Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  I did not tell my interviewer how narrow-minded he was being. My heart, actually, was set on the Times, despite my temper tantrum over the Meadlo story. I went to New York for an interview that, to my disappointment, was not with Rosenthal or one of his senior deputies but with a soon-to-retire editor who wore a green eyeshade in the office, just as some of the old-timers at the Associated Press in Chicago had done. He looked at my clips, acknowledged that I had done some very good work, and then suggested that I try to get a job on a good regional newspaper—he specifically cited The Washington Post and The Boston Globe—and try again with the Times in a few years. The experience was much more bewildering than depressing, and I decided I would have to stick to writing books. I had a good one in mind.

  I had been contacted early in 1970 by a senior army officer who was privy to the extensive investigation that was being done as part of the army’s inquiry into My Lai. He was convinced there would be a cover-up as the enlisted members of Calley’s company provided more specifics about the extent of the horrors and the colonels and generals at the top of Lieutenant Calley’s food chain—in the Americal Division—continued to insist they had no knowledge of the massacre. There was little doubt, the officer told me, that the initial investigation in the aftermath of the slaughter was replete with lies that were accepted without question at every command level inside the Americal Division. I had to tell the story, he said.

  The Peers Panel would generate forty volumes of testimony and findings by its completion in March 1970, none of which was meant then for public release. My officer friend decided to provide the volumes to me as they rolled off the press inside the Pentagon. His wife commuted by car to her downtown Washington office, and on most weekday mornings for the next few months she would deliver one or two volumes at a time to me, in numerical sequence, at a prearranged point on a city street. I had to exchange volumes with each delivery—the old for the new—and made an arrangement with a print shop in the National Press Building, where I still maintained an office, to rent a Xerox machine at night and run off copies of the Peers interviews, one page at a time. This was going on as I was continuing to report, write, and edit the My Lai 4 manuscript.

  I was overwhelmed with the massacre as I worked my way through the interviews, and I was increasingly troubled by evidence that the investigators themselves had failed to do the right thing upon learning of a second slaughter on March 16, 1968. Medina’s Charlie Company was one of three companies attached to Task Force Barker that were in action that day. Task Force Barker’s Bravo Company was ordered to attack a village known as My Khe 4 a few miles away from the village of My Lai 4. It was the same story, on a lesser level, as in My Lai: The task force burned, raped, and murdered at will after finding no enemy troops there. As many as one hundred innocent civilians were killed at the second site. The implication was obvious, in terms of how the ground war actually was being fought in that area, but it was an implication that the final army report on My Lai did all it could to muffle. “My Lai 4 was extraordinary, but it was not isolated,” I would later write. “My Khe 4, however, was just another atrocity; and that atrocity was covered up—after its uncovering in the midst of the My Lai 4 investigation.” I added, referring to General Peers and the civilian leadership of the army, “Even the best general in the Army and its highest civilian officials have a point at which they, like the Vietnamese at My Lai 4 and My Khe 4, become victims.”

  There was a hell of a book in the full story of the My Lai cover-up. To hell with the Times and the Post. I knew that Bob Loomis and Random House would readily agree to a contract with me when I got further along in my reporting.

  I stayed busy well into 1971 working on the cover-up book-to-be, doing antiwar speeches, and also researching and writing two long dispatches for David Obst’s attenuated Dispatch News Service. My army sources inside the CBW community were appalled by the fact that Richard Nixon’s renunciation of biological warfare had been more in word than deed; America, as of September 1970, was still maintaining large stockpiles of biological agents and had increased the Pentagon’s budget for such work, and I wrote a long piece late that fall for Dispatch about it. A second article, published in January 1971, after more than a month of research, showed that a highly publicized but failed American raid on a suspected prison camp in North Vietnam was based on outdated intelligence data that had been repeatedly manipulated and misrepresented inside the U.S. community. The Times and the Post may have had their doubts about me, but more and more officials on the inside were talking to me and knew I would deal honestly with the information they shared and protect their identity. The two stories were published in full by many of the newspapers that had carried my My Lai articles, including the London Times.

