I do not remember whom in New York I bitched to, but I was bitching aplenty. It may well have been something I said to Bob Phelps that made its way north. In any case, in the midst of my doldrums, I got a call from Clifton Daniel, a senior Times editor who was primarily known to me as the husband of Harry Truman’s talented daughter, Margaret. I recall the gist of the one-way conversation well: “Sy, this is Clifton Daniel. I know you’re unhappy but don’t go anywhere. I’m coming down—this is private—to run the bureau in a few weeks, and I promise that you will be able to write any story you have.” A few days later it was announced that Max was moving to New York to become Sunday editor of the newspaper, a job that got him out of Washington and put him in the running to eventually become the executive editor, the top job that every editor on the newspaper, for reasons I could never fathom, dreamed about. How could anyone want to edit when there was so much fun to be had reporting? I stayed put.
Clifton was a North Carolinian who was always gracious and polite. It would be hard to locate anyone on the newspaper, or perhaps on the planet, who could be more of a contrast than I was. He always dressed well and oozed charm and very pointed humor. At an end-of-year reception for the staff and families, I introduced Clifton to my wife and he said, with a big smile, “Oh my, Mrs. Hersh. You have my heartfelt condolences.” A few days later he walked into the newsroom and dumped half a dozen boxes full of Brooks Brothers shirts and sweaters on my desk and said only, “Dress better.” As different as we were, we had two things in common—a love of stories that pained Nixon and Kissinger, architects of a mutually despised war, and two young children of the same age, all of whom adored McDonald’s. The two of us eventually set up a standing date to take our children there on Saturday mornings, and occasionally to a very bad kiddie movie. I would be dressed as I usually was, in a T-shirt and chinos, and Clifton was always in a suit. The odd couple.
Just before the end of 1972, with Nixon reelected by a landslide—his opponent, the liberal Democrat George McGovern, won only 37.5 percent of the vote—and the Democrats in total disarray, Clifton gave me the bad news: Abe Rosenthal wanted me to drop my obsession with Vietnam—an obsession I thought Abe shared—and focus on Watergate. Nixon may have won, I was told, but Abe was convinced the story was far from over. There would be investigations not yet envisioned, and he did not want Ben Bradlee to continue humiliating the Washington bureau as many in New York were suggesting. I protested but Abe insisted he was doing me a favor by giving me a chance to show the newspaper world that my skills went beyond trashing the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about the White House or the Watergate story, other than what had been published.
Over the Christmas holiday Abe had made another radical move, hiring Leslie Gelb to begin work in January 1973 as a reporter in the Washington bureau. I knew Gelb as someone who had worked as director of policy planning and arms control for the Pentagon and also served as director of the top secret Pentagon Papers project that was authorized by Robert McNamara. Earlier, while working on a doctorate at Harvard, Gelb was a teaching assistant for Henry Kissinger. I had interviewed him while he was at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, about the Paris peace talks, about which he was knowledgeable and helpful. It all sounded pretty bad to me, especially because he had never worked for a newspaper and had worked on the war.
Gelb was assigned a desk a few feet from me, and he turned out to be the most fun-loving guy I had met on the newspaper. He was brilliant, no fan of the war, and innately suspicious of Kissinger—although respectful of Henry’s intelligence and cunning—and understood the soul of bureaucracy in a way no one who spent his life as a reporter could. If I learned of a new highly secret document, Les would get it within a few weeks. He was a marvel. We became fast friends and active pranksters. I not only had a bureau chief who would have my back, but I had a new best friend.
All I had to do was figure out Watergate, six months after Bob and Carl had done so. That story, by the end of 1972, seemed to be at a dead end. In fact, it had just begun.
*In a critical study of American global power published in September 2017, McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, recalled an important role—not remembered by me—I had played in initially getting his book published. Cord Meyer, the deputy director for covert operations, had gone, very early, to McCoy’s publisher, Harper & Row, in New York, and asked that they not publish it. Harper & Row refused, but did agree, to McCoy’s horror, to allow the CIA to review the manuscript prior to publication. At that point, McCoy, as he wrote, went to me: “Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day that the CIA courier arrived…to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm and his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship soon appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead….The book was published unaltered.”
· THIRTEEN ·
Watergate, and Much More
I had one thing going for me as I slunk into the Watergate scandal. It came off a tip I had received a month or two earlier but had ignored. A friend from the New York publishing world told me that a freelance writer named Andrew St. George, who had ties to the anti-Castro Cuban community in Miami, was circulating a book outline about the experience of Frank A. Sturgis, one of the five men who had been caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington.
