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NY Review of Books, JUNE 27, 2019 ISSUE
A Muckraker’s Progress
by Scott Sherman
Reporter: A Memoir
by Seymour M. Hersh
Vintage, 355 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Seymour Hersh has been the premier American investigative reporter of
the last half-century. In the late 1960s his articles (some of which
appeared in these pages) helped inspire a partly successful campaign to
abolish America’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. His 1969
exposé of the My Lai massacre, based on an interview with the man who
ordered it, Lieutenant William Calley, revealed the savagery of the
Vietnam War. He provided the first comprehensive account of President
Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. His disclosure in 1974 that
the CIA had spied on antiwar activists prompted the creation of two
congressional investigating committees. He led the effort to unearth
American dirty tricks in the early 1970s against Chile’s democratic
socialist president, Salvador Allende. After September 11, he warned
that US intelligence was being manipulated to justify an invasion of
Iraq, and in 2004 he brought to light the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Hersh has also been dogged by criticism, some of it legitimate. He has
bullied sources, lashed out at colleagues, succumbed to hoaxes, and
destroyed the reputation of at least one blameless person: Edward M.
Korry, the US ambassador to Chile between 1967 and 1971.
In 1974 Hersh reported in The New York Times that Korry had facilitated
the CIA’s efforts to foment internal opposition to Allende, who
committed suicide during a coup that overthrew him in 1973. In fact, the
White House and the CIA had bypassed Korry. After Hersh published his
story, the ambassador loudly proclaimed his innocence. According to
Korry’s wife, Patricia, Hersh then tried to essentially blackmail her
husband, offering to clear his name in return for his assistance in
implicating Henry Kissinger, whom Hersh despised. In 1981 Hersh
apologized to Korry in a long, highly unusual, page-one correction in
the Times, after which Hersh admitted to Time magazine, “I led the way
in trashing him.”
Now eighty-two, Hersh has told his own story. At its best, Reporter is a
lively self-portrait of a maverick and troublemaker. But it is scrubbed
and sanitized. He appears in a half-light; the book does not illuminate
the darkest corners of his long career. In an interview with Kissinger
in the early 1970s, Hersh told him, “The only spirit is truth.” But
Hersh is less than truthful in chronicling, for instance, the Korry
affair, about which Reporter contains two hasty, misleading paragraphs
that ignore the damage he inflicted. (Hersh insists that he was “very
surprised” to learn in 1980 that Korry “had not been trusted by the CIA
station chief” in Chile.) For a full view of Hersh and an authoritative
sense of his career, which embodies the expansive possibilities of
muckraking as well as its many perils, one must look elsewhere.
Hersh’s Yiddish-speaking father, Isadore, was, in his son’s words, a
“man of mystery” from Lithuania, who died when Seymour was seventeen;
his mother was born in Poland. Six decades later, Hersh discovered that
his father’s farming village, near Vilnius, was devastated by a German
Einsatzgruppe during World War II: 664 Jews were executed in August
1941. After his father’s death, Hersh was told by a family friend from
the local synagogue to “fuck them before they fuck you!”
He took over the family business, a dry cleaning store located in what
he calls a “black ghetto” on Chicago’s South Side. He was a lackluster
student: after being kicked out of the University of Chicago Law School
at twenty-two, he worked at Walgreens. But he soon stumbled into a job
at the City News Bureau, an outfit that supplied information, mainly
about crime and sports, to Chicago’s thriving dailies. With its tobacco
haze and cynical scribes, the bureau evoked Ben Hecht and Charles
MacArthur’s The Front Page. It was here that Hersh began to acquire his
moral education: “the cops were on the take, and the mob ran the city.”
In Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist (2013), his comprehensive, largely
admiring biography, the journalism professor Robert Miraldi suggested
that Hersh developed some bad habits in Chicago. A City News Bureau
veteran told Miraldi that “in the end, whatever went into a story was
accurate, but the methods might not have been ethical.” Bureau reporters
would pose as cops or coroners to coax information from unwitting
citizens. “Those tactics,” wrote Miraldi, “seem remarkably similar to
what Hersh used in finding Lieutenant William Calley a decade later.”
After six months in the army and a stint in Pierre, South Dakota, for
United Press International, Hersh returned to Chicago for a position at
the Associated Press and began to closely follow the news from Vietnam;
the reports he most admired were those by David Halberstam, Charles
Mohr, and the fiercely independent Washington-based I.F. Stone. In 1966
Hersh became the Pentagon correspondent of the AP. He was immediately
dismayed by the lethargic, pipe-smoking journalists who worked alongside
him. The Vietnam War was raging, but the Pentagon press room was
“stunningly sedate.” Hersh began to wander the halls, chatting up
officers in the cafeteria and showing undisguised contempt at press
briefings. In Reporter, he describes one such session: “When the officer
finished his presentation and asked for questions, I stood up and,
invoking my right as the senior AP correspondent, thanked him for his
time and walked out.”
Officers leaked him information that left him “frightened” by the lies
he was being told about Vietnam. For decades he stayed in touch with
those military sources, from whom he learned that there are “many
officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath
of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the
Constitution and not the President.”
A merit of Reporter is the way in which it divulges Hersh’s trade
secrets: Be a bookworm (“read before you write”); work the graveyard
shift (late one evening in 1967, he allowed Stone to slip in and ransack
the AP’s files); scrutinize the retirement notices of government and
military officials (some of them will sing); be alert when meeting
sources in restaurants (they may leave secret manila envelopes on
chairs); behave as though journalism is a bazaar (when CIA Director
William Colby asked Hersh in 1973 not to publish a story, “I told him I
would do what he wished, but I needed something on Watergate and the CIA
in return”); and, lastly, assume your job is precarious (“Investigative
reporters wear out their welcome…. Editors get tired of difficult
stories and difficult reporters”).
What is Hersh’s underlying philosophy and motivation? On this question,
Reporter, which is written in chatty, hurried, self-satisfied prose, is
not very introspective or revealing. Ida Tarbell’s father was ruined by
Standard Oil, which motivated her to write her classic work exposing the
company’s transgressions. Stone was a left-wing intellectual. Hersh’s
politics, by contrast, are rather inchoate. When I was researching a
profile of him for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2003, Mark Danner
told me that “if he has an ideology, it’s the belief that the government
should not be able to tell a story publicly that is really a
contradiction of what’s going on in reality. And he sees his job as
closing the gap between the public version and real version.”
In the case of Vietnam, that gap was vast. In 1969 Hersh received a tip
that a soldier had been court-martialed for directing a massacre in
Quang Ngai province. It was up to Hersh to learn the soldier’s name and
locate him. He has related this tale many times before, in speeches and
interviews, but it is worth having in a book: it’s a classic account of
journalistic ingenuity, indefatigability, and trickery. While hunting
for Calley at Fort Benning, Georgia, an army base “roughly as big as all
of New York City,” Hersh, dressed in business attire and carrying a
briefcase, told suspicious soldiers that Calley’s lawyer believed he was
“guilty of nothing”; Hersh later insisted that remarks like that were
merely “the standard newspaperman’s bluffing operation”—as if every
reporter behaves that way. After he interviewed Calley, Hersh traveled
the US in search of other witnesses, eventually alighting on Private
Paul Meadlo, whose foot was blown off the morning after the My Lai
massacre. Hersh found him on a chicken farm in Indiana. “I began my talk
with Paul,” Hersh writes, “by asking to see his stump.”
