Seymour Hersh - Scoop Artist
Seymour Hersh - Scoop Artist
Seymour Hersh - Scoop Artist
P O T OM AC B OOKS
An imprint of the University of Nebraska Press
© 2013 by Robert Miraldi
All rights reserved. Potomac
Books is an imprint of the
University of Nebraska Press.
Manufactured in the United
States of America
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miraldi, Robert.
Seymour Hersh: scoop artist /
Robert Miraldi.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical
references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61234-475-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Hersh, Seymour M. 2. Journalists—
United States—Biography. 3. United
States—Politics and government—
1945–1989. 4. United States—Politics and
government—1989– 5. United States—
Foreign relations—1945–1989. 6. United
States—Foreign relations—1989– I. Title.
PN4874.H473M57 2013
070.92—dc23 [B] 2013023619
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Notes 353
Index 403
Illustrations
11. Yoko Ono gives Hersh the LennonOno Peace Prize, 2004
xi
participant in the plotline had sued Hersh for $50 million, although it
ultimately was resolved in Hersh’s favor.
At the workshop that afternoon I could not get him to discuss jour-
nalistic technique for the students I had asked to attend. Instead, he
wanted to talk about the CIA, intelligence gathering, Richard Nixon,
and Kissinger. The reporter did not want to talk about reporting — only
what he had uncovered in the process of reporting. Like all the great
journalists, his passion was reserved for the issues. Form and function
were of little interest.
Before his evening lecture, the college president hosted a dinner at
her home. The president invited vice presidents, deans, and local offi-
cials. This kid from Chicago, the son of immigrant parents, a law school
dropout and former Chicago crime reporter, was a celebrity, “a fucking
celebrity,” as he called himself in a triumphant post-Pulitzer interview.
One guest was Alan Chartock, a political science professor who was also
a well-known personality on a network of National Public Radio sta-
tions he ran from the state capital in Albany. Hersh had a Washington
DC neighbor whom Chartock knew. Hersh liked the man; Chartock did
not. They proceeded to argue about him over dinner. When he left the
dinner, Hersh said to me, “Who is that little prick?” I explained he is a
considerably influential pundit in New York’s capital. Hersh just uttered
more profanities. Hersh seldom minces words or pulls punches, I came
to learn. He goads and blusters and intimidates, leaving enemies every-
where he goes, from presidents to generals to secretaries of state. It is
part of his style — and success.
The evening lecture went better. Nearly 750 people packed the college’s
largest lecture hall. Hersh had his notes on three small cards tucked into
his pocket, but he spoke without them, fluently and passionately, assailing
the immoralities of the Nixon era from Vietnam to Watergate. To many
people in this university town, Hersh was a hero, and they applauded
frequently. Hersh more than earned his fee. For Hersh, who had bank-
rupted himself as he traveled around the world to research The Price of
Power, it was one of hundreds of talks to fill the coffers before the great
investigative reporter zeroed in on his next target. He has had, in fact,
two careers: the journalist who has produced hundreds of newspaper
xii PROLOGUE
and magazine articles and nine books, and the public speaker who has
crisscrossed the nation hundreds of times talking to crowds big and small
in his breathless style, often saying more than he should and stirring
controversy in the process. When the evening talk was over, and he had
answered many questions and received a standing ovation, I escorted
him back to his car. He was staying in a dingy hotel, courtesy of the col-
lege, outside of the village of New Paltz before heading home the next
day. “I miss my family,” he said as he left campus, referring to his wife
Elizabeth and three children back in the nation’s capital.2
I did not speak to Sy Hersh again for nearly twenty years as he produced
five more books, all controversial, a few documentary films, and dozens
of articles for the New Yorker magazine. That’s when the chase began in
earnest — to try to get Hersh to do what he despised — talk about himself.
In 2004 I had decided to write his biography. He was sixty-seven years
old, and I had filled folder after folder with old yellowed newspaper clips
and bookmarked more websites with Sy Hersh profiles and commentar-
ies than I thought my computer could hold. I sent him a registered letter
to tell him my intentions. He had to walk to the post office in 102-degree
Washington DC heat to pick it up. Not a great start. I had no clue if he
would cooperate. He had long been intensely private and media shy,
except when promoting a book or exposé for the New Yorker because
then, after all, it was about the work. He had refused again and again to
discuss his family or his upbringing. “God, this is all so tedious,” he told
one interviewer who made the mistake to ask about his early life. “What
the hell does it have to do with anything I write?” One of the world’s most
famous investigative reporters did not think he was the story. Then again,
at times there have been serious threats made against him, when a story
touched a nerve, which may explain his reluctance to open his family life.3
When his older sister said she would love to talk to me, Sy vetoed the
possibility. She knows little about my work, he insisted. I went back and
forth with his twin brother, Alan, who also was willing to be interviewed.
But we — Alan and I — could never agree on terms that assuaged Sy. Hersh’s
wife never answered my letter requesting an interview; Hersh had told
me a long time ago I would not be able to interview her. Getting a lens on
Sy Hersh through his family became impossible, which left, mostly, his
PROLOGUE xiii
work — the stories, the crusades, the endless controversies, the countless
awards, and the long list of successes, victims, and enemies.4
Still, I was hopeful Hersh would talk to me, his first biographer. “Look,”
he said, in his famously rapid style when I first called him in 2004, “I
am not dead yet.” That the world knew. He had re-emerged on center
stage that year, reporting on the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy that had
struck America. His exposé of the American torture of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib in Iraq was groundbreaking. Awards poured in; he was profiled in
magazines. While many applauded him, one Bush administration official
called him “the terrorist of American journalism.” From the press’s point
of view, he was back. Of course, he had never really left, as this book shows.
From My Lai in 1969 to Abu Ghraib in 2004 — logical bookends — he was
remarkably productive, successful, and controversial. And, along with
his longtime rival Bob Woodward, he has surely been America’s most
well-known investigative reporter. “You can’t draw up a pantheon of
American reporters that doesn’t include Hersh,” says author Thomas
Powers. “If it’s a pantheon of two, he’s one.”5
Over my years of research, Hersh has been polite but standoffish. “I
just don’t have time to sit down for long interviews,” he said in one phone
conversation. “Maybe when these sunavabitches are out of the White
House,” a reference to the Bush cast and crew. But when Barack Obama
was elected, Hersh proved no more willing to talk about his life story. I
should not have been surprised. Writers have been chasing him for four
decades. His home and work phone numbers are publicly listed, and he
answers his own phone, abruptly, with “Hersh.” He will answer a few
questions and then dismiss the caller with, “You’ve got enough. G’bye.”
The chase has been repeated dozens of times. David Jackson of the Chi-
cago Tribune wanted to meet “the legendary investigative reporter” at
an airport to talk with him as he came back to his hometown Chicago to
receive an award. “Leave me alone,” Hersh said. When Jackson met him
at the airport anyway, Hersh acquiesced, and they drove together to his
old neighborhood on the South Side. The result was a rare inside look.
On another occasion, Hersh dismissed the Associated Press’s Deborah
Hastings after a few questions, saying, “I’ve given you more than enough.”
xiv PROLOGUE
When Scott Sherman wrote a profile of Hersh in 2003 for the Columbia
Journalism Review, the closest he got was to watch Hersh take phone calls
in his cubby-hole office, a scene that has been re-created by many jour-
nalists over the years. Joe Eszterhas, a magazine journalist who went on
to write Hollywood screenplays, got the closest in 1975 when Hersh was
riding high after his exposés of the CIA. Hersh sat for a long Q&A with
Eszterhas for Rolling Stone magazine. But he could not get too close. “I
don’t want anybody reporting about my private life,” he declared.6
Leonard Downie, who later became editor of the Washington Post, also
got Hersh to talk in considerable detail in the mid-1970s, first labeling
him the “scoop artist.” Everyone else has mostly had to chase Hersh, a
breakfast here, phone call there, a few stolen minutes in his office or before
or after a speech. Marianne Szegedy-Maszak tried to write about him in
1991 for Esquire, but he kept saying to her, “But imnotgonnatell you a
thing.” She still wrote a story. His friend Robert Sam Anson interviewed
Hersh for Vanity Fair just as his book on John F. Kennedy was coming out
in 1997. The outcome may explain his shyness: his revelations about why
he pursued Kennedy’s sex life were thrown back at him by reviewers and
enemies, and he has many enemies. I spoke to some, and decades after
he wrote about them or someone close to them, they were still furious,
still convinced they had been wronged. But there are others, to be sure,
who insist Hersh is the man who speaks the truth, who cannot be stopped
by government subterfuge, and who uncovers the hidden deeds that no
one else can find.7 You will find both those men in this book.
In 2008 journalist Wajahat Ali, who writes for CounterPunch, a biweekly
muckraking newsletter, sought, as he put it, “to score an interview” with
Hersh. The result was comic and typical. Reached by phone, Hersh said
it was a bad time, that he had phone calls coming in all day. Undoubt-
edly true; he lives on the phone. Try me in two weeks when I will be
back from traveling, Hersh said. Ali called back, a few days before Hersh
was to return, thinking he could leave a voice mail. But the surly Hersh
answered. “Why do you want an interview? Who are you again? Islamic
what? Islamic? Listen, you know I did Jazeera right?” And on and on,
concluding, more or less, with “I got a lot of reporting to do. I really don’t
like doing this. . . . I report the facts. I’m just a reporter.”8
PROLOGUE xv
Ali had been treated to the famous Hersh brush-off. I pretty much
got the famous Hersh treatment for five years. He was always polite. He
answered my emails promptly but curtly. He gave a few phone interviews,
and he promised on a few occasions to find documents he thought he had
in his basement, but it never happened. He was too busy reporting, even
now, at age seventy-six, finishing a big book on former vice president Dick
Cheney. At times when I asked him questions about old stories, he simply
could not recall. I seemed to know more about some of them than he did.
Not surprising. He wrote hundreds of articles for the Associated Press
and United Press International from 1963 to 1969, and then hundreds
more for the New York Times from 1972 to 1979. Then more books and
dozens of magazine articles for the New Yorker. When his “scoops” were
newsworthy and controversial enough, which was often, he discussed
his work with the press. He was on the record all over the place — from
YouTube videos to interviews with Amy Goodman, Charlie Rose, and
Jon Stewart, to countless short newspaper sound bites. And, maybe, in
the end I was sort of glad to not have access. Times columnist Joe Nocera
criticized Steve Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson for being too close to
his subject, with whom he met more that forty times. I never got close
to Hersh. My view of him is, mostly, though his speeches, his “pimped”
interviews, as he called them, his enormous body of work, and the ample
comments he has made on that work for four decades.9
Some people who know him told me he would talk, that he has a very
large ego. But an interviewer once asked him, how would you like people
to remember you? He answered: “I couldn’t care less. I don’t believe in
life after death.” And while I do believe he cares, I think he cares about
something else much more — being left alone so he can keep reporting.
“The myth about me is that I am wildly abrasive, antagonistic, hostile,”
Hersh says. “I do very little to bother it, because the myth is a plus.” He
is crusty, crabby, and aloof — because it keeps people away and lets him
do what he wants, which is to uncover more stories than any other jour-
nalist in the past forty years. It lets him be America’s unrivaled “scoop
artist” — and a great American journalist and character.10
xvi PROLOGUE
Acknowledgments
xvii
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SEYMOUR HER SH
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C HA P T ER 1
1
Post interested, but he had no luck. Cowan could have tried to publish
it in the Voice, but he feared this well-known liberal newspaper would
not be credible, and that the story was too important to be buried in a
publication that might not be trusted. A lawyer working with Cowan at
the Center for Law and Social Policy, Ben Heinenman, suggested Cowan
call reporter Sy Hersh. Seymour Hersh. Seymour Myron Hersh. “I did
not know him,” Cowan recalled, “but from what I had heard I knew he
was a tenacious reporter and he might run it.”1
Indeed, although only thirty-two years old, Hersh had developed a
reputation around Washington for his pugnacity. Born in Chicago to immi-
grant parents, Hersh had gone to the University of Chicago as a history
major. Then he had drifted into journalism after failing law school. For
a short period he published a weekly newspaper in suburban Chicago
before working for the fabled City News Bureau. After a short stint work-
ing for the United Press International (UPI) in South Dakota, Hersh came
east to cover the Pentagon for the Associated Press (AP), a time when
he learned to ignore formal press briefings and wander the halls of the
Pentagon, making friends with midlevel sources in the military’s sprawl-
ing bureaucracy. His time with the AP ended when it refused to run a
long series of articles he produced on chemical and biological weapons.
His first book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arse-
nal, came out in 1968 to favorable reviews but small sales. “I knew his
book,” Cowan recalled. Many others did also since it played a key role
in the Nixon administration’s decision to ban the continued production
of such lethal weapons.2
Hersh was also known in the journalistic community in Washington for
another reason. He had left reporting for a three-month period in early
1968 to work on the antiwar campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy of
Minnesota as he sought to wrest the Democratic presidential nomina-
tion from Lyndon Johnson. This aberration in Hersh’s journalism career
ended when he had an argument with McCarthy. Now, in the heady fall
of 1969, with thousands of protestors regularly amassing on the capital’s
lawns, Hersh was a freelance reporter. He was working on a book about
the Pentagon — tentatively called The Ultimate Corporation — but he took
Cowan’s October 22 phone call and listened. “I’ve got a fantastic story,”
14
dumb he was. I could have really ripped him off,” Hersh said. A year after
the story came out, Hersh wrote: “To this day I have not written all that
Calley told me.”2 But he learned enough to piece together what became
the biggest news story of the year.
Angry, frustrated, and nervous, the men of Charlie Company, Hersh
discovered, prepared a series of assaults on the enemy in an area known
as Song My, which was a collection of rural hamlets including My Lai. For
some reason it was labeled Pinkville on the army maps. Later testimony
was mixed, but some soldiers recalled that they were explicitly told to
kill anyone they encountered, young or old. “This was a time for us to
get even. A time . . . when we can get revenge for our fallen comrades,”
recalled Sgt. Kenneth Hodges.3 Early in the morning the men fanned out
through the villages to flush out underground bunkers and small huts,
looking for the enemy. All they found were old women and men, young
mothers and children, and lots of animals. When they saw something
move, the soldiers fired randomly into the surrounding fields and jungle,
but there were no return volleys. It did not stop the assault, however. For
reasons that would be unclear for quite some time — orders from above?
a policy of leaving behind no survivors? the civilians were collaborators
with the enemy? — the soldiers began to round up civilians. The killings
began without warning. If the villagers did not come out of their houses,
the soldiers threw in grenades. When they did come out, they were shot.
At one point, Calley fired into the head of a monk who was praying over
a sick old man and killed him. Soon after, Calley ordered three or four
of his soldiers to push civilians — women, children, old people — into a
ditch. When they tried to get out, Calley began shooting them. A lot of the
women threw their bodies over the children, but the soldiers kept shoot-
ing. When some children tried to crawl out, Calley and his men shot and
killed them. A two-year-old boy miraculously was unhurt and crawled
away. Calley grabbed the child, threw him in the ditch and shot him.
“I guess you could say the men were out of control,” one soldier said.
It was an understatement. The shooting and killing and raping went on
all morning. “Just like a nazi-like thing,” one soldier said. In the end,
perhaps as many as 500 Vietnamese civilians were dead, including, as a
plaque in the village eventually reported, 182 women, of whom 17 were
Flying High
Sy Hersh and David Obst were flying high in late November. On Novem-
ber 25, the president announced that America would stop producing and
stockpiling chemical and biological weapons. Although not widely known,
it was a direct response to Hersh’s 1968 book. Meanwhile, newspapers
across the country were carrying Hersh’s My Lai stories — with two more
on the way — and the television networks were all following Hersh’s lead.
Suddenly, as Hersh told a group of newspaper editors, “the newspaper
profession, in one of those collective changes of mind that can only be
found in business, decided that each man’s testimony was important to
play all over the front pages.” The once obscure Associated Press reporter
was now getting his name known across the country. Syndicated columnist
Mary McGrory wrote a profile of Hersh, saying it was difficult to capture
the nervous energy of the “fast-talking fast-moving” reporter. Robert
Walters of the Washington Star went to interview Hersh and Obst in their
new offices in the National Press Building, but it was an odd interview:
there was no furniture! “Obst and Hersh simply haven’t had time for
the luxury of setting up desks and chairs,” he wrote, because they have
been “single-handedly investigating” the massacre. An exaggeration,
for sure; the press pack had descended on the story. But Walters saw the
same thing as McGrory. Hersh’s “non-stop style overwhelms observers
even when he isn’t working on something important,” Walters wrote.
Obst was particularly ebullient. “Now we have a little money to play
around with,” he chortled, referring to the $10,000 from CBS. “We’re
on our way.” Showing the optimism of the young, and naive, Obst was
convinced the atrocity stories would have a profound effect. “I really
28
thought our story would end the war . . . . I couldn’t imagine how . . .
any rational person would let it go on.”1 But a counterattack on Hersh’s
work and motivations — and on the interpretation of what he was expos-
ing — was about to begin.
The White House first commented the day after the Paul Meadlo
interview appeared on CBS, a day a congressional committee also held
a hearing to discuss the photographs in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, photo-
graphs that soon came out in Life magazine. The president’s spokesperson
called the incident “abhorrent to the conscience of the American people.”
But he assured the public that a full investigation was under way and
that “illegal and immoral conduct” will be dealt with. Nonetheless, Ron
Ziegler said, thousands of Americans had served with honor and cour-
age, and this one incident should not reflect on them or the conduct of
the war. “If Nixon’s advisers had once hoped that the massacre could be
held outside the horizon of public concern, that hope had finally faded,”
observed historian Kendrick Oliver. Hersh’s work — and the press’s follow-
up onslaught — made sure of that. Nixon’s strategy had always been to
fight the press head-on. Vice President Agnew’s attacks, secret plotting to
take antitrust action against the television networks, and a plan to audit
taxes of newspaper executives — all underscored his aggressive posture.
