Reporter Read online

  ALSO BY SEYMOUR M. HERSH

  The Killing of Osama bin Laden

  Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

  Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America’s Ailing Veterans and Their Government

  The Dark Side of Camelot

  The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy

  “The Target Is Destroyed”: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It

  The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House

  Cover-Up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4

  My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath

  Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Seymour M. Hersh

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hersh, Seymour M. author.

  Title: Reporter : a memoir / Seymour M. Hersh.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017051856 | ISBN 9780307263957 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525521587 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hersh, Seymour M. | Journalists—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Editors, Journalists, Publishers.

  Classification: LCC PN4874.H473 A3 2018 | DDC 070.92 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017051856

  Ebook ISBN 9780525521587

  Cover photograph by Mark Mahaney/Redux

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  v5.3_r5.1

  a

  For Elizabeth

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Seymour M. Hersh

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ONE · Getting Started

  TWO · City News

  THREE · Interludes

  FOUR · Chicago and the AP

  FIVE · Washington, At Last

  SIX · Bugs and a Book

  SEVEN · A Presidential Campaign

  EIGHT · Going After the Biologicals

  NINE · Finding Calley

  TEN · A National Disgrace

  ELEVEN · To The New Yorker

  TWELVE · Finally There

  THIRTEEN · Watergate, and Much More

  FOURTEEN · Me and Henry

  FIFTEEN · The Big One

  SIXTEEN · Off to New York

  SEVENTEEN · Kissinger, Again, and Beyond

  EIGHTEEN · A New Yorker Reprise

  NINETEEN · America’s War on Terror

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  I am a survivor from the golden age of journalism, when reporters for daily newspapers did not have to compete with the twenty-four-hour cable news cycle, when newspapers were flush with cash from display advertisements and want ads, and when I was free to travel anywhere, anytime, for any reason, with company credit cards. There was sufficient time for reporting on a breaking news story without having to constantly relay what was being learned on the newspaper’s web page.

  There were no televised panels of “experts” and journalists on cable TV who began every answer to every question with the two deadliest words in the media world—“I think.” We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered nonstop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.

  Yes, it’s a mess. And there is no magic bullet, no savior in sight for the serious media. The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high cost, unpredictable results, and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive lawsuits. The newspapers of today far too often rush into print with stories that are essentially little more than tips, or hints of something toxic or criminal. For lack of time, money, or skilled staff, we are besieged with “he said, she said” stories in which the reporter is little more than a parrot. I always thought it was a newspaper’s mission to search out the truth and not merely to report on the dispute. Was there a war crime? The newspapers now rely on a negotiated United Nations report that comes, at best, months later to tell us. And have the media made any significant effort to explain why a UN report is not considered to be the last word by many throughout the world? Is there much critical reporting at all about the UN? Do I dare ask about the war in Yemen? Or why Donald Trump took Sudan off his travel ban list? (The leadership in Khartoum sent troops to fight in Yemen on behalf of Saudi Arabia.)

  My career has been all about the importance of telling important and unwanted truths and making America a more knowledgeable place. I was not alone in making a difference; think of David Halberstam, Charley Mohr, Ward Just, Neil Sheehan, Morley Safer, and dozens of other first-rate journalists who did so much to enlighten us about the seamy side of the Vietnam War. I know it would not be possible for me to be as freewheeling in today’s newspaper world as it was until a decade ago, when the money crunch began. I vividly remember the day when David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, called in 2011 to ask if I could do an interview with an important source by telephone rather than fly three thousand miles to do one in person. David, who did everything possible to support my reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison horror in 2004—he paid dearly to enable me to publish reporting pieces in three consecutive issues—made his plea to me in what I thought was a pained, embarrassed voice, almost a whisper.

  Where are the tough stories today about America’s continuing Special Forces operations and the never-ending political divide in the Middle East, Central America, and Africa? Abuses surely continue—war is always hell—but today’s newspapers and networks simply cannot afford to keep correspondents in the field, and those that do—essentially The New York Times, where I worked happily for eight years in the 1970s, constantly making trouble—are not able to finance the long-term reporting that is needed to get deeply into the corruption of the military or intelligence world. As you will read herein, I spent two years before I was able to learn what I needed to report on the CIA’s illegal domestic spying in the 1960s and 1970s.

