Writing at BuzzFeed, my colleague James Kirchick informs readers that famed New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh once opined that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy “might have been some justice.” Kennedy had plotted to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. So, in Hersh’s view, it is “right” to believe there may have been some “rough justice,” as one of Hersh’s readers put it, in Kennedy’s “terrible death by assassination.”

Kirchick’s column builds off of a superb essay he wrote for Commentary magazine, “The Deceits of Seymour Hersh.” It is worth reading Kirchick’s pieces in full, so I won’t try to summarize them entirely here. But I do want to pull out just one of Kirchick’s keen observations and add a footnote to it.