FYI, I started to review C. David Heymann’s book Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story but found the entire book relies on Heymann’s credibility as an honest broker, because all his key witnesses are dead, and the families of dead people can’t sue for libel. So I started researching Heymann and his previous works. I’ll give you a hint as to what I found. He lies right on the cover of his book, claiming to be a three-time Putlizer Prize Nominee. The Pultizer Prize committee never nominated him for anything. His book was sent in to the committe. That makes him a multiple entrant, along with thousands of others. Not a nonimee.
I wrote a long, in-depth piece, and will talk about it on Black Op Radio next week. Please take a gander at it here: http://www.ctka.net/reviews/heymann.html. Then listen up next Thursday night at http://www.blackopradio.com as host Len Osanic and I discuss Heymann’s works.
Here’s a snippet but please check out the whole thing. This guy has made a career writing books that no one has fact checked:
I submit that even the title is false, because Heymann doesn’t even attempt to paint a love story. He paints a lust story, and a lopsided one at that. And really, the title should have been: Heymann and the Kennedys: A Hate Story. That would have been a more honest description of the book.
Heymann goes after nearly all the Kennedys, starting with the father, who he accused of being an “ardent admirer of the Third Reich,” a gross misrepresentation of Joe Kennedy’s views. Joe was an ardent pacifist, who feared that another world war would bring socialism not just to more of Europe, but to America as well. For his reluctance to go to war, or, as historian Will Swift puts it, for his willingness to explore every avenue for peace, he was branded an appeaser. And for that, people made the leap that an opponent of war was a friend of Hitler, when in fact that is an unjustified leap. Those of us who opposed George W. Bush’s war in Iraq did not do so out of any admiration for Saddam Hussein. It’s a ridiculous meme about Joe Kennedy that has persisted for reasons beyond the scope of this book review.
Heymann goes after John Kennedy, portraying him in such sexual terms one wonders when the guy had a chance to govern. He even claims Kennedy’s youthful glow in the debates was due to his having had sex just prior to the debate, saying “The results of the exercise were obvious to anyone who watched the debates. Kennedy looked refreshed and composed on camera, whereas Nixon seemed nervous and out of sorts.” And pre-debate sex is his only possible explanation? Whatever else Kennedy was, he was ambitious as hell and believed in preparation. It’s just not credible that he would have allowed a moment of pleasure to interfere with the most important political moment of his career.
Heymann sources this episode to “a longtime congressional and senatorial aide to JFK,” Langdon Marvin. Author David Pietrusza, in his book 1960 – LBJ Vs. JFK Vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies, challenged Marvin’s credibility on this episode, which first appeared in Heymann’s book on Jackie.
Pietrusza notes that in the original account, Heymann’s version in the Jackie book claims the sex happened at the Palmer House in Chicago. Pietrusza notes that the Palmer House is nowhere near the studio in which the debate was filmed. He also noted that the route there would have taken Kennedy “perilously close” to Nixon’s “Pick-Congress” headquarters. As Pietrusza puts it, “There are risks, there are John Kennedy risks, and there are risks not even a Jack Kennedy would take.”
Pietrusza also questions Marvin’s assertion, conveyed by Heymann, that just prior to the debates, Jack Kennedy had sex with a stripper in New Orleans while her fiancé, Governor Earl Long, held a party in the next room. The problem with that is that the debate was filmed September 26, Long had left office in May, and had died September 5. So either Marvin or Heymann’s account of what Marvin said is simply not credible.
Pietrusza notes that Marvin did have a motive to attack the Kennedys. Marvin was an aviation consultant. But for whatever reason, Bobby Kennedy wrote the following to reassure airline industry representatives who expressed concern about Marvin having a role overseeing their industry. Pietrusza quotes the following letter from Bobby Kennedy:
I assure you that Langdon Marvin will not be a part of the administration. He will not have a job of any kind and will play no role, directly or indirectly, in the policies of the administration.
Your sentiments regarding Mr. Marvin are exactly in accord with mine, and I assure you that, when I say that Langdon Marvin will have nothing to do with the government for the next four years, I mean what I say.
As Pietrusza summarized, “Langdon Marvin’s story is a good story. Repeating it uncritically is not very good history.”
Heymann paints Jackie as, forgive the words, a royal bitch. There is no nuance. There are no other colors. He has her throwing fits at publishers, threatening to sue, demanding payments from the Kennedys for her wardrobe and expenses after John’s death, and, of course in the centerpiece to the book, sleeping with Bobby. Of course, Heymann has no direct source for that. He has all kinds of innuendo, but not one credible account from anyone who can verify their quote to show that the two were in love or had any sexual contact of any kind.
One of his racier episodes, where he claims a witness spied Bobby with his hand on Jackie’s naked breast at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, has already been disputed by Andrew Goldman in his review of Bobby and Jackie in the Daily Beast (July 24, 2009). The witness in question is Mary Harrington, who, according to Goldman, died a year before Heymann ever quoted her. Heymann has Harrington supposedly watching the two on the grass from Harrington’s third-floor window next door to the Kennedy estate.
The problem with this, Goldman notes, is that, according to Ned Monell, the listing agent for the Kennedy residence when it was sold in 1995, the entire property was walled. The only place, therefore, from which Harrington could have been staying would have been a beach shack which was 10 feet lower than the Kennedy house. And given that heavy vegetation surrounded the house, she couldn’t have seen anything on the lawn at all.
Many of Heymann’s sources for the affair between Bobby and Jackie are people saying they heard it through the grapevine, so to speak. Here’s a typical factless piece of innuendo:
Film producer Susan Pollock had a friend who occupied a suite opposite Jackie’s at the Carlyle. On several occasions, the friend saw Bobby and Jackie return to the suite late at night, then leave together in the morning. “You can look at people and tell if they’ve been intimate,” said Pollock. “My friend could tell. In any case, their affair was an open secret. Everyone knew it.”
What standards of proof does this meet? That is sheer speculation. And of course, there’s a very innocent explanation for overnights. Bobby had taken over the responsibilities of father for his brother’s two children. He read to them at bedtime. He took them to school in the morning. It makes sense he’d spend the night. Anything else is unproven speculation.
