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  And yet my life was changed there—perhaps salvaged—by an intervention that I managed to repress for three decades. Flash forward to 1983, in the months after I published The Price of Power, a very critical look at the White House career of Henry Kissinger. I was working in Washington, D.C., happily married with three children, and my days at Navy Pier had evaporated from my memory bank. The book made waves, lots of them, pro and con, and generated a flood of letters. One, carefully typed, was from a University of Illinois professor named Bernard Kogan who introduced himself by saying that he had been a recently frocked Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago who, in the fall of 1954, was teaching a modern literature course at Navy Pier. “Dear Mr. Hersh,” his letter began. “I am sure you do not remember me.” I did not, even after he explained his reason for writing. “I intervened with you in a way I have only done two times in my career. In one case it was on behalf of a young man who became a surgeon and has saved many lives. The other intervention was with you. I am proud of both of you.” I had no idea what the guy was talking about. And then, as I reread the letter, memory flooded back with a jolt, as did tears. It was three decades earlier and class had just ended. I was trying to hide in a back row, as always, and scrambling toward the door when Kogan called out my name and asked me to come talk to him. Total anxiety. Had I fucked up? I walked up and the first thing he said was “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” I remembered understanding exactly what he meant. It was a question I’d been asking myself for weeks. In response I mumbled something about my father dying and being left with no choice but to run the family business. I did not remember more until the editing of this memoir: Then I recalled that a week earlier I had turned in an essay comparing a novel by the British writer Somerset Maugham with a contemporary American work, perhaps an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and Kogan returned the paper to me marked A with a lot of kind comments scribbled on it. Kogan stunned me by asking if I would meet him at the University of Chicago admissions office as soon as possible. I did, took the entrance test given to all candidates that day, or soon after, was accepted, and immediately transferred, as the fall semester had just begun.

  I was at home there, with its focus on critical thinking and its core curriculum that relied not on textbooks but on original works of scholars and theoreticians. Most important, the final grade for many of the courses was based solely on a four- to six-hour written test. I could always write—say exactly what I wanted to say in one take—and that ability got me through college with better grades than I perhaps deserved.

  As for the wonderful Dr. Kogan, within a few weeks or so of receiving his letter, I flew to Chicago to meet with him and give a talk, at his request, before the Chicago chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honors society, which he had founded in the late 1970s. I also made it a point from then on to be as available as possible for lectures or classroom discussions for those teachers in the Washington area who had questions about America’s foreign policy, whether in college or high school. Bernard Kogan and I had our last exchange of letters in 1998, when he told me he was ill. In late 1997, he had written, with an obvious sense of satisfaction, “One thing is crystal clear, Seymour, that you’re not now the fairly quiet young man whom I took aside and counseled outside the classroom one afternoon in the ’50s.” Thank you, Dr. Kogan.

  My college days at the University of Chicago were exciting and fun. The university had more than its share of oddballs, many of them brilliant and iconoclastic, to be sure. I was not a Maoist, or a Platonist, or a Socratic, but I obviously was a fellow oddball, because I mixed education with continuing to run the family cleaning store and still sharing the townhouse with my mother. Nonetheless, I found time to study, play a year or two of varsity baseball, join a fraternity, try to figure out girls, and grow up. My mother, to her credit, had become more involved in the day-to-day running of the store, which was on a glide path steadily going down but still producing enough income to keep us afloat. I had nothing to do with journalism, other than learning to do the daily New York Times crossword, looking at headlines, and worrying about Ike and Nikita and the bomb. By 1958, with graduation for me and Alan approaching, freedom beckoned. Al, faithfully living up to the commitment he had made, took an engineering job in San Diego, moved there with his wife, and arranged a nearby apartment for our mother. The cleaning store was sold, for little money, to an employee. I moved into a twelve-dollar-a-week basement room in Hyde Park, the South Side neighborhood of the university, with a bathroom down the hall. It was glorious.

  With my degree in English, but with no honors, for the next few months I couldn’t find a decent job. I was most interested in the Xerox Corporation, which was then a year away from marketing the first commercial copying machine. I don’t remember who gave me the heads-up about the company, but by the end of summer it was clear the company was not interested. One of my good friends in college was David Currie, a fellow baseball player whose father, Brainerd, was a leading legal scholar and professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He also loved baseball and spent hours hitting fly balls to his son and me. David had gone off to Harvard Law School the year before; he clerked for Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and went on to spend more than four decades teaching at the Chicago Law School. When I went to see his father and explained that, late in the summer as it was, I wanted to be admitted to the U of C Law School, Professor Currie got it done within a few days. He, like Bernard Kogan, saw more in me at that time than I saw in myself.

  I got through a few quarters with reasonable grades, but found the law boring, and felt the same way about law school, with its emphasis on reading cases and memorizing them. I had pretty much disappeared by the end of the year and was kicked out of school by the dean, Edward Levi (who would reenter my life a decade later). I was far from troubled, because I knew the dean had done the right thing. My only regret was that Brainerd died in 1965 and did not live to see me make my mark in another field.

