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The original manuscript of Hersh's book made a number of controversial assertions about the former president, including that:
Though Jacqueline Bouvier officially was his first wife, his actual first marriage was to a woman named Durie Malcolm, which was never legally terminated, and was hushed up by his father Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.
He had been a semi-regular user of a prescribed pharmaceutical amphetamine-related drug, receiving injections from Dr. Max Jacobson.
He had had a close working relationship with American Mafia boss Sam Giancana that supposedly included vote fraud in one or two crucial states in the 1960 presidential election.
In 1958, when he was a member of the United States Senate, he had an extramarital affair with "an attractive aide in [his] Senate office," Pamela Turnure. This was three years before she became First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's press secretary. In 1958, Turnure's landlady Florence Kater took a photograph of the senator leaving Turnure's apartment in the middle of the night, a photograph that Kater tried repeatedly to bring to public attention to ruin the senator's presidential campaign.[1]
"On May 14, 1960," says The Dark Side of Camelot, "just four days after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, [Florence Kater] approached him at a political rally at the University of Maryland carrying a placard with an enlarged snapshot of the early-morning scene outside Pamela Turnure's apartment. Kennedy ignored her, but a photograph of the encounter was published in the next afternoon's Washington Star, along with a brief story describing her as a heckler."[2]
The reels of microfilm for The Washington Star that cover the month of May 1960 indicate that the newspaper, then known as The Evening Star of Washington, D.C. and The Sunday Star, never published an article about Florence Kater, nor did the article about Kennedy's campaign appearance at the University of Maryland mention a heckler.
For many of these allegations, Hersh relied only on hearsay collected decades after the event. In a Los Angeles Times review, Edward Jay Epstein cast doubt on these and other assertions, writing, "this book turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy."[3] Responding to the book, historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called Hersh "the most gullible investigative reporter I've ever encountered".[4]
The above material was part of larger move of material from Seymour Hersh to this article via this edit. It is about Hersh's allegations and his book and not specifically about the hoax, so I have moved it her for future reference. -Location (talk) 23:00, 10 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
