(2 of 2)
But how did one of America's top investigative reporters go so far down the road with a story that would, if published, have ranked with the Hitler diaries in the annals of journalistic blunders? Hersh, a Pulitzer prizewinner who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in 1969 and has since written provocative books about Henry Kissinger and the downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007, asserts that it all amounts to basic journalism--uncovering evidence and then checking it out. "I believed the documents," he says. "But I knew from the beginning they'd have to be extensively verified."
That turned out to be a time-consuming and expensive process (estimated cost: $80,000), bankrolled by ABC, which financed the documentary after NBC flirted with it but backed out just before the start of production. The documents were shown to handwriting analysts (several found them credible but not conclusive) and even tested for fingerprints (none of Kennedy's were found). Then, in late spring, a full analysis was done by Jerry Richards, a former document examiner for the FBI, who concluded they were fakes on the basis of the typewriting. Two more experts, one brought in by Hersh and Obenhaus and another by ABC, confirmed his analysis.
ABC's Westin expresses no regrets about exposing the journalistic near miss to a national TV audience (albeit a small one; most viewers were tuned in to the much hyped season premiere of ER). "We did what good journalists do, and we got to the bottom of it," he says. "In a sense we're proud of it." Little, Brown (a subsidiary of Time Warner) is proud too: it still plans a huge first printing of 350,000. Even without the J.F.K.-Marilyn dish, publisher Sarah Crichton promises, Hersh's book will deliver plenty of details about "a President whose private recklessness was beginning to edge into his public life." But apparently not quite so reckless as it seemed a few months ago.
--With reporting by William Tynan/New York