The New Yorker’s longtime national security reporter, Seymour Hersh, told a reader that "there might have been some justice" in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, according to a new report.
Reporter James Kirchick, who is also a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, obtained correspondence between a reader and Hersh from 1998, after Hersh had released a book about the Kennedy family.
Kirchick reports:
Hersh made the shocking suggestion in 1998 correspondence with Albert Alioto, a San Francisco bus driver who had written to the New Yorker journalist about his controversial book about the Kennedy clan, The Dark Side of Camelot.
"If your portraits of John and Robert Kennedy are essentially accurate, given the emphasis on assassination plotting," Alioto asked, "do you see any moral difference between the Kennedys and Oswald and Sirhan?" Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were, respectively, the killers of JFK and his younger brother Robert.
"The morality of JFK in comparison with Oswald and/or Sirhan," are "obvious questions," wrote Hersh — whose latest story for the New Yorker alleges that the United States is training members of an Iranian terrorist group in Nevada. The 38th president’s backing of assassination attempts against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Hersh explained, meant that he was as immoral the men who took his and his brother’s lives.