I called Obst late in the afternoon and told him to let editors know we had done it again and now had a front-page story for the world—a firsthand account of the massacre, on the record, from a shooter. I spent the night at Paul’s house, with his wife and young son, outlining the story and grabbing a few hours’ sleep on a couch. His wife told me how hard it had been when Paul returned from the war without his right foot, and to a little boy he had never met. He did not talk about his experiences in Vietnam, but he was often uncomfortable around the child. One night, shortly after his return, she said, she woke up to hysterical screaming in the baby’s room. She rushed in and found Paul violently shaking the terrified infant. It had happened before. I could not help but wonder whether Myrtle was referring to Paul’s violence toward his son when she told me that Vietnam had turned her son into a murderer.
Obst, meanwhile, had somehow convinced CBS’s flagship nightly television news show, anchored by Walter Cronkite, to pay ten thousand dollars to Dispatch for an exclusive interview with Meadlo the next night, hours before my My Lai story was to be published. There was a huge argument for television exposure, if Meadlo would agree to do an interview, but it would be completely unethical, in the newspaper world, to pay him to do so. You cannot pay for information that the public has a right to know. I’m not sure Obst understood that, but I did. And so I asked Paul if he would do it, and also made it clear he could not be paid for the interview, and that I and Dispatch would be. There was an inducement: I told Paul that CBS would fly him and his wife to New York City and put them up in a good hotel. I was not surprised when Paul readily agreed; he somehow knew, or sensed, that it was time to open up. I flew with Paul and his wife early the next morning to New York, first class, courtesy of CBS.
In his memoir, Obst somehow managed to gloss over the fact that he had made a commitment to produce Meadlo for CBS before we had a commitment. It was all magical:
As a typical baby boomer, I instinctively knew that nothing was real in America until it was on TV. I picked up the phone and called CBS Evening News. I told them what we had and they wanted it—badly. When I told them that we needed our expenses covered, they hesitated. “We’re not into checkbook journalism,” said the CBS Evening News managing editor. I politely asked him for NBC’s phone number. He asked me where I wanted the check sent.
Sy brought Paul Meadlo to New York. On the way he wrote another installment of the story and we sent it out for morning release to all of our papers….
Sy came over….The phone rang moments after he arrived. It was Abe Rosenthal, head man of the New York Times. I’d sent him a copy of our story figuring they’d have no choice but to run it. It was too big a story to ignore and they were America’s paper of record. Mr. Rosenthal couldn’t have been nicer. He complimented me on the great job Dispatch and Seymour Hersh had done on uncovering the story….Rosenthal continued his banter and then casually mentioned that since the Times was the paper of record, he’d kind of like to have one of his reporters come over and interview our star witness. Sy grabbed the phone out of my hand.
“Mr. Rosenthal, it’s Sy Hersh. Listen, you want an interview with Paul Meadlo? Well, he’s somewhere in New York—find him.” Sy slammed the phone down. I stared at him in awe. He’d just hung up on “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Seconds later the phone rang again. Sy grabbed it.
“Mr. Hersh,” Abe Rosenthal yelled, “do you know who I am!”
“Yes,” replied Hersh and hung up on him again.
That night Paul Meadlo led the CBS Evening News. Mike Wallace interviewed him and Paul calmly told America how he had shot women and children in the ditches of My Lai. It sent a shudder through the nation.
The Times ran an account of Mike Wallace’s interview with Meadlo on its front page the next day, crediting CBS all the way, with no mention of me or Dispatch. I did not care: I was not going to let Rosenthal and the Times turn my Meadlo story into their Meadlo story. I thought I was doing just fine by myself. I would have a testy relationship with Abe Rosenthal and the Times for the next two decades. Paul Meadlo’s confessional did change America, as I and David Obst hoped it would. His CBS appearance was broadcast on November 24; on the same day the Pentagon announced that Calley had been formally charged with the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians. (Richard Nixon chose to announce on the same day that America would unilaterally give up the use, even in retaliation, of biological weapons.)
The harrowing Meadlo account ended the debate, if there was a serious one, about what had happened at My Lai, and it also spawned a wave of Sunday feature stories by journalists about American massacres and atrocities they had witnessed in Vietnam. The one that troubled me the most was filed by an experienced and competent AP foreign correspondent who wrote in great detail of an incident he had witnessed in July 1965, just a few days after a contingent of combat marines hit the beaches in Da Nang, South Vietnam, pursuant to orders from President Johnson. The AP dispatch told how a few marines had gone on a rampage within days of wading ashore and killed a cluster of civilians who had taken refuge in a cave during a firefight. Hand grenades were thrown, and the post–My Lai AP story quoted a marine as calling out, “Whoosh, I’m a killer today. I got me two.” A second marine said, “Kill them, I don’t want anyone moving.” My first angry thought was why hadn’t these stories been published at the time; perhaps doing so would have set a precedent and saved untold thousands of Vietnamese lives. After all, I had gotten tough stories published about the war in real time while at the AP, telling of American bombing of North Vietnam and high-level lying about it. It didn’t take many days for me to be more charitable; my controversial stories had been written in an office far from Vietnam. Publishing a story from the scene about the needless killing of civilians in mid-1965 would have been seen by many as disloyalty, and the reporter’s story immediately debunked by all, including many of the most prominent newspapers.
