Burton Hersh

Burton Hersh Literary Background

Winner of the 2017 Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award ("Who's Who").

After a rousing undergraduate career at Harvard, during which he won the History and Literature Prize, the top Bowdoin Prize, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Burton Hersh pushed off into a life as a professional writer animated by occasional triumphs and more or less constant controversy. After college he spent a year in the Black Forest as a Fulbright student, then a stint in the military as a radio operator along the Czech border and a high-clearance German translator and intelligence specialist for the Seventh Army. Then, newly married, he moved to the Austrian Alps and wrote his still – fortunately – unpublished first novel.

He returned to the United States in 1961 just as John F. Kennedy was taking over the presidency. Throughout the subsequent decade he specialized in well-paid magazine articles on skiing, culture and politics for a variety of magazines from Horizon to Esquire. After four years in New York and New Haven he wrote his first published novel, The Ski People, and the widely anthologized Esquire piece on the fledgling Senator Kennedy, whose life would generate three books by Hersh over the next four decades.

The first, The Education of Edward Kennedy, with its moment-to-moment breakdown of the events surrounding the Chappaquiddick cookout, was regarded by right-wingers as a whitewash of Kennedy’s stumbling performance that terrible evening. The book was followed up by the bestselling The Mellon Family and, in 1992, after a decade of massive interviewing and research, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. Bitterly resented inside the Agency for spilling all its secrets though cherished by the likes of John Le Carre, the group biography is now required reading for every incoming officer and in evidence on most desks at Langley, its institutional history.

In 1997 Hersh published The Shadow President, a treatment of Kennedy’s subsequent twenty-five years that drew raves from critics from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to Tom Wicker to Daniel Schorr. A novel, The Nature of the Beast, that explored the ethical substructure of the CIA and was widely praised by critics up to the Agency’s own Inspector General, came out in 2003. In 2007 a book that came out of a whole career of journalistic, social, and at times political involvement with the Kennedys and explored the secret family connections to the underworld that undoubtedly led to Jack Kennedy’s assassination, Bobby and J. Edgar, brought down a tsunami of attacks from both the left and the right. Insults – but nothing specific ever to refute the details of who killed JFK and how – have poured in ever since from ignorant commentators.

In 2010 a thoroughly edited and much expanded and updated version of the two previous books on Edward Kennedy came out, Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography, and was generally hailed as definitive on Kennedy’s life and career. It contained the ins and outs of the very nearly lethal vendetta between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the reminiscences of the woman who had been Kennedy’s great love during the most trying years of his middle life.

Much additional detail is available on Burton Hersh’s website, www.treefarmbooks.com. He vents his opinions on a more or less weekly blog, What’s Left Out: http://burtonhersh.blogspot.com/ Keep reading!