Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  A major turning point came on the last day of January when the North Vietnamese army and its allies in the South, known as the Vietcong, began a well-planned and very violent series of armed attacks during the Tet holidays, at a time when a cease-fire supposedly was in place. Over the next two weeks, Americans watched in dismay and horror as South Vietnamese bases and cities fell and the U.S. embassy in Saigon was nearly overrun. It was suddenly clear to many that the war in Vietnam could not be won. Untold numbers of college students began rallying in ever greater numbers for Gene, throughout New Hampshire as well as across the nation. Our poll numbers began rising—faster and more intensely than the campaign chose to make public. My press office was suddenly besieged with requests for interviews and TV appearances. We all began thinking ahead, to the next major primary, in Wisconsin, where McCarthy, a Minnesotan, was far better known.

  The campaign continued to be starved for cash, but there was money to be had in Wisconsin. One night a jet was chartered—I had no idea who paid for it—and McCarthy and I flew to a private fund-raiser that had been set up in Milwaukee. We were told that a number of wealthy antiwar businessmen, many of them Jewish, were eager to meet the senator. Also on the flight was Harry Kelly, an AP pal of mine, who was doing a major story on the New Hampshire race. Kelly was bright and a charmer, and he and McCarthy had a terrific time gossiping about books, movies, and the vagaries of various senators—anything but the campaign. I wasn’t happy but what the hell. If McCarthy had fun with Harry, it might make it easier for me to get him to spend time with other reporters.

  We landed in Milwaukee just in time to get to the fund-raiser, which was scheduled for 8:00 p.m. As we drove into the city, we passed an art house movie theater that was showing a newly released British film version of Ulysses, the famed James Joyce novel. McCarthy insisted that our taxi turn around and then ordered me to go to the box office and find out when the next showing would begin. Gripped with dread, I reported back that it would start in the next few minutes. “Let’s go, Harry,” McCarthy said. “I understand they use the word ‘fuck’ in the movie.” What the fuck, I thought, and asked McCarthy as he climbed out of the taxi what on earth I should tell the men with checks at the fund-raiser. He laughed and said, “Tell them I’ll part the waters.” He and Harry then walked into the theater.

  The fund-raiser was a disaster. I mumbled something about the senator taking ill, and gave a short speech to a lot of insulted rich men. We didn’t raise enough cash to pay for the charter—if we had to pay. I was embarrassed by my lame performance but found it difficult to beg for contributions when I was not sure that the money would be well spent. I decided then that I would never write about the campaign—and have not until this memoir. I was convinced McCarthy was showing off for Harry, and I was crushed by his cavalier attitude toward the fund-raising that was vital to his chances of winning the Democratic nomination, and the presidency. We would not do well in New Hampshire if we could not match the Johnson campaign in terms of money raised. The President’s campaign, taking no chances, was beginning to spend more and more on television and radio advertisements.

  There were other difficulties. We were getting much more media coverage, and I was constantly finding myself having to explain away the senator’s penchant for dropping a tough paragraph from a speech that had been distributed in advance. One particularly painful instance involved a gutsy commitment by him to explicitly call for a guaranteed annual income for all Americans, an idea the bright kids on my staff had extensively researched. Stephen Cohen, who dropped out of Amherst College to work in the press operation, produced some terrific data, and when I asked where he got it, he said it came from a telephone chat he had with Wilbur Cohen, who was secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Johnson administration. This was very interesting. Stephen somehow got Cohen’s unlisted home telephone number and called him one night, identifying himself as a McCarthy volunteer, and got the cabinet secretary to fill in the blank spots in our proposal. Such antics were not unusual among Oates’s volunteers. Nancy Lipton, who was a reliable typist of the early morning speech drafts I wrote for the senator, once pulled me out of the shower to complain about sloppy language and comma faults in the text. Nancy was Mary McCarthy’s roommate at Radcliffe and, like Steve Cohen, became a successful academic. The ever-competent Steve became more and more essential to me and Marylouise Oates, and often traveled with us. There was a late night when the three of us, exhausted as usual, found ourselves with one room reserved, instead of three, in a seedy motel somewhere in New Hampshire. We shared the bed, fully clothed.

