It took four years of constant reading, interviewing, and writing and rewriting, before the book, far too lengthy, was published in June 1983. Its title, The Price of Power, was suggested by the ever-loyal Halberstam. The reaction was predictable: Those in the media whose success and insights were derived, in part, from their closeness to Kissinger, hated the book; others admired it. Noam Chomsky, whom I knew only slightly and respected greatly, sent me a warm note saying, “It is really fabulous, apart from the feeling that one is crawling through a sewer. It sets a new standard for far-reaching and insightful analysis of the making of foreign policy, one that is going to be very hard to equal.” The ever-droll Russell Baker wrote a column in the Times titled “The Hissing of Hersh” that depicted another point of view:
Among the well-tailored group headed for Seymour Hersh’s house, I recognized Endicott. “Come join us,” he cried. “We’re all going to stand outside Seymour Hersh’s house and hiss.”
Well, he didn’t have to tell me what that was all about. I knew Hersh had just published a book of 698 pages….Personally, I hadn’t read it and didn’t see how I could for a while….
Still, I’d read in the papers that Hersh’s book wasn’t very flattering to Kissinger; and knowing that Endicott considers Kissinger the greatest diplomat since Talleyrand, I wasn’t surprised that he might dislike opinion to the contrary.
“But is it bad enough to justify hissing Hersh en masse in front of his own house?” I asked. “Worse,” said Endicott. “It is a pack of slimy lies.” “That’s terrible. What are the things Hersh lies slimily about?” “How should I know?” said Endicott. “I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet.”
Baker’s inspiration came from an interview I did the day after publication with Ted Koppel, the distinguished anchor of ABC-TV’s Nightline, a hugely popular late-night news program. Kissinger had been interviewed by Koppel the night before my appearance on a different issue, but Koppel raised the subject of my book, whose opening chapter about double-dealing was splashed all over newspapers that day. Kissinger’s response was ferocious, and undoubtedly sold thousands of copies of my book. “I haven’t read the book,” he said, adding, “What you read is a slimy lie.” But it was he who lied when asked if he knew me or my work, telling Koppel, “I don’t know him at all.”
Koppel’s introduction of me the next night set the tone for an ugly hour that managed to produce something unusual for me—sympathy.
Koppel: “Mr. Hersh’s book paints a savage portrait of a wildly ambitious and largely unprincipled man, charges which Kissinger has denounced as ‘slimy lies.’…Sy Hersh, what’s the point? What purpose is served by the book?”
I remembered thinking that this was going to be bad. Easy answer, though: “Oh, truth, for sure…simply to tell what happened in that first Nixon administration.”
Koppel: “Truth without having spoken to him?”
Hersh: “A reporter is often able to get truth without speaking to some of the people directly involved.”
Koppel: “You must forgive me. I guess everyone’s in the same boat on this one….No one has quite had the time yet to read the entire book….I get the impression that beyond a grudging first couple of paragraphs about the China opening and the SALT talks there isn’t a great deal of admiration left in the book.”
It went on like that for a few minutes, with Koppel continuing to suggest that my book was focused on a Kissinger who was “almost Rasputin-like in his ability to fool everybody, until Sy Hersh comes along and rips the mask from him.” It was impossible to say much about what I had learned about Kissinger’s real foreign policy since Koppel had no idea of what was in the book, nor did he know just how Rasputin-like all in that White House had been.
Enter two more guests on the hour-long show: Larry Eagleburger, who was Kissinger’s undersecretary in the State Department and one of those who warned Kissinger that he was my “ultimate target” for his role in overthrowing the Allende government in Chile, and Winston Lord, whom I knew slightly from a few poker games at Les Gelb’s home. Lord, one of Kissinger’s most trusted aides, had my respect as someone who remained totally loyal to Kissinger on a staff full of malcontents. I had wanted both men to talk to me, but they would not.