Hersh was a shrewd businessman as well as a gifted sleuth. He and his
collaborator, David Obst of the Dispatch News Service, were then
syndicating the five My Lai stories to newspapers, but they were
determined to see the exposé on television as well. What ensued is
obscured in Reporter. In Miraldi’s words, Meadlo “allowed Hersh and Obst
to be his agents, to market him for interviews.” The private told his
harrowing story to CBS, which paid Hersh and Obst $10,000. Meadlo
received nothing except a free trip to New York City for the CBS
broadcast. In Reporter, Hersh insists that it would have been
“completely unethical,” under the canons of journalism, to have paid
Meadlo. But at other points in his career Hersh has expressed regret
over this episode. In Miraldi’s biography, the following quotes are
attributed to Hersh: “I don’t claim this as the greatest day in my
professional life…. We sold Paul Meadlo, in effect.”
The My Lai story earned Hersh a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 and the
recognition he craved. Random House wanted a book, which became My Lai
4, from whose newspaper syndication rights alone he earned $40,000. He
began to lecture on campuses, galvanizing students with blistering
vignettes of the My Lai carnage, and has continued to give lucrative
speeches ever since.
Hersh’s aspiration had long been to work for The New York Times, and he
arrived in its Washington bureau in 1972. It wasn’t a logical
destination: the Times had no tradition of muckraking. But The
Washington Post was beating it to the story of the Watergate scandal,
and the Times’s executive editor, A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal, needed a master
reporter to match Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Hersh, who called
himself a “Vietnam junkie” and was spending most of his time on the
American machinations in Southeast Asia, was ordered to devote his
energy to Watergate. He resisted, fearing that Woodward and Bernstein
were “too conversant with White House officials whose names I didn’t
even know.” But he was a quick study and, in 1973, produced more than
forty articles on Watergate. Still, he couldn’t catch up with Woodward
and Bernstein. Hersh once visited a source and found a sly note left
behind by Woodward: “Kilroy was here.”
In December 1974 Hersh broke what he calls the “most explosive” story
that he would do for the Times, about the CIA’s domestic spying.
Regarding his sources, Hersh writes, “I can name one of them now—Bob
Kiley, who died at the age of eighty in August 2016 of Alzheimer’s
disease.” Kiley worked for the CIA from 1963 until 1970, during which
time he infiltrated student groups. After resigning from the CIA, Kiley
helped administer the Boston and New York mass transit systems. When he
died, Hersh spoke at his memorial service in New York.
The story burnished Hersh’s fame, and when Leonard Downie Jr. published
The New Muckrakers in 1976, naturally there was a chapter on Hersh, who
groused that All the President’s Men was “still number one” on the
best-seller lists. “I keep thinking of all the money Woodward and
Bernstein got,” Hersh told Downie. “But then that’s what helped to
create the mystique about investigative reporting. I can’t really
complain. It’s put money in my pocket, too.” In a long, fascinating
interview with Rolling Stone in 1975, Hersh alluded to the film version
of All the President’s Men and proclaimed that “having Robert Redford
play me wouldn’t bother me at all.” There has never been a film about
Hersh’s journalistic adventures, but he profited nevertheless, getting
ever higher fees for his speeches.
In 1975 his wife, Elizabeth, enrolled in medical school in New York, and
Hersh, a creature of Washington, found himself in the West 43rd Street
newsroom of the Times. With Jeff Gerth, he spent six months (and
$30,000) investigating the reputed mobster Sidney Korshak. Times
executives feared a libel suit, and Hersh complained bitterly that the
story was pruned by “ambitious deputy editors eager to show Abe
[Rosenthal] that they could make a Hersh series sing.” Those tensions
(amid his “disgust at the editorial mischief”) prompted him to throw a
typewriter through the window of his office.