My initial response had been, more or less, “What does this have to do with the war in Vietnam?” Now, given my new assignment, I began calling around to get a copy of the outline. One of St. George’s most explosive claims, based on what he said were a series of interviews with Sturgis, was that Sturgis had done political surveillance of Democrats in Washington as well as being part of a team that was investigating drug trafficking in Central America. I wondered whether investigating meant smuggling. All of this allegedly was done at the direction of Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who was linked to the Watergate break-in team. St. George’s reputation in the New York publishing world was spotty, but he had won prizes in the late 1950s for his photographs of the Cuban revolution and apparently had gotten a contract, for minimal money, for a book based on interviews with Sturgis. I called him and we had a meeting at which it became clear that the likable St. George was extremely eager for me to write a story about his book project. I told him that would never happen unless he could produce Sturgis for me and prove that the two had the relationship he claimed. A few days later St. George, who died in 2001, told me that a meeting with Sturgis was on; the three of us, if I was still serious, were to have dinner in a few nights with Sturgis at Joe’s Stone Crab, a famous high-end seafood joint in Miami Beach.
We met, had a drink, and St. George told a sullen Sturgis that I was a hotshot who was interested in writing a story about the book they were doing. Sturgis, craggy-faced and deeply tanned, did not seem very interested in anything St. George said. I had done some homework and knew Sturgis had fought with Fidel Castro in the late 1950s to overthrow the dictatorship of the U.S.-supported Batista regime but had turned against Castro when, as Cuba’s leader, Castro embraced communism. By 1972, Sturgis had been involved in anti-Castro activities for more than a decade, with or without the help of the CIA. After a drink or two, St. George got up to go to the bathroom. Sturgis gave me a look and asked if I had a rental car. I said yes. He said, “Let’s go,” and began to slide out of our booth. It was a very brief moment of truth for me. Can I screw St. George to get what could be the story I need? Sturgis gave me the answer, of course. I dropped a few twenties on the table and we split. I drove him to my hotel. We had another drink, and dinner, during which he began telling me what actually had taken place, but only for a few moments. He abruptly announced that he had someone he needed to meet and asked if he could borrow my car. Since it wasn’t my car, and I knew there
was only one way to respond if I wanted to get this guy’s story, I said yes. He promised to be back for breakfast the next morning, or something like that. It was a charming introduction to the anti-Castro world of Miami Beach.
Sturgis returned the next day with the car intact, and we renewed our talk. He confirmed that he and others on the Watergate break-in team had been paid hush money since their arrest. He had wanted more money and did not get it, which was the sole reason, so I surmised, he had talked to St. George and was now talking to me. I returned to Washington knowing that Andrew St. George would be mad as hell at me, and he had a right to be, but I had the beginning of what could be a hell of a story. I also had information to barter with the lawyer who was representing Sturgis and his break-in colleagues as well as the Feds in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington who were prosecuting the case.
Sturgis had told me he thought John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general, had knowledge of earlier political dirty tricks targeted at the Democrats, which included spying, or attempts to spy, in 1971 on Senators George McGovern and Edmund Muskie, then the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination. I learned later, not from Sturgis, that $900,000, far more money than was previously known, could not be accounted for by Nixon’s 1972 reelection committee. There was no proof, but there also was no question in my mind that some of the unaccounted-for money had ended up, through cutouts, in the hands of the break-in team.
The story I wrote about all of this was the Times’s first big exclusive on the Watergate scandal, but it was a bitch to get into the paper. For all of Abe Rosenthal’s angst about Ben Bradlee and The Washington Post’s preeminence on the story, the editors drove me nuts in a way that had not been the case with any of my prior stories about the Vietnam War. There was a strange Times pathology when it came to stories that touched the presidency.
Bill Kovach, a colleague in 1973 who later became the Washington bureau chief, explained to The Washington Post years later that one of the biggest problems he had as an editor “was managing Sy at a newspaper that hated to be beaten but didn’t really want to be first. It was scared to death of being first on a controversial story that challenged the credibility of the government.” It was this attitude, Kovach added, that was “part of the culture of the institution that Sy was breaking down. Journalistically, Abe Rosenthal and the others wanted to be there. They wanted to be there. But historically, culturally, viscerally, they hated it….[T]he arguments and the debates and the rassling back and forth on every Sy Hersh story were almost endless. It wasn’t because Sy was sloppy. It was material they didn’t want to be out there with.”*1
Salisbury, in his book on the Times, recalled, as I do not, that I had originally proposed that my Watergate debut be a three-part series, but my new information was consolidated into one long piece that ran on Sunday, January 14, 1973, with a modest headline on the left side of the front page. I had used the word “source” repeatedly throughout the story, without identifying who the sources were. Of course Abe knew their names, but I insisted on being as opaque in print as possible; this was just the first step up a big hill, and I wanted everyone involved in that first story to keep on talking. Salisbury said that another issue was a threat of a lawsuit from John Mitchell. He wrote, “But in the end the story was published, including the Mitchell part. There had been trouble in both New York and Washington over the sourcing, it was not as clear and complete as The Times liked, but Hersh remembered telling the editors that ‘at some point you will just have to believe me and trust me. A number of guys had told me about the story.’ The Times did trust Hersh….At long last the great investigative story and the great investigative reporter had been linked. They would stay together for the duration of Watergate.”