Eagleburger went first. At one point in 1974, while working for Kissinger, Larry had invited me to the State Department and said, sardonically, that “Heinrich” wanted me to see some top secret documents about the CIA operations in Chile in an effort to prove that a former CIA official who had been talking to me had supported the mission at a critical time. I of course skimmed through the sensitive papers and realized, as Larry perhaps had not, that they included a summary of an earlier secret meeting at which yet another heinous covert operation against the Allende government had been approved by Kissinger, and wrote a story the next day about it for the Times. I had been glad to make a mockery of yet another Kissinger gambit that demonstrated his essential contempt for the working press. Remembering all this, I was hard-pressed not to laugh when Larry said, “What we have here is a total ignorance, or attempt to avoid…the fact this was a massive intellectual effort and a great foreign policy….I suffer also from not having read the book.”
Lord tore into me personally. He acknowledged that he had not read the book but depicted me nonetheless as a know-nothing who ignored Kissinger’s achievements in China, on arms control, and in trying to end a war with honor. “Are we better off” with Kissinger serving as an anchor for the American people and the world during Watergate? he asked rhetorically. “I submit the answer is yes. That will be the verdict of history long after hatchet men have slunk back into their holes.” Lord had to know he was playing fast and loose by bringing up the 1972 Kissinger and Nixon breakthrough visit to China. The middleman in the secret negotiations was, as I said earlier, the murderous Yahya Khan, the president of Pakistan, and Nixon and Kissinger looked away as the Pakistani army slaughtered untold numbers of innocents. Lord was famed on the inside in those days for his ability to know which aide had been told which set of lies by Kissinger. I quoted a rare on-the-record interview in my book that Lord gave about the slaughter, in which he managed to claim that Kissinger’s refusal to crack down on Khan’s attacks in East Pakistan, despite waves of protest inside the United States, was aimed at China: “So it was not so much a ‘Thanks, Yahya, for helping us with China’ as a demonstration to China that we were a reliable country to deal with.”
At that point, I was sure that Koppel would defend me, if only to suggest that I did have enough standing as a journalist to merit spending an hour on his broadcast. He did not and I was left having to say, “I’m a little tired of talking about my book to people who haven’t read it….I certainly hope…when Mr. Eagleburger and Mr. Lord were in government, they didn’t conduct foreign policy on the basis of what they read in newspapers.”
I had been exposed to tough love from CIA operatives, Sidney Korshak, Charles Bluhdorn, and a variety of thugs in my career, but nothing would match the face-to-face hostility generated by Koppel and the others, with millions watching on television. I knew Koppel had been a longtime admirer of Kissinger’s, and was open in describing him, as he did in a 1989 interview, as “one of the two or three great secretaries of state of our century.” In 2005, after his retirement from ABC, Koppel went further and told a public television interviewer that Kissinger, after being appointed by Nixon to be secretary of state, asked him to become the State Department spokesman with the rank of assistant secretary of state. “It was a nice offer,” Koppel told a reporter for the PBS Frontline documentary series. “I struggled with it for about three or four weeks” before turning it down.
The book did what it was meant to do: expose some of the truth about Kissinger. There were bad reviews, but more good ones. The one I thought caught both the good and the tedious in the book was written by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a Times daily book reviewer, whom I did not know. Wh
at was most impressive about the book, he wrote, was
its exhaustive detail, its seeming objectivity and, most striking of all, its ultimate thesis. This is a book that doesn’t just gossip and tattle, but reconstructs four years of American foreign policy in far greater detail than Mr. Nixon did in his own official memoirs, and almost rivals the exhaustiveness of Mr. Kissinger’s two volumes….
This is a book that through its factual density avoids the typically hectoring tone of the investigative reporter or the ideologue with an ax to grind. Indeed, Mr. Hersh manages to sound like a historian, a morally objective one at that.
Lehmann-Haupt went on to explain the ultimate difficulty with the book. It was a hard read, he said, in essence. “So densely detailed that it must test the tolerance of anyone who has grown even slightly weary of reading about the Nixon Administration.” Besides, he added, the book ultimately “is depressing, especially to anyone grown weary with Watergate. Foreign policy and Henry Kissinger were supposed to be two of the redeeming features of the Nixon Administration. If Mr. Hersh is wrong, then there is still cause for comfort, but if his monumental study stands the test of future scrutiny, then we will no longer have even that solace.”