  I should have told the senator about Wilbur Cohen’s involvement; it might have made him hesitate before deleting mention of a guaranteed annual income in the speech he delivered. His edit came an hour or so after I had assured a busload of skeptical political reporters that he would indeed say what was in the advance text. The reporters duly filed stories for their newspapers’ early editions. They were enraged, as they had every right to be. I took the heat for that, lamely explaining that I had misunderstood the senator’s wishes. When McCarthy had finished his speech, he walked past me off the stage and, knowing that he had undercut me, asked me how I liked it. I said, “D minus.” When I got to the hotel bar that night, a number of newspaper guys warned me that McCarthy was on the warpath toward me and, once again, my job was in danger. I wanted to say so was his insurgency, but did not.

  I also kept my mouth shut about the senator’s disdainful attitude toward fund-raising, as well as his amusement at Dick Goodwin’s continued private chats with the Kennedys. I would complain like hell to my staff and others, including Paul Newman and Cal Lowell, about the senator, but such was merely the other side of respect, or love, as those who worked with me understood. I confess to also being vocal about my distress at McCarthy’s complaints about the volunteers who were rallying more and more to his campaign, and kept on nagging the senator to spend more time at volunteer functions. He continued to resist doing so, on the ground that the students who dropped out of college to knock on doors were not doing so for him but using the campaign to express their anger over the Vietnam War. It was demoralizing to hear such talk.

  A far less important nuisance was the venom and paranoia that was constantly being injected into the campaign by Abigail McCarthy. She had called me early in the campaign to object to a photograph of her daughter that appeared in a campaign handout. Was she kidding? I told her that I was not her press secretary but her husband’s. Bad mistake. Once on her enemies list, one stayed on it forever. Her power came from the fact that her husband was as frightened of her as was his Senate staff of him. She and the senator would separate the next year. The path to power in the campaign, as two of McCarthy’s largest contributors quickly learned, was through Abigail. She also intimidated Curtis Gans, who ran the campaign’s political operation and was always having staff meetings that I refused to attend. I saw Gans and his gaggle of aides as typical politicians who would trade principles for votes. I also felt they worried far more about a future role in the campaign and in a McCarthy White House than about the issue that grabbed me and my aides—stopping the war. I had lobbied early in the campaign for the irascible, iconoclastic, and brilliant Harold Ickes to be put in charge of the New Hampshire campaign. It did not happen, so I understood, because Ickes wanted full control and Gans and Blair Clark would not give it up. I always had time for Ickes, who would flit in and out of New Hampshire, because he delighted in mocking me, cheerfully, and would invariably greet me by saying, in a singsong voice, “Chicken Little is here and the sky is falling, falling, falling.” He had it right: I took everything to heart, and he did not feel the need to go behind my back to say so.

  McCarthy’s impatience with his wife came through most vividly one night in Boston. My office had produced a twelve-page campaign brochure full of position papers and the obligatory handsome photographs of a happy McCarthy family that was to be distributed in Sunday ne
wspapers throughout New Hampshire on the last weekend of the campaign. A final proof was rushed from our union print shop in New York to our hotel late at night, and McCarthy and I looked it over before giving the go-ahead to start the presses. The press run was in the hundreds of thousands. I was dragged out of bed hours later by the senator and told to rush to his suite. Abigail, it turned out, had gotten a proof flown to their home in Washington, and she was upset about some of the photographs and language. It had something to do with angering potential Catholic voters or some such. The senator, in his bathrobe, got her on the phone and told her that he had me—the archenemy—sitting in front of him. He then repeated her complaints—she was listening—and told me in a very stern voice that I had to make the changes she wanted. Yes, sir, I said. The alternative was to say, are you nuts? The brochure was being printed as we talked. McCarthy asked Abigail if she was satisfied. She was, I gathered, and he hung up. He rose from his chair, shrugged, gave me a warm smile, and told me he would see me in the morning. It was as close to intimacy as we’d come. He knew he had thrown me to the wolves—that is, his wife—with his cowardly performance and I would suffer the consequences. Abigail, as predicted, told her moneymen that I had deliberately defied her husband. The senator had given me, his press secretary, an order, and I, in Abigail’s world, had just lied to his face.

