The Vapors of Camelot

Countrymice,

Today's subject is delicate.  We will be dealing here with friends, intimate history, how reality is lighted, or obscured.  You'll get the picture.

Last week excerpts from the tapes of a fairly extended interview Jacqueline Onassis gave Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 1964 made it onto network television.  The drumbeat of publicity leading up to this feature on ABC indicated that this premature release of many of the tapes was the price Caroline Kennedy was willing to pay if the network would refrain from airing the miniseries on the Kennedys it had already scheduled.  The miniseries ultimately made it onto a secondary cable channel.  While tiptoeing around most of the more contested issues -- Vietnam, Cuba, the unconstitutional tactics of Bob Kennedy's Get-Hoffa Squad -- the miniseries did touch on a surprising amount of heretofore protected information -- how sick Jack Kennedy really was, his tendency to clutch in a crisis, his heedless and politically suicidal womanizing.  Like Joe Kennedy and Jackie Onassis before her, Caroline Kennedy seems to understand instinctively how important it remains to calcify the abiding mythology, to blow the right publicity trumpets.

Well before the Schlesinger/Onassis interview aired there were leaks in the media suggesting potential bombshells.  The Texas oil wildcatters were behind the assassination of JFK.  Lyndon Johnson had a hand.  Having investigated and projected in my controversial book Bobby and J. Edgar my own very detailed treatment of who actually gunned down President Kennedy, and why, I hoped for something new.  But when the hour came these rumors appeared to be unfounded.  Such potentially loaded observations by Mrs. Onassis had obviously been censored out.

I felt for Arthur Schlesinger.  I knew Arthur well; he had been a teacher of mine while I was an undergraduate at Harvard.  For perhaps thirty years, once I began to research the CIA for The Old Boys, I never visited Manhattan -- and I was there often -- without having lunch with Schlesinger, who had served in the OSS and knew the intelligence pioneers well.  Arthur had been recruited as an adviser in the Kennedy White House-- his advice was almost always good but very rarely listened to -- and afterwards he became an important source and a close friend of Robert Kennedy, whose biography he wrote.  Robert Kennedy and His Times was an inspired performance.  But in it Good Bobby was everywhere, and Bad Bobby -- on whom I later lavished a lot of attention -- was nowhere in sight.  Arthur's devotion to the Kennedy crowd ultimately cost him a lot of reputation among historians. At our last lunch he asked me, rather timorously, what I thought of Evan Thomas' biography of Bob.  Thomas' book was capable if quite restrained in its attention to Robert Kennedy's faults -- certainly compared with Bobby and J. Edgar later on.  From what he had heard, Arthur said, he could not bring himself to read the Thomas biography.

For all his legendary prickliness, Arthur Schlesinger had fallen in love with a myth. His passion cost him.  As long as we continue to evade and classify the elements of our own unfolding history, it will cost us.

Burton Hersh