* * *
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I SAW BOTH the good and the tedious one day early in the summer of 1983 when my family was invited to swim at a YMCA pool in suburban Maryland. As we got settled, I saw a young woman reading my book while sunbathing. Thirty minutes later she was fast asleep, with the opened book shielding her face from the sun.
With the book behind me, Les Gelb thought we should combine on a column. There was no question that we would be able to sign up many newspapers for the venture. Les, though, brilliant as he was at getting hard-core information, was a bit lazy at heart and would have been clever and seductive enough to get me to do most of the writing, or at least the first draft. My real concern was that it just wasn’t for me: I thrived on long projects and would have gone nuts writing two or three seven-hundred-word columns week after week. Les did fine without me and ended up with a column at the Times.*3
Meanwhile, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on inside the White House. The consequences of President Reagan’s inability to control, or desire to control, William J. Casey, the CIA director, were not being reported, and I knew there was some important work I could do for the Times, if the paper would have me. I had a talk with Abe about me, the Times, and his hurt feelings, and we both knew then it would be a mistake. He wrote me a long letter afterward saying, “It would have been awfully nice if you had stayed and built with us, but since that didn’t work, I think it’s best to leave it at that.” He was right—although, once again, that didn’t stop him from publishing some pretty important stories I wrote over the next few years. The pieces
helped keep Kissinger out of a White House job in 1984 by revealing that a commission on the future of Central America he headed had concluded, farcically, that the Soviet Union was threatening a “strategic coup of major proportions” in the region. No such coup took place, and the commission dissolved amid controversy about its main conclusion. A draft of the commission’s report had been leaked to me, and much of it was reprinted in the paper.
revealed highly classified evidence reporting that Iraq had used a nerve agent in its war with Iran—the United States supported Iraq at the time—and had been buying laboratory equipment for the production of the agent from a West German company. The intelligence, gathered from satellite coverage, had been presented three times within a week to President Reagan without any indication he had read it, forcing CIA officials to redline the most pressing issues in the President’s daily intelligence brief that they prepared, which he apparently was not reading. (I was told at the time, but did not verify, that the White House’s national security aides eventually found a way to engage the President—by having the daily CIA intelligence brief recorded on a videotape and screened on TV for him.)
detailed a successful Pakistani operation over nine months to smuggle nuclear triggers out of the United States for its burgeoning nuclear weapons program. The story, which included an interview with the Pakistani agent involved in the operation, was published a few days in advance of the airing of a PBS Frontline documentary on the Pakistani smuggling that I had worked on with Mark Obenhaus, a New York filmmaker.
told of the secret role of the U.S. intelligence community in providing the South African government with intelligence on the banned and exiled African National Congress (ANC), which was then immersed in an ultimately successful fight to end apartheid. The sharing of such intelligence, which led to the jailing of ANC leaders, was shut down by President Jimmy Carter. (I was unable to learn whether it had been reinstated under Reagan.)
The most troublesome article I did, as someone not on the staff of the newspaper, came in June 1986 and dealt with American signals intelligence showing that General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the dictator who ran Panama, had authorized the assassination of a popular political opponent. At the time, Noriega was actively involved in supplying the Reagan administration with what was said to be intelligence on the spread of communism in Central America. Noriega also permitted American military and intelligence units to operate with impunity, in secret, from bases in Panama, and the Americans, in return, looked the other way while the general dealt openly in drugs and arms. The story was published just as Noriega was giving a speech at Harvard University and created embarrassment for him, and for Harvard, along with a very disturbing telephone threat at home, directed not at me but at my family.