  McCarthy killed it in the New Hampshire election on March 12, winning 42 percent of the vote as a write-in candidate. Lyndon Johnson had to know then that it was over, but he waited almost three weeks, until March 31, to announce that he would not stand for reelection. Bobby Kennedy jumped into the race, and Dick Goodwin left our campaign to join his. Bobby was going to be just as strident about the war as was McCarthy, and I was thinking more and more about going back to what I was good at—being a reporter. My tiny travel staff back in Washington, led by a tireless Joshua Leinsdorf, was now chartering two American Airlines planes, with crews, to fly the senator, our burgeoning staff, and scores of domestic and international reporters from campaign stop to campaign stop. The reporters had to be billed daily for the flights. Lowell had taken time off from the campaign, as had Newman and Ryan. And I was now running a travel agency. Was I really a politician?

  There was a chilling moment in Milwaukee that convinced me that McCarthy, with Bobby in the race, felt trapped in a campaign that was no longer viable. The Democratic nomination was still in sight, but there was a lot of political hardball to play. If Irish Catholic McCarthy wanted to win the nomination, he had to deal with Irish Catholic mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. Daley controlled the Illinois delegation to the Democratic convention and was known to be partial to the Kennedys. I had written extensively about police corruption and racism while working for the AP in Chicago and had contempt for the mayor. But I was told by one of our people—I do not remember who—that Daley would be delighted to take a call from McCarthy. I was given a private phone number to call and a time window. My ambivalence about Daley did not matter; it had to be done. I found McCarthy at lunch with the usual gaggle, including the now-returned Lowell, Mary McGrory, and two of the big money boys. I crouched next to him, waiting for a moment to whisper my message, but McCarthy ignored me. I finally interrupted him and, very quietly, gave him the message. McCarthy, as mean as I’d ever seen him, loudly announced to all that Sy Hersh was here and “wants me to kiss Mayor Daley’s ass.” He did not make the call.

  A few days later, I learned that McCarthy had agreed with Curtis Gans that he would attract a much higher percentage of the white vote in Wisconsin if he canceled a series of already scheduled campaign rallies in the black neighborhoods of Milwaukee. Race was always a complicated issue for McCarthy. He was in no way a racist or a bigot and had been adamant, magnificently so, in his public criticism of the Pentagon’s decision in 1966 to lower the standards for enlistment in the armed forces—a move, pushed by Robert McNamara, that resulted in a higher percentage of blacks and Hispanics in the front lines of the Vietnam War. The Johnson administration was “changing the color of the corpses” in the war, McCarthy said again and again in his speeches, as it tried to limit the number of middle-class whites in combat and tamp down the growing antiwar movement. But the senator, in a basic way, did not understand the extent of institutionalized white racism in America. He just could not relate to the anger of black America. Early in the campaign, a young black labor leader from Detroit named John Conyers, who went on to have a long career in Congress, arranged an off-the-record meeting for McCarthy with a number of black civic and union officials. It was a disaster. McCarthy talked about how he had once had a Negro roommate while in a parochial school. I subsequently wrote him a long memo about racism, making the point that he did not have to believe that institutionalized white racism existed; he just had to recognize that an overwhelming number of blacks believed it did. Mary McCarthy, who understood her father in ways many did not, made sure he read it.

