its details could have been culled from
reading the pulp fiction in the Monroe field: the idea that JFK
had a long, ongoing affair with Monroe; that she had threatened
to go public with it; that the Kennedys were in league with
Giancana; that the family would put up money to save JFK's career
etc. All this could have been rendered from reading, say two
books: Slatzer's and Thomas Reeves'. Even the touch about the
Carlyle Hotel-Kennedy's New York apartment-is in the Reeves book.
In other words, it is all too stale and pat, with none of the
twists or turns that happen in real life. Secondly, are we to
truly believe that the Kennedys would put their name to a
document so that a woman blackmailing them would have even more
power to blackmail them in the future? Or was that to lead into
why the Kennedys had her killed?
Hersh has leapt so enthusiastically into the "trash Kennedy"
abyss that these questions never seem to have bothered him. Anson
depicts him as waving the documents over his head at a restaurant
and shouting, "The Kennedys were...the worst people!" Lex Cusack
showed them to Hersh a few at a time, wetting his appetite for
more at each instance. Hersh then used the documents to get
Little, Brown to give him $250,000 more and to sell ABC on a