I also wrote three more detailed magazine articles in those years for The New York Times Magazine. One told of a secret army spy unit that had been corrupted by money and lack of supervision; another described the attempted assassination, by American F-111s flying out of England, of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and a third dealt with the Iran-contra scandal of 1987, which revolved around the White House’s secret agreement to sell arms to Iran in return for American hostages. That article, which relied on interviews with staff members of the separate House and Senate committees, as well as with some members, raised significant issues about the reluctance of the legislators, Democrats as well as Republicans, to delve deeply into the specific role of Reagan and Vice President Bush in the sordid affair that tarnished the last years of the administration.
The newspaper and magazine articles for the Times involved intensive interviewing and reporting and reminded me of the power and importance of long-form journalism. But my main projects in the decade after the Kissinger book revolved around writing two more books and doing a second Frontline documentary, in 1988, with Mark Obenhaus that depicted the many failures of intelligence and tactics during the problematic American invasion of Grenada in 1983. I also got dragged into another profession during that time by David Obst, who had drifted into the film world and helped produce Revenge of the Nerds in 1984. David nagged me relentlessly and finally persuaded me to take a few hours off on my next reporting trip to Los Angeles and join him in visiting with Martin Bregman, a successful producer whose most recent hit had been Dog Day Afternoon, starring a very young Al Pacino. I thought the movie was terrific and so off we went.
We were to discuss a possible movie based on a Kissinger-like character that David and I had spent perhaps half an hour discussing as we drove to what is known in Hollywood as a pitch meeting. After ten or so minutes of meandering chatter with Bregman, he stunned both of us by saying “Fine” and asking us to have our agents call. As I would learn, we were meeting amid a short-lived period of milk and honey when studios put up serious money on the basis of loose talk, without a script in hand.
It did not work out with Bregman, but David and I soon had a contract at Warner Bros., and I had something new to learn. We ended up writing five scripts over the next few years for a number of serious filmmakers, including Oliver Stone, Sarah Black, and Ned Tanen. My weeks of flying back
and forth between Washington and Los Angeles had nothing to do with journalism, of course, and were best described by my wife as accomplishing three things: a chance to get to the West Coast and play tennis with my brother; take my mother to dinner; and never get embarrassed by having anything made. I did learn how to write a reasonably competent script, mostly through our association with the brilliant and very patient Tanen, a longtime studio executive who was involved in a series of hit movies that included The Deer Hunter, American Graffiti, and Top Gun. As Ned told us again and again, it’s all about character.
I wrote two more books after the Kissinger opus. “The Target Is Destroyed,” published in 1986, was an exegesis of the 1983 Russian shoot down of Korean passenger Flight 007, and The Samson Option was a 1991 history of America’s secret acquiescence in the Israeli decision to go nuclear. Both were edited by Bob Loomis of Random House.
They both had much to say that went beyond the facts. The 007 book dealt with the Reagan administration’s willingness to immediately conclude, without evidence, that Russia had shot down the airliner in full awareness that it was a passenger plane, when it inadvertently flew into Russian territory. It turned out to be pilot error, but America went into a White House–generated spasm of Cold War hysteria over the shoot down. With the help of Major General James Pfautz, the head of air force intelligence, I got deep into the air force’s first-rate reporting on the mistakes that were made. The remarkable Pfautz, who flew scores of missions in the Vietnam War, was a strong-minded officer who essentially forced the system to realize that the Russians had simply mistaken the Korean airliner that had gone off course for an American spy plane that was constantly flying off the Russian coast tracking radar and other signals. Pfautz grew to trust me because, in my reporting on the shoot down, I had uncovered some facts that he requested that I not publish, and I did what he asked. In turn, he helped me find a number of people inside the American intelligence community who knew the truth and shared it with me. My book ended with this sentence: “A tragic and brutal Soviet mistake—never acknowledged by Moscow—was escalated into a tinder-box issue on the basis of misunderstood and distorted intelligence, while the NSA, which knew better, chose not to tell others in the government what they didn’t want to hear.” The book’s greatest sales were in Japan, whose citizens learned from my book that the National Security Agency (NSA) had a signals monitoring site, known to only a few in the Japanese hierarchy, on one of the country’s northernmost islands.
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