  This history, along with a lack of respect and distrust for Gans, made Marylouise Oates, and me, and most of my staff, frantic upon hearing that the senator had agreed to cancel appearances in the black community. I couldn’t believe McCarthy had signed off on such a dumb move, and I raced to his hotel suite. I almost came to blows with a young man who was then serving as a bodyguard when McCarthy came out. I told him what I had learned and asked if it were so. He told me, very coldly, that it was none of my business. That was it. He was running for the presidency now, and for him moral issues, so I believed, were secondary to getting votes. The Democrats of America had made a statement about the Vietnam War and I had done my part. I left the campaign the next afternoon, along with Oates. We had gone through three months together, protecting each other’s back and convinced there was nothing more important than what we were doing, despite the madness.

  One of Oates’s confidants chose to tell a New York Times reporter what had gone on, and our resignations became a two- or three-day television news wonder. Oates would remind me years later that our rumored resignations became official when we literally jumped off a campaign bus before a rally at Stevens Point, Wisconsin. As we fled down the street, with a few reporters following us, we spotted Robert Lowell sitting in the grass, waiting for the McCarthy caravan. As I loped by, Oates said, I yelled, joyously, “Good-bye, Cal Lowell. Good-bye, Poet Laureate.”

  I flew home, said hello to my family, and went to sleep. I answered no telephone calls and gave no interviews and kept my experience in national politics to myself. I had helped get rid of a president, but not a war. I had a book being published in a few weeks and lots of ideas for magazine assignments and wanted to put national politics behind me.

  McCarthy called me a few weeks after the blowup. There was no apology sought, or needed. Instead, he wanted to know if I would return to the campaign to help with speeches and position papers. I told him I was not sure. He said I would get a call to continue the dialogue, but I did not. I had no more formal contact with the campaign, which stayed alive through the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the violent and chaotic Democratic convention that nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey in Chicago. McCarthy would have been a far better choice.

  There was one last hurrah late in the summer when I was asked by Adam Walinsky, who had been one of Bobby Kennedy’s aides, if I would call McCarthy and find out if he would agree to a meeting to discuss a fourth party—Governor George Wallace of Alabama also was a presidential candidate in 1968—whose goal would be to deny the election to either Humphrey or Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate. The senator said yes, and Walinsky and I and a few others, Kennedy people, went to his home. McCarthy told us he thought he could win as many as four states if on the ballot—Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, and California—enough to throw the election to Wallace. I was pretty sure he was putting us on.

  There would be no fourth party. Nixon won the election that November and continued the war, as Humphrey would have. McCarthy began a slow drift away from the political mainstr
eam. He formally separated from Abigail in 1969, but their marriage, as many in the campaign knew, had ended long before. There would be no divorce. McCarthy announced in 1970 that he would not be a candidate for reelection to the Senate but, whimsically, so it seemed, staged two halfhearted presidential primary campaigns in 1972 and 1976 in which he performed very poorly. There was a final, doomed campaign in 1982 when he ran in the primary for the Senate seat in Minnesota he had abandoned eleven years earlier. He got 24 percent of the vote.

  My wife and I stayed in touch with the senator and made it a point to visit with him, usually over dinner, until he passed away in 2005. We talked very little about the past. His wonderful daughter Mary went on to law school and taught at Yale Law School. She died tragically young, from cancer, in 1990.

  *I made it a point to seek out foreign diplomats who had served in Russia, China, or North Vietnam before being assigned to Washington. I became especially friendly a decade later with the Indian ambassador, K. R. Narayanan, who had studied political science after World War II with Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. He joined the Indian foreign service and served in China, Russia, Turkey, and England before coming to Washington. Narayanan, with whom I took many long walks, was elected President of India in 1997, and I had the fun of visiting with him in late 2001 at his official residence, the Viceroy’s House, a 200,000-square-foot edifice built by Lord Mountbatten. The modest Narayanan told me he utilized only a few rooms there.