“The greatest mistake we can make” in dealing with the press, he told
his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, “is to . . . slobber over them with the
hope you can ‘win’ them. It just can’t be done.”2
In the midst of the My Lai stories the Birmingham (Alabama) News
published a cartoon showing an enemy soldier presiding over an atrocity.
Nixon urged his staff “to try to get this syndicated.”3 Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger was urging that the administration take “some unified
line.”4 Nixon adopted what became the common mantra: the other side
is guilty of more atrocities than American soldiers. Overall, the Nixon
staffers felt that the press was unduly blowing up the incident, for profit
and for purely partisan reasons. When New Mexico senator Pete Domenici
attacked Ron Haberle for selling his My Lai photographs, Nixon wrote a
note, declaring, “Bravo!”
Profiteering was at the heart of the attacks against Hersh and Obst
for bringing Paul Meadlo to CBS. Maine congressman Edward J. Gurney
45
university plummeted, and this may have helped Hersh gain entrance
since he was — by his own admission — a “very mediocre student.” He
earned B and B minus grades. He liked to read the New Republic maga-
zine and do the New York Times crossword puzzle. And he like to drink
and party. After visiting one after-hours bar, he recalled, “We’d drink
and stagger out . . . till seven in the morning. Drink martinis and stagger
out puking.”3
After completing his degree, he had no idea what path to choose. “I
was going through all the things everybody goes through,” he recalled.
“Profound doubt, navel staring, insecurity about everything from your
manhood to your brains.” He tried selling Xerox machines and then
strayed into the University of Chicago Law School. Since it is among
the most highly ranked and selective law schools in the world, gaining
entrance was impressive and no small accomplishment. But his entrance
was happenstance and aided by friends. Hersh’s best friend was David
Currie, with whom he had played baseball. Currie’s father, Brainerd, was
a professor at the law school, and in August, shortly before classes were
to begin, he helped Hersh gain admission. “I applied and was accepted
in a week. Can you imagine doing that today?”4
The law school, originally housed on the campus’s main quadrangle,
relocated just as Hersh was entering, moving into a new building. Hersh
did not have much time to learn his way around the D’Angelo Law Library
or a new mock courtroom. The first year of law school is a demand-
ing and regimented atmosphere for which Sy Hersh was not prepared.
Moreover, law school might not have been prepared for Hersh. Rebels
do not fit easily into the mold of law school. Whatever qualities of mind
students may bring with them, they usually need to be set aside and
given up in order to become a lawyer. The first year of law school is not
just about taking courses in civil procedure, constitutional law, contracts,
and torts. It is akin to boot camp; professors break students down into a
shell of the free-thinking person they were. And then they rebuild each
student as a person who “thinks like a lawyer.” Hersh was not likely to
be broken down — nor did he have the discipline to spend long hours
poring over obscure legal cases just so that a law professor could nail
him in class to give the facts or the arguments of the case. Mastering
Lasting Lessons
The rigorous checking and rechecking of facts was good for Hersh, a
lifelong lesson that became important later as his work elicited so much
controversy. But he was also introduced to the seamier side of journal-
ism — and may have picked up some disconcerting habits. The way the
City News reporters gathered facts would have provided journalism ethi-
cists with enough fodder and case studies for a textbook. There were few
rules to newsgathering. The skittish managing editor, Larry Mulay, who
ran the newsroom, recalled that when he was a reporter he interviewed
a woman who reported a missing child. The woman would not let him in
the house, he informed his editor. “Get in there if you have to burn the
house down,” the editor told Mulay. Soon after the fire department was
called to the house because of a fire on the woman’s front porch that Mulay
had set. The fire fighters broke down her door, and Mulay followed them
inside. The police found the bodies of the woman, who had committed
suicide, and her dead child. And Mulay got the story.16
“In the end, whatever went into a story was accurate, but the methods
might not have been ethical,” conceded Zimbrakos. In those days it wasn’t
uncommon for a reporter to say he was from the coroner’s office or the
55
The work likely surprised Hersh. The military was spending in the
neighborhood of $20 million to promote itself, sending, for example,
press releases to every hometown newspaper every time a local soldier
was promoted. “Seymour Hersh, the son of Isador and Dorothy Hersh,
of 835 E. 47th St., Chicago, has been appointed by the U.S. Army to the
Public Affairs unit as an Information Specialist at Fort Riley, Kansas, the
base commander announced yesterday.” That kind of “news” release — or
something like it — was then sent to every Chicago newspaper and all
local weeklies. Often newspapers ran the releases in roundup columns
on “locals in the military.” Hersh learned how the army PR machine
worked, and it was good insight to have for the time in five years when
he worked for the Associated Press in the Pentagon.
When Hersh left the army he hoped to return to the City News Bureau.
They would not have him, which was unusual, but his feuds with editors
and his recalcitrance to do scut work came back to haunt him. So, even
though he hated business school, he decided to try his hand at business
as the owner and publisher of his own newspaper. After all, his father had
run a small dry cleaner for years, and Hersh and twin brother Alan had
helped around the store. Now he set out to publish a weekly newspaper
in Evergreen, a suburban Chicago village of 3.2 square miles with fewer
than twenty thousand people, most of whom were white. Hersh’s part-
ner, oddly enough, was Bob Billings, the burly editor at City News who
had so gruffly pushed him around. They had become golfing partners
and saw the chance to make money in this affluent southwest suburb.
Billings “had the money,” Hersh recalled, “and I had the energy.” The
Evergreen Dispatch seemed to fill a void — news about the library, schools,
the Girl Scouts. Murder, mayhem, and the Front Page it was not. “I was
used to rushing to shootouts at City News Bureau but this was more of
the bake sale to benefit the library stuff,” said Lee Quarnstrom, who
was also at City News with Hersh and became a well-known columnist
at the San Jose (California) Mercury News. Nonetheless, “we had a lot
of fun,” Hersh recalled. Paid circulation went up to 14,000, they were
delivering 25,000 copies of the paper to 250 news delivery boys, and
the paper began to attract national advertisers. “I could sell and I could
talk,” Hersh bragged.3
61
said, “We take the beach and then everyone else comes in with the heavy
artillery.” Hersh, however, started out as a grunt, a foot soldier. His first
assignment was to take stories written by other bureau reporters and
rewrite them into short briefs to be read on the radio. “I began writing
the whole nightly radio wire for Illinois stations,” he said. “Rip-and-read”
was a common tactic of radio stations. In 1964 stations were required
by the federal government to provide news on the public airwaves, and
instead of employing their own reporters, they relied on the AP to produce
copy that could be read directly to the audience. Working the night shift,
Hersh had to rewrite a thousand words an hour, “trying to make it lively,”
he recalled. The experience taught Hersh how to write tightly — always
prized in journalism — and how to handle a range of news events. Ernest
Hemingway once labeled journalism “cableese.” “Isn’t it a great lan-
guage?” he mused.2
But it wasn’t long before Hersh moved beyond “cableese.” He thrived
on the lonely night hours, taking stories written during the day and put-
ting new leads — or beginnings — on the stories. “Once they realized I
could turn a phrase,” Hersh said, “they began to let me write stories.”
Hersh became a general assignment reporter, the glorious early stage
of journalism when you enter the newsroom never knowing what will
be on your plate. On one day Hersh was sent to a train crash where four
died and forty were injured; on another day he was at the bedside of
the ailing gospel singer and Chicago legend Mahalia Jackson; and then
he was dodging bullets at the site of a racial riot in suburban Chicago.3
From dangerously dwindling water levels in the Great Lakes to a gorilla
on the loose in the city to union boss Jimmy Hoffa being sentenced to
prison — Hersh was parachuted down each day into a new adventure.
The challenge in this, of course, was mastering new issues every day and
having to produce stories at lightning speed, at times six stories a day
including one major one. There was a deadline every minute. And it is
almost unfair to judge the prose produced under such time constraints.
But produce Hersh did — almost a feature a day. Two things are evident:
Hersh’s early journalism reveals the heartbreak and tragedy that is life.
And it shows Hersh to have the chameleon-like character so needed by a
journalist, the “peeping Tom” of the heart characteristic that allowed him
67
Associated Press, where many World War II generation reporters were
not about to make room for the upstarts.
Hersh was “impatient,” recalled Schweid, who worked at the AP for
fifty years and came to Washington five years before Hersh. He was just
“chafing at the snail’s pace of change, at being confined, and at the lack of
movement,” Schweid added. “If you were patient, you had a chance.” But
Hersh was never known for his patience. Certainly it was understandable
why he would want to move off night rewrite. Reporters mostly worked
over other people’s copy, getting it ready for the nation’s afternoon daily
newspapers by condensing, revising, and perhaps updating. The bureau
centered around black teletype machines lined up in rows. All day and
night they drummed out copy, like hypnotic music, pulsing out bulletins
and updates as news filtered in from around the world. The goal, of course,
was to get out the news before the arch-rival United Press International.1
Meanwhile, inside the room on Connecticut Avenue about a block from
Dupont Circle, Hersh’s goal was more limited — trim stories so Americans
could get their news in digestible versions, an important task since the
AP was the main source of information for much of what America con-
sumed. But, to his chagrin, there was very little reporting, except for an
occasional phone call to check a fact, if that was even possible at 3:00 in
the morning. “When rewrites were done, you were on guard duty,” said
Shaw, who came to Washington about the same time as Hersh. “Guard
duty” simply meant that you waited — and probably hoped — that some
disaster might strike in the wee hours that would get you out of the office
and into the real adventure of reporting. The mayhem of Chicago was
much more exciting than rewrite. How could this be fun? “You were not
reporting,” said Leubsdorf, a colleague who worked at the AP for fifteen
years and then became a political columnist in Dallas.2
Reporters only left the office to go out for “lunch,” an evening ritual
that often called for them to traipse around with night editor Joe Kane,
who would fill reporters’ heads with his wisdom on journalism. “Sy took
one walk with Kane,” recalled Shaw, “but never went again.” He was
simply not interested in kowtowing to an editor, especially one whose
view of journalism was known to be cautious. Hersh often went alone to
the famous Eddie Lawrence’s Sandwich Shop and then hustled back in
76
was coverage as usual: Defense Secretary McNamara says the Vietnam
War is at a turning point; the Soviets protest American nuclear testing;
more planes ordered to fight the war; a Navy Cross for an officer known
as “Mr. Vietnam.” All were stories Hoffman would have covered. But
Hersh wanted stories that did not come from the briefings or the press
releases known as “blue tops” for their light blue coloring over a DOD
insignia. “Many a determined young reporter,” wrote Washington Post
editor Leonard Downie, “had been worn down by the Pentagon’s tight
news-management producers and eventually became little more than
an uncritical parrot of the military’s pronouncements.” It was easy to
understand why.2
Reporters were cordoned off in a hallway known as Correspondents’
Corridor. The large press room was across from the reporters’ quarters.
Reporters would troop in each day for a daily briefing at which a Pentagon
spokesperson would deliver innocuous tidbits. Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalist Sydney Schanberg called the military briefings “the five o’clock
follies,” because they often yielded little that was newsworthy and much
that was PR bunk. Nonetheless, reporters were given so much informa-
tion in reports and press releases and access to safe officials that they
had no trouble coming up with stories — just not the stories that might
reveal the inner workings of the military or of the war in Vietnam. Most
correspondents — like the AP’s Hoffman — learned to accept the restric-
tions set by the military. Hersh would not; he developed a habit of asking
an impertinent question at briefings, and when it was brushed aside,
he wandered the halls of the world’s largest office building in search of
sources and stories. Often he found high-ranking officers in their lunch-
room — and they talked to him. The rumpled Hersh turned out to be a
charmer — he readily convinced top- and mid-level Pentagon sources to
talk. Pentagon officials began to call him “that little ferret,” deriding the
fact that he “broke every rule of bureaucratic journalism.” Said Hersh in
response: “I had more balls than most of the guys in the press room.”3
In September Hersh found another crusade: Navy officials — including,
anonymously, Admiral Clarence A. Hill Jr. — told him that there were not
enough planes or qualified fliers to fight the intensifying Vietnam War.
The story came to Hersh because, after getting a tip, he simply asked
88
he wrote, “are cloaked in secrecy.” Didn’t the public deserve to know
that nearly 10,000 civilians and 3,750 military officers in conjunction
with seventy American universities were working nonstop at six military
bases? Shouldn’t they know that $300 million — a 30 percent increase in
six years — was being spent to support these weapons? Most important
of all, shouldn’t they know that scientists had perfected “a massive array
of deadly agents?” He posed the question that even many researchers
and policy analysts were asking behind closed doors, “Can disease, once
spread, be controlled?” And his inability to get an answer on the record
from the Pentagon irked him most of all. “I hate secrets,” he said. “I don’t
think there should be secrets. I’m awfully tired of people in Washington
telling me something is secret in the name of national security.”2
“The whole subject,” Hersh wrote in words that were uncharacteristi-
cally dramatic for him, “has overtones of horror and revulsion that far
outstrip the world’s fear of a nuclear holocaust.” It is “almost too horrible
for rational debate,” he added. And if these weapons are not controlled
or eliminated, Hersh concluded, it might “set in motion a doomsday
machine on the planet — striking down attacker and defender alike.”
These strong words, of course, did not make it into his AP dispatch. His
article was produced for the AP’s bold new investigative unit, but little
or no reporter voice was allowed. “As for hard-edged investigative stuff,”
observed Pulitzer Prize–winner Jean Heller, “they wanted to tread very
lightly in those early days.” Hersh decided to move ahead on his own to
tell the story. On May 6 he wrote an article about “secret work on gas
and germ warfare” that the New Republic headlined “Just a Drop Can
Kill.” The article broke the AP’s ban on outside work, and it did not sit
well with his bosses.3
It was the first of six national magazine articles for Hersh — two in the
New Republic, a well-known progressive magazine, two in Ramparts, a
1960s muckraking upstart, and two in the staid New York Times Magazine.
Hersh could not know that his articles were making Pentagon insiders
nervous and, moreover, were reinforcing the arguments of reformers — in
both America and Britain — as they desperately sought to force the United
States to re-evaluate its policies. In particular, as he noted in the opening
salvo of his crusade, the United States had secretly made a major policy
98
firmly opposed the Vietnam War. “The central point,” he said, “is what
this war is doing to the United States . . . what it’s doing to us around the
world today, this draining of the material and moral resources of the
country from our really pressing problems.”2 It was, McCarthy declared,
a matter of conscience; the war had to be opposed. The insurgents threw
their support to fifty-two-year-old McCarthy, although many still hoped
Kennedy would jump in. McCarthy declared his intent in November 1967
to challenge Johnson in the April 2 presidential primary in Wisconsin, a
progressive Minnesota neighbor. But his supporters convinced him to
brave the snows of New Hampshire for the nation’s first primary, March
12. McCarthy, the Irish Catholic poet who loved baseball and hockey,
now had to put together a team for a quixotic quest for the presidency.
“We were never quite a team,” observed Curtis Gans, a young reformer
who helped organize the “Dump Johnson” movement.3 What actually
emerged was more a guerilla uprising connected by an idea but with no
central discipline. Nonetheless, it was destined to become part of Ameri-
can political folklore. A group of well-educated people, mostly liberal,
jelled around a man who was like a nineteenth-century utopian poet. And
although McCarthy was a loner who stuck to his own counsel, he still
needed a campaign staff to run for office. Reporter Richard Stout, who
covered McCarthy, observed that “a campaign staff began to develop, in
much the way a pickup baseball game develops.” And Sy Hersh — a baseball
lover who hated the Vietnam War like Senator McCarthy — got a call.4
116
in the Negro area was “subdued.” One McCarthy staffer called it sadly
comical. The senator went on a street corner, and groups of blacks — seeing
a busload of white people — ran the other way. McCarthy walked quickly
though the neighborhood, shook a few hands, and then got back on the
bus. He did his duty, but it was not an event that would win him black
votes in the Indiana primary.2
Although Hersh thought being a press secretary was an “awful job . . . a
disgraceful way to spend your life . . . a glorified travel secretary . . . [with]
no cerebral thought at all,” he actually toyed with returning. In planning
for Indiana McCarthy asked, “Can we get Sy to get involved in that?” Hersh
entered a negotiation for returning. He met personally with McCarthy.
“We’ll work you in, Sy,” McCarthy told him. And, Hersh said, “I was going
to come back,” perhaps as a policy analyst. But it did not happen; it was
over, or so it seemed. He received dozens of requests to be interviewed and
lucrative offers to write a kiss-and-tell account. “I didn’t talk to anybody
about it,” he said. Hersh turned his attention — by necessity — back to his
freelance writing, and especially to the issue of chemical and biological
weapons disarmament. Just as he was leaving the campaign, Chemical and
Biological Warfare: The Hidden Arsenal came out in serial fashion in the New
York Review of Books, a left-leaning publication read by intellectuals. Hersh
was on the map, and when the book came out in September, he took to
the lecture circuit mostly at college campuses. After a dozen speeches in
a few days, he was more sympathetic to McCarthy, who became cranky
during the campaign. “I was exhausted,” Hersh recalled.3
September brought another possibility. Robert Kennedy was assas-
sinated on June 5, the night he won the California primary. Although he
felt the campaign was over after the assassination, McCarthy stayed in
the race in a showdown with fellow Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey,
who eventually won. The Democratic convention in Chicago, of course,
was a debacle, with out-of-control police attacks on demonstrators turn-
ing McCarthy’s dream of a triumphant march by antiwar partisans into
a nightmare of brutality. When it was over, McCarthy took his family to
France to recuperate. But some antiwar political activists were not done.