I continued to race around America well into December, tracking down My Lai participants and witnesses, and produced two more articles on the massacre and its aftermath for Dispatch. There was more than a touch of madness involved. I had arranged to have dinner a few days after Christmas with one of the massacre participants who lived in central New Jersey, seventy miles down the New Jersey Turnpike from New York. My family and I were celebrating the holidays with my in-laws in a suburb of the city. A severe snowstorm hit midmorning, and by afternoon nearly two feet of snow had piled up, with more coming. I took off anyway in my father-in-law’s new stick-shift station wagon and somehow made it to the deserted turnpike and to my dinner, constantly gunning the car through snowdrifts. I had a terrific interview with a former GI who desperately needed to tell the truth; he, like many returning members of Charlie Company, was working a job that required little contact with others. I made it back to the snowy suburbs a few hours before dawn but burned out my father-in-law’s clutch doing so.
I of course had been in touch with Bob Loomis from the moment I found Calley, and there was no question that a book-length study of My Lai had to be written. Thankfully, there would be no book by me on the Pentagon; I had yet to find a penetrating way into the subject. David Obst was desperate to make my participation in Dispatch a permanent one, and he began talking at the end of the year to other journalists, and newspapers—many of them first-rate—about expanding Dispatch into an independent news organization. It was not for me. I spent the next few months writing, tracking down My Lai participants, and continuing to make scores of antiwar speeches at colleges and political events across the nation.
It wasn’t always as easy as the words above suggest. At one point, while writing the book, which was based on scores of interviews with those involved, I wrote Bob Loomis a sad note:
Some will claim that I have attempted to exploit some dumb, out of service, overly talkative G.I.s. But few men are exposed to charges of murder…it is not a “naming
names and telling all affair.” In fact, one of the strengths is that discriminating readers will know how much more I know—and did not tell. I’m convinced that to give the name and hometown of a G.I. who committed rape and murder that day, or one who beheaded an infant, would not further the aim of the book. It is an exposé, but not of the men of Charlie Company. Something much more significant is being put to light….Both the killer and the killed are victims in Vietnam; the peasant who is shot down for no reason and the G.I. who is taught, or comes to believe, that a Vietnamese life somehow has less meaning than his wife’s, or his sister’s, or his mother’s.
I believed those words then, and still do, but it was a hard-earned belief. One GI who shot himself in the foot to get the hell out of My Lai 4 told me of the special savagery some of his colleagues—or was it himself?—had shown toward two- and three-year-olds. One GI used his bayonet repeatedly on a little boy, at one point tossing the child, perhaps still alive, in the air and spearing it as if it were a papier-mâché piñata. I had a two-year-old son at home, and there were times, after talking to my wife and then my child on the telephone—I was often gone for many days at a time—I would suddenly burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably. For them? For their victims? For me, because of what I was learning?
I tried to avoid sharing the worst in my speeches, but did not always do so. A long-scheduled talk at Tulane University in New Orleans that winter was preceded by a front-page editorial in The Times-Picayune, the city’s morning newspaper. The editorial was bordered in red—for communist sympathizer, I assumed—and advocated against my appearance. The intervention provoked more interest in my talk, as usually happens, and I ended up speaking to a sea of people in the university’s basketball stadium. I saw a large number of Vietnam veterans in the crowd, easily spotted because they wore faded army fatigue jackets laden with VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) stickers. I was learning more and more about the air war in South Vietnam, and its lack of discipline, and I was more than a little pissed off at the cheap shot in The Times-Picayune, and so I improvised with a purpose in mind.
I began my talk by asking if any of the vets in the audience had served in a helicopter unit that saw combat in 1968 or 1969 near the hotly contested city of Quang Ngai, a provincial capital a dozen or so miles from My Lai. A few hands were raised. I asked one of those vets, at random, if he would come onstage and answer a few questions. He came up. After I assured him I was not interested in his name, he told me that he had been a door gunner on a chopper in the right unit at the right time and at the right place. There were lots of tough operations, I said. He agreed. I suggested he often ended his days ferrying dead and wounded Americans from combat zones. He agreed. And after a particularly horrific day, I asked, what did his crew sometimes do—just to cope with the rage—on the way home? I didn’t do it, he said, but I know what you’re talking about. Is it not a fact, I asked, that choppers in those years and after one of those missions would spot a farmer at work in his field and make a dive toward him? The farmer would begin running, of course, I said, and the pilot, flying lower and lower, would tilt the chopper and try to decapitate him with the propeller blades. There was a long silence. I didn’t do it, he said. I assured him that my questions were not about him but about what the war does to otherwise decent men. Did he have any idea what the choppers, once bloodied, would do before returning to home base? The veteran gave his first extensive answer: He understood that the pilot would land outside the unit’s landing zone and wash the blood off the rotors. Who would do the washing? I asked. I do not remember if he answered my question or if I just went on to say that the chopper pilot and crew would pay local Vietnamese to wipe off the blood. I did not like what I did to the vet, who was stunningly honest, but I wanted to get back, in some way, at The Times-Picayune.