  The next few months remain a blur. I thought about business school and went to a few classes. Nope. I had worked part-time while in law school selling beer and whiskey at a Walgreens drugstore in suburban Evergreen Park, in the far reaches of southeast Chicago, and began doing the same full-time at a Walgreens in Hyde Park. One evening two Chicago writers I admired greatly, Saul Bellow and Richard Stern, came in to buy some booze. Stern, whose seminar on writing fiction I had taken while in college—he personally picked the students—shamed me by essentially asking, as had Kogan, what are you doing here?

  It was in a what-to-do? mood that, while having a beer at a neighborhood bar, I ran into a guy whom I had met but could not place. His name was Peter Lacey, and he reminded me that he had tried to pick up my date a year or so earlier at a party. (Such thievery was known in Hyde Park as bird-dogging.) We shared a laugh and began talking over a few beers. What was I doing? Selling whiskey. Peter, in turn, told me he was now working for Time magazine, or wanted to work there, but had begun his career in journalism as a cub reporter for the City News Bureau (CNB) of Chicago. City News, as I subsequently learned, had been set up at the turn of the century by the Chicago newspapers to field reporters who would cover the city’s courts and police headquarters, sparing money and staff for the big boys. The bureau’s focus was on street crime—of which there was plenty in Chicago—and its reporting served as a tip sheet for the big dailies; the bureau was also a source of young, ambitious reporters. City News had been made famous, briefly, by The Front Page, the perennial hit play—later a movie—written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

  It sounded like fun, especially because Lacey had also told me that City News had two recruiting vehicles for its constantly changing reporting staff: Half came from Northwestern University’s famed Medill School of Journalism, and the other half came from those with college degrees who applied. I have no idea today if this was so, but it was what I believed at the time. So I went to th
e City News Bureau’s office downtown and filled out an application. No references were sought and I gave none. I was told by a copyboy that I would be called when my name came up. A few months later I changed apartments, without giving a thought to the fact that City News now had an out-of-date phone number for me. A few more months went by, and I continued to sell whiskey, shamefully, and continued, without shame, to enjoy my freedom—a freedom I had not known since my father became ill. I spent my days reading the moderns and the not so moderns—William Styron, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Nelson Algren, James Farrell—and keeping a journal with all of the words I did not know, such as “amanuensis” and “sobriquet.” My favorite novel for a long time was Saul Bellow’s famed The Adventures of Augie March, about a Chicago boy, like me, who was not making it.

  One Friday night, after work, I was invited to a poker game at the apartment I had recently left, which was now inhabited by a group of graduate students who knew, as I did not, how to play poker. I was busted by two or three in the morning and decided to crash on a couch in the dingy living room I knew well. The next morning, just after nine o’clock—I was dead asleep—the phone rang. I answered it. It was an editor named Ryberg at City News. He was looking for Hersh. I confessed. He asked if I still wanted a job as a cub reporter, pay thirty-five dollars a week, and, if so, could I start immediately. I could. Weeks later, as I was becoming more and more interested in the news business, I watched Walter Ryberg, the day city editor who spent five decades at City News, seek out a new reporter. He picked up the stack of applications and began dialing. If there was no answer, or the applicant no longer lived there, the application was shoved to the bottom of the pile. My newspaper career began because of a poker game at which I lost all the money I had.

  · TWO ·

  City News

  My first assignment at City News was humbling. I was assigned, as a copyboy, to the evening shift, from five o’clock on, and the demands on me were moronic. My most important task was to speedily churn out scores of copies of dispatches as they were produced. The stories, once edited, were typed onto a waxed-paper stencil that I would wrap around the drum of the office mimeograph machine. I would then begin cranking like hell. The copies I produced were routed into pneumatic tubes and sent flying to the bureau’s newspaper, radio, and television clients. It could be madness if there was big news—a double murder or a long-awaited jury verdict in a major criminal trial—and I would invariably be suffused by the end of my shift with the blue ink that I had to feed into the machine.

  My other basic chore was even more inane. I could not finish my shift without doing a detailed scrubbing, with special soap, of the desk of Larry Mulay, the early morning editor who had been at City News since the days of John Dillinger and mob shoot-outs in the streets. I could have won three Pulitzer Prizes the night before and still be shown the door if Mulay’s desk did not pass his fastidious white-glove inspection the next morning. He would put on the gloves and run his fingers all over the desk, looking for signs that there was a copyboy who was not going to make it. An even more odious task came on Friday nights, when City News was responsible for forwarding the area’s high school basketball scores to all of its clients. I spent hours on the telephone recording scores for the bureau’s one-man sports desk, whose sullen editor took his miserable job far too seriously, as I would later learn.