  I was not where I wanted to be—at the Times, where my reporting would have immediate impact—but I was still being productive. Neil Sheehan had called me months earlier to wonder why I had not been asked to work at the Times. I told him my sad story, and he arranged a lunch for me with Max Frankel, the bureau chief and senior correspondent for the paper in Washington. I was a bit worried about the meeting because Frankel had been quoted as expressing a concern about the “peddling” of the My Lai story at a time when Obst and I were essentially doing just that. James Reston, the longtime Times correspondent and columnist, also had questioned at one point whether a story such as the My Lai massacre should have been pursued as avidly as it had, given what he said was its adverse consequences for America. But Frankel could not have been more pleasant at our lunch, expressing support for what I had done and pleasure when I told him I wanted nothing more than to be a reporter for the Times. There was a freeze on hiring in Washington, Frankel said, but he would get back to me.

  I was still jobless, and after an outdoor speech at a publishers and editors’ antiwar rally in the spring in Central Park—by God, I thought, full of self-pity, I could lecture them but apparently not be put to work by them—I visited my agent. Bob Lescher was avuncular and gentle, and I had forgiven him for being manhandled by Willie Morris, although there were many at Random House who had not. Bob represented many New Yorker writers, and I asked about my going to work there. Would he call William Shawn, the fabled editor of the magazine, and ask him to meet with me? I was told, emphatically, to forget it; I was far too inexperienced for The New Yorker. In fact, as Bob reminded me, I had never worked for a newspaper. It was an impossible reach.

  I left his office, went to the first pay phone I could find, and called the New Yorker offices. I asked for Mr. Shawn and got his secretary. I told her my name and said I lived in Washington but was in New York at the moment and wanted to speak with her boss. Do you have an appointment? she asked. I said no but asked if he was in his office. She said yes. I then asked if she would please just tell him that Seymour Hersh is on the phone and wants to come see him. She hesitated but did so, and very quickly returned to the phone to ask if I could come right away. I could, and I did.

  Shawn was slight and fussy, but he radiated what the military call command presence. He was an intent listener and a watcher; his eyes did not waver as I yapped. I told him what I knew about the cover-up of the My Lai massacre. He listened without interruptions as I rattled off God knows what about the internal army report on My Lai that was in my possession. Yadda yadda yadda. I don’t recall a specific word or thought. After about five minutes Shawn raised a hand to quiet me and said—words I’ll remember the rest of my life—“That sounds fine, Mr. Hersh. Is five hundred a week enough?” I said five hundred a week of what? He explained he was referring to money, a cash draw to provide expenses for travel, research, and living while I pursued the cover-up. He shook my hand and I did some paperwork with someone at the magazine that day, and off I went. My last paycheck at the AP had been for something like $150 a week. Now I was working for The New Yorker at more than three times that pay. My first call was a regretful one to Bob Lescher. I told him what had happened and that I did not think h
e could be my agent any longer. He had been dead wrong about me and, more significantly, also about William Shawn. He understood.

  Bob Loomis was delighted to know that The New Yorker, if all went well, would excerpt my book on the cover-up. It wasn’t clear what I would find, or how interested the American public would continue to be in a losing war, but Random House’s modest advance and my New Yorker “draw”—I reveled in that word—would suffice. I had a new agent, Sterling Lord, who had been recommended to me by David Wise, a neighbor and family friend whose extraordinary work on the CIA in the 1960s had set the standard for investigative reporting on the American intelligence community.

