Victor Lasky (1918-1997) was a conservative columnist on the payroll of the CIA, and during the Nixon Administration, of CREEP (Comm to Re-Elect the President).
"JFK" was one of the first books to criticize Kennedy's judgment, from his boyhood to his assumption of the Presidency from a quasi-royal family with a popularity which Malcomb Muggeridge described as threatening to become a cult. Lasky is a practitioner of the death by a thousand cuts -- lifting every nuance, every word, every choice, slightly out of the immediacy and momentum of its context, so that it looks untethered, unstable, and perhaps perfidious.
Senseless "chapter" headings.
The "Sources" of the information are listed as if the anecdotes happened. Lasky wants to write ideology under color of "history". And that is the problem: Lasky overlooks the inebriation of Senator McCarthy (his briefcase was bulging with whisky), the incompetence of Nixon (plagiarizing law review, and declared by a panel of judges), and the uneducability of Casey, his CIA chief (whose international Intelligence rarely spoke native languages). We have to be grateful for his work painstakingly revealing voter fraud and Kennedy's work with Harris in using polling as an election technique. But the work is marred by the ideological bent. And it is bent. This hatchet job was followed by a similar book about President Carter which documents his fumbles. Yet, in the face of deliberate, not merely fumbled, acts of private benefit at public cost by Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, this "journalist" remains horribly silent.
JFK was a mythical figure while he was alive, and getting assassinated did not help. The Myth has got to go, although it was joyful while it lasted -- "with Vigah". It is a great relief to see "facts" dredged up concerning voter fraud. Lasky also has no hesitation to point out Kennedy's silence as a Senator during the McCarthy HUA Hearings -- and this is ironic, since Lasky was singing McCarthy's song. And that silence is, of course, deafening. JFK wrote "Profiles in Courage" about other leaders, and the book sold well, but it was not ABOUT Kennedy even indirectly.
I had to take a sweat bath after reading this book. ( )