Hersh and Gerth soon launched a probe of Gulf and Western, one of the
country’s largest conglomerates. To some degree, it was uncharted
terrain: muckraking in the late 1960s and 1970s was generally directed
at the government, not formidable corporations. For the first time,
Hersh tasted his own medicine: G&W executives treated him with contempt
and recorded his phone calls, during which he reportedly said such
things as “You better see me. Otherwise, you are going to jail with the
others” and “G&W is a piece of shit—garbage.” In Reporter, Hersh denies
those remarks but does admit to making some “deservedly tough” calls to
G&W executives. Once again, the story was stringently handled by “an
ass-kissing coterie of moronic editors.” (Both the Korshak and G&W
exposés received mixed responses from readers and press critics.)
Vietnam and Watergate had receded; the press was becoming more
restrained and centrist; by 1979, it was time for Hersh to move on.
Editors at the Times were uneasy about his use of anonymous sources and
his aggressive tactics for getting information. Hersh contends that he
didn’t abuse sources on the telephone, but one of his editors at the
Times, Robert Phelps, told me incredulously sixteen years ago that “he
would call people and he’d say, ‘I’m Seymour Hersh, I’m doing a story on
this…If he doesn’t call me, I will get his ass.’ They’d call back.” “His
ability to make people cower on the phone was unbelievable,” the
influential Times editor Arthur Gelb remembered in 2011. Woodward has
said that Hersh’s reporting techniques at The New York Times in the
1970s would not have been condoned at The Washington Post.
Hersh spent the next four years chasing an old enemy, Kissinger, about
whom he later remarked, “When the rest of us can’t sleep we count sheep,
and this guy has to count burned and maimed Cambodian and Vietnamese
babies.” The result, in 1983, was The Price of Power: Kissinger in the
Nixon White House, which contained chapters on Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile,
and Bangladesh, among others. Based on a thousand interviews, it is
Hersh’s best book, respected by historians. It also forced Hersh to
confront some errors in his earlier newspaper reporting, especially his
mistreatment of Ambassador Korry. Only one reporter, Joseph Trento of
the Delaware News Journal, pursued the Korry matter in the 1970s, and
Hersh did not appreciate his scrutiny. “You have no business reporting
on this story,” he told Trento. “You should turn your sources over to
me…I work for the New York Times, this is our story.” But Hersh also
told him that Korry “was the only schmuck dumb enough to tell the truth.”
When Hersh started to research his book on Kissinger, however, he
realized that he needed the ambassador’s help. An old friend of Korry’s,
Richard Witkin, who spent thirty-five years on the staff of the Times,
told me for my CJR report that “Hersh had no way of getting the
documentation that he wanted [on Chile]. And so he finally went up to
Korry’s house. And Ed said, ‘You want the documents, you can have the
documents. But only if you get a front-page retraction printed in the
New York Times.’” Rosenthal, who was a friend of Korry’s, complied. But
the apology may have come too late: the affair took a heavy toll on
Edward and Patricia Korry, and they eventually moved to Switzerland.
Miraldi covered the episode scrupulously in his biography and concluded
that, the apology notwithstanding, “Hersh did not believe Korry, plain
and simple.” Korry died in 2003.
The vitality in Reporter fades as the Reagan years approach. There were
more books—on the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviets
in 1983; on Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, a project of
daunting complexity—but they didn’t fly off the shelves. Woodward,
meanwhile, was producing a stream of best sellers (which were criticized
for their reliance on high-level, anonymous sources). In 1993 Little,
Brown offered Hersh and a coauthor a $1 million contract for a book on
John F. Kennedy that would illuminate his sexual escapades; he also
obtained a lucrative TV deal for the same project. “I started the book
on Kennedy,” Hersh told an audience at Harvard in 1998, “for a couple of
reasons. One, I had a publisher who was going to give me a lot of money
to do it. That’s very important, you know, these days.”
