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Then there's Charles Spalding, a longtime friend of Kennedy's who told Hersh that J.F.K.'s long-rumored first marriage to Palm Beach socialite Durie Malcolm was a fact. Though stories surfaced in the press in 1961, reporters could find no record of the marriage then. The Kennedy camp denied that it had happened. Malcolm continues to do the same. Spalding told Hersh that the ultra-brief marriage, perhaps an overnight sensation, did indeed take place, in early 1947. At Kennedy's request, says Hersh, Spalding, with the help of a lawyer, removed records of the marriage, presumably from Palm Beach County courthouse.
Spalding reconfirmed for TIME that the marriage, which he calls "a childish scamp," actually took place. He disputes a significant detail in another part of the book, the now much reduced portion dealing with Marilyn Monroe. Hersh writes that in 1960, on an occasion when Monroe was binging on alcohol and pills, Spalding went to Los Angeles at J.F.K.'s request "to make sure she was O.K.--that is, to make sure that Monroe did not speak out of turn." Spalding confirms the trip but emphatically denies that it was in any way intended to keep her quiet. "I don't think I would have gone on that basis," he says.
Most of Hersh's notes for those interviews, examined by TIME, closely match the accounts he offers in his book. He warns in his book that Spalding suffers from "short-term-memory loss," which was apparent in his interview with TIME. Hersh now says he has sources beyond Mickelson for the photograph story, though he doesn't explain why those sources are not identified in the book.
Hersh's methods and conclusions have been controversial. He's a volcanic man, one who doesn't flinch at shouting through the phone at a reluctant informant. Hersh has had second thoughts about some of his sources. For his book The Samson Option, about Israel's nuclear-weapons program, he depended on Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer with a penchant for intricate tales. But a story in the November Vanity Fair quotes Hersh as now saying that Ben-Menashe "lies like people breathe."
Hersh's chapter on Exner is typical of the book. Most of the Georgetown dinner scene with her and Kennedy appeared in a 1988 PEOPLE magazine story by Kitty Kelley, a piece acknowledged by Hersh in his frustratingly brief notes on sources at the end of his book. (Kelley's story was even headlined "The Dark Side of Camelot.") But that big bag of money seems like a new touch. Exner told TIME she did not reveal it to Kelley because Kelley became irritated with her during an interview and walked out. Hersh supplies a corroborating witness, Martin E. Underwood, "a political operative for [the late Chicago mayor] Richard Daley," who says he was assigned to watch over Exner from a distance during her train trip to Chicago, and saw her hand the money over to Giancana.