BOOK DISHES DIRT ON KENNEDY WHITE HOUSE.

Byline: Barry Bearak The New York Times

``The Dark Side of Camelot,'' a new book by the investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, relentlessly tries to demythologize President John F. Kennedy, portraying him as a reckless, often-immoral cad who accepted the aid of mobsters to steal the 1960 presidential election, became obsessed with the need to assassinate Fidel Castro and, against his better judgment, steered the United States deeper into the Vietnam War so as not to appear weak in his campaign for a second term.

Hersh's work is a collection of exposes, some big, some small, rather than a balanced historical account. It has already begun to meet criticism from historians like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Stephen E. Ambrose and Theodore C. Sorensen, who question the memories and motives of Hersh's sources and find the accusations, in the words of Sorensen, ``a pathetic collection of wild stories.''

Whether it survives the scrutiny of scholars, the book is likely to become the topic of a national talk-fest. Little, Brown and Co., the publisher, will begin selling the book on Monday with a rare same-day distribution of 350,000 copies. A documentary version of the book will be broadcast on ABC, probably in early December, said network spokeswoman Eileen Murphy.

The book is loaded with sex. Hersh has extracted 35-year-old memories from four retired Secret Service agents who, on the record, tell of the presidential liaisons that took place, they say, almost daily. According to the book, prostitutes and female friends du jour frolicked at parties in the White House pool as agents kept watch for any sign of Jacqueline Kennedy.

The president's libido, Hersh writes, left him with 30 years of venereal diseases and a vulnerability to political blackmail. The latter problem kept him in a prolonged dodge from scandals. One threat, Hersh said, prompted the president to give General Dynamics a $6.5 billion defense contract.

``I put in all the sex stuff because it goes right to his character, his recklessness, his notion of being above the law,'' Hersh, 60, said in an interview after providing The New York Times with an advance copy.

His evisceration of the Camelot myths, Hersh said, is meant to be ``a big, big book.'' But recently his credibility has come under attack. Hersh intended to use a sensational new collection of Kennedy papers until experts found them to be a fraud. Last spring, wary NBC executives pulled out of a television deal with Hersh. ABC, which picked up the project, also expressed misgivings. Hersh redrafted his book without the discredited documents.

A Pulitzer Prize winner for his investigation of the My Lai massacre, Hersh has earned renown for dogged, ground-breaking reporting about Watergate and other major news. At the same time, he has developed a reputation for prickliness and bullying.

He worked at The New York Times in the 1970s and returned twice on special assignments. His book, ``The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House,'' published in 1983, was a decidedly unflattering portrait of the former secretary of state. It became a best seller and won a general nonfiction award from the National Book Critics Circle. More recent books, however, have not sold as well.

``For two months, people have been giving me grief for what I merely thought about putting into the book but didn't write,'' Hersh said. ``You know I pay the price for being me. People like to come after me.''

Camelot image

This time, his thick hide may be put to furious testing. The Camelot imagery, chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband's death in 1963, well-suited the nation: its dead president a heroic king, the bright men around him the knights of the Round Table. To favor the myth was to numb the pain.

Americans preferred to savor Kennedy's memory in a succession of brief, shining moments: his finger jabbing the cold air on Inauguration Day, walks on the beach with his beautiful, sophisticated wife, his children at play in the Oval Office, a little boy's somber salute to his dad's passing coffin.

During 34 years, Camelot has taken its share of hits from revisionist critics and connoisseurs of scandal, but never a wallop as hard as Hersh's.

Among dozens of wide-ranging accusations, the book claims:

In 1960, in order to push his son toward the presidency, Joseph P. Kennedy held a previously unrevealed meeting with an old acquaintance, the Chicago mobster Sam Giancana. The family patriarch promised a friendly White House if mob-run unions would provide enough muscle and cash to get out the Kennedy vote. That deal - and not, as usually stated, the ballot finagling of Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago - tipped the balance for the decisive electoral votes of Illinois.

Kennedy supported a CIA plan to kill Fidel Castro just before the 1961 invasion of Cuba by a brigade of Cuban exiles. When the assassination effort failed, the president decided to withhold crucial air support that had been promised to the invaders, who then unknowingly went ahead with their ill-fated mission at the Bay of Pigs. ``A death sentence,'' Hersh calls it.

President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general, made constant demands for Castro's death. Historians have long debated if the Kennedys even knew of CIA assassination schemes. Hersh quotes Samuel Halpern, a onetime senior CIA official, as saying: ``You don't know what pressure is until you get those two sons of bitches laying it on you. We felt we were doing things in Cuba because of a family vendetta and not because of the good of the United States.''

A California woman named Judith Campbell (now Judith Campbell Exner) was a friend of Sam Giancana's and one of the president's lovers. In August 1962, while the FBI watched her apartment, agents observed a break-in at her apartment by two brothers whose getaway car had been rented by their father, the chief of security at General Dynamics. Three months later, the defense contractor, thought to be the second choice to build an experimental jet fighter, won the huge contract.

Norine Lyons, a corporate spokeswoman, said it was impossible to respond to such a dated charge of political blackmail. ``We don't even make airplanes anymore,'' she said.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, while using richly salacious dossiers as political currency against the Kennedys, also sometimes came to their rescue. One of the president's paramours, Ellen Rometsch, was suspected of being a communist spy. Hoover dutifully warned his boss, who arranged for the woman's deportation, supplying enough money to keep her comfortable.

Kennedy, as others have written, was a reluctant warrior in Vietnam. While he believed in the domino theory, which held that the loss of one country to the communists would lead to other nations falling like dominoes, and while he feared being tagged as the man who lost Vietnam, he saw the war as unwinnable and planned to extract United States forces in 1965. By Hersh's reckoning in the book, the delay was immoral, the president putting his re-election ``ahead of the well-being of soldiers and civilians.''

A trail gone cold

Quotations in ``The Dark Side of Camelot'' are almost all fully attributed. The book includes material from unpublished memoirs, newly opened FBI files and 14 previously unheard tapes of Kennedy's conversations. The chapter notes cover 16 pages, but there is not the rigorous footnoting favored by historians. ``Who wants to write a book for historians?'' Hersh said.

Many interviews come from secondary sources, the children, widows and mistresses of the now-deceased. Frank Sinatra is not quoted about his purported links to the Kennedys and Giancana, but his daughter, Tina, is allowed to authoritatively recount her version of those relationships.

Many of Hersh's techniques are understandable on a trail gone cold during three decades, but criticism of this controversial, loosely knit book is inevitable. ``It's a triumph of gullibility, this book!'' Schlesinger said.

He had obtained three chapters of the book on Friday and, upon reading them, complained: ``The chapter on the vote in Chicago is total vanity. The idea that Sam Giancana controlled the Chicago unions is ridiculous. The unions belonged to Mayor Daley. Just look at this. He bases his statements on disgruntled Secret Service people or mobsters who'll claim anything.''

Schlesinger insisted that Kennedy knew nothing about CIA assassination schemes, and said, ``The notion that there was a bunch of bimbos parading around the White House is ridiculous. I worked in the White House.''

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PHOTO President John F. Kennedy is the target of a markedly unflattering portrayal in Seymour M. Hersh's book, ``The Dark Side of Camelot.''