  I spent the next few months continuing to absorb the forty volumes of the Peers report on My Lai—none of which had yet been released to the public—and drawing harrowing conclusions from the more than four hundred interviews the panel conducted. The panel had recommended criminal charges against fourteen officers, including Major General Samuel Koster, who was commanding general of the Americal Division, and thus was ultimately responsible for the conduct of the units under his command, including Captain Ernest Medina’s Charlie Company. Koster had been promoted and was serving as commandant of the West Point Military Academy by the time I published the Dispatch articles, and his involvement in the scandal added to the nightmare for the army, the Pentagon, and President Nixon, who was continuing to escalate the war. The only Americal Division officer who would be convicted at a court-martial of his peers, and serve time in custody, was William Calley.* The military justice system had failed, but only a few generals were caught up in the scandal, and the Vietnam War, with its violence still targeted on civilians and body counts, would continue apace.

  There were extensive rules of engagement for waging war that were provided to all combat units in Vietnam. In his testimony before the Peers Panel, General Koster noted that his headquarters had published seven pages of “criteria for the use of firepower before firing in any civilian areas.” But the promulgation of rules was little more than a charade that allowed the system to treat murder, rape, arson, and other war crimes merely as violations of rules. The commanders at My Lai and elsewhere in Vietnam were faced with a choice, one that was repeated again and again in the war: deal with the killings of civilians as murder, and begin a war crimes investigation, and invariably suffer professionally for so doing, or treat the massacre as a violation of the rules of engagement, and punish those who had committed major crimes as rule breakers.

  This insanity was dramatically spelled out for me in the spring of 1971 when I was approached by a Vietnam veteran after I gave a speech at the University of South Dakota, in Vermillion, in the far southeastern corner of the state. He had been a clerk in headquarters of the Americal Division in July 1969 when four American helicopters shot up two hamlets in a restricted fire zone ten miles north of the division headquarters, killing ten innocent civilians and wounding fifteen. The crews claimed that they had detected gunfire from one of the hamlets, but it was widely known that the war, for some reason, had not come to the area, which was dotted with small fishing villages just west of the South China Sea. There were complaints from the Vietnamese, and an investigation was ordered by Major General Lloyd B. Ramsey, the commanding general of the division. The official record of the inquiry was replete with what, at best, could be called contradictory testimony about the threat to the gunships. At its end, General Ramsey issued official letters of reprimand to three of the four command pilots involved. The men were guilty of a violation of rules, Ramsey concluded, and the letters of reprimand were to remain in their personnel file until the pilots completed their tour of duty in the division. If no further violations of the rules took place, Ramsey wrote, the letters would be removed from their files and destroyed.

  The army clerk’s contempt for Ramsey’s decision to treat the clearly unwarranted attacks as a rules violation, especially given the division’s sordid My Lai history, drove him to copy the files involved and take them to South Dakota with him. In March 1971, a month before my visit to Vermillion, Ramsey had been promoted to provost marshal general of the army, a promotion that added significance and drama to the story I would write; he was now the officer in charge of all military police functions. The former clerk gave me the files and wished me luck. I called Shawn from South Dakota, told him what I had, and got his okay to chase it. It took a few months, but I got to General Ramsey and some of the pilots and crew members involved, and wrote a twelve-thousand-word article for The New Yorker. I ended the account by quoting a senior army lawyer who said officers such as Ramsey find themselves caught in “a system of rules and regulations that have no relationship to what goes on in Vietnam. It’s a little like the Ten Commandments—they’re there but no one pays attention to them….We’re trapped by a system we created.”

  I called Shawn to tell him I had finished the piece and apologized for its length. He responded, “Oh, Mr. Hersh, stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.” I had spent ten years in the business being told stories are always too long. My editor at the magazine was Pat Crow, a shrewd Arkansas boy who wore jeans and boots to the office and had little patience for chitchat—of which I was a master. These were the days at The New Yorker when the writer was dominant, and an editor with a different point of view about a paragraph or structure, or a cut that was needed, would not impose his will, but discuss a change that was wanted, and explain why. I quickly learned that it was suicidal to avoid the logic and common sense of Pat’s recommendations. He, like Bob Loomis, was full of grace. The story was easily fact-checked—having a chunk of documents helped—and soon ready for publication. Crow called me in Washington to say that Shawn wanted to read the proof; he assured me such was standard operating procedure for a first story by a new writer.

