Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  O’Connor’s office at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue was spare, but the Archbishop was a delight. We traded stories on background about Spellman, and at one point he gestured toward one of the steel filing cabinets in his office and said that when he’d first arrived in New York one of the cabinet drawers was sealed. “Well,” O’Conner told me with a laugh, “the first thing I did was call in a workman and get it opened. Inside was a wrapped package, also sealed, with a rope around it and a note saying, ‘Not to be opened by anyone. Cardinal Spellman.’ So I opened it. Hersh, it was fascinating. Full of letters.” He laughed again as I practically leaped off my chair in anticipation, and then he told me that the papers would never be seen: “I had them sent to the Vatican archives.”

  He asked about reporting, and I asked about running a huge enterprise like the Catholic Church in New York. His secretary interrupted after forty-five minutes and again after an hour. He ignored her until she opened the door to the office and made it clear he was being rude. I got up to leave, and O’Connor walked me outside. It was a sunny, warm, early spring day, and as we approached the front door he threw an arm around me, pulled me close, and said, “My son, God has put you on earth for a reason, and that is to do the kind of work you do, no matter how much it upsets others. It is your calling.”

  Of course he knew what I had done at My Lai, and he was telling me that he was okay with it. I walked down Fifth Avenue blinking away tears, thinking that a belief as powerful as his was a profound and wonderful gift. The cardinal was diagnosed with brain cancer a few years later and passed away in 2000, but we exchanged letters on and off until then. I saved his.

  Another special moment came in 2004 after I had a chat about the White House’s War on Terror over lunch in Berlin with Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister. Fischer had studied Marxism as a radical student leader in the late 1960s and the 1970s and led many violent street protests, but later emerged as a leader of Germany’s Green Party as it moved to the center of German politics. He was brilliant, full of himself, and willing to be extremely caustic about America and its politics as long as we were chatting—make that gossiping—on background. We agreed it would be okay if there was something I wanted to use in The New Yorker and did not cite him by name. We talked about the Bush administration’s ambitions in the Middle East, and Fischer described Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld’s influential and very conservative deputy secretary of defense, as a “Trotskyite”—one who believes in permanent revolution. In a subsequent piece for The New Yorker, I quoted a senior foreign diplomat in Europe as depicting Wolfowitz as a Trotskyite. Fischer was called by a fact-checker and read the phrase, a routine check. He then insisted that I immediately call him in Berlin. I did and assured him there was no way the quote could be linked to him: It did not cite him by name, did not mention Germany, and did not say the phrase came from a foreign minister. “But I’m the only diplomat in Europe who would understand what a Trotskyite is,” he said. When I stopped laughing, I assured him we would take out the line.

  It’s a wonderful business, this profession of mine. I’ve spent most of my career writing stories that challenge the official narrative, and have been rewarded mightily and suffered only slightly for it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  *1The NSA material I obtained depicted enormous hypocrisy among the royal family, with widespread sexual partying and much talk about financial corruption and arguments about which prince would get which percentage of bribery proceeds from the state’s many billion-dollar purchases of arms. The mainstream media ignored the story, although I named names, but financier George Soros did not. He invited me to dinner at his apartment in New York to talk more about Saudi Arabia. When I declined, he offered to pay a huge contribution to a public interest group whose director, Morton Abramowitz, was a retired diplomat, if I changed my mind. In his career, Mort had directed the State Department’s office of intelligence and also served as the U.S. ambassador to Thailand and Turkey. He was a longtime friend of mine, and I felt I had no choice but to go. Much of the talk dealt with future oil prices, about which I cared not a bit.

  *2Rumsfeld was charming and likable and became a hero of sorts to the Pentagon press corps, and to much of America, in the early days of the war. He was having fun at press briefings with his laughing denials of my early, and negative, stories about the conduct of the war while privately sending messages to his staff, some of which I obtained, raising questions about the honesty of General Franks. Robert Gallucci, who had a long career as a government arms control expert before becoming director of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told me of a Pentagon meeting with Rumsfeld at the time of a Middle East crisis in 1983. The meeting was attended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior State Department officials; Gallucci was there as a deputy to his boss at State. Rumsfeld, then serving as a special envoy, outlined a diplomatic approach he thought would resolve the problem, if it was backed up by a display of American military might. He asked for comment and none was forthcoming. Gallucci finally asked Rumsfeld why he thought his approach would work, since the same concept had not worked in an earlier, similar crisis. Rumsfeld stared at him and said, loudly, “Out.” Gallucci was stunned and looked at his boss, who looked away. Rumsfeld again said, “Out.” Gallucci got up and walked to the door. As he did, Rumsfeld added, “I will not tolerate anyone who is not a team player.”

