New E. Howard Hunt memoir panned by NYT

The old hands at the C.I.A.’s publications review board, who maintain the agency’s memory hole, must have had a mordant chuckle over [Watergate defendant E. Howard Hunt's] “American Spy,” and connoisseurs of literary crimes and misdemeanors will find much to savor here. Hunt describes a foreign president’s wife as “the true power behind the thrown.” He makes Dwight Eisenhower president in 1950, at the start of the Korean War, instead of 1953, at its end. He mangles the names of, among others, the leaders of Iran and Nicaragua. He also identifies Mark Felt, a k a Deep Throat, as Howard Felt — a howler calling for a psychiatrist as well as an editor. The publishers of this book seem to have received an impossible last draft, handed it to a book doctor and closed their eyes.

The low point — and there is strong competition — comes when the author examines the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hunt was falsely linked to the killing by conspiracy buffs, and this chapter can be read only as a twisted form of bitter revenge. He exhumes worm-eaten theories linking C.I.A. officers and their Cuban agents to the case and pretends to take them seriously. Then, with a straight face, he purports to put Lyndon B. Johnson’s finger on the trigger.