Les understood the intricacies of nuclear bargaining strategy, a rarity among newspaper correspondents—it was his beat at the Times—and Kissinger worked hard to keep him, a former academic associate, in the loop and on the team, as Kissinger saw it. Les and Kissinger talked often, leaving a trail of transcripts that showed Kissinger’s sense of mortality and, perhaps, doom. At one point in a 1974 telephone talk about one of Gelb’s arms control stories that suggested deliberate deception—this talk was classified—Gelb said, “It’s hard…in Washington today not to believe that every government official isn’t trying to pull your ear”—that is, trying to mislead. Kissinger, hearing the word “ear,” had a revelatory response: “I’m not talking about wiretapping.” At the time, questions about his responsibility for such were still pending before the Senate. Gelb: “I’m talking about in general…including the wiretapping.” Kissinger: “Sy Hersh is out to get me.” The ever-loyal Gelb: “All I’m saying…if you have a conversation with him, you will explain your notion of reality. Sy Hersh will print it and he will take that into account. He will be bound by it.” Kissinger: “I will defend substance. If in order to keep in public office, I have to turn myself into a constant defense of my integrity I won’t keep public office.”
Les was a lifesaver for me amid the pressures of the Washington bureau, and it was sometimes hard to say no to one of his antic schemes. For instance, one miserable winter day I tagged along, very reluctantly, when Les had a late morning appointment in the State Department to review the text of a Kissinger background briefing on arms control. As Les later told a journalist, he casually asked a Kissinger spokesman if he “could bring a friend in, too?” The answer was yes. We arrive and Gelb, who is having the time of his life, says after shaking hands with the spokesman, “This is Sy Hersh.” The spokesman, as Gelb recalled, “begins to tremble, physically tremble. Sy is reading a newspaper. [The spokesman] can’t keep his eyes off him. He might as well have been Dracula.” The guy was completely unnerved, but Les quickly said something like I was there on another mission and had nothing to do with the appointment at hand. The aide did not get around to shaking my hand. Les and I laughed about the scene for weeks.
It was wonderful to have a laugh or two in the office, but we were dealing in the early 1970s with a corrupt president who was fighting to stay in office and perhaps would do anything to do so. I got a brutal taste of the power of the presidency and the complicated responsibility of the press a few weeks after the military spying scandal evaporated. Nixon’s internal taping system had been revealed the summer before, and federal prosecutors handling the various Watergate cases were successfully suing for access to conversations that could be relevant. In early May, a federal employee I knew slightly sent me pages from a Nixon tape that had been subpoenaed and received for use in the criminal trial in New York of two of Nixon’s cabinet members, Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans and former attorney general John Mitchell.*3 On the nighttime tape, Nixon was perhaps showing off, or perhaps after too many martinis, mouthing off about minorities. He talked repeatedly and disparagingly about “those Jew boys” in the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who “are all over everybody. You can’t stop them.” There was similar talk about “stopping those Jews in the U.S. Attorney’s Office” in Washington that were involved in proceedings against him. He referred to Judge John Sirica, who skeptically handled the original Watergate break-in case, as “that Wop.” I spent many days verifying that such language came easily in the Oval Office and was far from being used, as the White House would later contend, “in a spirit of good humor among friends.”
The story ran on the front page of the Times and created the expected wave of protest from the White House and the President’s supporters. A number of White House officials, obviously being egged on by a furious president, attacked the story publicly and privately in letters to various editors at the Times, including Clifton Daniel, still the Washington bureau chief. All of that was expected, but what happened next was not. Tom Wicker, the wonderful reporter, editor, and columnist for the Times, pulled up a chair next to my desk in the noisy newsroom and asked if I had a minute. Of course I did. He hunched closer and said my story about Nixon’s language, and the White House’s over-the-top denials of such, amid attacks on me and the Times, told much about Nixon’s irrational state of mind and reminded him of a story he did not write. He had become the paper’s Washington bureau chief in 1964 while also covering the White House. At some point late in 1965, as the Vietnam War was, even then, stalemated, he filed a tough analysis piece about the war and its dangers a day or so before he and his colleagues in the White House press corps flew down to the Johnson ranch with the President for a long weekend. There was a routine press briefing midmorning on Saturday, and the reporters were told that the “lid” was on, meaning that there would be no official presidential events that day. At some point the President, driving, as he often did, a white Lincoln convertible, drove up to the press pool at breakneck speed, slammed on the brakes, opened the right front door—all eyes were on him—yelled “Wicker,” and made a come-hither motion. Tom got into the car and the two of them sped off down a dusty dirt road. No words were spoken. After a moment or two, Johnson once again slammed on the brakes, wheeling to a halt near a stand of trees. Leaving the motor running, he climbed out, walked a few dozen feet toward the trees, stopped, pulled down his pants, and defecated, in full view. The President wiped himself with leaves and grass, pulled up his pants, climbed into the car, turned it around, and sped back to the press gathering. Once there, again the brakes were slammed on, and Tom was motioned out. All of this was done without a word being spoken.