  *3I had been unable to find General Taguba before writing the first Abu Ghraib dispatch, and I did not track him down for two years. Taguba told me then that Rumsfeld seemed convinced that he had leaked his report to me. The general said he was summoned to a meeting with the defense secretary a week after the report became public and was greeted with sarcasm and scorn. “Here…comes…that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report,” Rumsfeld said, mockingly, in front of the senior generals of the army. His fast-rising career was cut short after that meeting, Taguba said, and he was eventually forced to retire with no further promotion. He and I have talked many times since about war crimes and torture—we still share lunch every few months—and his honesty is breathtaking. He told me, with much bitterness, of a limousine ride he shared in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib with an anxious General John Abizaid, then commanding the floundering war in Iraq. Abizaid rolled up the glass separating the two of them from the driver and warned Taguba that he was going too far and too deep in his inquiry. “You and your report will be investigated.” “I’d been in the army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time I thought I was in the Mafia,” Taguba said.

  *4There was a moment, in one of my last interviews with Nasrallah, that stuck with me. The sheik was beloved by his English translator, a Hezbollah cadre who was always ecstatic to see me because it meant he would spend what he called “quality time” with the sheik. During the interview, which took place a few months after Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, Nasrallah told me of the financial support for rebuilding—Israeli bombing had turned Shiite areas of Beirut into a wasteland—that flowed from Iran and Qatar. Nasrallah then cited a figure of something like twelve million dollars in daily aid from Iran. At that point, the interpreter began a strident conversation with the sheik. Back and forth they went in Arabic. I finally interrupted to ask what in hell was going on. It turned out that the interpreter thought that Nasrallah had not been fully forthcoming in discussing the funds supplied by Iran, and without a hint of rancor Nasrallah gave me a shrug and a smile and then substantially upped the amount given. The interview came a few weeks after President Bush had ordered a high-level State Department official fired for daring to correct him during a national security meeting.

  *5David Obey would not have been surprised by Obama’s waffling. I stayed in touch with the former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee after his retirement in 2011, and he told me of a leadership meeting with the President in early 2009, a few months after Obama took office, dealing with the war in Afghanistan, whi
ch was continuing to go badly. The issue was whether the President should authorize a significant increase in the American military presence there. Obey and Vice President Biden were the only two to voice any skepticism. Obey recalled warning Obama that if he authorized the troop surge, he would have “to face the fact that it would crowd out large portions of your domestic program—except perhaps health care.” Obey remained after the meeting to have a private word with the President and asked him whether he had listened to the broadcasts of Lyndon Johnson’s telephone conversations about the wisdom of expanding the Vietnam War, which had been made public in 2003, creating a sensation in Washington. Obama said he had. Did the President recall listening to Johnson’s conversation with Richard Russell, the conservative chairman of the Armed Services Committee, in which both men acknowledged that adding more American troops there would not help the war effort and could lead to a disastrous war with China? Obama again said yes. Obey then asked, “Who’s your George Ball?” Ball, a senior State Department official in the Kennedy administration, repeatedly argued against escalating the American presence in Vietnam; it was a stand that hurt his reputation among the men around Kennedy. “Either the President chose not to answer, or he didn’t have one,” Obey told me. “But I didn’t hear anyone tell the President that he ought to put the brakes on in Afghanistan.” Obama authorized the deployment of thirty thousand more American troops to the war over the next six months.

  Acknowledgments

  I was convinced that I would never write a memoir until I was too old and infirm to drive a car or hit a tennis ball, and perhaps not then. The flap about my Cheney project, mentioned briefly in these pages, changed that, and here we are. I am thankful to Sonny Mehta and Jonathan Segal of Knopf for their forbearance and to my very heady literary agent, Esther Newberg, who led me out of the morass into this book. Jon Segal’s early years as a writer and an editor for The New York Times gave him invaluable insight and a point of view that kept me focused on what was important in the business of being a good reporter. He insisted, again and again, that I tell why, and not just how, I did what I did.

  Doing it turned out to be fun—who doesn’t like writing about him or herself?—and it also assuaged my guilt at not wanting to teach investigative journalism or accept an appointment or chair in such at a university. I’ve tried to be as open as possible in telling how I did it. I remain convinced that the key to being a good reporter and getting the story is, as I said in these pages, to read before you write, and especially before you do an interview.

  I apologize for the fact that only a few of my sources over fifty years in the business are named, but that is a necessity when one is focused on secret operations and secret lies. Of course every senior journalist in the profession understands the dilemma.

