The Camelot aura of the Kennedy years in the White House has taken a fresh dent. A new book digs up more evidence about John Fitzgerald Kennedy's well-known womanising, and also claims that his millionaire father bought his election by bribing the Mafia. The book, The Dark Side of Camelot, is by the investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, famed for his exposure of the My Lai massacre by US soldiers in Vietnam. But already members of the Kennedy family and historians have strongly challenged the latest demythologising portrait of JFK.
The New York Times summarises the book as "portraying him as a reckless, often immoral cad who accepted the aid of mobsters to steal the 1960 Presidential election, became obsessed with the need to assassinate Fidel Castro and, against his better judgement, steered the United States deeper into the Vietnam war so as not to appear weak in his campaign for a second term".
Some of Hersh's credibility has been undermined, however, by his earlier reliance on documents which purportedly showed that President Kennedy was paying off Marilyn Monroe to ensure her silence about their alleged affair. The documents have now been shown to be forgeries and Hersh has withdrawn the chapter dealing with this matter.
On the other hand, many of Hersh's sources for his other claims are on the record from living people. Retired secret service agents give details of having to ensure the President was not disturbed while he had liaisons with women in the White House, some of whom were prostitutes.
But the historian, Arthur Schlesinger, who worked for Kennedy calls the book "a triumph of gullibility".
"The notion that there was a bunch of bimbos parading around the White House is ridiculous. I worked at the White House. No doubt some things happened but Hersh's capacity to exaggerate is unparalleled," Schlesinger told the New York Times after reading some advance chapters of the book, which is published today.
Senator Edward Kennedy's office has also challenged claims in the book that he and his brother Robert distributed money to Democratic officials in West Virginia to ensure that JFK won the vital primary contest there in 1960. Senator Kennedy's office told the Washington Post that the claim was "categorically and unequivocally false. There's no truth to it whatsoever."
Another vital contest in the election of John F. Kennedy was Chicago, which would decide the Illinois electoral college votes. Hersh describes a hitherto undisclosed meeting between Joseph Kennedy, the candidate's father, and the Chicago mobster, Sam Giancana.
Kennedy senior allegedly promised the Chicago mobsters a favourable attitude from the White House in return for their use of cash and influence with labour unions to get out the maximum Democratic vote for the candidate. According to Hersh, this deal and not the efforts of Mayor Richard Daley was responsible for the Illinois victory, which ensured Kennedy's narrow election win over Richard Nixon.
Schlesinger comments, however, that "the idea that Sam Giancana controlled the Chicago unions is ridiculous. The unions belonged to Mayor Daley . . . He [Hersh] bases his statements on disgruntled Secret Service agents or mobsters who'll claim anything."
It is also pointed out that Robert Kennedy as Attorney General pursued Giancana for wrong-doing and that FBI wiretaps on the mobster heard him repeatedly complaining that he had been doublecrossed by Jack Kennedy.
A former CIA agent, Samuel Halpern, is quoted as saying that John and Robert Kennedy put huge pressure on the agency to have Fidel Castro assassinated. Schlesinger denies this.
The book also repeats an old allegation that John Kennedy was briefly married to a socialite called Durie Malcolm and quotes Charles Spalding, a long-time Kennedy friend, as saying he personally expunged any public record of the 1947 marriage. Ms Malcolm has consistently denied the report.
Hersh reports that Marilyn Monroe "was said to be deeply in love with Kennedy" and had made stream-of-consciousness tape recordings about her feelings for her psychoanalyst. In the recordings, the actress spoke of her "obedience" towards Kennedy.
"Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world," she says on the tapes. "The first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander-in-chief. He says do this, you do it. He says do that, you do it."