  Nonetheless, I was smitten. Most of the editors and reporters were cynics and wise to what can only be described as the Chicago way. The cops were on the take, and the mob ran the city. The City News reporters, with rare exception, ignored the corruption and, in return, were given access to crime scenes and allowed to park anywhere they wished as long as they displayed a press card on the dashboard. Chicago’s Outer Drive, its main south-to-north highway, was famously depicted by comedian Mort Sahl as the last outpost of collective bargaining. The bars stayed open after hours, and the cops got more free drinks than reporters did. Lenny Bruce was doing his thing a few blocks away at Mister Kelly’s nightclub on Rush Street, and Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk could be heard, over a beer, at the Sutherland Lounge on the South Side. The ambitious young reporters working the courthouses and police beats understood their mission was to live within the system and somehow help make the city work. The City News street reporters were, so I thought, the ultimate citizen cynics—wise guys full of badinage and constantly mocking all (especially a new copyboy). They lived totally in the moment. I, who spent so much of my life feeling as if I had little control of anything, was dazzled.

  My eagerness to get on with it—to escape from desk cleaning and mimeographing and move out onto the streets—was annoying to the editors, especially to Bob Billings, the night editor, my night editor, at City News. Most of the reporters worked outside the main office, with its shabby desks, dirty floors, old typewriters, and marginal lighting. There was a copyboy, an editor, and three or four rewrite men; the important stories were phoned in to the office by the reporters scattered through the city, and put together by rewrite. The life-and-death rule was check it out before calling it in. One of the senior editors, Arnold Dornfeld, who lived outside the city and sometimes wore muddy boots that, to my horror, he enjoyed parking on Larry Mulay’s desk, had famously told a reporter, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The guys on the street who did not get their facts straight or were consistently being out-reported did not last long. One of my jobs as a copyboy was to read all Chicago dailies for stories or details that our reporters missed, and paste copies of their better stories on the office bulletin board. The notices were known as “scoop sheets,” for obvious reasons, and I confess to being delighted to scoop away. There was a constant shuffling of reporters and I wanted in.

  There was lots of time for chitchat, which was good, but Billings was almost constantly on my case—partially out of boredom and partially because I was a good foil. I initially saw Bob, a big guy with a square jaw, as a cliché in action. He had played football at the University of Illinois, talked tough, and was dating, as all of us somehow knew, the estranged wife of a Chicago police captain—an awesome feat that, given the reputation of the cops, put him at peril of his life. Bob, then in his late twenties, repeatedly made it clear to me that he was totally incompatible with a punk Jew from the University of Chicago who could not get sandwich orders straight and churned out blurry copies on the mimeograph. But I had begun reading the four Chicago newspapers daily, as well as The New York Times, and would occasionally point out information therein that our reporters did not have. I also always had a book, and Bob invariably wanted to know what I was reading. He would then loudly pronounce that the book, especially if it was a novel, was not going to help make me a good reporter. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that Billings was well read, far brighter and more open than he wanted others to see.

  His interest in me provoked torture, too. One insanely miserable night in Chicago—heavy snow, a vicious wind off Lake Michigan, temperature well below zero—there was a police report of a routine fire in a manhole a few blocks from the office. I jumped when Bob asked if I wanted a reporting assignment—my first—outside the office. Cover the fire, he said. I dressed as warmly as I could and eagerly dashed to the scene of the crime, showed the deputy fire chief in charge my press card, and, taking out a notepad, asked, “What’s up?” The chief was mystified. It was just a fire in a manhole. No one was hurt. There was no story. Get the hell out of here, he told me. I returned to the office and reported the nonstory to Billings. What was the name of the fire chief? I didn’t know. Get out there and get it, he said. I did so. Write it up, said Bob. And so I did, treating the manhole fire with dignity and extensively quoting the deputy fire chief. Billings edited the story and had me run copies off on the mimeograph—all of which he trashed, as I knew he would.

  A few weeks later my days as a copyboy were over. I was initially assigned as the overnight reporter at the central police headquarters just south of dow
ntown, a promotion that clearly emanated from Billings. Over the next few months, I would learn the basics, both good and bad, of my newfound profession while always keeping the faith.

  Lesson one came within a few weeks. A squawk on the police radio well before daylight said there were “officers down”—a double shooting on Roosevelt Road, a main thoroughfare just south of downtown. I had a ten-year-old Studebaker that needed a lot of care in the winter—four hours in the cold was more than enough to freeze the battery, and I spent night after night having to run the car every four hours, whether at home or at police headquarters—but luckily it was ready to go. I sped the mile or so to the scene.

  What a scene. My police pass got me inside a marked-off perimeter, and someone told me the victims were Feds, two postal inspectors. An unmarked four-door sedan was crumpled up against a light pole. Bullet holes were all over the windows and doors. Two men were inside, heads back, with blood all over. I had only seen one dead man in my life—my father in his coffin before burial—but these two were goners. A very angry Chicago police sergeant was in charge, and I approached him, chirping out, “City News.” He said nothing. I asked if the victims were dead. The cop grabbed me by my jacket and shoved me, hard, up against a squad car. “Not unless they’re pronounced,” adding “you asshole,” or “you fuck,” or “you shithead.” He meant pronounced dead by a police coroner. No coroner was on the scene yet. What to do? I had a scoop, of sorts, because no other reporter had yet arrived. Should I dash to a pay phone and call it in? I was sure my mother loved me; did I need to check it out?