It was Hersh’s first work of tabloid journalism. Early in his research,
he was offered an astonishing trove of handwritten documents about
JFK—some of which seemed to be written in Kennedy’s own hand—showing,
for instance, that he had paid hush money to Marilyn Monroe, given
bribes to J. Edgar Hoover, and given instructions to employ the mobster
Sam Giancana to manipulate the 1960 election. But the documents were
forgeries, and Lawrence X. Cusack, one of the men who peddled them to
Hersh, was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison for fraud. The
resulting book (minus the forged material), The Dark Side of Camelot,
was savaged: in these pages, Garry Wills wrote that Hersh had
“obliterated his own career and reputation.” Hersh admitted to the
journalist Robert Sam Anson in Vanity Fair that he’d fallen for “one of
the great scams of all times,” but he pointed to the occupational
hazards faced by investigative reporters: “Any investigative journalist
can be totally fucking conned so easy. We’re the easiest lays in town.”
When I interviewed Hersh in 2003, he expressed grave doubts about the
book, which featured salacious details from members of JFK’s Secret
Service team. “I wish they hadn’t spoken on the record,” he told me. “I
wouldn’t have used it.”
But Hersh’s career was not quite obliterated. In 2000 he wrote a lengthy
article for The New Yorker showing, in great detail, how US soldiers
under the command of General Barry McCaffrey had massacred scores of
Iraqi troops in the final days of the 1991 Gulf War. (The story, based
on three hundred interviews, was sparked by a tip from a retired
four-star officer who, speaking of McCaffrey, instructed Hersh to “go
get him for what he did.”) After September 11, Hersh wrote dozens of
stories for David Remnick at The New Yorker, some of which evinced a
hawkish streak that alarmed liberal press critics such as Michael
Massing. The young Hersh thought the CIA was too zealously aggressive;
the mature Hersh believed, based on what he was hearing from his
military sources, that the agency was overly bureaucratic and had to
become more effective. In 2003 Thomas Powers recounted a conversation he
had had with Hersh before September 11, in which Hersh announced,
“Listen, Tom, you gotta understand, this isn’t the CIA that you used to
know in Richard Helms’s day. This place has been severely weakened. It’s
a lot of geriatric cases and timid careerists.”
Remnick, like Rosenthal, insisted on knowing the identities of Hersh’s
anonymous sources. But their relationship frayed, and between 2013 and
2016 Hersh wrote four pieces for the London Review of Books, including a
much-criticized account of how Osama bin Laden was captured and killed.*
In his work on Syria for the LRB, Hersh insisted, contrary to
documentation from Human Rights Watch and the UN, that President Bashar
al-Assad was not responsible for the sarin gas attack near Damascus on
August 21, 2013.
Hersh, we learn in Reporter, “had met often with Assad by late 2007.”
The information he obtained from him, he says, “invariably checked out.”
The passages in Reporter devoted to Assad are strikingly friendly. They
illustrate the moral dangers of Hersh’s brand of muckraking, which
entails a relentless determination to get the story at any cost. As
Hersh told Vanity Fair’s Anson in 1997, “You think I wouldn’t sell my
mother for My Lai? Gimme a break.” In what seem to be some hastily
composed pages near the end of the memoir, he affirms that journalists
“tend to like those senior officials and leaders, such as Assad, who
grant us interviews and speak openly with us.” Apparently one can kill
hundreds of thousands of people and still be a valued source. Hersh
tells us that “Remnick was far more skeptical than I was of the
integrity of Assad.” The journalist who documented war crimes in Vietnam
and Cambodia has overlooked them in Syria.
Hersh’s LRB articles also suggest the dangers of his old reliance on
military sources. An article about Syria from early 2016 featured quotes
from Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was then mostly unknown and
whom Hersh depicted as a beleaguered underdog. The notorious Flynn was a
dubious source at best. That aside, one wishes that Hersh had spent more
time adding texture, nuance, and humility to Reporter. If he had
scrutinized his own life with the same tenacity he has directed
elsewhere, he might have given us one of the great journalistic memoirs.
*
See, for example, Ahmed Rashid, “Sy Hersh and Osama bin Laden: The Right
and the Wrong,” The New York Review, September 29, 2016. ↩
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