The Last Empire by Gore Vidal

Author:Gore Vidal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400032990
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

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To further undo JFK’s delicate physical balance, along with the cortisone that he took regularly, there was his reliance on—addiction to, in fact—the amphetamines that the shady drug dispenser Dr. Max Jacobson regularly injected him with. It was through Chuck Spalding that Max entered JFK’s life. Max made more than thirty recorded visits to the White House; traveled with the President; provided him with shots that he could give himself. So, in addition to cortisone, which can have dangerous side effects—a sense of misplaced, as it were, euphoria—the President was now hooked on speed. According to Jacobson’s memoirs, Bobby was sufficiently concerned to want the medicine analyzed. “ ‘I don’t care if it’s horse piss,’ ” Jacobson quoted Kennedy as saying. “ ‘It’s the only thing that works.’ ” In 1975, Max’s license to practice medicine was revoked.

In Hersh’s interviews with the Secret Service men, sex and drugs to one side, one is struck by how little actual work Jack got done. There were many days when Kennedy “didn’t work at all. He’d come down late, go to his office. There were meetings—the usual things—and then he had pool time before his nap and lunch. . . . We didn’t know what to think.” My own impression, reading this, was how lucky we were that he wasn’t busy all the time, because when he did set his hand to the plow Cuba got invaded and Castro was set up for assassination, while American troops were sent to fight in Vietnam, and the Diem brothers, our unsatisfactory viceroys in that unhappy country, were put to death in a coup, with White House blessing if not direct connivance.

In a way, the voices of the Secret Service men are the most damning of all, and I was prepared for what I call the Historians’ Herndon Maneuver. William Herndon was for seventeen years Lincoln’s law partner and shared an office with him. Herndon is the principal historical source for those years, except when Lincoln told Herndon that he had contracted syphilis in youth and had a hard time getting rid of it. Herndon wrote this after the President’s death. The Lincoln priesthood’s response to the syphilis charge is Pavlovian: Herndon was a disreputable drunk and not to be relied on—except when he is. As I read Hersh, I knew that the Kennedy zealots would say the same about the Secret Service man who mentions Jack’s nongonorrheal urethritis and all the rest of it. On Larry King, a professor appeared along with Hugh Sidey. He conceded that JFK had a “squalid covert life.” Then, when one of the Secret Service men was named, it was Sidey who executed the Herndon Maneuver: the agent later had a problem with “alcohol.”

I think Hersh comes to some wrong conclusions, inevitable considering his task. Incidentally, it is ridiculous to accuse him of not being a serious, sober historian, careful to footnote his way through a past that very few American academics could even begin to deal with.

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