Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  I quickly found that what editors called human interest stories were hiding in plain sight. I had moved into a cheap room near the University of Chicago, and one weekend night I went with my wife-to-be to a film festival at the school and found an overflow crowd of students oohing and aahing to The Maltese Falcon, the 1941 classic film starring Humphrey Bogart as Dashiell Hammett’s detective Sam Spade. It was clear something newsworthy was going on. I sought out the guy running the festival and learned that Bogart and his movies were the rage in colleges across the nation. I made a few more calls and wrote a piece for the AP describing the phenomenon, and it was published coast-to-coast, including prominently on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune.

  I also took advantage of the fact that my years running the family business in Chicago’s black ghetto put me in touch with the international importance and vibrancy of gospel music. When the famed Mahalia Jackson fell ill in 1964 with a heart ailment, I telephoned her in the hospital after being refused permission to visit and wrote about the outpouring of letters and flowers she had received. Many were from Europe, where she was widely admired. “There were so many flowers,” she told me, with a laugh, “that one morning I woke up and thought I was dead.” We did a lot of Chicago talking, especially about my career as a young white boy trying to make a living running a cleaning store in the heart of the black ghetto. I also told her how a few of my father’s favorite customers made a point of being around as I closed up after a busy Saturday night, with the day’s receipts in my pocket. I thought they were there just to chat; it would be years before I understood they were there to protect me. A few months later, after her recovery, Mahalia invited me for a fried-chicken-and-corn-bread lunch at her home on Chicago’s South Side and told me her doctors had assured her that she could continue singing. She had gone to a Roman Catholic Mass and prayed, she said, “for the Lord to continue to strengthen and heal me. I’m a Baptist but I believe there is only one God.” I wrote a long feature story for the AP about her recovery, and her music, and put to use one of the lessons I was learning: My story was much more readable because I let her good humor, humanity, and humility come through.

  Arimond and his fellow editors in Chicago must have seen some talent, and they, like others had throughout my early years as a reporter, just let me run free. I wrote dozens of self-generated feature stories while in Chicago on subjects that had to have caused my editors angst—including police corruption, birth control, and civil rights abuses. Chicago, like many big cities in the mid-1960s, was feeling the pressure of black America for equal rights across the board, including the housing market. Black families were constantly being told there were no vacancies in apartment buildings that were continually renting to whites. I wrote a long piece about such discrimination, quoting, for some idiotic reason, “circles close” to the real estate community. On the afternoon after the publication of one such piece, I came to work and saw that Arimond had posted on the office bulletin board a page from an artist’s oversized sketch pad that contained only a large circle. The caption below said, “Staff: above is an informed circle.” I felt the chill.

  Despite such back-and-forth, and my obvious sympathies, the AP assigned me in my second year in Chicago to be the civil rights reporter for the region. It was a good call for reasons the AP could not know. I had worked on and off in the family cleaning store for nearly a dozen years and had a far closer relationship with the black employees than did my dad or my mom. I spent many Sundays as a teenager going to Negro League baseball games with a young man who pressed clothes in the store and shared my love of baseball. I understood his frustrations and his sense of limitation, as well as his acceptance of the racism that, so he correctly thought, limited his life.

  My new assignment got me in contact with Martin Luther King Jr. These were the days and nights of massive rallies in the North and violent resistance. King was a genius at reading reporters and could spot those, like me, who were eager to fall in love. He was very savvy about the media, and the AP, and thus me, were important to him; my dispatches would be on the front pages of many of the important newspapers in cities where there was racial tension. King, after speaking at one tense nighttime rally in Chicago, caught my eye—how hard was that?—and crooked his finger. That meant hang around and we will talk. King knew that the rally would produce stories for the morning newspapers, but there was another news cycle for the afternoon editions. After ten minutes or so, King drew me aside and provided me with pungent quotes, in one case about his disillusionment with the Johnson administration, that would keep the story alive for another day.

  I was doing my thing, for sure, but also learning about my profession, and about the sophistication and resilience of words. On a quiet, hot Sunday night in August 1964, a black woman had been caught trying to shoplift a $2.69 bottle of gin from a neighborhood liquor store in Dixmoor, a middle-class suburb just south of Chicago whose population of thirty-one hundred was heavily black. She had been caught by the white store owner, and the initial reports said that he had thrown the woman to the ground. Tensions grew over the next few hours as word spread, accurately or not, that the store owner also had severely beaten the woman. A crowd of blacks, many of them young, congregated. Police carrying shotguns and firing tear gas dispersed them, amid reports that fifty people, most of them white, had been injured by flying bricks and stones. I quoted Dixmoor’s white deputy fire chief as saying, “I’ll tell you, it was like savages.” The disturbance would become one of the earliest of what would be many black-versus-white urban confrontations in subsequent years, but on that Sunday night it seemed to be a one-off.