I of course do not remember all of Tom’s precise words, but I remember some, and all of his pain. Johnson was passing a very obvious message about what he thought of Wicker’s newspaper analysis. But what he did was crazy, just as Nixon’s use of language and his insistence, through others, that the words were meant to be affectionate was crazy. “I knew then,” Tom told me, “that the son of a bitch was never going to end the war.” He added that he thought then, and still thought, he should have found a way to write about what happened, and what it said about Johnson’s blind insistence that he was right and those who disagreed were wrong, shit-kicking wrong. The Vietnam War would go on and on.
I would have my own Wicker-like moment, but without the regret, shortly after Nixon left the White House in disgrace on August 9, 1974, to return to his beachfront home in San Clemente, California. A few weeks later I was called by someone connected to a nearby hospital in California and told that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had been treated in the emergency room there a few days after she and Nixon had returned from Washington. She told doctors that her husband had hit her. I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency room physician who treated her. I had no idea what to do with the information, if anything, but I went along with the old adage from the City News Bureau: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” I had gotten to know John Ehrlichman well enough by mid-1974, so I called him and told him, with more specifics than I am writing here, about what had happened to Pat Nixon in San Clemente. Ehrlichman stunned me by saying that he knew of two previous incidents when Nixon struck his wife. The first time was in the days after he lost the race for governor of California in 1962, when he bitterly told the press that it was his last political race and they would not have “Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.” A second assault took place during Nixon’s years in the White House. I did not write the story at the time, and I do not recall telling any of the editors in the Washington bureau about it. I did think about turning what I knew into a footnote in a later book on Kissinger, but decided against doing so. I raised the story once again during a talk in 1998 to that year’s journalism fellows at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. The issue was the merging of private life and public life, and I explained th
at I would have written about the attacks if they were an example of why his personal life impinges on policy, but there was no evidence of such a link. I added that it was not a case where Nixon had gone looking for his wife with an intent to hit her, could not find her, and bombed Cambodia instead. I was taken aback by the anger my decision generated among some of the female fellows, who noted that battery is a crime in many jurisdictions and wondered why I did not choose to report a crime. “What if it’s another crime that he’s committing?” I was asked. “What if he went in and robbed a bank?” All I could say was that at the time I did not—in my ignorance—view the incident as a crime. My reply was not satisfactory. I did not comprehend then, as the women who challenged me did, that what Nixon had done was a criminal act. I should have reported what I knew at the time or, if my doing so would have compromised a source, have made sure that someone else did.
In early September 1974, I was slipped a letter, written by Michael Harrington, a member of Congress, telling of top secret testimony that William Colby, the CIA director, had given five months earlier about CIA economic and political activities aimed at imperiling and eventually overthrowing the government of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who had been elected to office in 1970. Allende had been assassinated the previous September, and a coup leader, General Augusto Pinochet, instituted martial law and moved the nation to the far right while murdering, jailing, and repressing much of the leftist opposition. Colby told Congress that most, if not all, of the CIA’s clandestine activities had been approved by the Forty Committee, a high-level State Department covert intelligence panel that was headed by Henry Kissinger. Colby, in his testimony, depicted the operations against Allende as being a test of the use of cash payments to bring down a government viewed as hostile to the United States. The budget for the operation was eight million dollars, Colby testified. Kissinger, in his confirmation testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had been asked whether the CIA had been involved in any way in Allende’s overthrow. He did what American officials are taught to do at such moments; he responded with a qualified lie, saying, “The CIA had nothing to do with the coup, to the best of my knowledge and belief.”
I tore into the story over the next month or so, quoting those involved as saying that the policy was Richard Nixon’s, but Kissinger had emerged as the key strategist in the economic fight against Allende. There had been repeated allegations of American influence in the overthrow, bolstered by the Nixon administration’s immediate recognition of the Pinochet government, and the refusal of Washington to insist that Pinochet’s murderous recriminations against Allende supporters be ended. Representative Harrington’s letter essentially said that Nixon and Kissinger had been lying for years with their insistence that the United States was not intervening illegally inside Chile, and that the Allende government’s inability to get loans and credit was not a result of Chile’s poor credit but the result of American policy. Within a few weeks, I had been given access to secret documents showing that the CIA’s activities went beyond economic pressure and involved the funding of violent extremist groups inside Chile that staged strikes aimed at disrupting the economy. There also was talk of assassination, and at least one senior Chilean army general who was pro-Allende was murdered with arms smuggled in by the CIA station in Santiago.
It was obvious that some in the CIA were talking to me and doing more than that. Kissinger must have known why: The pressure on the Agency to do something about Allende was constant and had come from Nixon, as relayed by Kissinger. The CIA, battered by the Vietnam War and by its disturbing role in the Watergate scandal, was not going to go silently into the night when it came to Kissinger. Neither was I. Kissinger was their target, and mine. There was no doubt about my intent inside the State Department. A September 24, 1974, memorandum to Kissinger, later declassified, written by two close aides, Larry Eagleburger, Kissinger’s executive assistant, and Robert McCloskey, the State Department’s spokesman, warned,
We believe Seymour Hersh intends to publish further allegations on the CIA in Chile. He will not put an end to this campaign. You are his ultimate target.
