} and Jacqueline Kennedy were convinced that the president had been struck down not by communists, as J. Edgar Hoover and many others believed, but by a domestic conspiracy.(450)

Walton told Bolshakov, according to the Soviet files, that the Kennedys believed that a major political conspiracy was behind Jack Kennedy's murder….According to Walton, wrote Eursenko and Naftali, "The Kennedy clan considered the selection of Johnson [as vice-president] a dreadful mistake.(452)

CONCLUSION:This leads to Chapters 3 and 4 in Recapturing America and all in between until we have today, Bill Clinton and an America which would be unrecognizable to previous generations of Americans (from an ethical and moral point of view). While we always believed we knew the main players, and their motives, the true common bond was removing evil from the highest office in the land. Thus, it behooves those who know the truth, to reveal it, because then it gives value to those, including ourselves, who believe that a person's character and background is critical to high office. We don't want to wait thirty to forty years to assess the damage Bill Clinton, who idolizes JFK and seeks to live his life in parallel, has done to the country. If the truth regarding JFK and his assassination were revealed to the public, the leadership of this country would be other than it is today. Thus, in essence, those in power and leadership roles rightfully don't belong there, and those keeping the secrets have altered the future from one which could have been a more moral and ethical one: rather than the one we have today which operates to the detriment of our children, our country, and our planet. That is why we fight as we do to enlist help from those in and out of government, world-wide, to bring forth the truth regarding, Kennedy, TWA and Diana.

The following was added on December 3, 1997:

Press reports accompanyng the announcement of the book stated:

"John F. Kennedy had sex with call girls in the White House, and an aide bought their silence by threatening to have them thrown into an insane asylum, says a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. The book, "The Dark Side of Camelot," also says Kennedy suspected his wife, Jackie, of having an affair with Aristotle Onassis to get back at him for his own infidelities. John F. Kennedy had sex with call girls in the White House, and an aide bought their silence by threatening to have them thrown into an insane asylum, says a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. (Reuters)

The Times of London October 8th reported:

Kennedy ' suspected wife of affair with Onassis'

President Kennedy suspected that his wife, Jackie, was sleeping with Aristotle Onassis in revenge for his own philandering, according to a new book which claims Kennedy sometimes invited prostitutes to the White House. "She's getting back at me 'cause I have so many," Mr Kennedy reportedly told a friend about his wife's alleged early affair with her future husband. "I resent it. He's an ugly Greek."

There was no reference, we could see, to the above in the copy of the book we purchased or read. In fact, Onassis wasn't even in the index. Further, we could not locate any news story indicating that the book was redacted since its publication only a short time before (on which the above stories were predicated).

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