RFK vs. Hoover; seizing the pope

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Three subjects are a truth-be-hanged, free-fire zone for writers willing to discard credibility in favor of sensationalism: The Kennedys (including the JFK murder), the Mafia and late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. No item is considered too spurious to overlook, the more salacious the better, and ill-sourcing is the norm rather than the exception.

In what could be termed a trifecta incorporating all three of the fore-mentioned subjects, Burton H. Hersh does a serious disservice to history (and the truth) in Bobby and J. Edgar (Carroll & Graf, $28.95, 612 pages). He has produced what I can only call a nose-holder of a book, one so laden with outlandish assertions that only a sense of duty kept me turning the pages.

On the surface, Mr. Hersh's idea a was a splendid one, for the rivalry between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Hoover is a continuing Washington legend. Ample credible material is around to tell the story accurately. Mr. Hersh, sadly, chose the opposite route.

His criteria seems to be, "If something is in a book, it must be true, and therefore I can 'report' the wildest of statements as fact." Well, nonfiction writing demands a bit more than the regurgitation of gossip, and Mr. Hersh has been around the business long enough to know better. The footnotes cite a number of "writers" whom I would not believe if they asserted that we now lived in the 21st century.

Repeating nut stuff serves only to keep nonsense in circulation, for many moon-howlers are prepared to believe the worst about the Kennedys, the Mob and Hoover. So I cite only several examples (of dozens) that raised my eyebrows.

Consider the claim that Hoover was a secret cross-dresser who wore fancy gowns to homosexual orgies. A British writer made this assertion in a Hoover "biography" some years back, relying on divorce-suit allegations of an embittered woman who was a convicted perjurer.

The statement about Hoover was outrageously false — and so labeled even by critics who hated him. When references to the lie kept popping up in the New York Times, the paper yielded to a protest by the Society of Former FBI Agents and stated, in an editors' note, that it would permit no further citing of the yarn.

Then there is the allegation that Robert Kennedy, as a young federal prosecutor, accompanied narcotics agents on raids so that he could coerce sex from women who happened to be at arrest scenes. He also snorted any cocaine that happened to be about. Mr. Hersh's "source" is a former narcotics agent who supposedly told this story to another writer years ago. He offers no evidence that he tried to confirm the story. That the politically savvy RFK would put his career at risk through such conduct, in front of strangers, boggles the mind.

Or consider the JFK murder, which Mr. Hersh asserts had heavy Mafia involvement, with the help of U.S. intelligence agencies. Here Mr. Hersh packs a considerable amount of nonsense into a single sentence: "[Jack] Ruby is alleged to have provided the bogus Secret Service identification badges (which originated with the CIA)," which Mob underlings could flash to "shoo away the curious" from the site from which the fatal shots were fired. (Not by Lee Oswald, to be sure.)

Hersh also coughs up a remarkable claim (taken from an RFK "biographer") that "Gerald Ford publicly admitted [emphasis added] that in 1975, while President of the United States, he had suppressed certain FBI and CIA surveillance reports that indicated that JFK has been caught in a crossfire in Dallas, and that John Rosselli and Carlos Marcello [Mob figures] . . . orchestrated the assassination plot." Curiously, no serious Kennedy researcher has come across this Ford statement — or, at any rate, given it enough credence to repeat it.