The choice of Humphrey, a defender of the war, and Richard Nixon, a
lifelong hawk, was a bleak one. Kennedy speechwriter Adam Walinsky
A Stunning Triumph
Sy Hersh had little reason to expect progress from Nixon on chemical
and biological weapons. In the 1960 election Kennedy proposed bring-
ing the weapons under international regulation with a view toward their
elimination, but Nixon called their continued development essential to
defense. When Nixon was elected, he asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to
reassess the weaponry. Little happened, however. Nixon’s concern was
more with freezing the number of missiles in the Soviet Union’s arsenal,
which led to the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) treaty.4
But Nixon’s priorities changed when he took office. Unbeknownst
to Hersh, Nixon’s secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, a Wisconsin
125
hundred into the college’s largest auditorium. The often unkempt Hersh
was dapper in jacket and tie. He carried note cards but, typically, rarely
glanced at them. “He uses old-fashioned free association,” commented
Robert Katz, Hersh’s booking agent for twenty years. Hersh’s mind works
at lightning speed as he jumps from thought to thought, although always
with an overall theme. “He doesn’t prepare his talks,” offered David Jack-
son, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune who watched Hersh get ready
to speak. “His mind just starts going.” This night in New Paltz, “it was
a My Lai talk but the framework was American foreign policy,” recalled
Gerald Sorin, a history professor who attended. Sorin said Hersh told the
audience: “America is not innocent. It was a broader framework than
just My Lai.” But within the framework Hersh wove some of his most
startling massacre anecdotes.2
He explained how Charlie Company, William Calley’s unit, lost soldiers
on patrols. “Everyone would talk in terror of their private parts being
blown up,” he said. “They were increasingly angry.” Finally they were
told that the next day they would encounter the “enemy” face to face.
That night, “the kids did what those kids did: they toked up,” and he put
his hands to his face as if he were smoking a joint. At 3:30 in the morning
“they got on a chopper” and went to the village of My Lai, “to kill or be
killed.” But they met only old men, women, and children making morn-
ing tea. So, “they put ’em in ditches and shot and shot and shot,” Hersh
said matter-of-factly. “What I am telling you is empirical.” He would
know — he spoke to sixty-two of the sixty-seven soldiers involved. It was
the white soldiers who did most of the shooting, he said. Twenty-five
black and Hispanic soldiers “shot, but they shot high. It just wasn’t their
war. If the whitey wants to go do this . . .”
And then, as the audience sat silently, he said a Vietnamese mother who
was dead had cradled her small child to protect him. When the shooting was
done the boy crawled out and ran. “Plug him,” Calley told Paul Meadlo, the
soldier who went on national television. Meadlo refused. “Calley, with this
great show of bravado, ran behind the kid in front of everybody and shot
him in the head,” Hersh said. “Big man on campus.” More silence. Hersh,
barely pausing, said the next day Meadlo stepped on a land mine and lost
his right leg. They called in helicopters to get him to a hospital, and with
132
Hersh to be “a reporter first of all. He has mastered the techniques of
marshaling factual evidence and avoiding the crusader’s instinct. I think
we should not let him walk by.” But they did, and a year later, when his
name resurfaced again, Frankel called Hersh “first-rate” yet concluded,
“We do have a number of good investigative reporters.” Hersh had to wait
until he proved himself with his trip to North Vietnam; he was offered a
job in April 1972. He was eager to get started. “I’ll be forwarding a long
list of story ideas — some of which I have been working on for years,” he
wrote Rosenthal assistant Peter Millones.2
Despite its star-studded cast of reporters — Hersh was joining a news-
paper with five Pulitzer Prize winners, including Rosenthal — the Times
did not have a reputation as an investigative paper. Sassy Times reporter
John L. Hess observed that “muckraking . . . tended to make the Times
brass nervous.” In fact, he added, “truly investigative, questioning, skep-
tical reporting was practically unTimesian.” But Rosenthal knew that
smaller publications — Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe — were winning
Pulitzers, and that the Washington Post was outpacing the Times in the
nation’s capital. He knew also the Times revenues and circulation were
flagging, putting the newspaper in serious financial trouble. The Times
needed to catch up with a trend that was catching fire. “They hired me
to be an investigative reporter,” Hersh said.3
But his first assignment was of a different sort. Hersh barely had time
to unpack when the Times sent him to Paris, where the Vietnam peace
talks were unraveling. His high-level contacts with the North Vietnamese
were put to work. An anonymous North Vietnamese official insisted to
Hersh that Nixon’s bombing of the North must halt before talks could
resume. “No matter how disastrous the bombing is for our people, it
brings about no change in our attitude,” the official said. In his first big
story for the Times, Hersh was allowed to use an unnamed person to yell
at the Americans. A day later the head of the Vietcong delegation gave
Hersh a ninety-minute interview at a villa near Paris. His long article
deftly wove demands the United States was making with candid views
of the other side, a rarely heard voice in the American press. The peace
negotiations were especially troubled since, the day before, the United
144
was involved in Watergate, long before anyone suspected, and that it was
part of a large-scale White House espionage effort.2
With Smith leaving, Phelps had to figure out what to do with the tip.
But somehow the story just died. “Why we failed is a mystery to me,”
said Phelps, who finally disclosed the missed story in 2009 when he was
eighty-seven years old. It would have been logical for Phelps to turn to
his crackerjack staff of thirty-five reporters. “We had one of the world’s
finest new bureaus at anytime,” observed Smith. The Washington Post
feared Walter Rugaber more than any other reporter; his early “beats”
rivaled Woodward and Bernstein, but Tad Sculz, who had broken the 1961
Bay of Pigs invasion, correspondents Robert Semple, James Naughton,
Christopher Lydon, John Crewdson — all good reporters — were also nib-
bling at the story. And then, of course, there was the thirty-six-year-old
Sy Hersh, who the Times hired specifically to be their ace investigative
reporter. He was the most logical candidate to be given the Gray leak. “I
never knew about the conversation,” Hersh said.3
Smith, still angry about the bumbled opportunity three decades later,
observed: “I do not know what happened. I assumed the paper, for some
reason, could not confirm it. It was tremendously shattering. Why didn’t
Phelps do anything with it?” The week after debriefing Smith, Phelps and
his wife went on a month’s vacation; he thought he gave the notes and
the tape to a reporter or editor. When he returned, he never followed up.
“It defies any sense,” Smith said. “He wasn’t a stupid editor.” But some
wondered if the hands of bureau chief Max Frankel or even powerful
columnist James Reston had entered the mix. Hersh was sure that Frankel
had talked to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who assured him the
break-in did not reach the Oval Office. But Phelps said if Frankel was
told the story had no merit, he never passed it on nor did anything to call
off the staff. “From the top editors on down we all shared in the blame,”
Phelps said.4 Which didn’t convince an angry Smith and a dubious Hersh.
On one level it is easy to see how the Times could miss the story. It was
a police story, a break-in, burglars caught red-handed, albeit in the head-
quarters of the Democratic Party, wearing surgical gloves. The Washington
Post was a local newspaper; DC was its town. Reporters knew cops and
courts and had sources on a beat the Times did not cover. The Times was
FIG. 2. Bodies of men, women and children are piled in a ditch in the village of
My Lai where American soldiers massacred hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese
civilians in 1968. (Ron Haeberle / TIME & LIFE Images / Getty Images)
FIG. 3. Lt. William Calley Jr. leaves his trial after Hersh’s stories identified him as the
twenty-five-year-old American soldier who ordered and assisted in the killing of nearly
five hundred civilians in My Lai. (AP Photo)
FIG. 4. The thirty-two-year-old Hersh smiles as he holds up a newspaper that blares
the headline of one of his five stories about the massacre in My Lai. (AP Photo / Bob
Daugherty)
FIG. 5. Hersh huddles with Eugene McCarthy in 1967 when he acted as the senator’s
press secretary as he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against Lyndon
Johnson. (University of Minnesota Libraries)
FIG. 6. After Hersh went to work at the New York Times in 1972, he dove into
the story of the Watergate scandal and engaged in a fierce competition with
Carl Bernstein, left, and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. (AP Photo)
FIG. 11. Yoko Ono gave Hersh the LennonOno Peace Prize in 2004 for his ground-
breaking work on the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (AP Photo / Kathy Willens)
FIG. 12. When his 2004 book, Chain of Command, came out, Hersh went on the TV talk
show and book-signing circuit to promote his ninth book which spent some time on
the best-seller lists. (Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images)
FIG. 13. Even after four decades of reporting, Hersh immerses himself in documents
and reports as he sits in front of a map of the world in his tiny two-room office in
Washington DC. (Mark Mahaney)
C HA P T ER 1 5
Cambodia, Bombs,
and Impeachment
157
federal prosecutors felt that John Dean, the president’s former counsel,
had no evidence to link Nixon to the break-in or cover-up. The story was
wrong; Hersh had made his first mistake. But inside the White House the
Dean story hit close to home. Haldeman and Nixon met the morning of
Hersh’s story, trying to figure out if Dean had anything on the president.
They fretted over a safe Dean kept with national security documents, and
worried that Hersh would find out. “Seymour Hersh — he’s got a good line
into there,” Haldeman said about Hersh’s connection to the prosecutors.
“He’s been accurate on everything he’s printed.”2
That assessment turned out to be false, and perhaps to make up for his
error, Hersh pushed the Dean angle hard, reporting next that the lawyer
tried to set up a spy ring to infiltrate protestors at the upcoming Republican
National Convention. Then on June 3 Hersh contradicted his initial Dean
story, reporting that Dean told Senate investigators he huddled more than
forty times with Nixon, who showed “great interest” in the Watergate
matter.3 The White House was indignant, charging that the story was
“part of a careful, coordinated strategy . . . using innuendo, distortion
of fact and outright falsehood. We categorically deny the assertions.”
But Hersh rebutted the denial. “We’re all scared to death by this guy,”
said an unidentified source with close connections to top White House
officials. “We don’t know what he can or can’t prove.” And the anger
was not just in their prepared statement. Meeting with Nixon on June 5,
his new counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt, called Hersh’s story “very careless,”
adding, “I think Woodward and Bernstein wrote it accurately.”4
While both the Post and the Times had an army of reporters covering
Watergate, it was Hersh and Woodward and Bernstein who were dueling
daily for scoops. “There was a lot of pressure on Hersh,” Woodward said.
“When we beat him, the people would have a fit at the Times. They’d call
him up late at night to get him to confirm our story and do better.” Once,
Woodward wrote a story that indicated that Nixon had bugged his own
brother, Donald, to make sure he wasn’t doing anything to embarrass the
president. Hersh was furious at being scooped. He called Woodward and
yelled, “You fucker, you fucker!” It wasn’t the only time that Woodward
and Bernstein angered him. In All the President’s Men they described him
as pudgy. “Do I look pudgy to you?” Hersh fired back. “I’m much more
A Dandelion in a Windstorm
By the fall of 1974 Sy Hersh was the Golden Boy of the New York Times, but
he had his share of flubs and missed stories. As he pursued Watergate and
wider corruption in the White House in late 1973, one source filled Hersh’s
ears with sketchy details about some sort of taping system in the Oval
Office. Something about the president bugging his own conversations.
Hersh was getting nowhere on the story until the source hooked him up
with a Secret Service agent. “Secret Service guys rarely want to see report-
ers,” Hersh pointed out. This one did. He brought Hersh to a crowded
noisy discotheque, where he took Hersh on the dance floor. “We did not
dance,” Hersh said. The agent told Hersh the president was sitting in his
office listening to tape recordings of his conversations. “It’s the craziest
thing,” the agent said, “the President just sits in his office all day listening
to tapes. He’s got hundreds of tapes.” Nixon was trying to figure out what
evidence his own conversations would offer investigators about Watergate.
Hersh returned to his office to work the phones. He called Nixon’s coun-
sel, J. Fred Buzhardt, who declared, “Come on, I’d know about a taping
system.” Hersh turned to top Nixon aide John Erlichman, who “swore up
and down there was no taping system.” Erlichman “often didn’t tell me
the truth,” Hersh said, “but he never lied to me.” Finally Hersh went to
“The Big Lying Machines,” Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and three other
inside sources. They all denied it existed. And they were not lying; they
did not know. So Hersh dropped the story. The tapes were not revealed
until congressional testimony by Alexander Butterfield on June 25, 1973,
shocked the nation. “It was probably good that the story came out later,”
Hersh said. “We might still have Nixon.”1
169
Hersh missed another major story. John Darnton was a novice thirty-
two-year-old working in the Times New York office in early 1973, years
before he won a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Poland. A source
told him that that Vice President Spiro Agnew was accepting bribe money
from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Darnton did not know what
to do with it or how to track it down. An editor told him to call Hersh and
turn it over to the ace investigative reporter. Hersh returned Darnton’s call.
In his staccato style, he asked, “What you got?” Darnton told him. Hersh
asked a series of lightning quick questions. And then declared, “It doesn’t
sound right. Not a story.” Darnton and Hersh moved on, the Agnew story
ignored. On October 10, 1973, Agnew resigned and pleaded no contest
to federal income tax evasion for failing to report $29,500 in income
that was, essentially, bribe money he received while he was governor
of Maryland. Hersh missed the chance to bring down a vice president.2
A few misses did not affect Hersh. He was nonstop in pursuit of scoops.
“He rarely completes a sentence and is almost continually on the tele-
phone,” noted a story in the Times archives that called him “as active as
a dandelion in a windstorm.” He was an amusing figure in the DC office.
His sandy blonde hair was parted on one side, looking, one observer said,
like it “sees a comb just once a day.” Black horn-rimmed glasses sat on
a sharp nose, and three brownish moles were visible on the left side of
his chiseled jaw. He wore button-down collar shirts, the sleeves rolled
up, and a tie that was always open at the collar. His three-sided desk was
adjacent to a window. A typewriter sat on one side. The rest was piled
high with manila folders stuffed with notes and newspaper clippings,
legal pads, a Rolodex, and a small calendar. Thick government reports,
half open, sat awaiting the reporter who knew that talking to people was
not enough. He had to read everything.3
But the phone was still his key weapon, crooked in his neck like an
appendage. Like all reporters, Hersh was always coy about his sources.
Once he told me, “I don’t discuss sources,” but strictly speaking that
was not true. At times he would be clear that a certain person was not
his source or that a story did not emanate from a certain official. But he
never divulged his sources. He aggressively sought out new government
insiders. When people retired from the CIA or the Pentagon, he would
An Investigator’s Dream
Daniel Schorr was one of America’s most famous broadcasters back
when the television networks — CBS, NBC, ABC — ruled the airwaves.
Rumpled, gray-haired Schorr, the recipient of three Emmy awards, was
part of CBS’s Old Guard who learned at the feet of legendary Edward R.
Murrow. His reporting earned him a place on Richard Nixon’s enemies
list. Schorr knew journalism. And he sensed something big was afoot in
the fall of 1974 when he and his wife, Lisbeth, had a dinner party for his
Washington DC neighbors, Elizabeth and Sy Hersh. Sy talked excitedly
about the Central Intelligence Agency coming under increasing scrutiny
since Watergate, particularly because younger employees of “The Com-
pany” were beginning to “leak” information about the agency’s shadowy
activities. Schorr understood what Sy was sensing. “Leaking,” he said,
“was a cottage industry. The anonymous source acquired a new degree of
respectability.” Walter Pincus, a veteran Washington Post reporter agreed,
saying, “The town was just more open than ever.”1
What irked Schorr and Hersh was that people began to believe that
reporters lived on “leaks” in putting together stories, that it was all a world
of “Deep Throats.” Schorr knew better. As he observed, “A little band of
Seymour Hershes and Woodward-Bernsteins knew that the story that
read so comprehensively, so smoothly that it seemed to have been copied
intact from a bestowed document, often was the product of weeks of pain-
ful digging, prying and assembling from many reluctant sources.” Hersh
agreed. “Sources are funny things, a piece there and a piece here. Nobody
comes in and lays things on you,” he said. A leaked story, “that’s usually
a story you put 200 man-hours in on.”2 For Hersh, the story and crusade
185
that came next were actually the result of years of work. In the spring of
1973, while looking into Watergate, a Justice Department official who
had worked for the CIA told Hersh that the real truth about the break-in
might never come out. But, he said, “Some of the dirtiest things weren’t
done by the White House but by the CIA.” His antenna up, Hersh started
digging. Some of his Watergate stories nibbled at the edges. He tried to
get top Nixon aide Charles Colson to give him information on the CIA
connections of Egil (Bud) Krogh, a lawyer in charge of Nixon’s “plumbers,”
assigned to stop White House “leaks.” Hersh knew more than Colson,
telling him that Krogh had a history with the CIA back to 1971 when he
helped stop drug production in South Vietnam. Colson later asserted that
Hersh was going to write the Krogh story, but the White House asked
him to hold publication because the drug operation was still in progress.3
Hersh never wrote a story about Krogh. One he did write, however, in
May 1973 brought him closer to the question the nation would soon ask:
could the CIA — in pursuit of spies — do anything it wanted on American
soil — from spying on citizens to breaking into homes? When a grand jury
looked into who planned the break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s
psychiatrist as Nixon sought damaging information on the man who leaked
the Pentagon Papers, CIA connections surfaced. Hersh explored how the
1947 law that established the CIA expressly forbid it from having “police,
subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions” unless
it was following espionage from abroad. The experts were not sure if the
Pentagon Papers, about a war abroad, would exempt the CIA. The issue
was not debated.4 Hersh poked at the spying issue three more times over
the next few weeks, but none involved the CIA, just the FBI.
