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Uncovering dirt is the job that made Hersh's name. He won the Pulitzer in 1970 for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Later he detailed the CIA campaign of domestic spying against Americans. He gained a best seller and a National Book Critics Circle Award with The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Now comes the book he hopes will be the capstone of his career. His publisher, Little, Brown--a subsidiary of Time Inc., the publisher of this magazine--is rolling out a sizable first printing of 350,000 copies. Hersh is bracing for the backlash from Kennedy loyalists--and not just from them. "I've had people I've known for 30 years be cold and angry," he says. "It's going to be very tough." If Dark Side can withstand close scrutiny, its portrait of J.F.K. as a mendacious, Mobbed-up sex addict will be the crown jewel of Kennedy pathographies--the unmaking of the President, 1997.
All of which is a big if. Hersh's book amplifies some of the most radioactive stories of the Kennedy era. It also promises to nail down more than it does. Even that eyebrow-raising first chapter is a tease. If those dirty files exist, Hersh didn't get them. Don't look here either for a nuanced portrait of Kennedy's presidency. This isn't the kind of book that has much to say about the space program or the Alliance for Progress. And if the Kennedy name already has a cloud over it, Hersh's book comes to market the same way. Before publication he had to remove what would have been its most titillating assertion--that the President signed a contract agreeing to pay Marilyn Monroe $600,000 in hush money to keep quiet about their alleged (but much, much rumored) affair. Hersh acted after document experts warned him that the "contract" showed signs of being a counterfeit manufactured years after both Monroe and Kennedy died.
Hersh has repudiated the Monroe papers, saying that while he may have been duped at first, what matters is that he realized his mistake in time. Meanwhile, he has been promising that what remains of the book will still rock what remains of the Kennedy legend. The legend survives because it was more than that. Kennedy was a turning point in American life, a President who restarted the nation's psychic engines and successfully brought the U.S. through some of the worst predicaments of the cold war. All the immensities of the later 1960s--Vietnam, the racial transformation of America and the erstwhile youth revolution--were set in motion during his presidency. That same complicated stature makes him a legitimate target for the grinding inquiries of real historians. It also makes him a natural one for the mud balls of less scrupulous commentators.