JFK Hoax Tarnishes Book’s Launch

When a journalist has a source who turns out to be unreliable or great information that withers under the hot light of inspection, he usually shrugs off the exercise and moves on. Readers or TV viewers rarely hear about stories that didn’t pan out.

But in the case of Seymour M. Hersh--one of the most accomplished investigative reporters in the business, the man who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for documenting the My Lai massacre in Vietnam--the public has been allowed a rare peek at material discarded from his upcoming book on President Kennedy.

Moreover, stories about Hersh’s latest journalistic odyssey have put him in an unflattering light, perhaps unfairly, before his book goes on sale Nov. 10.

Little, Brown & Co. trumpets Hersh’s “The Dark Side of Camelot” across two pages in its fall catalog: “This monumental work--five years in the making--will change our view of the Kennedys forever.” In the past week, though, Hersh’s most explosive find--a signed trust agreement showing that Kennedy allegedly spent $600,000 to buy Marilyn Monroe’s silence about their supposed romantic involvement--has been dismissed as a forgery. It will not appear in the book.

Peter Jennings, who has been working on an ABC documentary on the writing of the book, opened the network’s “20 / 20” last Thursday with a report on how the hoax was unmasked by forensic experts retained by ABC. Among other things, they detected that a typewriter model used to produce the documents was not invented until years after they purportedly had been written.

The papers had been “discovered” by Lex Cusack, a former law clerk who shared them with Hersh and later was retained by ABC as a paid consultant on the documentary. Cusack’s story was that his father had done legal work for former Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch. The elder Cusack died in 1985.

Although Jennings’ segment was introduced by anchor Hugh Downs as “our own reporter’s journey . . . a winding path with unexpected detours and a surprise ending,” the piece downplayed ABC’s own appetite for the documents’ veracity while making embarrassingly clear that Hersh originally had fallen for them.

How did he feel when experts debunked the material?

“Like a dupe,” he told Jennings.

No one with a book to sell needs this kind of prime time. And the unfavorable attention did not end with “20 / 20.”

The New York Times, Hersh’s employer in the 1970s, reported Saturday that doubts about the JFK-Monroe papers had prompted NBC to drop plans to produce a film based on the book--before Hersh hooked up with ABC. NBC had paid Hersh and his partner, TV producer Mark Obenhaus, a total of $1 million before the author moved on and cut his deal with ABC for $2 million.

“Peter Jennings and Seymour Hersh have ears full of cider,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that same day. “How on earth did these two geniuses believe for a second that Kennedy would put something like that on paper?”

“She owes me one,” Hersh said of Dowd, sounding amused. “I gave her a column.”

In an interview with Newsday this week, Hersh said he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry about the media attention generated by the Monroe collection.

“All I did was find something, which is what reporters do. I looked at it very closely, and I ran it into the ground when it didn’t add up. It was going to be only one of 24 or 25 chapters in the book--and the book is not behind schedule.”

Still to be heard from is tenacious reporter Robert Sam Anson, who has written a profile of Hersh for the November issue of Vanity Fair, on sale next week. “One of the most unfortunate byproducts of this whole thing is that Sy [Hersh] will look tainted,” Anson said Monday. “I’ve not seen his book. I’ve known him for 30 years. But he clearly lost his way in Cusack’s papers, to put it mildly, though my guess is that he’ll also have remarkable stuff in the book, too.”

Anson, who said he interviewed more than 200 people for his Vanity Fair profile, said Hersh refused to heed the assurances of Kennedy contemporaries and figures close to Monroe that the documents were bogus. According to Anson, besides references to a Kennedy fling with the movie star, the discredited papers also touch on the late president’s alleged first marriage, his dealings with the Mafia and a bribery attempt by late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

As for the documentary on Hersh’s book, it still will air on ABC, network spokesman Arnot Walker said Monday. “The documents are not the whole of Hersh’s book,” Walker said.

Little, Brown’s Sarah Crichton said this week that Jennings’ report “has certainly caused a set of problems that I don’t think anyone foresaw. . . . People don’t seem to understand the fact that none of this material is in the book.”

“The bottom line,” Hersh says, “is the book will stand on its own.”

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* Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com. His column is published Thursdays.