Has anyone read this book??? I'm thinking of buying it, and would like a review.
Hersh, Seymour M. The Dark Side of Camelot. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. 498 pages.
Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist at the top of his profession, spent five years on this book. By tackling the one topic that has benefitted from more spin, puffery, and outright lies than any other, Hersh knew he'd be stepping on toes. The defenders of conventional wisdom pounced -- they had little choice, because by exposing Camelot in interview piled on top of amazing on-the-record interview, Hersh inadvertently puts American journalism in the dock: How is it that so many reporters and so many pundits have been so misleading and incompetent for so many years?
Hersh avoids the assassination, but persuasively shows the two brothers and father as dangerous, corrupt, dishonest, vindictive, and megalomaniacal, with JFK also recklessly dependent on illicit sex and drugs. What all this means today is unexplored by Hersh. It still seems likely that the Mafia, which was clearly double-crossed by the Kennedys, had revenge as the best motive. But Castro and the USSR could have conscientiously acted out of self-defense; the threat to them was objectively that serious. Whoever did it, at least it's easier now to understand the success of the cover-up. To put it bluntly, those insiders who might otherwise have exposed a cover-up, were also in a position to know that JFK was a bigger threat to America than his killers could ever be. They may have simply decided to let it go.
ISBN 0-316-35955-6 |