  The proof came by mail a few weeks later, very long weeks. A New Yorker galley back then contained something like four hundred words, and the first thing I did was count galleys. There were more than thirty of them, about right for a twelve-thousand-word story. That was good. I started reading the galleys. There was nothing from Shawn on galley one. Good. He liked the lead. There was nothing on galley two. On galley three, however, Shawn circled a cliché—a routine figure of speech I had used. He drew a line from the offensive phrase to the left margin and wrote in his tiny and very legible hand, “Mr. Hersh—pls use words.”

  My Reporter at Large piece, titled “The Reprimand,” was published in October 1971 in a two-hundred-page edition of the magazine that had my reportage sandwiched among work by Donald Barthelme, Whitney Balliett, Calvin Trillin, and Pauline Kael. The police reporter from the South Side of Chicago had made it to Broadway, but the war was still on and I was going to stay on it.

  Three months later, The New Yorker excerpted the gist of what would be my book on the My Lai cover-up in two issues. Each excerpt ran more than twenty-five pages in the magazine, and Shawn took no chances of a dumb mistake that could turn an innocent soldier into a murderer. The two articles were fact-checked, line by line, by two experienced young women who essentially moved to Washington for weeks. The process taught me humility, or what passes for humility for me; I had made many errors, the bulk of which arose when I was summarizing material that had been published or printed elsewhere. I learned from the checkers that every detail—essential or otherwise—matters. The New Yorker articles and the book, which was published by Random House a few months later, produced no lawsuits or threats of such, and no need for a published correction. I’ve been an avid supporter of fact-checking since then.

  The two excerpts attracted the attention of someone at the Times, and Doug Robinson, a reporter in the Washington bureau, who got an early proof, spent time on the telephone with me, and wrote two cogent articles on the cover-up. In the midst of this, I learned that a visa application I had sought years earlier from the North Vietnamese government had been approved, and I was going to be the first mainstream Weste
rn reporter going to Hanoi since Harrison Salisbury’s momentous visit in late 1966. I was excited and Shawn was all for it. I told Robinson about the visa, and he, so I gathered, passed the word inside the newspaper. In any case, I was telephoned sometime in February by James Greenfield, the foreign editor of the Times. He complimented me on the New Yorker series and wondered whether I would consider doing reporting for the Times when in North Vietnam. Greenfield also asked if I would be willing to have a visit with Abe Rosenthal. That was more than a little odd: Did Rosenthal really think I would say no if he extended an invitation? On the other hand, perhaps I had been a little peremptory by hanging up on him twice.

  I told Shawn about the call, and he urged me to talk to the Times. So I did. Greenfield greeted me and introduced me to Abe, who promptly walked me into a small annex to his office. It was modeled, so I thought, after a Japanese tearoom, or some such. I learned later that Abe had reported for the Times from Japan and had been enchanted by the experience. His first sentence to me was a stunner: Why hadn’t I ever approached The New York Times for a job? What? I could understand that he had forgotten our exchange of letters two years earlier, and perhaps he did not know I had been told to get a job somewhere else in an interview a year earlier. But surely Max Frankel had told him about our meeting, and the fact that there had been a job freeze imposed on the Washington bureau by none other than, I had to believe, the man sitting across from me. (I learned years later that Frankel had written to Abe more than a year earlier, on December 9, 1970, that I was eager to join the newspaper and he, Max, was persuaded that “the talent, energy and sources this man possesses ought to be in the service of the Times….[H]is ability could bring us great rewards.” Max also dealt with my obvious personal political biases, writing that “regardless of his opinions on this or that issue, he is a reporter first of all. I think he not only recognizes the Times’ standards of fairness and nonpartisanship but has shown, above all in his Mylai work, that he has mastered the techniques of marshaling factual evidence and muting the crusader’s instinct.” It was a very generous assessment for a man whose instincts, in terms of being a crusader, would always be the opposite of mine.)