One of the first calls I got on Monday morning was from Bob Woodward. We had never met or talked, but he congratulated me and thanked me for doing the story. The Post could not do it alone, Bob said, and he knew he needed the Times with them. Nixon’s landslide reelection, despite the brilliant work he and Carl Bernstein had done, obviously rankled. I’ve liked and respected Bob ever since, although we differ on many issues. He did not have to make that call.
There was no lawsuit from John Mitchell or anyone, and I sensed—as I was pretty sure Abe did, too—that there would be none as I kept on going. I focused over the next few months on learning what I could about the White House and the men who ran it, and I had a few long talks with senior Republican Party insiders who supported Nixon politically but were fearful of what he might have done. The Senate Watergate Committee was voted into being in early February by an ominous, for the White House, vote of 77 to 0, after which I was able to make useful contact with a few senior senators and staff, Democrat and Republican. I was trying to find truth in a White House sodden with lies, deception, and fear. Being the New York Times guy on the beat surely helped—no other newspaper in America had its authority—but it was still Bob and Carl’s story.
I wrote a few suggestive articles about the inevitable sacrifice of lower-level aides who worked directly for Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s hard-driving chief of staff. The aides had been stupidly funneling money and messages for much of the past year to college chums they recruited to carry out a series of jejune dirty tricks on behalf of the President. I was convinced that Haldeman and his partner in the White House terror, John Ehrlichman, the domestic adviser, had to know they were going to be eventual targets. I also made contact with investigators and staff members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office who led the federal government inquiry; they did far more to bring down Nixon than history has given them credit for. There were also a few good guys in the Nixon cabinet and White House who were appalled by what had been authorized, in one way or another, by Nixon. The most important of those for me was Elliot Richardson, a State Department official who was named secretary of defense in January 1973 and served less than four months before being appointed attorney general in May by an increasingly desperate Nixon.
I got to where I needed to be by mid-April, in terms of contacts inside the Nixon White House, Congress, and the agencies doing the investigation into Watergate. From April 19 to July 1, I published forty-two articles in the Times, all of them dealing with exclusive information moving the needle closer to the President, and all but two of them on the front page. The high point was in early May; in six days I wrote four stories that led the paper with banner headlines and a fifth that was the off lead—the front-page story at the top of the far-left column. Reviewing them for this memoir reminded me how half-nuts I must have been with exhaustion and anxiety and lack of sleep. On May 2 it was a three-deck banner headline saying, “Watergate Investigators Link Cover-Up to High White House Aides and Mitchell.” A subhead said, “6 May Be Indicted.” On May 3 it was a three-deck headline reading, “Investigators Term G.O.P. Spying a Widespread Attempt to Insure Weak Democratic Nominee in 1972.” On May 5 my off-lead dispatch linked a senior Nixon attorney to the destruction of campaign data. On May 6, I brought CIA wrongdoing onto the front page; there was a three-column headline that day saying, “C.I.A. Officials Summoned to Explain Agency’s Role in Ellsberg Break-In Plot.” On May 7 there was another three-column headline: “Marine Corps Head Linked to C.I.A.’s Authorization for Ellsberg Burglary.”*2
It was an unimaginable explosion of news as Nixon was being fed to the wolves by his friends and enemies. Amazingly, it all took place before the existence of the White House taping system was known. It was nirvana for me, marked by halcyon days without second-guessing by editors in Washington or New York. I also felt I was responding, in a totally appropriate and professional way, to Nixon’s cavalier attitude toward the My Lai massacre, his support of Lieutenant William Calley, and his unwillingness to protect General Jack Lavelle, whose sin was doing what he had been ordered by the President to do. The national desk in New York, and its editor, David Jones, became my best friends. I would be called midday by someone on the desk in New York and asked if I thought
I would have a story for that day. If the answer was yes, I would be asked if it was front-page material. I always said yes, of course. On occasion, as the evening wore down, I would be asked by a late-shift editor whether I thought a story was worth a two- or three-column headline.
Many years later I told Bob Thomson of The Washington Post, who wrote wonderful stuff for the paper’s Sunday magazine, “There will never be a period like that in our business again. Nobody can understand what it was like. Boy wake up. Boy hear story. Boy get story. Boy put story in paper. No trauma.” Salisbury, always generous to me in his book on the Times, said simply of my Watergate reportage, “It was as though Sy Hersh had been born for this moment.”
It was, in those months, a self-perpetuating process. I was getting stories because I was finding and writing stories, and people inside the government or Congress with something they thought important or pertinent to say wanted to talk to me. It was inevitable that I would end up in close contact with the honorable men in that disgraced administration; for example, I could reach Elliot Richardson or one of his senior deputies whenever I needed in the month or so after Richardson’s appointment as attorney general.
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