Then, in spring 1974, someone in the CIA — probably one of the younger
agents upset by the agency’s activities — said he had heard rumors of an
“in-house operation,” meaning CIA domestic surveillance. “I kept on
talking to people,” Hersh said until someone gave him “hard facts . . . and
pretty much laid out the story.” Hersh had yet to give anyone at the Times
a hint of what he was working on. He did not trust his own colleagues.
“There is an awful lot of gossip. I don’t go to parties simply because I
find that I shoot off my mouth,” he said. But Hersh also had bad experi-
ences with some colleagues. When the Times established an investigative
The Firestorm
In unmasking CIA involvement in Chile, Hersh put the agency on the run
for its foreign endeavors. Chile was its greatest crisis. But now things had
gotten worse. Hersh was attacking the tentacles that reached onto domestic
soil where its charter forbids activity. Hersh was alleging that snooping
had begun in the 1950s and then got worse as Nixon became furious with
antiwar protestors and militants. Cold Warriors such as Angleton were
sure they were inspired by communists, but Hersh made clear no one else
believed that. How close to reality was Hersh? Did he exaggerate? Were
his sources to be believed? Couldn’t someone go on the record? Wasn’t
there some document that could prove the spying? The counter-attack
on Hersh’s work was furious. “The grey New York Times has decided to
undertake what I consider advocacy journalism in its news columns,”
wrote Pincus. Even people inside the Times were suspicious.16
Five days after Hersh’s story, John Oakes, editor of the editorial page
and nephew of the Times founding publisher, Adolph Ochs, wrote a nasty
note to Rosenthal, calling Hersh’s story the latest example of “tenden-
tious reporting in the Times.” Oakes complained that the “breathless,
prejudicial, pejorative and truly non-objective manner” of the Hersh
stories “seem to be a betrayal of the Times’ own standards of objective
journalism.” After the New Year, Rosenthal fired back at Oakes’s “embar-
rassing harangue,” adding, “Your emotional, pejorative, denunciatory,
and self-serving style brings out the worst in me. Let me leave it at this:
Hersh and The Times broke a story that will go down in the annals of
American journalism as one that contributed vitally to the understanding
of our times and the betterment of our society.” Rosenthal could not resist
a parting shot: “If indeed you have encouraged investigative reporting on
this paper, it certainly has been a well-kept secret.” Oakes volleyed back.
197
materialistic thing to say, but it’s a fact. I wouldn’t mind making a million
dollars on a book, having Robert Redford play me would not bother me
at all.” The Hersh-Woodward rivalry was in full swing.2
No movie was forthcoming, but his fame was enough for Rolling Stone
magazine to send writer Joe Eszterhas, later a famous Hollywood screen-
writer, to conduct a two-part interview. Annie Liebovitz, the famous
photographer, was sent to capture Hersh — his feet propped on a desk;
at an airport telephone getting in one last call; carrying a typewriter at
his Washington house, with a rare glimpse of wife Liz and son Matthew.
Hersh, who was drinking, was loose lipped to Eszterhas, who called him
“a hurricane of a man who seems to approach life as if it were a battlefield.
He walks and talks like a speed freak but the energy is all natural; he
doesn’t even smoke.” Reflecting on his fame, Hersh said, “I don’t get any
sense that I am an American folk hero at all.” In fact, he said, “We should
be looked upon maybe as super schlemiels. My God! We’re responsible
for letting them get away with it.” As for his exploits, Hersh said, “I’m
doing the same thing I did in 1959 and ’60 and ’61, just trying to tell as
much as I can about something.” But the CIA story worried him. “I do not
have a piece of paper that says: ‘top secret, the following is a summary of
CIA domestic operations.’ Without that piece of paper, no reporter feels
comfortable. No matter how good your sources are, how careful you are,
there’s always a certain amount of anxiety when you drop a bomb.”3
And the powers-that-be kept pounding away at Hersh. Colby warned
about “serious damage to our country’s essential intelligence,” insisting
Hersh’s story was filled with “exaggerations and misrepresentations.” Times
columnist Tom Wicker fired back, pointing out that “the oldest bureau-
cratic defense known to man is . . . to convince the public that the critics
are the problem rather than the thing being criticized.”4 Former Times
columnist Leslie Gelb, in the New Republic, took apart Colby’s testimony
before Congress and, in essence, confirmed all of Hersh’s allegations.
His only beef was with the word “massive.” But make no mistake about
it, Gelb noted, “the city is in motion on the subject of covert activities.”5
Judgment on Hersh’s work — at least partially — finally came on June 2
when the 350-page report of the Rockefeller Commission was released
with fanfare. The vice president said there indeed had been violations of
211
action. Nonetheless, Hersh liked very much the platform the Times offered.
In fact, he reveled in it. He might not have wanted to upset that apple-
cart — just yet. He may have consequently been oblivious to certain tips
that would have jump-started the story. James Phelan, a freelance writer,
was researching a biography of Howard Hughes in 1974 when he met Hersh
in Washington. Phelan mentioned a possible CIA-Glomar connection; it
went over Hersh’s head. After the story broke, he told Phelan, “Nobody
seems to have known about Glomar.” “I did,” Phelan answered. “Did
you tell anyone?” Sy asked. “I told you,” he said. It took the LA Times to
finally move him into action. When he saw their story, he recalled, “I hit
my head and said, ‘dumbell.’” And then, the competitive urge kicked in.2
Working with Times editor Bill Kovach, Hersh the relentless combatant
reappeared. “Every place we went,” said columnist Jack Anderson, “Hersh
had been there.” Anderson called Daniel the night the story broke, offer-
ing it to the Times. Daniel declined, which must have made Hersh wince.
Kovach had already given the outline of the story to John Siegenthaler,
publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, and to Charles Morgan, a promi-
nent attorney. Kovach thinks Morgan leaked it to Anderson. And clearly
Anderson called Hersh to discuss the story; the journalism fraternity at
the working-class level was more likely than publishers to want to publish.
Hersh’s story had been sitting in New York for a while, awaiting a go-
ahead. “I pushed and pushed to get the story in the paper,” Kovach said.
“I did everything I could.”3 It took a competitor to finally push the Times
from behind the bogus national security rock. “So is it a game?” asked
Hersh. “No, it’s more than a game. But there’s a dance that has always
gone on between us and them. We push it as hard as we can. . . . There’s
always this tension, and sometimes it’s ratcheted up.”4
And what did all of it get Hersh? Despite his soft-pedaling the story,
Hersh’s conservative critics saw his CIA stories as more proof that he was
the leader of the left-wing press cabal trying to wreck American intel-
ligence. “Hersh had as much as any American to do with the turning of
the American mind against the CIA,” charged Edward Korry, the former
ambassador to Chile who had scrapped with Hersh in 1974. Commen-
tary magazine’s Arthur Herman, detailing a thirty-five-year war on the
CIA, observed that “the real sea change in the public perception of the
224
enlisted Gerth. The duo had taken on a mobster, but what was in store
for them now was even more hostile.3
Investigating business has always been tricky. A primary function of
the press is to check on government. Policymakers never like it, but they
accept it. Disagreement begins, however, when it comes to its role vis-
à-vis the private sector. Of course, the press is a business, beholden to
advertisers, which might tamp down its enthusiasm for going after busi-
ness wrongdoing. Consequently the function of checking on business has
always been spotty. Certainly Ida Tarbell had no qualms when she tackled
John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil Company in 1902. Nor did Upton
Sinclair hold back in his condemnation of business values in The Jungle in
1906. Nonetheless, the great investigative reporting surge that emerged
in America in the late 1960s was more an attack against government mal-
feasance than business. Enter Hersh, the business school dropout who had
written nothing about the corporate sector in his seventeen-year career.4
Hersh and Gerth began to prowl around — in public records, of course,
but also looking closely at the fourteen investigations involving Blud-
horn and Gulf and Western, many of which had been kicked off by the
Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission,
which were looking at complex schemes that entangled the company. It
led the reporters to conclude that company executives had lied to the
government, destroyed damning documents, and duped shareholders
and banks. Bludhorn, they felt, was using the company as his personal
candy store, as backing for private loans and lavish personal purchases
that he hid from shareholders. Over four months, the reporters spoke to
seventy-five former company officials. Gulf and Western insisted that no
one in the company but a spokesperson talk to them. About five weeks
after Hersh wrote his initial memo scoping out his story, G&W fired back.
Charles Davis, a vice president who was the front man in dealing with the
Times, asked assistant managing editor Seymour Topping for a meeting.
Your reporter, he said, is “spreading lies, although he bluntly asserts
them as facts — lies of the most vicious kind. We are being investigated by
a man whose repeated statements must lead us to believe that he is, in his
own words, ‘out to get’ us.” He then cited some of the things Hersh was
saying: “I am going to make trouble for G+W. . . . They tried to bribe IRS
234
attempts to implicate him always fell short — Lavelle, Cambodia, Allende.
No doubt the reporter known as “Henry’s nemesis” roughed up Kissinger
and tarnished his image, but he needed the time a book would give to
locate Kissinger’s fingerprints on questionable White House activities.
“I am not going to tell you I am writing a friendly book about Kissinger,”
he wrote, a warning on which his critics would pounce. His intention was
spelled out a decade earlier, when he told colleague Harrison Salisbury:
“I’d really love to get that son-of-a-bitch.”3
Hersh asked for a leave of absence; Rosenthal said no. Generally, the
Times did not grant book leaves. Roger Kahn, the best-selling author of The
Boys of Summer, recalled that Rosenthal once offered him a sports column;
Kahn said he wanted to write books. Rosenthal countered, “Roger, we
write our books in the morning, before work.” Kahn declined the offer.
Editor Seymour Topping said two of his books were written at night, after
work was done. Top Rosenthal aide Arthur Gelb said his 1956 Eugene
O’Neill biography was written while he worked full-time. “Your loyalty
was to The Times only; go ahead and figure out how to work full time and
write a major book.” Sometimes, however, book leaves were given. “If the
person was invaluable you tended to give the leave,” observed Al Siegal,
a retired editor who was expert on Times policies. But as invaluable as
Hersh had been, Rosenthal let him go.4
Hersh and Rosenthal made an arrangement, which was unusual, that he
could freelance for the paper. Hersh immediately embarked on a ten-day
trip to Communist Vietnam, filing seven articles. He found a black market
flourishing in Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City. The nightclubs and
girlie shows were all shuttered, and the people were unhappy. In Hanoi
top officials gave him hours of interviews and took pot shots at the Carter
administration. But as he wandered the city where he started his Times
career in 1972, he found that Western culture had penetrated — blue jeans,
rock music, teens holding hands. His critics saw his visit as evidence that
the left-leaning Hersh was at it again. “It is with breathless interest that
one reads the series of dispatches,” commented Richard Grenier of the
conservative American Spectator. “One is astonished to find Hersh . . .
sitting at the feet” of Vietnam’s acting foreign minister “without the
faintest hint of skepticism.” Hersh, as Grenier saw it, was a dupe of the
247
The Nixon administration was weighing options to prevent Allende from
taking office in 1969, including assassination. “I realized that my govern-
ment actively was involved in planning to kill people,” he told Hersh. Of
course, Radford was also the man who surreptitiously copied and leaked
National Security Agency documents to the military brass so they could
spy on White House activities — originally also revealed by Hersh. It made
him a suspect source, albeit one who had the inside poop.2
Some of Hersh’s critics yawned. “I am left with this vacuous feeling,”
wrote Victor Gold, “of having been subjected to ‘Rocky XVI’ or ‘Super-
man XII’; that I’ve been in this theater before and heard it all.” Kissinger
did not respond. Privately he set the tone for a response to Hersh’s Chile
allegations. “The thrust of his Chilean critique is purely Marxist: that our
policy was to defend rapacious American enterprise,” he wrote. “This was
not its thrust.” The old Sy-is-an-untrustworthy lefty was the best Kiss-
inger could do. Hersh’s trademark, Kissinger added, “is the viciousness
and ruthlessness with which he goes after his victims and the tendency
to extend the assault to the institutions which they serve.”3 Chimed in
William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter who had become a Pulitzer
Prize–winning New York Times columnist, “The Hersh attack is a work of
vengeance and self-justification.” None of this made Kissinger any more
comfortable as his sixtieth birthday approached a month before The Price
of Power was published. The two Atlantic installments had come out;
everyone knew what was forthcoming. “Everybody talks about it except
in front of Mr. Kissinger,” wrote Charlotte Curtis in the Times. Safire
attended a gala sixtieth fete for Kissinger, sitting near Lady Bird Johnson
and the Empress of Iran, along with Kissinger journalist pals Joseph Kraft
and Marvin Kalb. Why, oh why, Safire wondered, is Sy “obsessed with
getting The Man Who Got Away? What is it about Henry Kissinger that
turns him into a white whale and transforms an investigative reporter
into a monomaniacal Ahab?”4 The book was not out, but the bashing of
Sy Hersh had begun.
258
he could get away with slaughtering opponents. To protect the summit
meeting, “no price was too great, not even the butchery of hundreds of
thousands of civilians.” The United States rationalized the policy by saying
Khan’s opponents were pro-India and pro–Soviet Union. Add to the mix
the fact that Nixon did not like Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi,
whom he called a deceitful “bitch.” Nixon and Kissinger said they had
“reliable sources” who were telling them Gandhi planned to attack East
Pakistan, a blatant attempt to humiliate the Pakistanis that might bring
China into the conflict. Hersh said a key informant was reporting to the
CIA from India. “Undoubtedly,” Hersh wrote, it was Desai, who had
been fired by Gandhi as deputy prime minister in 1969, even though he
stayed in the cabinet. “I have been able to establish firmly” that Desai
worked for the CIA through 1970, he wrote in a footnote. Kissinger “was
very impressed with this asset,” Hersh asserted. “American intelligence
officials,” all unnamed, were Hersh’s source.2 The allegations about Desai
were contained mainly in one paragraph, 325 words, on page 450. Desai
sued Hersh for $50 million.
Since 1964, in order for public officials to win a libel lawsuit they must
prove that the writer knew what he or she wrote was false or that the
writer was reckless in ascertaining truth. Desai chose a federal court in
Chicago (saying he could embarrass Hersh more in his hometown) to
prove what is known as “actual malice.” Hersh had a team headed by his
long-time Washington DC counsel Michael Nussbaum. The case did not
get to trial until 1989 (Desai was too ill at age ninety-three to attend) as
Desai’s attorneys set out to prove that Hersh had uttered “a scandalous
and malicious lie.” To do so, they sought to force Hersh to name the six
sources who told him Desai was an informant. But federal judge Charles
R. Norgle ruled that if Hersh turned over his notes from his interviews
with the sources, he would not have to reveal their names. He did so.
A six-person jury heard two weeks of testimony, but the highlight came
on October 2, when the judge insisted Kissinger appear. It was only the
second time he had ever testified (the other time was in a case involving
his wife). His lawyers tried to allow a taped deposition to suffice. Coming
to court with bodyguards and two attorneys, and dressed in a gray suit,
Kissinger declared, “I was not eager to testify.” But he did for three and
A Mystery Unraveled
The August 31, 1983, Boeing 747 flight from New York City to Seoul was
routine — snacks, meals, movies, and a stop in Alaska for the 269 pas-
sengers, including Congressman Larry McDonald, a Georgia Democrat
who was also chairman of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. The
captain had flown the route many times. But Korean Air Lines Flight 007
went terribly off course, somewhere past Anchorage, and veered toward
the coast of the Soviet Union. The crew, either not paying attention or
terribly misled by misprogrammmed tracking systems, was unaware it
had strayed. The Soviet Union was not. Its radar systems picked up the
plane, although, it turned out, no one knew it was a commercial flight.
Given that American spy ships routinely cruised the skies in this region,
including earlier that day, often baiting the Soviet Union and looking for
clues about the communists’ intelligence behavior, it is likely KAL 007 was
believed to be a spy plane. A Soviet fighter plane was ordered to intercept.
No radio contact was made, but a warning shot was fired. KAL 007’s crew,
not knowing they were being tracked or that they had penetrated Soviet
air space, likely did not even see the warning. Moments later, on orders
from the ground, the Soviet fighter jet fired at KAL 007. And then the
pilot declared, “The target is destroyed.” The plane plummeted into the
Sea of Japan as nearby fishermen watched, dazzled and horrified. All 246
passengers — including 22 children and 23 crew members — were killed.
As the news spread, claims of horror and angry Russian-bashing came
from the United States, especially the Reagan administration, which saw
the downing as a convenient way to push the president’s “evil empire”
271
his 1998 memoir alleged that the famous secret source, “Deep Throat,”
was made up. “Woodward said he thinks I am asshole,” Obst said. “If you
speak to him, don’t mention my name.”2 Obst, like his buddy Hersh, was
not very good with money. He was broke in the late 1980s and called Sy
for help, saying he could get a $250,000 advance from Stone to write a
script for a movie on Noriega. Hersh had applauded Stone’s movie Pla-
toon as helping change views on the Vietnam War; they seemed a good
team. He set out to write the dramatic story of Noriega — the Panamanian
teenager recruited by the U.S. Army who rose to command the country,
albeit also as a drug merchant protected by three American presidents.