  Things got much worse on the next night, when the liquor store and nearby shops were looted and set on fire by a much larger, angrier, and more confrontational group of blacks. The AP night city editor, Bob Olmstead, sent me dashing again to the scene. I ended up behind a police line, a few hundred feet from the liquor store. A fire truck was nearing the scene when a volley of what sounded like bullet shots rang out. At that point, a white cop, carrying a shotgun, screamed at me and the few other reporters at the scene to “get back” and added, “They’re shooting at us.” This was hot stuff. I dashed to a nearby telephone, crawling part of the way, as I had done in basic training, and dictated a bulletin to Olmstead that focused on the cop telling me that the protesters were firing on the police. I took a moment or two to gather myself, reviewed my notes, and then, as AP style demanded, telephoned the office to dictate a new lead backed up with more details of what I had seen and been told. There were no subsequent reports of bullet injuries or deaths, and the police eventually formed a skirmish line and drove off the protesters, while making a few arrests.

  I drove back to the AP office downtown feeling a bit heroic. I knew my story, with its vivid quotes and description of the riot scene, would be on front pages all over the world the next morning. By this time I had become an avid daily reader of The New York Times and especially its coverage of the expanding Vietnam War. David Halberstam and Charley Mohr of the Times were my heroes, along with the AP’s Malcolm Browne and the UPI’s Neil Sheehan. I got back to the office many hours later envisioning myself as a veteran combat correspondent and prepared to write a longer, more detailed account of the rioting for the next day’s afternoon papers. Olmstead had gone home by then but left a file of what had moved from Dixmoor with the overnight editor. The bulletin and lead I had dictated to Bob hours earlier had said, quoting the cop, that Negroes had opened fire on the police amid an expanding race riot. Modest, competent Bob had rewritten my first bulletin to say, “Gunfire broke out tonight” at a riot in Dixmoor. He had conveyed the urgency of the situation without getting into the issue of who started what. Of course I had no way of knowing who shot at whom, or even whether a volley of bullets had been launched. I had relied on a panicked cop despite knowing, from my time at City News, that cops often do not tell the truth, or know the truth. I also realized that I had made no effort to g
et to the rioters across the police barriers and did not begin to know what they thought the riot was about. Bob Olmstead, who went on to become an editor for the Chicago Sun-Times, taught me a master’s degree’s worth of journalism in one night.

  At some point, well into my second year in the bureau, I was asked to fill in as night city editor. It was on a quiet Sunday night. The stories I edited were routine and easily moved to New York or to the Illinois wire for the many newspapers in the state that relied on the AP for their foreign and domestic news.

  One of the bureau’s sportswriters filed a late report on a Chicago Blackhawks hockey game and then returned to the office, as usual, to write an overnight report, replete with interviews and after-game gossip, for the many newspapers in Canada and New England whose readers dwelled on such stories. The guy who covered hockey was a fine journalist, but he annoyed some of us because he had access to free house tickets for all the sporting events in the city but traded them in for free drinks in a downstairs bar instead of sharing with his fellow reporters. A popular Chicago hockey player named Reggie Fleming had been released at the end of the season, and our reporter filed a story about it, stating that when he sought him out at home for an interview, the door was slammed in his face. It was one of the last stories I edited and sent on its way before going down to the bar with a colleague, Paul Driscoll, for a post-work drink. The sports reporter was, as usual, drinking his free martini. As I walked by his booth, I complimented him, as I thought an editor should, about his story and added, “So the son of a bitch actually slammed the door on you?” No, he answered. He’d called Fleming at home and the guy hung up on him. My first night as the editor and I had just edited a story with a total lie. Should I go back to the office and file a correction? Or should I have a beer and never agree to play night editor again? I chose the latter, but wondered what poor Reggie would think when he read the story. The experience forever wiped away any desire I had to become an editor.

  Newsrooms were full of cynical talk about life and death, the lucky and the unlucky, but dealing with the fate of others was a necessary and often brutal part of the profession, as I learned one evening in Chicago. It was just another day at work until we were informed that a jammed passenger plane had crashed hours earlier somewhere in the Pacific, with many deaths. One fatality was a young woman from a suburb north of Chicago. My assignment was to telephone her home and learn what I could about her, including why she was on that plane. I also was to ask for a photograph. I, of course, resisted but was told that it was part of the job and that very often friends and family members were willing to share what they could with the media, even in the midst of their pain. I found the right telephone number and made the call. It was well after the dinner hour. It was clear after a question or two that the gentleman who answered the call had no idea that his daughter had been killed in the crash. The airline had fucked up in a way that was impossible to imagine. Someone else, perhaps a sibling, was eventually put on the phone, and through her tears I was able to share the telephone number of a contact for the airline and left it at that. There was no way I was going to ask any questions or for a photo, and my colleagues in the office agreed. I do not recall whether my anger at myself for agreeing to make the call was greater than my anger toward the airline for its irresponsibility. No AP story about the death was written that night, and I have no idea whether one ever was.