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath, my second book, was published on June 1. Its publication, to the dismay of many at Random House, was overshadowed by Harper’s magazine, which published a thirty-thousand-word excerpt of my book, on a different grade of paper from the rest of the magazine, in its May edition, which appeared weeks before my book was available in bookstores. I knew that Willie Morris, the canny editor of Harper’s, had bought the rights to publish an excerpt of the book from my agent, Robert Lescher, but I had no idea of Morris’s definition of excerpt. Neither, apparently, did my literary agent, though he should have. To further hype his coup, Morris titled the May edition a “Harper’s extra.” My shock was tempered by the fact that there were literally lines of magazine buyers outside drugstores and bookstores on the morning the magazine was released. Morris’s coup left Random House with a sure bestseller that did not become one, but his instinct about the importance of the story was a boon for the antiwar movement.
There was another plus of sorts: I was telephoned a few days after the excerpt was published by Robert McNamara’s twenty-year-old son, Craig, who opposed the war and told me that he had left a copy of Harper’s, with the My Lai story splashed on the cover, in his father’s sitting room. He later found it in the fireplace. (Thirty years later, a senior Pentagon official told me that McNamara had been troubled in 1967 by newspaper reports of American atrocities in Vietnam and ordered the Pentagon’s inspector general’s office to study the issue. The subsequent 208-page study found that a majority of American troops in combat did not understand their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, which set standards for humane treatment of prisoners of war. The report, turned in on August 15, 1967, seven months before My Lai, was ordered rewritten and never published.)
My five pieces on the massacre earned me the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, a rarity for a freelance journalist; as well as a George Polk Award, given by a panel of my peers; the Distinguished Service Award of Sigma Delta Chi (the journalism fraternity); and the Worth Bingham Prize. They also brought me fame and enough money to make a down payment on a small house in Washington. My family were no longer renters. I still wanted a newspaper job, and I had more to say, much more, about the My Lai massacre, how it was covered up, and the many flaws of an internal Pentagon inquiry into the tragedy that finished its work in mid-March 1970. I had been tracking that investigation, known as the Peers Panel, for its director, army lieutenant general William R. Peers, since it began its work in December 1969.
I still had the same dilemma, Pulitzer Prize or not: where to publish and where to work?
· ELEVEN ·
To The New Yorker
I had been snotty to Abe Rosenthal because the reporter he wanted to send to “check quotes” from Paul Meadlo was John Corry, one of the aces on the Times staff. Did Rosenthal really think I was that much of a rube? Corry wanted to get to Paul to write a front-page interview with him, under his byline, for the next morning’s Times; the last thing he was interested in was checking the quotes of someone else’s story.
But Abe was the executive editor of the Times, and I was looking for a job, and so, in late December 1969, after my run of My Lai stories for Dispatch had finished, I sent him a short note proposing that “we could get together, if you want” for coffee or lunch on December 26, if he was going to be in his office that day. I got my comeuppance. Rosenthal wrote back immediately, saying that he might take the “whole damn day off,” and added, “Could you possibly call me on the 26th and if I am in, we could have that cup of coffee.” I got the drift; paraphrasing what I had said to him when he asked about Paul Meadlo, Abe was going to be in New York and I should try to find him. I did not call, and Abe expressed no regret.
Once My Lai 4 was published in the spring of 1970, I went job hunting again at the Times and The Washington Post. I now had a Pulitzer, a bunch of other prizes, and two published books; surely, I thought, it was a hell of a good starting point. I was interviewed at the Post by a science editor who chose to focus only on an AP story I had written four years earlier dealing with a highly classified Pentagon study concluding that the
United States had the capability to reliably monitor a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. The Pentagon’s long-standing resistance to such a treaty was based on an insistence that the Soviets could cheat by testing nuclear weapons in an underground cavern in Siberia, or some other place. I remembered my surprise, and irritation, when the Post did not publish the story, which was a front-page banner story in the Washington Star, the Post’s main competitor in Washington.
The editor told me why it did not: He had checked my story with a senior Pentagon spokesman who explained that I had been misled by my sources about the recommendations of the secret study. If I had made one more call, the editor told me, I would have realized the need to do more reporting. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, because the editor ignored, or chose to ignore, the many direct quotes I published from the report itself. Of course, I did not explicitly state in the article that I had been provided with a copy of the top secret report by a Pentagon scientist, an expert geologist who had been involved in the research and was angered and a bit frightened by the response to the report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The nation’s top officers had for years been dead set against a nuclear test ban with the Soviets on the grounds that it was technically impossible to monitor compliance. The new study explicitly said that a test ban could be monitored by the addition of high-tech monitoring sites along Russia’s borders. After a briefing, army general Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stunned the involved scientists by declaring that he and his fellow chiefs would drop their long-standing objection to a test ban treaty on technical grounds, but would now object to such an agreement on political grounds. It was that high-level sleight of hand that led the Pentagon insider to me.
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