But the relationship with Stone did not go smoothly. According to Obst,
when Stone came to Washington DC, Hersh invited him to his home for
dinner — and Stone brought a female friend, not his wife. Hersh recalled
that a woman did show up after dinner. Obst recalled Hersh being miffed
by Stone’s boorish behavior in front of his family. Hersh is abrasive, but
he is not a womanizer and is described as a bit prudish by friends. But
Hersh does not recall being put off, saying the woman “was totally his
business.” Perhaps more offensive to the reporter, Stone wanted to play
fast and loose with the facts. He was, after all, a Hollywood filmmaker,
not a documentarian. His look at “Wall Street” told a larger truth about
finance, but it was fiction. His movie JFK was a hit, but its allegiance to
facts was suspect. Hersh, brashly, told Stone he would be a “historical war
criminal” if he made his fictionalized version of the Kennedy assassina-
tion. Hersh also toyed with a screenplay called The Adviser, a White House
thriller. Who was that about? “You can guess,” Hersh said. But none of
the movies were ever made. Hersh tried, partly because Obst needed the
money, but when Stone made wholesale changes to the Noriega script,
Hersh backed out. Obst recalled a meeting where Hersh just quit. He left
a lot of money on the table, Obst said without any bitterness, recalling
fondly dinners he had with Sy at his mother Dorothy’s house in Califor-
nia, where she lived until she died in 1998. The screenplays were fun and
paid some bills, but Hersh returned to reporting. “I wouldn’t work with
Oliver a second time, but I’m sure the feeling was mutual,” Hersh said.3
One of the biggest scandals of the Reagan administration slipped by
Hersh as he worked on his books. And that was the Iran-Contra affair in
284
natures.” The battle for disclosure, Hersh wrote, was not about finding
more about Watergate. The tapes, he argued, might “provide firsthand
evidence of previously unknown and potentially prosecutable crimes.”
And thus far, Hersh lamented, Nixon was winning the battle in “keeping
what happened in his White House from the public.” The government
did not get control of the tapes until 2007.2
The Nixon article was more essay than exposé, but Hersh returned to
his muckraking mode in September 1994 when he questioned whether
George H. Bush’s family profited from the 1991 Gulf War. Three months
after he left the presidency, the ex-president went to Kuwait, the tiny
oil-rich country his administration had saved from Saddam Hussein’s
clutches, to receive the nation’s highest medal. The Kuwaiti people del-
uged him with gifts valued at thousands of dollars. He did not refuse
them, nor did two of his sons, Marvin and Neil, who accompanied their
father. And while it was not illegal for private citizens to accept such gifts,
Hersh pointed out, “certain things” after a war “are beyond the bounds of
decency.” Hersh wondered why former top-level Bush aide James Baker
was meeting with representatives of the oil giant Enron? And what of
John Sununu, another top Bush aide, who joined the former president as
consultant for Westinghouse, which was seeking a billion-dollar contract?
Was it unseemly to seek big-bucks deals so soon after American soldiers
risked their lives? Hersh asked. Or was this simply the American way — to
the victor goes “the spoils of war”? Neither Marvin nor Neil Bush would
answer Hersh’s questions. Marvin, the youngest son, had not spoken to
a reporter in twelve years. Neil said he had not spoken to the press since
federal regulators accused him of a banking conflict in 1990. Hersh had
touched a raw nerve. But General Norman Schwarzkopf did talk, con-
firming he had turned down millions of dollars because, simply put, he
represented 541,000 American troops, “not some private companies.
Why should I profit from their sacrifice?” When Hersh traveled to Kuwait,
he found many Kuwaitis and Americans uncomfortable with the Bush
entreaties. “I felt sleazy,” one American banker told him.3
The word sleazy, however, was just about to enter Sy Hersh’s journalistic
vocabulary in a serious way. James Silberman, who had published Price of
Power, was lobbying Hersh to tackle the legend of Jack Kennedy. “I resisted
298
shocking and perfect for TV.” Finally the focus will turn to American
foreign policy and Kennedy, which, Hersh reminded, “is the reason I
wrote the book in the first place.” Hersh left out one thing — everyone
would wonder if the book could be believed at all after the great reporter
had been so duped by Cusack, who was sentenced to ten years in prison.
“How believable is his controversial new book?” asked Time in a cover
story. “Do you think you were blinded by the desire to tell a sordid tale?”
asked NBC’s Matt Lauer.2
“As far as I’m concerned,” Hersh shot back, “investigating those papers
and doing everything I did is part of the business. . . . I’ve been criticized
for a lot of things I’ve written . . . but this is the first time I’ve been criticized
for what I thought. The bottom line is that I didn’t publish them. I don’t
understand what’s so bad about chasing a story, finding out it’s not real
and saying so.” The forgeries, however, were just part of the controversy
that swirled around Camelot. The book, wrote one critic, “has indeed met
with an astonishing reception; astonishing in its vitriol.”3
Camelot caused a furor for a few reasons. First, Hersh was stepping
on the toes of a cult hero, the glorious son of America’s most beloved
political family. “A handsome, charming, witty man who had a fling with
Marilyn Monroe is as close to a god as we have,” quipped Frank Rich.
“I think I touched a nerve,” Hersh told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.
Second, Hersh’s no-holds-barred approach to promoting himself never
endeared him to anyone. He had enemies everywhere, and now they
had their scalpels out, waiting to pounce. “It is not hard to find a lot of
people who don’t like me. I have a lot of blood enemies,” Hersh admitted.
“Hard stories produce a lot of anger.”4 It would now be fun to savage the
cocksure and abrasive Hersh.
Third, conservatives had long despised Hersh, but this time it was
the liberals, who saw Kennedy as the progressive who inspired a genera-
tion. Hersh was turned on by his crowd. “Hell hath no fury like liberals
with their icons threatened,” observed the Times of London.5 How odd,
as even Hersh noted, that arch-conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.
liked Hersh’s book. Fourth, Hersh was wading into the uncharted ter-
ritory of the private lives of public people. The Kennedy–Judith Exner
affair had first raised the question of whether private sexuality was ever
306
casualty, an antidote to the still-bitter aftertaste of Vietnam. The war, Hersh
said, “restored the integrity of the American GI.” But Hersh, the scoop
artist, was not one to write about sweet victories. He had been listening
to sources for nearly seven years on the war’s “glitches.” The vaunted
Patriot antimissile system was a failure; America knocked out none of the
Iraqi scud missiles; of the 146 Americans killed — admittedly an amazing
low count — one-fourth were killed by “friendly fire”; American “smart
bombs” were nowhere near as effective as the public had been told. And
that was no surprise because the Bush administration — looking at the
press coverage that so hounded the living room war in Vietnam — found
a press eager to accept the Pentagon mythmaking. “It was a Teflon war,”
Hersh concluded.2
But the conduct of a war was not his target — that would come soon.
He set out to see if the thousands of returning American troops — he
puts the number at 15 percent — with unexplained illness (chronic flu-
like symptoms, memory loss, aching joints) were merely suffering from
a war fatigue, as the government insisted, or if they had been victims of
a chemical or biological assault not detected. Or, even worse, was the
government keeping this possible deadly seepage a deep dark secret?
Gulf War Syndrome should have been Hersh’s story from the start. Had
he still been at the Times, it would have been. Back in 1968, remember,
he launched a warning shot when he wrote a book on the threat posed by
germ weaponry. The great fear as America entered the first Gulf War was
that Saddam Hussein would unleash these weapons, as he had done on
his own people. The U.S. government worried intensely about this. And,
yet, as Hersh found, most of the masks supplied to American soldiers did
not fit properly and were useless. Moreover, systems in place to detect a
poisonous attack would not register in time to protect the troops; soldiers
would be dead before the system went off. “For all their brave talk about
future warfare,” Hersh concluded, the men who run America’s military
have been unwilling — perhaps even unable — to learn the real lessons of
the Gulf War.”3 So Hersh set out to find out what those lessons might have
been when it came to the mysterious “Gulf War Syndrome.”
But this 103-page book lacks the punch of his earlier work and remains
an exploration that came up will little new and nothing startling. Readers
317
you first talk to people. Nothing happens. Call again in three weeks.” The
New Yorker gave him months to work on stories. Eventually the sources
would pay off. He still trolled lists of recently retired CIA agents and top-
level military officers. And the new Internet search engines made it easier
than ever to find people. Sometimes he had to be careful, calling people
from phone booths and stuffing notes into mailboxes. At a conference on
sources Hersh scoffed when well-known writer James Bamford said he
went out to lunch with sources. Hersh sarcastically noted, no one wants
to be seen in public with the scoop artist.4 Then there were the constant
calls from sources who wanted Hersh to write certain stories. A reporter
interviewing Hersh heard him tell a source: “Let someone else write that
shit. It’s just not my cup of tea.” Before abruptly ending the conversation,
he added: “My free advice: it’s garbage.” Who was that, the reporter
wondered? “Somebody I’ve known for thirty years who used to work in
the CIA, giving me a tip.” Moments later, Hersh switched from brusque
to seductive, leaving a message: “Hi, it’s Sy Hersh, I’m just checking in.
Call me. Let’s talk.” Hersh has “an extraordinary stable of knowledgeable,
well-placed sources who trust him,” Remnick notes.”5 The breadth of
those sources and four decades of digging into layers of government was
about to pay off in ways neither he nor Remnick could ever have expected.
Back on Top
328
his gloomy portraits: “It is a pleasure to talk to Sister Mary Sunshine.”2
Much of the gloom was directed at Rumsfeld. And it soon got worse.
Always trawling, Hersh was in Damascus, Syria, in spring 2003 soon
after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces. For four days he met with an Iraqi — “a
two-star guy from the old regime.” They talked about many things, includ-
ing prisons, and he told Hersh that some of the women in prisons under
U.S. control had asked relatives to come kill them because they had been
molested. “I didn’t know whether it was GIs playing grab ass or what, but
it was clear that the women had been shamed,” he said. And then Hersh
heard about photographs — of other activities.
Hersh was a prolific daily reader: Washington Post, New York Times,
Wall Street Journal, Al-Jazeera, Der Spiegel, all the London papers. But this
information surprised him. Perhaps it should not have. The American press
had nibbled at this story for some time. In March 2003, right before the
U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Times’ Carlotta Gall wrote about the homicide of
an Afghani prisoner; it was buried on page fourteen. Then, on December
26, 2003, Dana Priest and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post revealed
how al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects were often severely beaten to make
them talk. Some officials bragged about the treatment. Some suspects were
whisked out of the country to secret locations to be tortured. Outside of a
few human rights organizations, however, the stories did not cause a stir,
as everyone fretted about threats to domestic security. Hersh seemed not
to have seen these stories. He kept coming back to the photographs. He
knew that when My Lai was revealed, the country was in denial — until
photographs surfaced, and no one could deny the massacre.3
And in 2004 a new digital world had dawned. Many soldiers in the
Mideast had laptop computers, mostly to watch movies. But it also enabled
them to compile and share photographs. At some point a mother in the
Northeast contacted Hersh about her married daughter, who returned
from the Mideast severely depressed. Hersh met the mother, who said
her daughter had left her husband and was covering her body with tat-
toos, as if to blot out her past. He helped her get counseling, actually the
kind of work his wife, Elizabeth, did in Washington. The woman also
told Hersh that when using her daughter’s computer she looked in a file
labeled “Iraq.” She found dozens of shocking photos. “The photographs
339
for the kind of courage they exhibit. The pressures aside — from lawsuits
to irate presidents and secretaries of state to personal threats — Hersh
has long thrown himself into stories that others avoid. “He is a bomb
thrower, the one who runs into the machine guns first,” said author Bob
Woodward, his longtime friend and sometimes rival. “We don’t have
enough Sy Hershes out there charging out of the safety and comfort of
the trenches to run at the sources of power and secrecy. We need more
of that.”2
So what kind of journalist has Seymour Hersh been in a career spanning
four decades, from wars in Vietnam to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with
a trove of scandals, revelations, and spy stories in between?
For one, Hersh has never followed the pack. Scholar Robert Entman,
assessing press coverage after 9/11, notes that “even when government is
promoting ‘war’ against terrorism, media are not entirely passive recep-
tacles for government propaganda,” which is, after all, their job. Among
the reporters who deviated, he cited Seymour Hersh. Indeed, Hersh was
among a tiny media elite after 9/11 that did not genuflect to patriotism
and the flag at the expense of truth; in 1969 he was the lone reporter who
aggressively pursued a story of American atrocities in war. Before Hersh,
no one had even questioned such things. This is not to say that he is not
patriotic. “There’s a kind of fearlessness, a love of justice and a strain of
American Puritanism there,” explained the Pulitzer Prize–winning author
and journalist David Halberstam in interpreting Hersh. “He takes songs
like America the Beautiful seriously.”3
Hersh’s relentless pursuit of stories is legendary, the stuff of journalistic
myth and metaphor. Author Thomas Powers, capturing the essential Hersh,
said he had a “professional style notoriously similar to the single-minded
ferocity of the wolverine . . . known among fur trappers of yesteryear for its
ability to tear its way through the log wall of a cabin for a strip of bacon.”
In the same vein, wrote Time magazine’s defense correspondent Mark
Thompson, “A lot of Washington journalists act like hedge-trimmers or
pruning shears. Sy is a noisy, smoke-spewing chain saw — and a relentless
stump-grinder, to boot.”4 And then there is David Wise, an author who has
an office next to Hersh’s. “No one can dig up a story like Sy. He’s fiercely
independent. And once he’s on a story, he’s like a bulldog.”
340 EPILOGUE
David Remnick, the New Yorker editor, watched the bulldog at work for
a decade starting in 2004 and engaged in the shouting matches, hang-
ups, arguments, and threats to resign that came with the turf for anyone
who had edited Sy Hersh. He observed: “Is he volcanic? Yes. Is he lovely?
Yes.” He also knew that Hersh had helped transform the lumbering New
Yorker into a publication that could break big national defense stories
and influence the course of wars. “We weren’t built for this,” he observed
after Hersh began to throttle the Bush administration in his Iraq war
stories. “Imagine you’re in a car that starts to shake at 80 miles an hour.
Then you look at the speedometer and you see you’re doing 120. Well,
Sy’s doing 120.” Ben Bradlee, the legendary editor of the Washington
Post, who watched Hersh work in the Watergate era, observed that part
of the reason for his success is how hard he works. “You have to get up
very early in the morning to beat Sy Hersh,” he said.5
Aw shucks, says Hersh, self-deprecatingly. Don’t over-intellectualize
it all. “I just follow stories.” Describing how he works, Hersh once com-
mented: “Boy get story. Boy write story. Boy fight editors. Boy wrestle.
Boy throw typewriter. Boy scream. Boy have tantrum.” And, of course,
that might explain why just about everywhere he has ever worked he has
worn out his welcome or left in a snit. The City News Bureau in Chicago
would not take him back when he returned from the army. He left the
AP fighting with the top brass over the editing of his stories. He resigned
as press secretary to Eugene McCarthy because he disagreed with the
senator over policy. Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and editor Abe
Rosenthal were ultimately relieved when he left the New York Times in
1979, despite all the plaudits he brought for the newspaper. “He is unique,
and driven, and his own worst enemy,” observed Bill Arkin, who worked
with Hersh in the 1990s. He called Hersh a friend, but one of the most
“annoying” people you will meet. After working with Hersh, he said, “I
needed a valium or a shower.”6 It was a refrain repeated many times by
people who have worked with Hersh — he is driven, abrasive, and obsessive.
It would have been easy for Hersh, at age sixty-seven, to slow down
after Abu Ghraib. But he wrote twenty-two more articles afterward for
the New Yorker and even kept up a regular blog. Some of his work has
caused great controversy, of course. He insisted in 2005 — in print and in
EPILOGUE 341
speeches — that the Bush administration was going to invade Iran, and he
repeated this allegation five more times in articles. Each time he went on
the talk-show circuit to explain what sources in the military were telling
him. Commented one critic: “If there is one thing that Hersh — known
to every aspiring journalist as the greatest investigative reporter of his
generation — has been consistent on, it’s his uncanny ability to be utterly
wrong.”7
Nonetheless, to the legion of Hersh’s critics and enemies, errors of
fact and judgment are a hallmark of his work. One wrote an entire article
on “King Sy’s mistakes” while another wrote in great detail about “the
deceits of Seymour Hersh.” One critic observed, not without merit, that
Hersh often makes outlandish claims in public speeches, but he will not
write those same things.8 General Barry McCaffrey, who Hersh so exco-
riated in 2000 and who went on to become an NBC commentator, told
me that in his “long history” dealing with the media he found reporters
were “extremely keen on getting the facts right. Mr. Hersh was an excep-
tion.” What should be noted, however, is that Hersh’s harshest critics
have usually been his targets or have written for conservative journals,
often repeating the same anecdotes as if working from the “we-hate-
Sy-Hersh playbook.” “Has he made mistakes?” asked Steve Weinberg, a
long-time observer and admirer of Hersh. “Any journalist who does that
many high-stakes stories and has to depend on so many sources, whose
truthfulness cannot always be determined, may be misled some of the
time.” Added author John Weisman: “Sy’s a long ball hitter. He’s gonna
strike out a lot.”9
Added Arkin, “He can get every fact wrong but get the story correct.”
And he has been right on so many big stories — from My Lai to illegal Cam-
bodia bombing to the CIA’s domestic surveillance to the bumbling early
efforts in the Mideast war. Of course, he may have been very wrong on Iran,
but it is very possible that his reporting — based on inside sources — actually
prevented George Bush from pursuing another Mideast invasion. In fact,
Hersh says that one of the reasons he has not contemplated retirement is
that sources inside the U.S. government need him. “I am a mouthpiece
for people in the inside,” he says. “You get a sense I am vehicle for a cer-
tain form of dissent.” And the dissenters inside government who go to
342 EPILOGUE
Hersh have made him the enemy of six presidents, from Lyndon Johnson
to Barack Obama. In 2009 he insisted that Iran did not have a nuclear
weapons capability, and that Israel and the United States should stand
down. It was Hersh’s first public encounter with Obama. “The Obama
White House can’t abide me,” he says. “Within a month, they were going
behind my back to my editor: ‘What’s your man Hersh doing?’”10
Hersh was doing what he has been doing for forty years — raking the
muck, looking for “scoops,” taking down big men. Sy Hersh’s career in
journalism has left a long line of victims — from General John Lavelle
to former Chilean ambassador Ed Korry to Henry Kissinger to Manuel
Noriega, to mention just a few. Hersh is a big-game hunter. And each time
he shoots, his critics howl that he shot the wrong man. Dick Cheney is
next, by the way. As this book goes to print, Hersh was writing, rewriting,
and still finding new material on the former vice president, with whom he
has tangled since 1975. “The best is yet to come,” Hersh told me in one
email. “It is just amazing how many secrets the government can keep,”
he said in another email about a book that he claims will be, in essence,
“the covert history of our times.” That after four decades of reporting
Hersh could still be amazed — and indignant — explains why he is still
reporting. When the book comes out, it will no doubt make headlines.