  I do not pretend to have an answer to the problems of our media today. Should the federal government underwrite the media, as England does with the BBC? Ask Donald Trump about that. Should there be a few national newspapers financed by the public? If so, who would be eligible to buy shares in the venture? This is clearly the time to renew the debate on how to go forward. I had believed for years that all would work out, that the failing American newspapers would be supplanted by blogs, online news collectives, and weekly newspapers that would fill in the blanks on local reporting as well as on international and national news, but, despite a few successes—VICE, BuzzFeed, Politico, and Truthout come to mind—it isn’t happening; as a result, the media, like the nation, are more
partisan and strident.

  So, consider this memoir for what it is: an account of a guy who came from the Midwest, began his career as a copyboy for a small agency that covered crime, fires, and the courts there, and eleven years later, as a freelance reporter in Washington working for a small antiwar news agency, was sticking two fingers in the eye of a sitting president by telling about a horrific American massacre, and being rewarded for it. You do not have to tell me about the wonder, and the potential, of America. Perhaps that’s why it’s very painful to think I might not have accomplished what I did if I were at work in the chaotic and unstructured journalism world of today.

  Of course I’m still trying.

  · ONE ·

  Getting Started

  I grew up on the South Side of Chicago knowing not a soul in the newspaper business and having little interest in the world beyond that of the nearest ballpark and playground. But I did read sports pages and, on Sunday, the comics. My parents were Jewish immigrants—my father, Isadore, from Lithuania; my mother, Dorothy, from Poland. They arrived at Ellis Island in the years immediately after World War I and somehow found their way to Chicago, where they met and married. I do not think either one, once in America, managed to get through high school—there was always a living to be made and a family to feed. Four children, two sets of twins, came: My sisters, Phyllis and Marcia, were born in 1932, five years before me and my brother, Alan. None of us fully understood what compelled our parents to leave their family and birthplace for the long boat ride to America. It was a conversation we never had, just as we never talked about my parents’ lack of formal education.

  We were lower-middle-class. My father owned a dry cleaning store at 4507 Indiana Avenue, in the center of what was then, and still is, a black ghetto on Chicago’s South Side. It was a 7:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m. job, with deliveries often keeping him out for another hour or so. By the time Al and I were barely into our teens, we were expected to work at the store, when asked, on weekends and busy evenings during the week. My brother and I lived in fear of our dad, who had a quick temper and whose idea of a fun Sunday was to rise early, grab the two of us, drive to the store, mop the floor, and then take us to a Russian bathhouse, long gone now, on Chicago’s West Side, where we would be sweated and then scrubbed down with rough birch branches. Our pleasure came afterward; there was a small pool to jump into, and fresh herring and root beer for lunch. Daddy was a man of mystery. I learned only six decades after his death that his hometown was Seduva, a farming village with a large community of Jews one hundred or so miles northwest of the capital of Vilnius. In August 1941, Seduva’s Jewish population of 664, including 159 children, was marched outside the village and executed, one by one, by a German commando unit aided by Lithuanian collaborators. My father never discussed Nazi Germany or World War II. In his own way, Isadore Hersh was a Holocaust survivor as well as a Holocaust denier.

  My father did tell me, however, that he had earned a few precious dollars after landing in America in the early 1920s by playing birdsongs on a violin. It was just a story until, under much duress, my brother and I began taking violin lessons on Sunday afternoons with David Moll, who was then, at the end of the war, a violinist with the Chicago Symphony. Al and I would pathetically scratch around for an hour or so, and then Moll and our father would play duets, on and on. Our father really could play but never did so outside the odd hour or so with Moll. I remember only one other of his pleasures—monthly Saturday night card games with his landsmen, fellow refugees from Seduva who, like him, were small-business men who somehow ended up in Chicago.

  My father never figured out America. When Al and I were sophomores in high school, we moved from our bare apartment in what we thought was a largely Jewish community on East Forty-Seventh Street to a new housing development miles away on the far South Side. It had to have been our mother’s idea. Our new home was a corner unit in a townhouse complex, replete with some new furniture inside, covered in plastic, and a small patch of grass outside. We hated it, even if it did have two bathrooms, because we were far removed from our friends and the playing fields we knew so well. Within a few days of moving in, I stood with my father as he dutifully, and very quietly—he was always quiet, until his temper flared—watered our lawn. At some point one of our new neighbors came toward us with a big smile. He was as Irish as could be, with a strong brogue. He said his name was McCarthy and welcomed us into the neighborhood. My father shook his hand and asked, very plaintively, “Do you happen to be of the Jewish faith, Mr. McCarthy?” I can still feel the mortification as I stormed into the house in utter shame. My mother must have struggled to adapt to America, too, but she found refuge, happily, I guess, in an obsession with cooking and baking. Food became her essential means of communication. Mom was, to be fair, a marvelous baker of cookies and pastry; I can still taste her apple strudel, even if I cannot remember sharing any private thoughts with her.