Bill Colby told Brent Scowcroft [Nixon’s military assistant] that Hersh’s articles of today, last Friday, and Saturday are false and that he is prepared to say so. We believe that a direct and public denial from Colby is the most effective method of countering Hersh.
Nat Davis and Harry Shlaudeman [diplomats who served in Chile] have drafted the attached statement which represents the truth as they know it [emphasis added]. With your authorization we would ask Scowcroft to give it to Colby for him to check, verify absolutely, and issue if justified. Time is of the essence since the longer Hersh’s allegations go uncountered, the more credibility they assume. Can we proceed?
The articles cited dealt, in part, with internal CIA directives that I had seen, dealing with the Agency’s efforts to get funding to support anti-Allende extremists, such as the Patria y Libertad, a reactionary group that openly boasted of its involvement in military efforts to overthrow the Allende government. Colby issued no denial.
Three days later I wrote about a stunning Kissinger rebuke to David Popper, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, who had discussed torture and other human rights violations during a meeting on military aid with representatives of the Pinochet government. “Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures,” Kissinger had scribbled over a cable he had received from Popper. I wrote that Popper and other diplomats in Chile and in the State Department’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, which is responsible for diplomacy in Latin America, were angered and “amazed” by the Kissinger rebuke.
Kissinger immediately convened a meeting of the department’s leadership after reading my dispatch and went on a rant, according to a verbatim transcript that somehow ended up in the files of the State Department’s Office of the Historian:
I want it to be made very clear that the party is over. I don’t want to hear from you what I am doing wrong anymore and anyone who doesn’t like what I am doing can leave….I am simply fed up….The Foreign Service is a disgrace to itself….I don’t care about the leaks because I will be gone anyway. I want Popper’s explanation of what his role was in this Hersh thing….I don’t feel obligated to explain myself to Sy Hersh. If a Secretary of State cannot write a note on a cable without it being leaked…then you don’t have a Foreign Service, but a rabble….These leaks are simply unmanly, cowardly and disloyal. If they had guts, if there was one person who had the guts to resign, it would be something. But there must be something wrong with this system and how we take them in.
Kissinger’s tirade, before at least eight senior State Department officials and a note taker, did not leak. His role in Chile would be a focal point of many investigations to come, including the most significant and far-reaching inquiry into the role of the CIA and the American intelligence community since the Agency came into being after World War II.
*1Reston was always a little mystified by me but eventually ended up, so Harrison Salisbury put it, admiring my chutzpah. I wasn’t so sure. On Christmas Eve in 1973. I had volunteered, as one of the office Jews, to work late that night. It would be me, a clerk, and a teletypist until well after midnight. At some point very late, Scotty, in black tie, walked into the bureau with his wife and two other bedecked couples, one of them being the Paul Nitzes, he of arms control fame. Scotty had had a few and I assumed he was there to collect a fresh bottle from his office, since liquor stores had long closed. Reston spotted me and exclaimed, “Hersh, aren’t you going to get that exclusive interview with Jesus for the second edition?” I was, to put it mildly, nonplussed. Was Scotty making fun of my constant hustle? Or was he pissed at me for breaking the rules by going after his high friends in government? I got my answer a few weeks later. Ernst Klein, my wife’s garrulous and sometimes cranky grandfather, who had immigrated to New York, allegedly from Hungary, as a youth and pro
spered enough to be able to escape to Miami Beach for the winter, suddenly strolled into the bureau. He wanted to see me at work, he said, but admitted that he actually was there to meet Scotty Reston, whose columns he admired. I was on deadline but happily walked him to Scotty’s office and introduced Ernie, who was in his mideighties, as a fan. Scotty waved him to a chair and I left. I forgot about the two of them until after I had filed, hours later. I dashed to Scotty’s office and found them deep into a quart bottle of vodka and having a grand time talking about the old days. No question that Scotty was a street reporter at heart, as I liked to think I was. But we never had lunch.
*2By this time David Obst somehow had befriended Woodward and Bernstein—he would later become their literary agent—and he arranged a dinner meeting with the three of us, then, so we thought, at the top of our game, with Jann Wenner, the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine. There was the usual drinking et cetera, which Bob eschewed, and at a hazy moment late at night the talk turned to the conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Obst, or was it Wenner?, in their wacky genius, came up with what seemed at that hour to be a fantastic idea: Rolling Stone would announce a joint investigation by Woodward and Bernstein and Sy Hersh into the JFK assassination—one that would be publicly financed and completely divorced from any outside influence. Stock in the venture, which would produce newspaper stories, a book, and a TV documentary, would be sold through the magazine for twenty-five dollars a share. All in America and around the world could buy in. There was frenzied talk of raising scores of millions of dollars. Needless to say, what seemed to be a terrific idea in the middle of the night proved to be less interesting the next morning. I called Obst and told him not a chance, and I assume Bob and Carl did the same.
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