And the pundits and the bloggers will bring out the old labels: Sly Sy,
King Sy, Rabbi Sy, Fucking Sy, Terrorist Sy, Spooky Sy. There is a grain
of truth to each label.11
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist William Safire once
called Hersh the American Javert, the fanatic police inspector from Victor
Hugo’s novel Les Miserables who relentlessly pursues his opponents.
Indeed, Hersh is the great American detective, who never lets up on
what he perceives as the evils of modern government. Some consider
Hersh — and Javert — misguided, inflexible, and cruel. I think not. This
kid from Chicago who used to bring laundry from his father’s dry clean-
ers to houses of prostitution in Chicago has sat with world leaders who
have invited him into their offices. And he talks to them on a par with a
secretary of state, a representative of the American people. His countless
sources in the middle of the American government tell him of the abuses
or fumbles by those at the top. And then he comes back to his scrubby
EPILOGUE 343
office in Washington and tells the world how things really are, not how
the White House would like us to believe they are. He tears down all the
institutions that he wishes could be trusted but cannot. “He is an icono-
clast about everything and everyone, including himself,” says Woodward.
“I do think I wear the white hat,” admits Hersh. “I think I’m fighting the
good fight as a journalist and trying to do what I can, and I feel virtuous.”
Of course, not everyone will agree. Animosity from those who think he
represents a 1960s left-wing culture goes back forty years.12
What has angered him most over those forty years, as he has leapt
from one scandal to another, is the lack of morality he has found in deci-
sion making. Yes, he likes to make money. Yes, he can be threatening to
targets as he researches. Yes, he uses way too many anonymous sources.
And, yes, he loves the spotlight. But anger is what fuels Hersh. He is as,
one author suggests, “a man on fire.” “The word morality or immorality
is never part of the debate,” he complains. Too often, “It’s not even on
the pages.” Hersh is unabashed in describing what he thinks is the job
of the reporter, a description that, if you follow the arc of career in this
book, mirrors his work. “I’ve been at it for 40 years,” he says, “but I still
consider myself a newspaper man. That’s my soul. It’s such an important
business. You have to hold the people at the top to the highest possible
standards. Those people who have the right to send our sons and our
daughters to die in the name of democracy. You have to say to them . . .
that the same things that are so valuable in our personal lives and our
family lives — we don’t want to lie, we want trust in that relationship. It’s
this business that gives us a chance, the average person, anybody — gives
us a chance to hold the highest people to the highest standards, to put
your finger in their eye. It’s a great way to spend your life.”13
344 EPILOGUE
Selected Works of Seymour Hersh
1967
“Just a Drop Can Kill,” New Republic, May 6, 11–15.
“But Don’t Tell Anyone I Told You,” New Republic, December 9, 13–14.
“Gas and Germ Warfare,” New Republic, July 1, 12–14.
1968
“The Secret Arsenal,” New York Times, August 25, SM26.
Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill).
1969
“Dare We Develop Biological Weapons?” New York Times, September 28, SM28.
“Germ Warfare: For Alma Mater, God and Country,” Ramparts, December, 20–28.
“The Story Everyone Ignored,” Columbia Journalism Review, Winter 1969–
1970, 55–58.
“Officer Charged with Murdering 109 in Viet,” Chicago Sun Times, November
13, 1, 19.
“GI’s Story of Pinkville: ‘Point-Blank Murder,’” Sun Times, November 20, 1, 4.
345
“Hoosier’s Story ‘I Killed Dozens in Pinkville,’” Sun Times, November 25, 1, 6.
“‘Like Wild Animals’ prior to Pinkville: Story of GI in Unit,” Sun Times, Decem-
ber 2, 57.
“Germs and Gas as Weapons,” New Republic, June 7, 13–16.
“On Uncovering the Great Nerve Gas Coverup,” Ramparts, June, 12–18.
1970
“How I Broke the My Lai Story,” Saturday Review, July 11, 46–49.
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York, Random House).
1971
“The Reprimand,” New Yorker, October 9, 101–2.
1972
(Unless otherwise noted, all articles from 1972 to 1981 are from New York Times.)
“Coverup,” New Yorker, January 22, 29, 34–40, 40–48.
Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 (New York:
Vintage Books).
“General Bombed in North before President’s Order,” June 11, 1.
“General Testified He Made 20 Raids without Orders,” June 13, 1.
“Airman Says Raid Reports Were Falsified on Orders,” June 14, 3.
“Sargeant Says 200 Men Helped Falsify Bomb Data,” September 7, 1972, 1.
“Ex-Airmen Tell of 20 Planned Raids a Month in ’70–71,” June 16, 3.
“You Might Call It ‘Protective Aggression,’” June 18, E1.
“Somebody Higher Up Must Have Known,’” September 17, E1.
“How We Ran the Secret Air War in Laos,” October 29, SM18.
“Decline and Near Fall of the U.S. Army,” Saturday Review, November 18, 58–65.
1973
“4 Watergate Defendants Reported Still Being Paid,” January 14, 1.
“Pressures to Plead Guilty Alleged in Watergate Case,” January 15, 1.
Hersh, “McCord Reported Linking Payoffs,” April 9, 1.
“Watergate Jury Believed Seeking a Haldeman Link,” April 22, 1.
“CIA Memos Show Political Fears over Watergate,” June 4, 1.
“New Dean Charge on Nixon Awaited,” June 24, 1.
“Colson Is Accused of Improper Use of His Influence,” July 1, 1.
1974
“Spying in the White House Said to Have Begun in ’70,” February 3, 1.
“President Warned Justice Department against Inquiry on His Watergate Role”
May 2, 1.
“Senate to Query Justice Officials on Cover-up Case,” May 9, 1.
“Nixon Use of Ethnic Epithets Is Reported,” May 12, 1.
“Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents
in Nixon Years,” December 22, 1.
1975
“Colby Said to Confirm CIA Role in U.S.,” January 1, 37.
“CIA Admits Domestic Acts, Denies ‘Massive’ Illegality,” January 16, 1.
“CIA Salvage Ship Brought Up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise
Atom Missiles,” March 19, 1.
“Submarines of U.S. Stage Spy Missions inside Soviet Waters,” May 25, 1.
“Report on CIA Is Praised, but Recommendations Are Called Weak,” June 12, 23.
“Great Power and Secrecy: A Formula for Abuse,” June 15, E1.
“Kissinger and CIA Said to Conflict in Testimony on Chile Plot,” November 21, 53.
1976
“The Contrasting Lives of Sidney R. Korshak,” June 27, 1.
“Korshak’s Power Rooted in Ties to Labor Leaders,” June 28, 53.
“Major Corporations Eager to Seek Korshak’s Advice,” June 29, 63.
“Korshak Again the Target of a Federal Investigation,” June 30, 77.
1977
“SEC Presses Wide Investigation of Gulf and Western Conglomerate,” July 24, 1.
“Gulf and Western’s Relationship with Banks Is Issue in SEC Study,” July 25, 45.
“Gulf and Western Tax Practices Coming under Wide Examination,” July 26, 61.
1980
“The Iran Operation: Hard Questions That Need Answers Now,” May 1, A31.
1981
“New Evidence Backs Ex-Envoy on His Role in Chile,” February 9, A1.
“The Qaddafi Connection,” June 14, SM32–34.
“Exposing the Libyan,” June 21, SM8.
1982
“Kissinger and Nixon in the White House,” Atlantic, May, 35–53.
“The Price of Power,” Atlantic, December, 31–48.
1983
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books).
“The Pardon,” Atlantic, August, 55–62.
1985
“Pakistani in U.S. Sought to Ship A-Bomb Trigger,” New York Times, February
25, 1985, 1.
1986
“Panama Strongman Said to Trade in Drugs,” New York Times, June 12, 1986, 1.
“007’s Last Minutes,” New York Times, August 31, E15.
“The Target Is Destroyed,” Atlantic, September, 46–53.
The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America
Knew about It (New York: Random House).
1987
“Target Qaddafi,” New York Times, February 22, 1987, SM16.
“Who’s in Charge Here?,” New York Times, November 22, 1987, SM34.
1990
“The Iran Contra Committees: Did They Protect Reagan?,” New York Times,
April 29, 46–47.
“Our Man in Panama: The Creation of a Thug,” Life, March, 81–85.
1992
(Unless otherwise noted, all articles below are from the New Yorker.)
“Nixon’s Last Cover-up: The Tapes He Wants the Archives to Suppress,” Decem-
ber 14, 76.
1993
“The Spoils of the Gulf War,” September 6, 70.
1994
“Spy vs. Spy: The Central Intelligence Agency Needs More Than an Overhaul,”
August 4, 4.
1997
The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little, Brown).
1998
Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome, the War between America’s Ailing Veterans
and Their Government (New York: Ballantine).
1999
“The Traitor: The Case against Jonathan Pollard,” January 18, 26.
“The Intelligence Gap: How the Digital Age Left Our Spies out in the Cold,”
December 6, 58.
2000
“Overwhelming Force: What Happened in the Final Days of the Gulf War?,”
May 22, 48.
2001
“What Went Wrong: The CIA and the Failure of American Intelligence,” Octo-
ber 8, 34.
“King’s Ransom,” October 22, 35.
“Escape and Evasion,” November 1, 50.
“The Iraq Hawks,” December 24, 58.
2003
“The Cold Test,” January 27, 42.
“Lunch with the Chairman,” 6.
“Who Lied to Whom?” March 31, 41.
“Offense and Defense,” April 7, 43.
“Selective intelligence,” May 12, 44.
“The Stovepipe,” October 27, 77.
2004
“Torture at Abu Ghraib,” May 10, 42.
“Chain of Command,” May 17, 38.
“The Gray Zone,” May 24, 38.
Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins).
2005
“The Coming Wars,” January 24, 40.
“The Iran Plans,” April 17, 30.
“Last Stand,” July 10, 42.
351
1973 Uncovers the Nixon administration’s illegal bombing of Cambodia.
1974 His December story on the illegal domestic spying of the CIA leads
to sweeping reforms.
1975 His Times stories on American involvement in the overthrow of
Chile’s president leads to various investigations and more reforms.
1976–77 Works in the Times New York offices while his wife goes to medical
school in New York; writes long series of articles on a mob lawyer
compared to The Godfather and stories about a large American
corporation that causes a furor.
1979 Leaves the Times to begin work on a book on Henry Kissinger.
1983 The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House is published,
causes great controversy and wins the National Book Critics Award.
1984 Works on and narrates documentary films.
1986 His articles in the Times and Life magazine lead the U.S. to invade
Panama, apprehend the dictator, Manuel Noriega, and bring him
to the U.S. for trial.
1991 His book The Sampson Option, on Israeli nuclear weapons, causes
great controversy and leads to a libel lawsuit from publisher Robert
Maxwell, who soon after dies in a mysterious drowning accident.
1993 Becomes a regular correspondent for the New Yorker magazine.
1997 Publishes The Dark Side of Camelot about John Kennedy’s presidency;
it is viciously attacked for its prying look into Kennedy’s sex life,
perhaps the nadir of his career.
2001 His articles for the New Yorker after the 9/11 attacks bring great criti-
cal acclaim as he provides exposés on war foul-ups and intelligence
problems and offers an alternative view of the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
2002–3 His steady stream of New Yorker articles reestablishes him as one
of America’s premier investigative reporters, but President Bush
labels him a “liar,” and another critic calls him “the terrorist of
American journalism.”
2004 Hersh exposes the torture and abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq;
his three New Yorker articles win him numerous awards and great
celebrity.
2004 Publishes his eighth book, Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib.
Prologue
1. Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New
York: Summit Books, 1983).
2. “Author Contends Deceit Is Common in Foreign Policy,” Poughkeepsie Journal,
October 18, 1983, 1. “Hersh Slams U.S. Secrecy, Enthralls Crowd,” Kingston Free-
man, October 18, 1983, 1. See www.alanchartock.com.
3. Bob Thompson, “The Hersh Alternative,” Washington Post, January 28, 2001,
W9.
4. I exchanged emails with Hersh and his brother and spoke with his sister and
brother on the telephone.
5. Seymour M. Hersh, telephone interview by author, July 12, 2010. Thompson,
“Hersh Alternative.”
6. David Jackson, “The Muckraker,” Chicago Tribune, June 25, 2004, 1. Deborah
Hastings, “Journalist Hersh Shuns Fame for Stories,” Associated Press online,”
May 21, 2004. Scott Sherman, “The Avenger,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/
August 2003. Joe Eszterhas, “The Reporter Who Broke the My Lai Massacre, the
Secret Bombing of Cambodia and the CIA Domestic Spying Stories” (part 1), Roll-
ing Stone, April 10, and “The Toughest Reporter in America” (part 2), Rolling Stone,
April 24, 1975.
7. Leonard Downie, The New Muckrakers (New York: Signet, 1976). Marianne
Szegedy-Maszak, “The Many Secrets of Sy Hersh,” Esquire, November 1991, 142–47.
Robert Sam Anson, “Secrets and Lies,” Vanity Fair, November 1997.
8. Wajahat Ali, “Going 15 Rounds with Seymour Hersh,” Counterpunch, Janu-
ary 15, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/01/15/going-15-rounds-with
-seymour-hersh/.
9. Joe Nocera, “The Biographer’s Dilemma,” New York Times, October 25, 2011,
A31.
10. Mehdi Hasan, “The Obama White House Can’t Abide Me,” New Statesman,
November 26, 2009.
353
1. The Story No One Wanted
1. Geoffrey Cowan, telephone interview by author, August 8, 2007. Cowan was
dean of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communi-
cation from 1996 to 2007 and director of the “Voice of America” in the Clinton
administration.
2. Cowan, interview. Seymour M. Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s
Hidden Arsenal (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). “Miscue on the Massacre,” Time,
December 5, 1969, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901621,00
.html.
3. Seymour M. Hersh, interview, San Francisco Chronicle, September 7, 1989, A7.
4. Cowan has never revealed his source. He was miffed that Hersh later identi-
fied him as his source. Cowan, interview. Initially Hersh simply called Cowan “a
young man.” Seymour M. Hersh, “How I Broke the My Lai Story,” Saturday Review,
July 11, 1970, 46. He later called Cowan “a source with Pentagon connections.”
Hersh, “The Story Everyone Ignored,” Columbia Journalism Review 8, no. 4 (Winter
1969–70): 55. But in an interview with Joe Eszterhas in Rolling Stone magazine, he
referred to “one of the Cowan brothers, Geoff Cowan.” Eszterhas, “Reporter Who
Broke,” 52. Hersh, radio interview by Steve Bookshester, “How the My Lai Story
Broke,” 1969, Pacifica Tape Library, Berkeley Library.
5. David Obst, Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the ’60s and ’70s
(New York: John Wiley, 1998), 136. John Schultz, Motion Will Be Denied; A New
Report on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: Morrow, 1972). Jason Epstein,
The Great Conspiracy Trial: An Essay on Law, Liberty, and the Constitution (New York:
Random House, 1970). Elliot Landy, Woodstock Vision: The Spirit of a Generation
(New York: Continuum, 1994). Rob Kirkpatrick, 1969: The Year Everything Changed
(New York: Skyhorse, 2009).
6. Walter LaFeber, The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election (Lanham
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1998). A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). George C. Herring, America’s Longest War:
The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996). Rich
Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New
York: Scribner, 2008).
7. Eszterhas, “Reporter Who Broke,” 83.
8. Associated Press, “Army Accuses Lieutenant in Vietnam Deaths in 1968,” New
York Times, September 7, 1969. Also, Hersh, “How I Broke the Story,” 46. Winant
Sidle, “Massacre at My Lai,” in Crisis Response: Inside Stories on Managing Image
under Siege, ed. Jack Gottschalk (Detroit: Gale Research, 1993), 334–35.
9. Hersh, “How I Broke the Story,” 46. Eszterhas, “Reporter Who Broke,” 74.
Morton Mintz, “Financing Our Best Work,” IRE Journal: Investigative Reporters and
Epilogue
1. Seymour M. Hersh, IRE Conference, Phoenix, June 8, 2007. Hersh would
not elaborate on the incident when I asked him about it. New Yorker website post,
September 4, 2004.
2. Woodward, interview by author, February 8, 2012.
3. Robert Entman, “Cascading Activation,” Political Communication, October–
December 2003, 18. Peter Johnson, “Media Mix,” USA Today, May 18, 2004.
4. Bob Thompson, “The Hersh Alternative,” Washington Post, Jan. 28, 2001,
W9. Howard Kurtz, “At the Front Lines,” Washington Post, May 19, 2004; Page C1.
5. Rupert Cornwell, “The Reporter Who’s the Talk of the Town,” Independent,
May 22, 2004, 40. Neuman, “Reporter Is Back.” Bill Bradlee, telephone interview
by author, March 1, 2012.
6. Thompson, “Hersh Alternative.” Bill Arkin, telephone interview by author,
August 20, 2012.
