It is election season, the time when we choose what facts to bring forward and which ones to leave behind. I have been pondering this notion of fact choice for the last three months; I have been on a JFK history roll. Clearly, who chooses the facts matters in support of your thesis.
I started with The Fitzgeralds and Kennedys, by Doris Kearns Goodwin because I had read a memoir by her, and it was summer, and the Kennedys where an important part of my family’s locational back story. It’s a tome, but frisky. She reaches back to the mid nineteenth century in Boston, tracing first the Fitzgerald family and their involvement on Boston politics, and then the Kennedy family until the election of JFK. Drawing on family papers and interviews, she wrote an even handed history of the family and the time. Clearly, she admired the Kennedys, but she was also the first to reveal that one of their daughters was lobotomized. It struck close to home as well; Honey Fitz was still a character in Boston lore when I was a child; my mother dressed like Jackie O.; my great aunt lived a few miles from the family compound in Hyannisport (they probably ate at her third husband’s restaurant). It took a month, a chapter a day, but it was worth it.
Because I wanted to learn about JFK as president, I moved onto Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy years, written by David Talbot. He’s a fan and this is where I began to wonder about the choice of facts and sources. His thesis is that it was Robert and John Kennedy against the CIA, FBI, and entire government. The CIA wanted to kill Castro, but the Kennedys did not. The CIA wanted to bomb Cuba, but the Kennedys did not. The CIA or the mafia wanted to kill Kennedy—both of them—and may have. And Robert did not feel like he had the political power to investigate the assignation unless he was president—and then he was killed as well. I wish, now, that I had created a character chart, because the names of all of the men involved in the various intrigues get tangled together, especially when I wanted to compare this history with the next book I read.
When I finished Brothers, I remembered scanning over The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hirsch, one of my reporting heroes. I checked a copy out of the library and began working through it. In this version, the Kennedys want to kill Castro, are not in control of anything, and JFK, at least, spends hours every day cavorting naked in the White House pool with starlets, as well as carrying on serious affairs with a multitude of women. JFK was about to lose control of the narrative and his reelection when he was killed. If I had created the chart while reading the last book, I could have compared the two more clearly; I actually went back to the library to get it and it was gone! Someone else in Corvallis is on a Kennedy roll.
The two books are both deeply researched; they have bibliographies and cite their sources; the authors spent years interviewing people who were engaged in the government and the press at the time. But the conclusions are different. I suspect they asked very different questions. They clearly chose their quoted sources to support their own thesis and probably ignored discussions that did not. The interviewees are old—many die before the book is printed—and their memories may not be as clear. Hirsch quotes from more manuscripts of unpublished memoirs; his time as a reporter in Washington may have given him access to documents the other writer did not have or want. Both are “true,” in that they are based on facts and evidence.
And there is the cautionary tale—we need to research a variety of opinions and sources in order to understand history, politics, and our culture. Believing just one source will not give us an accurate or reliable picture of the world. Creating a chart to compare details is a good thing, even if it means backtracking in our research. Considering the bias of the writer is essential. Hirsch exposed the Mai Lai massacre and blamed Kennedy for involving the United States in Vietnam; that impacts his research. It does not make him wrong, however.
There is a week to go before this election season ends. We are being told that Haitians are still eating the pets; that democracy will collapse if you vote for the other candidate; that council will be more efficient if there are only six councilors, rather than nine. Do your research, consider the bias of your sources, compare notes, and vote.
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