Hersh's next book, "The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy" (1991), is another tale of U.S. hypocrisy. Hersh demonstrated that the government, while preaching nuclear nonproliferation, encouraged Israel to secretly acquire and develop nuclear weapons, then kept silent about it. Cold War needs were again served, because many of the Israeli nukes were aimed at the Soviets. Among the fascinating claims in the book: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir gave U.S. intelligence documents that had been stolen by convicted spy Jonathan Pollard and given to the Soviet Union. And: British press baron Robert Maxwell and his foreign editor at the London Daily Mirror, Nicholas Davies, were agents of Israel's intelligence agency Mossad. Outraged at the accusation, the pair sued Hersh for libel. They lost.

A tale of intrigue that perhaps was a little too Byzantine for American readers, "The Samson Option" contained the germs of two later exposis that Hersh wrote for the New Yorker: One delved further into Pollard's misdeeds in order to persuade Clinton not to grant him clemency, as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was urging. The other, more terrifying, revealed that in 1990 India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war because the United States, under Reagan, illegally sold nuclear weapons to Pakistan, our ally against the Soviet Union in the Afghanistan war. As Hersh pointed out, this was a far more dangerous situation than the also-illegal Iran-Contra scandal, but Reagan got away with it.

Which brings us to a question: Who was the most corrupt president in the post-war era? Reagan? Nixon? Clinton? All have their advocates, but if you're Hersh, the answer is none of the above. His choice is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And when he made his case for that in his 1997 bestseller "The Dark Side of Camelot," the amount of flack he received was astounding. Talk about pack journalism. The media ganged up on him like jackals circling a wounded antelope. Hersh's sources were untrustworthy, they cried, his evidence sheer speculation and innuendo. And not only media, but academics like Garry Wills and historians like Arthur Schlesinger swarmed Hersh as well, calling him an irresponsible money-grubber. The story of the reaction to "The Dark Side of Camelot" ended up being much bigger than the book itself, which, truth be told, contained less new information than confirmation and amplification of known Kennedy misdeeds.

We know JFK was a sex addict, but Hersh tells us that prostitutes made regular visits to the White House. We know JFK was obsessed with Castro, but Hersh presents evidence that Kennedy gave the order to assassinate the Cuban leader during the Bay of Pigs invasion. We know JFK's father, Joseph, was a crook who stole various elections for his son, but Hersh gives new sordid details. As far as brand-new information is concerned, the most damning is probably Hersh's claim that Kennedy ordered South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem assassinated because the leader was negotiating with Ho Chi Minh to end the war, and Kennedy didn't want the war over until after he was reelected.

Another sideshow that ended up overshadowing "The Dark Side of Camelot" was the saga of the forged documents. The smokiest of the smoking guns Hersh planned to include in the book was his discovery of a supposedly authenticated handwritten note from Marilyn Monroe to JFK in which the actress demanded the president create a $600,000 trust fund for her ailing mother. The quid pro quo was that Monroe wouldn't reveal her and JFK's affair. A contract spelling out the terms of the trust fund was signed by both of them. This was sizzling stuff, and there were lots of other damning documents from the same cache. Hersh used them to get NBC to sign a $2.5 million contract to make a Kennedy documentary, and when the network pulled out Hersh signed with ABC for the same amount. But when ABC had the documents tested, they turned out to be phony. Hersh had been duped, and he admitted it.

Yet even though he didn't use any of the material for his book, he got lambasted for believing it in the first place. And he probably should have been more suspicious, because in hindsight, his attempts to peddle the papers seem unseemly. Says Hersh, "Abe Rosenthal [recently fired New York Times columnist who was executive editor during Hersh's tenure] once told me, 'Don't hang your ass out in the air, cause it'll get bit.' Well, I hung it out and it got bit." Still, the negative reaction to "Dark Side" was way out of proportion. Why? "There's a suspension of belief when it comes to the Kennedys," Hersh told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "It's a cult. We want to believe."

That includes several prominent journalists, who didn't like to be told they were wrong about Kennedy. "What does this book say about Hugh Sidey and Ben Bradlee?" Hersh asked Newsday. "They would love to see me bamboozled." Bradlee, the dashing former editor of the Washington Post, was a friend of Kennedy's. "I think Hersh was a pioneer," he told Newsday. "But this is very sad what is happening now. Some of this stuff defies belief."

Bottom line: Hersh approached "Dark Side" no differently than any of his other books. It is rigorously documented and relies on interviews with named sources, in this case several former Secret Service agents who never spoke with anyone about Kennedy before Hersh. But because this time Hersh took on the king of America's de facto royal family, the media pored over the book as though they were scientists examining evidence in a forensics lab. Not surprisingly, not all Hersh's information turned out to be unimpeachable -- but the same could be said for all his other books. What he has been throughout his career, though, is more unimpeachable than practically anybody else. With his latest book, "Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome, the War Between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government," Hersh has come full circle. He wrote about chemical and biological weapons in his first book, and in "Against All Enemies" he shows that there were manifold opportunities for soldiers in the war against Iraq to be exposed to chemical agents, whether nerve gas or uranium traces or faulty vaccinations. He also cites a classified report that said up to 47 percent of the gas masks supplied to U.S. troops were defective.

The upshot: thousands of Gulf War veterans showing up at veterans hospitals have reported debilitating symptoms ranging from headaches and memory loss to chronic fatigue. It's like Vietnam and Agent Orange all over again. But in that case it took 20 years before the government came clean about Agent Orange and started paying disability benefits.

"What we did to those kids, this is going to be an issue," Hersh said to a newspaper while on a book tour for "Against All Enemies" in Denver. "We're going to make this an issue. We're going to make the American people collectively ashamed that they cared more about Monica Lewinsky than what's going on in their own neighborhood."

Hersh is howling again. Sounds like music.

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