7. James Kirchick, “The Deceits of Seymour Hersh,” Commentary, March 2012,
18. Seymour M. Hersh, “Iran and the Bomb,” New Yorker, June 6, 2011, 30–35. Hersh,
“Shifting Targets,” New Yorker, October 8, 2007, 40. Hersh, “The Redirection,”
Abrams, Creighton T., 135–36, 138–39, Associated Press (AP), xvi, 2, 6, 7, 28,
141 32, 56, 60–87, 255, 284, 345, 351
Abrams, Elliott, 271 Atlantic, 60, 206, 241, 248, 257, 261
Abu Ghraib, xiv, 319, 330–38, 339, 341,
Baer, Robert, 273, 338
345
Baker, Bobby, 288–89
Abzug, Bella, 196
Baker, Gladys, 292
Afghanistan, 320–23, 328, 340
Baker, James, 285
Agnew, Spiro, 19, 29, 31, 170
Baker, Russell, 233, 251
Air Force Magazine, 143 Ball, George W., 256
Ali, Wajahat, xv, xvi Bamford, James, 318
Alford, Mimi, 291 Barnes, Peter, 101, 105, 107
Allen, Richard, 251 Battle of Rumaila, 309–12, 315–16
Allende, Salvador, 171–86, 246–48, Bay of Pigs invasion, 145, 287
256 Bellow, Saul, 47, 274
Alvarez, Everett, 129 Belushi, John, 273
al-Zuhair, Harb Saleh, 325 Ben-Gurion, David, 277
Ambrose, Stephen, 27 Ben-Menashe, Ari, 277, 279, 281–82
American Spectator, 235 Bernhardt, Michael, 14, 21
Anderson, Jack, 138, 157, 173, 209, 212 Bernstein, Carl, 18, 144, 157, 271
Angleton, James Jesus, 191–92, 193, Bernstein, Richard, 302
195, 232 Beschloss, Michael R., 286
Anson, Robert Sam, xv, 297, 298 Billings, Bob, 51–52, 56–57
Aragon Ballroom (Chicago), 63 bin Laden, Osama, 320, 328
Arkin, William, 279, 341, 342 biological weapons, 2, 28, 43, 85–86,
Armed Services Committee. 88–97, 116–24
See Senate Armed Services Birns, Laurence R., 173
Committee Black Panthers, 111
Arnett, Peter, 82 Blitzer, Wolf, 321
403
Bludhorn, Charles G., 225–27, 230–32 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
Bobbs-Merrill, 90 CIA, xv, 157, 228, 232, 236, 238,
Boot, Max, 324 259–60, 267, 271, 273, 290, 309–10,
Boston Globe, 19, 31, 104, 133, 280 318–19, 321; chemical biological
Bradlee, Ben, 20, 146, 148, 151, 155, 341 weapons, 121–22; Chile, 170–71,
Braestrup, Peter, 20 173, 169–84; domestic spying,
Brill, Steven, 231 185–96, 198–201, 205, 291; Glomar
Brinkley, Joel, 278 Explorer, 205–13; Israel, 276–77;
Brookings Institute, 142, 244 KAL, 264–66; Manuel Noriega,
Brugioni, Dino, 277 269–71
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 140, 250 Chapin, Dwight, 171
Buchanan, Patrick, 31, 237 Charlie Company, 34, 35, 42, 146
Buckley, Kevin, 41 Chartock, Alan, 12
Buckley, William F., Jr., 299 chemical weapons, 2, 28, 43, 85, 86,
Bukro, Casey, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53 88–97, 116–24
Bunker, Ellsworth, 137 Chemical and Biological Warfare
Burnham, James, 237 (Hersh), 2, 92, 117
Burns, John F., 182 Cheney, Dick, 195, 233, 234, 235, 343
Bush, George H. W., 306, 311 Chicago, xii, 2, 14, 24, 44, 47, 50, 51,
Bush, George W., xiv, 271, 307, 319, 53, 58, 59, 61–66, 112, 117, 127, 217,
320, 322–23, 328, 333–36, 337, 219, 259, 270, 274, 278, 284, 287,
341–42 289
Bush, Marvin, 285 Chicago 7, 4
Bush, Neil, 285 Chicago Tribune, xiv, 30, 32, 50–51, 59,
Butterfield, Alexander, 169 60, 126
Buzhardt, J. Fred, 158, 160–61, 169 Chile, 171–84, 188, 193, 194, 201, 205,
211, 212, 247, 248
Callanan, Charlie, 113 China, 34, 149, 166, 209, 275, 278, 279
Calley, William, xi, 6–19, 25, 34, 38, Church, Frank, 176, 194, 215, 219, 211
41–42, 126–27, 293 City News Bureau, 2, 47–54, 56, 60,
Cambodia, 21, 24, 140, 160, 157–88, 74, 234, 341
269, 362 Cleveland Park (Washington DC), 90
Carter, Jimmy, 235, 250, 276 Cleveland Plain Dealer, 21–22, 29
Casey, William J., 287, 293 Clark, Blair, 99, 100, 105, 116
Casey, Patrick, 160, 162 Clark, Tim, 99
Castro, Fidel, 215, 291, 300 Cline, Ray S., 177
CBS, 29–30, 49, 50, 54, 61, 205, 291, Clinton, Bill, 25, 318
351, 352 Coburn, Judith, 1
Center for National Security Studies, Colby, William, 171, 194, 232; and
256 Chile, 171, 194; and domestic
404 INDEX
spying, 187–92, 195, 198; and Department of Health, Education
Glomar Explorer, 201–11, 213–14 and Welfare, 94
Cold War, 91, 191, 205, 264, 318 Desai, Morarji, 258–60
Colombia, 309, 313 Diplomatic History 304
Colson, Charles, 186, 242, 284 Di Rita, Lawrence, 328, 329
Columbia Journalism Review, 15, 152, Dispatch News Service, 17, 18, 22, 26,
183, 334 31, 32, 271
Columbus GA, 8, 11, 42 Domenici, Pete, 29
Committee to Re-Elect the President, Dornfeld, Arnold, 49
Dowd, Maureen, 298
148
Downie, Leonard, 15, 77, 151, 159, 197
Congo, 177, 196
Drinan, Robert, 166
Conrad, Charles, 71
Duckett, Carl, 203, 208
Conyers, John, 167
Dudman, Richard, 19
CounterPunch, xv
Dugway Proving Ground, 92–93, 120
Cowan, Geoffrey, 1
Cowan, Paul, 1 Eagleburger, Lawrence, 177, 241, 243
Crewdson, John, 145, 196 Eisenhower, Dwight, 71, 92, 276, 284
C-Span, 252 Eller, Jerry, 100, 103, 106
Cuba, 121, 181, 240, 264 Ellsberg, Daniel, 82, 148, 236, 237, 242
Currie, Brainerd, 46 Emerson, Gloria, 35
Currie, David, 46 Emerson, Steven, 280, 281
England, Lynndie, 330, 332
Curtis, Charlotte, 248, 252, 253
Epstein, Edward Jay, 301
Cusack, Lawrence X., III, 292–97,
Erlichman, John, 152, 157, 169, 237,
299, 301
242, 244
Daley, Richard, 65 Ertegun, Ahmet, 257
Daniel, Clifton, 149, 153, 157, 176, 208, Eszterhas, Joe, xv, 198
211, 232 Evergreen Dispatch, 56–58
The Dark Side of Camelot (Hersh), Evergreen IL, 56
284–305 Ewing, Michael, 294, 304
Darnton, John, 132, 170, 216, 233 Exner, Judith Campbell, 291, 299, 311
Davies, Nick, 282 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
Davis, Charles, 225 144, 151, 159, 162, 186, 190–91,
Davis, Nathaniel, 172 217–18, 228, 238, 241, 267, 320;
Dayan, Moshe, 277 investigating Hersh, 214, 267, 328
Dean, John, 151, 157, 158 Feith, Douglas, 323
Deep Throat, 153, 159, 272 Feldstein, Mark, 157
Defense Policy Board, 325 Felt, W. Mark, 159
Delta Force, 321 Finch, Robert, 237
INDEX 405
Firing Line, 303 Goldwater, Barry, 65, 98
Fitzgerald, John F. (Honey Fitz), 287 Goodale, James, 226
FOIA. See Freedom of Information Act Goodenow, Donald, 222
Fonda, Jane, 128, 191 Goodman, Amy, xvi, 321
Ford, Gerald, 120, 171, 192, 213, 240 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 101
Fort Benning GA, xi, 3, 6, 8, 9–11, 16– Goodwin, Richard, 101–3, 108–10, 113,
18, 23, 31, 42, 55 114, 118
Fort Dedrick MA, 90 Gordon, Michael R., 315
Fort Leavenworth KS, 54, 55 Gray, Ed, 295, 304
Fort Riley KS, 55–56, 61 Gray, L. Patrick, 144–45, 147, 153
40 Committee, 171, 206, 247 Greenberg, Daniel S., 95
France, 117, 275, 276, 325 Greider, William, 200
Frankel, Max, 40, 129, 132, 145, 180, Grenier, Richard, 235, 236
273 Griffith, Ronald, 310
Franks, Lonnie, 140, 142, 161 Gromyko, Andrei, 120
Freed, Kenneth, 69, 72, 74, 76 Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, 332
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Gubsen, Charles, 137
236, 261, 266 Gulf and Western Industries, 224–32
Friedheim, Jerry, 164 Gulf of Tonkin (Vietnam), 102
Freidman, Max, 276, 281, 287 Gulf War, 285, 306–7, 309, 310, 313, 317
Frontline, 262, 308 Gulf War Syndrome (Hersh), 306–8,
Front Page, 49, 50, 56, 61 313
Gurney, Edward J., 29
Gadaffi, Muammar, 238, 240
Gallagher, Wes, 80, 85, 86 Haig, Alexander, 160–61, 240, 243–
Gandhi, Indira, 174, 259 45, 261–62
Gans, Curtis, 99, 113, 115 Halberstam, David, 60, 82, 84, 306,
Gelb, Arthur, 226, 235 322, 340
Gelb, Leslie, 194, 198, 245 Haldeman, H. R., 29, 155, 157–58, 242
General Motors, 322 Halperin, Morton, 161–62, 199, 238,
Geneva Convention, 38, 90, 91, 119, 244–46
120, 333 Hamilton, Nigel, 286
Gerth, Jeff, 218–26, 228, 231, 239–40 Hammer, Richard, 38
Giancana, Sam, 287, 291, 292, 295, Hanoi, Vietnam, 41, 73, 79, 82–83,
301, 302, 311 128–30, 306
Glomar Explorer, 201–13 Harrington, Michael, 171–74, 178
The Godfather, 218 Hastings, Deborah, xiv
Gold, Victor, 248, 253 Health, Education and Welfare,
Goldblatt, Joel, 219 Department of, 94
Goldstein, Tom, 227, 232 Healy, Robert, 118
406 INDEX
Hearst, William Randolph, 135 128–31; as press secretary, 98–115;
Heinenman, Ben, 2 Pulitzer Prize, xi, 19, 32, 44, 200;
Heller, Jean, 81, 83, 85, 89 and rivalry with Bob Woodward,
Helms, Richard, 122, 173, 188, 190–91, xv, 145, 151, 154–59, 197–98, 273,
194, 209 286, 293, 337–38; speechmaking,
Hemingway, Ernest, 62 xi, xv, 125–26, 260–61, 331, 336;
Hentoff, Nat, 221 United Press International, 58–60;
Hersh, Alan, xiii, 45, 56, 274 Watergate, 144–56. See Hersh,
Hersh, Dorothy Margolis, 56, 272, 274 Alan; Hersh, Dorothy Margolis;
Hersh, Elizabeth, xiii, 55, 66, 67, 185, Hersh, Elizabeth; Hersh, Isador;
196, 198, 215, 216, 329, 339 Hersh, Matthew; Hersh, Melissa
Hersh, Isador (Hershowitz), 45, 56, Hess, John L., 133, 134
112, 273–74 Hewitt, Don, 46
Hersh, Matthew, 190, 216 Hilton, Barron, 222
Hersh, Melissa, 216 Hill, Clarence A., Jr. , 77
Hersh, Seymour Myron: Abu Ghraib, Hirstein, Stuart, 312
328–35; anonymous sources, 84, Hitchens, Christopher, 256
135, 138, 153–56, 185, 214, 230, 262, Ho Chi Minh Trail, 165
268, 273, 275, 281, 312, 323–24, 334, Ho Chi Minh City, 235
336, 344; anti-Semitism, 35, 51, Hoffa, Jimmy, 62, 217, 222
161–62, 279–80, 274, 279–80, 283; Hoffman, Dustin, 108
Associated Press, 61–87; awards, Hoffman, Fred, 75–79, 83–84
xi, xii, 19, 32, 44, 58, 83, 124–25, Hoffman, Stanley, 241, 249, 252
132–33, 146, 147, 155, 168, 170, 180, Hoover, J. Edgar, 144, 241
200–201, 216, 335, 338; chemical Horrock, Nicholas, 196
and biological weapons, 2, 28, 43, Hotel Metropole (Vietnam), 128
85, 86, 88–97, 116–24; City News
Houseman, Martin, 173
Bureau, 2, 47–54, 56, 60, 74, 234,
Howard Hughes Company, 206–7, 212
341; and defamation lawsuits, 220,
Hughes, Harold, 136–38, 163–64, 294
231, 258–60, 279–83, 326; educa-
Humphrey, Hubert, 73, 117–18, 250
tion of, 12, 45–47, 324; and Gulf
Hussein, Saddam, 307, 309, 331
War I, 285, 306–7, 309, 310, 313,
Hyde Park (Chicago), 45, 47, 112
317; Iran, 272–73, 276, 309, 318,
323, 342–43; Iraq, 330–38; military impeachment of Richard Nixon, 166–
service of, 54–56; mistakes of, 67, 273
131–32, 165–70, 341–42; and My India, 174, 258–59
Lai massacre, 1–44; New Yorker, International Telegraph and Tele-
306–38; New York Times, 125–233; phone Co. (ITT), 173
on Nixon 155, 166; on nuclear Iran-Contra affair, 272–73
weapons, 271–83; and POWs, Isaac, Rael Jean, 281–82, 324
INDEX 407
Isaacson, Walter, xvi, 234, 245, 256 Kennedy, Robert, 98, 103, 108–9, 115,
Israel, 275–83, 306, 321, 343 218
Kennedy, Rose, 187, 293
Jackson, David, xiv, 126
Kenworthy, Ned, 104, 113–14
Jackson, Mahalia, 62, 64
Kerner Commission, 111
Jacobsen, Max, 294
Khan, Yaha, 258
Jennings, Peter, 287, 296, 298
Khashoggi, Adnan, 325
Jerusalem Post, 278, 281
Khmer Rouge, 163, 167
Jewish Daily Forward, 274
Kihss, Peter, 181
JFK (Stone), 272
Kilpatrick, James, 194
Jobs, Steve, xvi
Kimmitt, Mark, 332
Johnson, Lyndon, 136, 138, 161, 178,
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 70, 241
180, 250, 276, 287, 289, 343
Kissinger, Henry, xi, xii, 4, 188, 231,
Joint Chiefs of Staff, 5, 81, 118, 136,
234–57, 262, 275, 339, 343; Cam-
152, 166, 247, 331
bodia, 161, 163–66; Chile, 171–77,
journalistic crusade, 70, 74, 77, 89,
179; Central Intelligence Agency,
94, 135, 136, 174, 177, 186, 333
192, 194–99; chemical biologi-
journalistic objectivity, 231–32, 73–74,
cal weapons, 119, 122–23; Glomar
85, 174, 313
Explorer, 202–3, 206, 208, 211, 213;
The Jungle (Sinclair), 225
John Lavelle, 127, 139, 141, 143; My
Justice Department, 150, 157, 186,
Lai, 23–24, 29; Watergate, 145, 155;
190, 213–14, 262, 335
wiretapping, 240–44
Kahn, Roger, 235 Kissinger, Nancy, 257, 259
Kalb, Bernard, 241, 256 Kitt, Eartha, 196
Kalb, Marvin, 241, 248, 256 Knight, Hal M. , 160–64
KAL Flight 007, 258–70 Kogan, Bernard, 45
Kane, Joe, 68, 85–86 Koppel, Ted, 255
Karpen, Julius, 58 Koprowski, Michael, 64
Karpinski, Janis L., 333–34 Korea, 42, 78, 106, 191, 249
Kass, Hal, 293 Korry, Edward, Jr., 174, 182
Katz, Robert, 126 Korry, Edward M., 174, 178–84, 212,
Kefauver, Estes, 219, 221 247, 343
Kelley, Kitty, 291, 302, 336 Korry, Patricia, 174, 179, 181–82, 184
Kennedy, Edward, 3, 288, 301 Korshak, Sidney, 215–23, 224, 228
Kennedy, Jacqueline, 286, 289, 293, Koster, Samuel W., 37
300 Kraft, Joseph. 248
Kennedy, John F., xv, 178, 284–305; Kristol, William, 323
assassination, 40, 58, 61, 272, 284; Krogh, Egil , 186, 237, 244
election, 98, 118; Vietnam, 98, 284 Kump, James P., 312
Kennedy, Joseph, Sr., 187–88, 193, 287 Kurtz, Howard, 302
408 INDEX
Kuwait, 205, 306, 310 Luttwak, Edward, 268
Lydon, Christopher, 145
LaFeber, Walter, 243, 247, 256
Laird, Melvin, 202, 243; chemical MacArthur, Charles, 49
biological weapons, 118–19, 121–23; Madison Square Garden, 224
and John Lavelle, 135, 137, 142, 165; Manchester, James, 311–12
My Lai, 22–23 Marchetti, Victor, 173
Lake, Anthony, 237, 244 Marks, John D., 173
Lalli, Frank, 221–22 Martin, David , 313
Lamb, Brian, 252 Massing, Michael, 321
