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So which is Hersh? Despite the pre-publication hype, most of his claims have been reported before. To many of them Hersh adds some further bit of substantiation or at least some suggestive new tidbit. If anyone still doubts that Kennedy was a one-man Roman orgy, Hersh's chapter on his most reckless adulteries will be useful reading. And although historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was a member of Kennedy's inner circle, insist that it is "an exercise in political fantasy," Hersh helps elaborate stories that Chicago Mob leader Giancana helped deliver Illinois to the Democrats in 1960. He says the support came largely by helping get out the vote among the rank-and-file in Mob-controlled unions and through "campaign contributions from the corrupt Teamsters Union pension fund." G. Robert Blakey, a Mafia expert and former federal prosecutor, confirmed to TIME what he told Hersh--that FBI bugs picked up Mob conversations about the deal. "The substance of it was that money went to the campaign through [Joe Kennedy]," says Blakey. "There was an expectation [by the mobsters that] life would be better because of it."
But Hersh is also willing to put testimony, hearsay and speculation into close proximity to one another, then declare that they add up to fact. So Hersh says Joe Kennedy clandestinely poured $2 million into the West Virginia primary that clinched the Democratic nomination for his son. The entire Democratic outlay for the national campaign in 1960 has been estimated at around $10 million. But while Hersh tells a number of stories about money being handed around--all of them interesting, some of them plausible--he never explains how he arrived at that whopping figure. Charles Peters, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, who chaired the Kennedy campaign in West Virginia's Kanawha County, says he was interviewed five times for the book. He says that when he tried to argue that the $2 million figure made no sense, "Hersh just kept yelling, 'Bullshit, bullshit!' He just wasn't listening."
As the "what ifs" of one page become the self-evident conclusions of a few pages later, large leaps of judgment--on the 1960 election, Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs--are made from shaky perches. And while it's true that muckrakers have to find a lot of their informants in the muck, some of Hersh's most sensational claims come from sources who have had trouble with the law or, like Exner, have told different versions of the same stories in the past. He sometimes acknowledges those problems in his text but nonethelesss doesn't hesitate to put faith in what those people tell him.
In a few cases, credible sources for his book who were contacted by TIME say Hersh's account of their stories differs from what they recall telling him. Hersh writes that during Kennedy's presidency, a Secret Service agent brought "sexually explicit photographs of a naked President with various paramours" to be framed at the Washington art gallery of Sidney Mickelson. In some pictures, Hersh says, J.F.K. appears among a group of people wearing masks. But Mickelson now insists that what he described to Hersh was just two pictures of three masked figures in a bed with the covers pulled up to their neck. He never told Hersh that the President was among them, he says, and in any case, none of the shots were sexually explicit. "Absolutely not," he told TIME. "There wasn't any picture of anybody naked there."