  Dad smoked three packs of Lucky Strikes a day—I dreaded his constant coughing at night—and was diagnosed with acute lung cancer when I was barely sixteen. That kept me from smoking more than an occasional joint throughout my life. There was an unsuccessful operation, and the disease crawled along for more than a year, eventually metastasizing into brain cancer. I was the designated caretaker because I was less afraid of displeasing him and being whacked, as occasionally happened, by the leather strop he used to sharpen the straight razor with which he shaved every morning. One of my early memories is watching in awe as he sharpened and carefully shaved with the scary razor. My father remained incommunicative but was often inwardly enraged at his fate. And ours. You could sense it. He would pass away, at age forty-nine, in late July 1954, a month after my brother and I graduated from high school.

  I barely made it, having slipped, along with my dad, into a funk. I had always been an aggressive learner, a self-starter who at the age of thirteen or so joined the Book-of-the-Month Club and dutifully mailed one dollar for the monthly nonfiction selection—more often than not an anticommunist diatribe written by J. Edgar Hoover or people who shared his views. But there were also delights—long histories of the Hapsburg monarchy and studies of the Roman Catholic Church and the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages. High school, though, had become increasingly irrelevant for me as my father slowly faded away. I cut classes, ignored homework, smarted off to teachers, and in all sorts of other antisocial ways displayed acute distress that no one picked up, in school or at home.

  I made a deal with Alan, who had been fascinated for years by the new science of cybernetics, led by Norbert Wiener of MIT, its guru, that he could flee Chicago for the downstate campus at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, two hours away by car. It was understood that in return he would take care of our mother after graduation. Al studied electrical engineering and made all in the family proud by going on to earn a doctorate in fluid dynamics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

  I did not sulk because all along I had been much more engaged than Al in my father’s cleaning store, with its constant sweatshop smell from the steam generated by a pressing machine as it pounded away on suits and coats. I wanted to make sure the struggling business survived and would keep my mother in pots and pans and flour. Talk about dislocation. It did not matter that I and two others in my high school class had scored the same highest grade on a standardized IQ test in our senior year; the other two went off to Harvard, and I had no idea what I would do, other than continuing to run a family business. My sisters had fled the family much earlier, and so it was just me, my mom, a new home I hated, and the store. Being smart was, at that moment, irrelevant. But I was my own man and made the choices I thought had to be made, even if they kept me on Indiana Avenue.

  I got an early lesson in business ethics a few weeks after my father’s death from Benny Rubenstein, the patriarch of the local temple in our old neighborhood—which none in our agnostic family went near, although Al and I had gone to Hebrew school the
re, essentially because it was adjacent to a great softball field. Benny, who survived the Holocaust, was a thin little guy in his late eighties or so with a big nose and huge tufts of white hair coming out of his ears. It was hot, a midsummer heat, and his apartment, like all others in our old neighborhood, had no air-conditioning. I was more than a little rattled about being summoned by Benny, and as I walked in, the old man flicked out his hand and caught a fly, squeezed it, and let it fall. Try it sometime. There is no way I could forget his words, said in the most Yiddish of Yiddish accents: “Seymour. You are now the man of the house, and you must take care of your mother. So let me give you some advice as a businessman. Fuck them before they fuck you!” I was nonplussed. Did he really say “fuck” two times? Was he talking about Nazis or a would-be business partner? I got out of that apartment as fast as I could.

  A month later I followed the only path I had: I, a generalist who hated science but was consumed by novels and history, would go to a two-year junior college at the edge of downtown Chicago that had no admission requirement other than the ability to pay a forty-five-dollar semester fee for a locker. The school, known as Navy Pier, was opened by the University of Illinois immediately after the war in a former navy training base that jutted more than half a mile into Lake Michigan. It was meant to accommodate returning veterans with little money who were desperate for education. After two years, students had to transfer to the main campus at Urbana-Champaign to get their degree.

  My weekday schedule called for me to open the store at seven o’clock and then, when help arrived, to drive a few miles north to the school to attend classes. I remember walking along a dim central corridor linked to dank wooden classrooms that had initially been used for teaching navigation and other skills to men going off to war. I especially hated the compulsory gym classes, which required all male students to run, or try to run, a quarter mile daily under one minute. I knew no one at the school and made no friends there. It was just driving, going to classes, running around a track, and driving back to the store.