  I had gotten married in mid-1964, and by the next spring my wife, a native of New York, was as eager as I was to move east. Chicago had been fun and instructive, but America was getting more and more involved in Vietnam; it was an issue that was not going away, and in Washington I would be much closer to covering the war. I supplemented my daily newspaper reading with Bernard Fall’s wonderful work on Vietnam, with accounts of the disastrous French loss to the North Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954. I was also introduced to I. F. Stone’s Weekly by my mother-in-law and was wowed by Stone’s ability to take on, and debunk, the official accounts of events annunciated by the Johnson administration. There was no mystery to how Stone did it: He outworked every journalist in Washington.

  A requested transfer to the AP’s Washington bureau came through in the spring, and by early summer I was heading east. I’ve kept in touch with my pal Driscoll over the years, and he reminded me as I was writing this memoir of a note I received from Carroll Arimond before leaving Chicago, praising me with the most generous of words for the work I had done while in the bureau. I cannot believe I did not keep it, and did not remember it, but I’m glad that my vanity led me to share it with Paul.

  · FIVE ·

  Washington, At Last

  I hit Washington in midsummer 1965 and found the city to be slow, southern slow, and the AP bureau to be riveting and fast. I had spent my last year in Chicago monitoring the reporting out of Washington and marveling at the speed and accuracy of reporters such as Frank Cormier, Walter Mears, and Harry Kelly, names little known today, who covered the presidency, Congress, and politics. Their important stories, often initially dictated as bulletins, seemed to me to be exquisite wire service matter—just fact after fact, with no analysis, presented in clean, spare prose under rat-a-tat pressure. The wire services invariably gave America its first knowledge about a vital event at home or abroad, and I was envious of the swagger of the old pros as they dashed from a major news event to the nearest pay phone and smoothly dictated a thousand-word account.

  I spent the first week or so obligatorily hanging around the bureau, which was on the ground floor of a creaky office building on Connecticut Avenue eight blocks or so from the White House. My real job, on the overnight rewrite desk, would start on week two. Most of the AP’s reporting about the government moved from Washington on the national, or A, wire. I had just spent two years in Chicago scrambling and pleading to get my stories on that wire. Of course there was a municipal government and the city had professional sports teams, but in general local stories about politics or sports were relegated to a secondary AP wire for lesser matters, known as the B wire. That’s where I began my reporting career in Washington. One afternoon that first week, I was sent to cover a Shriners parade that threaded through downtown Washington and onto the great mall behind the White House. I understood that the Shriners did a lot of valuable charity work and supported children’s hospitals around the nation, but a parade is a parade, and it was brutally hot and sunny. I was happy to bump into another young reporter named Leonard Downie Jr., who, on his first day at The Washington Post, also had been shoved into parade purgatory. (Downie would end his career as executive editor of the Post and the author of a series of insightful books about the media business.) I filed a much too cheery story about the parade that ended up, untouched by any editing, under my name on the B wire—my first Washington byline.

  That first week I also met Don Sanders, the day city editor who, like Carroll Arimond, let his work speak for itself. He wrote occasional reviews of the performing arts, as seen in Washington, but his skill at shaping stories and anticipating the news made him the go-to guy of the Washington editing desk. He would prove to be someone who shared my dire views about the growing American involvement in the Vietnam War.

  The rewrite desk was a mandatory stop for newcomers like me, and it involved taking the major Washington stories of the day, as filed by the bureau’s reporters for the nation’s morning newspapers—those with deadlines beginning at 7:00 p.m. on the East Coast—and rewriting them overnight for the afternoon papers, with deadlines the next morning. It was easy work if there was a new development—even something as obvious as writing that “President Johnson returned last night from a triumphant visit to…” But if the story was static, the goal was to find something new—for instance, by trying to reach senators and public officials late at night by telephone. Sometimes there were dozens of stories to be turned around for the next newspaper cycle, and the overnight crew consisted of me, a fellow rewrite colleague, and a rewrite editor
who was content to funnel our stuff onto the A wire. It was okay for a month or two, but the work quickly became dry, rote, and lonely. I started my night shift an hour or so before my wife returned from her work.

  On the plus side, I was in Washington in the serenity, safety, and openness of the mid-1960s. On the Saturday night of my first weekend off, my wife and I wandered into an unpretentious Italian restaurant near my office. I immediately recognized the much older guy seated at the small table next to us as Earl Warren, the chief justice of the United States. I figured what the hell and introduced myself to him, and explained that I was a reporter brand-new to Washington, and my brand-new wife had just begun a job as a psychiatric social worker. Warren introduced his wife and we chitchatted on and off throughout the meal. It was like talking to grandparents I never had. He wanted to know about my job and how it came to be. Brash as I was, I still did not dare ask him about his workday. It felt good, though, to learn that even in the upper stratosphere of Washington people were people. I would soon put that knowledge to work.