Lang, W. Patrick, 324 Maxwell, Robert, 279, 282, 283, 302
Langguth, A. J., 83 Mayer, Jacqueline, 63
Lansdale, Edward G., 236 McCaffrey, Barry, 27, 309–17, 342
Lee, John M., 228–30 McCain, John S., 138
LeMoyne, John, 312 McCarthy, Abigail, 100, 105
Laos, 128–29, 138, 169 McCarthy, Colman, 253
Latimer, George, 7–9, 14, 16–17 McCarthy, Eugene, 2, 32, 98–118
Lavelle, John D., 134–43, 160–62, 168, McCarthy, Joseph, 73
171, 235, 243 McCarthy, Richard D., 119–20, 123–24
Lavelle, Mary, 141 McCone, John, 188, 277
LennonOno Peace Prize, 335 McCord, James, 155, 157
Leubsdorf, Carl, 67–69 McGovern, George, 5
Levi, Edward, 214–15 McGrory, Mary, 28, 32, 100, 107–9
Lewellen, Charles, 10 McIntyre, William, 290
Lewis, Anthony, 134, 169, 174, 176, McNamara, Robert, 77–78, 80–81,
199, 211, 246, 249, 253 100, 277
Libby, Lewis, 323 Meadlo, Myrtle, 25
Library of Congress, 237, 275 Meadlo, Paul, 24–27, 29–30, 35, 126
Liebovitz, Annie, 198 Mears, Walter, 70, 75, 80, 86
Life, 17, 29, 34, 108, 271 Medina, Ernest, 22
Liman, Arthur, 229 Meselohn, Mathew, 123
Lithuania, 273 military-industrial complex, 92, 94,
Little, Brown and Company, 286, 96, 120
297–98 Miller, Edison, 130
Lockhart, Joe, 315 Millones, Peter, 133, 216
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 65 Milwaukee WI, 69, 111, 113–14, 116
Lofton, John, 31–32, 194, 201 Mindszenty, Josef, 178
Lord, Sterling, 264 Mitchell, John, 144, 148, 150, 156
Lowell, Robert, 100 Mobil Oil, 318
Lumumba, Patrice, 196 Monroe, Marilyn, 292–99
INDEX 409
Moorer, Thomas H., 135, 139, 141 New York, 230
Morgan, Charles, 212 New Yorker, 13, 16, 37, 60, 127–28, 134,
Morris, Roger, 241–42, 244, 256, 277, 143, 147, 263, 305–35, 341
280 New York Review of Books, 117, 119, 301
Mortimer, Bernard, 64 New York Times, xvi, 66, 65, 72–73, 75,
Moss, Frank, 93 114, 132, 244–45, 264, 300, 314,
Mossad, 29, 282 326, 337, 341; and Cambodia, 157–
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 24, 174 68; chemical biological weapons,
muckraking, xv, 89, 93, 133, 138, 157, 89, 95–96, 104, 121, 123–24; Chile,
173, 176, 243–44, 250, 285, 304 169–84; CIA domestic spying, 185–
Mulay, Larry, 52 201; Glomar Explorer, 201–13; Gulf
Mulcahy, Kevin, 238–40 and Western, 224–32; John Lavelle,
Mulligan, Hugh, 83 135–43; Libya, 238–240; My Lai,
Murrow, Edward R., 185 6, 18, 22, 30–31, 39, 127; organized
Musharraf, Pervez, 323 crime, 227–33; Vietnam, 79, 82,
Myers, Richard, 321 Watergate, 144–56
My Lai, xi, xiv, 1–44, 53, 58, 82–83, 122, New York University Medical School,
124–29, 131–33, 137, 139, 188, 199, 215
221, 293, 295, 313, 335, 338–39 Nightline, 247, 251, 255, 271
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Nixon, Richard, 4, 12, 116, 118,
Its Aftermath (Hersh), 36 243, 244–45, 258–59, 289; on
Nation, 99, 256, 264, 283, 321 anti-Semitism, 35, 242; chemi-
National Press Building, 5, 19, 28, 44, cal biological weapons, 2, 118,
125, 237 120, 130, 166; on Hersh, 160; on
National Public Radio, xii, 209, 275 John Lavelle, 134, 126–29, 152,
National Review, 30, 237, 322, 336 158; pardon by Ford, 176, 261–62;
National Security Council, 161, 213, Presidential tapes, 176, 261–62;
241, 247, 270 press relations, 19, 29, 31, 35, 157;
Naughton, James, 145, 148 Watergate, 146–49, 152, 158
Nazis, 162, 280 Nocera, Joe, xvi
NBC, 24, 26, 38, 114, 119, 178, 180, Norgle, Charles R., 259
240, 262, 295–96, 315, 342 Noriega, Manuel Antonio, 269–72,
Negev Desert, 276 275, 343
Newman, Larry, 290 Nornienko, Georgi, 266
Newman, Paul, 108–9 North Vietnam, 72, 78–79, 81–82, 131–
New Republic, 46, 60, 84, 89, 120, 193, 32, 135–36, 138, 142, 165
198–99, 268 Northwestern University, 50, 63
Newsweek, 41, 101, 140, 194, 196, 197, Nussbaum, Michael, 26, 30, 259–60,
209, 254, 305, 312, 335 267
410 INDEX
Oakes, John, 193 Perle, Richard, 323–27
Oates, Mary Louise, 110–11 Peters, Charles, 288
Obama, Barack, 14, 143, 343 Peterzell, Jay, 236–38
Obenhaus, Mark, 262, 295–96 Pfautz, James C., 265–66
Obst, David, 4, 17–23, 26, 28–30, 32, Phelan, James, 212
35, 40, 44, 271–72, 338 Phelps, Bob, 144–46, 148, 151–53, 204,
O’Donnell, Kenny, 288, 290 215, 227
Ogarkov, Nikolai, 266 Pierre SD, 59–61
Oglala Sioux Indians, 59 Pike, Otis G., 134–36, 139, 195
Oliver, Kendrick, 17, 19, 23, 29, 34, Pincus, Walter, 185, 193
40, 42 Pinkville, 10, 15–16, 20, 27
Olmsted, Kathryn S., 196, 200, 211 Platoon, 272
Olson, Gregory, 33–34 Poland, 170, 180, 274, 283
O’Malley, Jerome F., 142 Polk, James, 67
Omar, Mullah, 320–21, 328 Polk Award, 168, 216, 338
O’Neill, Michael, 213 Poindexter, John, 270
Operation Phoenix, 1, 39 Pollard, Jonathon, 279, 308
O’Reilly, Bill, 321 Powell, Colin, 306
Powers, Dave, 288, 290
Pakistan, 258–59, 263, 276 Powers, Thomas, xiv, 268, 303, 340
Palm Beach FL, 287, 290 Prescott, Peter, 254
Panama, 269–71 Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon
Pape, Frank, 51–52 White House (Hersh), xi, xii, 234–57,
Paramount Pictures, 224, 232 275, 285
Paris Peace Talks, 23–24, 133–34, 250 Proxmire, William, 40, 161–62
Peace Corps, 287 Public Broadcasting System, 262
Peers, William, 33, 36, 128 Pulitzer, Joseph , 135
Peers Commission, 36–38, 44, 127, 134 Pulitzer Prize, xi, xii, 19, 32, 44, 58, 83,
Pentagon, 2–3, 38, 41, 72, 85–88, 170, 124–25, 132–33, 146, 147, 155, 170,
284, 321–22, 325, 328, 333–34; Cam- 180, 200–201, 295, 301
bodia, 163–65; chemical biological Pyle, Richard, 61, 80
weapons, 89, 91–92, 120–21; Gulf
Quarnstrom, Lee, 56–58
War, 307, 313, 315; John Lavelle,
136, 138, 140; My Lai, 6, 16, 20, Raby, Kenneth A., 10
23–24, 32, 42; public relations, 76– Radcliff College, 290
77, 79, 80, 84, 89, 334; Vietnam, Radford, Charles E., 247–48
78–79, 81, 83, 100, 284 Ramparts, 109, 120,
Pentagon Papers, 37, 82, 148, 186, 203, Random House, 35, 125, 150, 264, 267,
209, 236, 284 278
People, 262, 269, 291 Raskin, Frances, 289
INDEX 411
Raskin, Hyman, 289 Royko, Mike, 47–48, 57, 125
Rather, Dan, 331–32 Rugaber, Walter, 145, 152
Reagan, Ronald, 195, 236, 239–40, Rumsfeld, Donald, 215, 320, 322–23,
253, 256, 263–56, 270, 272–73, 325 326–27; Abu Ghraib, 328–29, 333–35
Redford, Robert, 198 Russia, 91, 201–2, 263–65, 283, 309
Reedy, George, 71 Russo, Gus, 221
Reeves, Richard, 286, 302–4 Ryan, John D., 136
Remnick, David, 309, 312–15, 317–19,
Safer, Morley, 41
322, 324, 331–32, 341
Safire, William, 248–49, 253, 300, 343
Reston, James, 30, 134–35, 137–38, 145,
Salisbury, Harrison, 83, 235; on CIA,
157, 247, 253
187–88, 207–8; trip to North Viet-
Reznikoff, John, 313, 316
nam, 41, 78–79, 83, 128
Rich, Frank, 299
Samson, 277, 280
Ridenhour, Ron, 20–21, 26, 34, 42,
161, The Samson Option (Hersh), 278–79,
Rivers, Mendel, 5 284, 287
Roberts, Gene, 164 Sandbrook, Dominic, 111
Rockefeller, John D., 45, 225 Sanders, Don, 81
Rockefeller, Nelson, 75, 98, 190, 199, Saxbe, William, 166
250 Schanberg, Sydney, 77, 163, 217, 226–
Rockefeller Commission, 195, 198– 27, 255
99, 199, 205 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 60, 220, 286,
Rogers, William, 122, 137, 165 301, 303–4
Rolling Stone, xv, 188, 198, 211 Schlesinger, James, 163, 187, 190–92
Romney, George, 118 Schorr, Daniel, 177, 185, 205
Rose, Charlie, xvi, 299, 321 Schroeppel, Richard C., 63
Rosenfeld, Stephen, 249 Schultz, George, 264, 266
Rosenthal, A. M. (Abe), 131–33, 135, Schwarzkopf, Norman, 285, 306, 309
183, 203, 215–16, 218, 224, 230– Schweid, Barry, 67–70
31, 243, 250, 252–53; anonymous Schweiker, Richard, 23
sources, 193; arguments, 194, 216, Scowcroft, Brent, 208
220, 227, 230, 232–34, 341; CIA, 189, Scranton, William, 65
193–94; Glomar Explorer, 202, 209– Sculz, Tad, 145
10, 214, 223, 225, 229, 234; hires Secret Service, 169, 290, 296, 303
Hersh, 131–32, 149–50; Pulitzer Securities and Exchange Commis-
Prize, 180, 200–201; Watergate, sion, 225, 229
149, 156 Segretti, Donald, 151
Roth, Philip, 274 Selective Service (draft), 72, 74–75, 78,
Roosevelt, Franklin, D., 60, 90 84, 103–4
Roosevelt, Theodore, 176, 304 Semple, Robert, 145
412 INDEX
Senate Armed Services Committee, Spock, Benjamin, 103–4
134, 139, 143–44, 162, 324 Sporkin, Stanley, 229
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Stars and Stripes, 61, 86, 88
173, 175 State Department. See U.S. Depart-
Shamir, Yitzhak, 282 ment of State
Shaw, David, 337 Steffens, Lincoln, 176
Shaw, Gaylord, 67–69, 78, 80, 86 Stein, Howard, 110–11
Shawn, William, 128 Stennis, John, 139, 141
Sheehan, Neil, 82–83, 148 Stephens, Mitchell, 183–84
Sheinbaum, Stanley, 20 Stern, Laurence, 172, 194, 214–15
Sherman, Scott, xv Stern, Philip, 7
Sherman, Tony, 290 Stern, Richard, 47
Sidle, Winant, 6, 23–24 Stevens, Geoffrey, 280
Siegal, Al, 235 Stewart, Jon, xvi, 328
Siegenthaler, John, 212 St. George, Andrew, 150
Silberman, James, 234, 253, 285–86 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 22
Silberman, Laurence, 192, 207 Stone, I. F., 84–85, 237
Silver, Michael, 50 Stone, Oliver, 271–72
Simon and Schuster, 224 Stout, Richard, 99, 108, 113–14
Simons, Howard, 44, 154 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty
Sinclair, Upton, 176, 225 (SALT), 118, 249, 252, 259
60 Minutes, 26, 127, 331 Strauss, Leo, 324
Skull Valley UT, 92–93 Sturgis, Frank, 150
Slate, 322 Sulzberger, Arthur Ochs, 188, 195,
Smathers, George, 287 214, 220, 341; Glomar Explorer,
Smith, Gerard, 122 203, 205, 207, 209, 211; Gulf and
Smith, Margaret Chase, 65
Western, 227, 229; on investigative
Smith, Robert M., 144
reporting, 197, 233
Snepp, Frank, 239
Summa Corp., 206
Solis, Gary D., 315
Summit Books, 234, 249
Song My, 10, 15
Sununu, John, 285
Sorensen, Ted, 286, 296, 301
SUNY New Paltz, xiii, 125–26, 260–61
Sorin, Gerald, 126–27, 274
Swanson, Jan, 93
South Dakota, 2, 57, 59–60, 66, 195
Sylvester, Arthur, 71, 80
South Vietnam, 78, 84, 106, 186
Symington, Stuart, 141
Soviet Union, 80, 128, 191, 273; chemi-
Syria, 278, 329
cal biological weapons, 119–20,
Szegedy-Maszak, Marianne, xv
122; Glomar Explorer, 205, 213–14;
Israel, 275, 278–79, 282, 308; KAL, Taguba, Antonio M., 332–33
263–69; SALT, 249, 252, 259 Talese, Gay, 132
INDEX 413
Taliban, 320–22, 329 Vanity Fair, 15, 317
Tarbell, Ida, 176, 225 Vanunu, Mordechai, 282
The Target Is Destroyed (Hersh), 267 Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Wood-
Terpil, Frank, 238–40 ward), 273
Terry, Michael, 21 Vidal, Gore, 295–96
Tet offensive, 5, 23, 41, 106, 129 Viet Cong, 69, 125–31; My Lai, 1, 4, 14,
Thach, Nguyen Co, 236 16, 25
Thoman, Charles J., 95–96 Village Voice, 1, 221
Thomas, William, 206 Vonnegut, Kurt, 47, 49, 58
Thompson, Hunter S., 261
Walinsky, Adam, 117, 218
Thompson, Mark, 340
Wallace, George, 118
Time, 23, 105, 183, 194–95, 197, 209,
Wallace, Mike, 26–27
240, 299, 302, 322, 348
Times of London, 299 Wall Street, 272
Today Show, 127, 298, 314 Wall Street Journal, 314, 324, 326, 329
Topping, Seymour, 217, 228, 230–31, Walsh, Denny, 149, 152, 154, 233
234–35 Walters, Robert, 28
Totenberg, Nina, 140 Warnke, Paul, 275, 280
Trento, Joe, 182–84 Warren Commission, 286
Trireme Partners, 325 Warshafsky, Ted, 110–11
Trujillo, Rafael, 196 Washington Monthly, 288
Tucker, Douglas B., 7 Washington Post, 1, 18, 20, 31, 105, 140,
Tucker, Jonathan B., 122 329; and Glomar Explorer, 209; and
Turner, Kathleen, 73 Hersh, 66, 249, 267, 296; and John
Turner, Stansfield, 271 F. Kennedy, 297, 302, 305; My Lai,
20, 22, 31; rivalry with Times, 133,
United Nations, 79, 90, 121, 132, 175, 145, 149, 151, 194, 270; and Water-
271, 335
gate, 138, 145
United Press International (UPI), xvi,
Watergate, 65, 95, 136, 138, 144–56,
2, 20, 32, 42–43, 58–59, 68, 74, 82,
186–87, 193, 196, 201, 204, 243,
110, 113, 178
262, 273, 285, 337, 341
University of Chicago, 12, 45, 46, 324
Watson, Albert W., 30
Unruh, Jesse, 118
Weekly Standard, 323
U.S. Air Force, 134–43
Weisberg, Jacob, 303
U.S. Army, 55, 56, 92–93, 128, 309, 310;
Weinberg, Steve, 303–4, 342
and My Lai, 3, 6, 9, 16, 33, 37, 38, 41
Weiner, Bob, 311, 313
U.S. Department of State, 67, 132, 173,
Weisman, John, 342
177, 179, 236, 253, 258
Weisman, Phil, 54
van Courtland Moon, John Ellis, 123 West Virginia, 288
Van de Kamp, John, 219 Wheeler, Earle, 5, 81, 122, 164, 166
414 INDEX
White, John, 125 145, 151, 154–59, 197–98, 273, 286,
Wicker, Tom, 138, 165; on Chile, 172, 293, 337–38; and David Obst, 155,
174, 176, 178, 181; on CIA, 177, 198 271–72; sourcing, 185, 243; and
Wills, Gary, 301–2 Watergate, 138, 144, 146–50, 154
Wilson, Edwin, 238 World Trade Center, 319
Wilson, Hugh, 280
Yardley, Jonathon, 305
Wise, David, 195, 340
Yeosock, John J., 310
Witcover, Jules, 301
Yom Kippur War, 279
Wolfe, Alan, 253–54, 256
yellow journalism, 49, 73, 301
Wolfowitz, Paul, 323
Woodstock festival, 1, 3 Ziegler, Ronald, 29, 157, 169
Woodward, Bob, 18, 157–58, 213, 233, Zimbrakos, Paul, 49–54, 57, 74
344; CIA, 270; Hersh rival, xv, Zimmerman, Peter D., 280
INDEX 415