and then Mary Meyer
stories made headlines in the Washington Post. These
elements-intrigue from the CIA assassination plots, plus the sex
angles, combined with the previous hazing of Richard Nixon over
Watergate-spawned a wave of new anti-Kennedy "expose"
biographies. Anti-Kennedy tracts were not new. But these new
works differed from the earlier ones in that they owed their
genesis and their styles to the events of the mid-seventies that
had brought major parts of the establishment (specifically, the
CIA and the GOP) so much grief. In fact we will deal with some of
the earlier ones later. For now, let us examine this new pedigree
and show how it fits into the movement outlined above.
Looking for Mr. Kennedy
(And Not Finding Him)
The first anti-Kennedy book in this brood, although not quite a
perfect fit into the genre, is The Search for JFK, by Joan and
Clay Blair Jr. The book appeared in 1976, right after Watergate
and the Church Committee hearings. In the book's foreword, the
authors are frank about what instigated their work:
During Watergate (which revealed to us the real character of
President Richard M. Nixon-as opposed to the manufactured
Madison