  I’ve been aided by a bunch of wonderful researchers who constantly went beyond what I needed and cared about getting things as right as possible. And so thank you Max Paul Friedman, Bill Arkin, Jay Peterzell, Benjamin Frankel, Mark Feldstein, and Gil Shochat. I also thank Thomas Lannon, a curator at the New York Public Library, for his much-needed help in guiding me through the library’s extensive collection of the Abe Rosenthal papers, which cover his fifty-six-year career at The New York Times. Jeffrey Roth of the Times provided more photos from days gone by than I could use, and the staff of the newspaper’s licensing group, including Gregory Miller, Kymberli Wilner, and Phyllis Collazo, produced the many too many reprints of articles and magazine covers I requested. All of this was done gratis at the direction of Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times. I thank all.

  My wife and children loved me, laughed with and at me, and always felt free to tell me I was full of it. Nothing is more important.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SEYMOUR M. HERSH wrote and reported most notably for both The New York Times and The New Yorker. His unmasking of the murder of innocent Vietnamese civilians by the American soldiers at My Lai won him a Pulitzer Prize. His writing on civil rights, the Pentagon, Watergate, intelligence abuses, and other major events earned him five George Polk Awards. His series of pieces on the abuse at the army-run prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq won him his second National Magazine Award. Mr. Hersh is the author of ten books, including The Price of Power, a study of Henry Kissinger’s role in the Nixon administration, The Dark Side of Camelot on the administration of John F. Kennedy, and My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. He and his wife live in Washington.

  Courtesy of Cindy Zimmerman

  My twin brother, Alan, left, and me at about the age of five. Our two sisters, Marcia and Phyllis, five years older, also were twins.

  Courtesy of Paul Zimbrakos

  The grungy desks at the City News Bureau of Chicago, circa 1960. I began my journalism career there as a copyboy, and the most hated of tasks was to make the top of one of the desks spotless for the day city editor.

  Courtesy of Paul Zimbrakos

  Celebrating the first edition of the Evergreen Park/Oak Lawn Dispatch in the early winter of 1962. Bob Billings, my partner, who also was my former hard-nosed editor at the City News Bureau, is on the left; Paul Zimbrakos, who worked with Bob and me at City News and volunteered to help put out the first edition, is in the middle; and I am on the right. The fledgling newspaper promised to cover both suburbs as never before, from high school sports to city hall debates.

  Associated Press

  David Halberstam of The New York Times, Malcolm Browne of the AP, and Neil Sheehan of UPI in South Vietnam in 1963—three magnificent, courageous, and oh-so-young reporters. Neil and David would become fast friends.

  My first major freelance article, written in May 1967 for The New Republic, as I was ending my AP career.

  Courtesy of Jefferson Siegel

  Senator Eugene McCarthy, right, and his supporter Robert Lowell, the poet, during the 1968 Democratic Party primary race. The two men delighted in each other’s company, and I delighted in being a witness to their friendship. The resonance of McCarthy’s anti–Vietnam War campaign was a body blow to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

  Courtesy of Marylouise Oates

  Marylouise Oates, seen here at an antiwar planning session in late 1967, was my trusted deputy when I ran the press office of the McCarthy campaign. She went on to help organize the major anti–Vietnam War rallies of the next few years.

  © 1970 Charles Ryan for The New York Times

  Ron Ridenhour, in Vietnam in 1970 as a journalist, viewing the aftermath of an American assault in the My Lai area. In late March of 1968, while in the army, Ridenhour had flown over My Lai and seen the destruction and was determined to learn what had happened there. Unlike his colleagues, he chose to do something about the massacre. It was his wave of official complaints that led me to the My Lai story. Ron selflessly stepped back and helped me pursue it. He was a caring man who died after a heart attack in 1998 at the age of fifty-two.

  The first page of the original draft of my first article on Lieutenant William Calley, who ordered the killing of more than a hundred innocent Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in March 1968. In November of that year, David Obst, who ran the Dispatch News Service, wired the completed piece to newspaper editors, seeking publication. He somehow succeeded in convincing more than thirty-five editors to pay one hundred dollars for the right to publish the story.

  Courtesy of David Obst

  The always cheeky David Obst in 1992 with a man soon to be president.

  The major play given my second story on My Lai by the London Times influenced many American newspapers to reconsider my stories, which they had initially rejected or downplayed.

  Th
e first page of an important chapter from my typed manuscript for my book My Lai 4, edited by Robert D. Loomis and published by Random House in June of 1970.

  The wildly successful Harper’s magazine “extra” issue of May 1970 with its almost-book-length insert of My Lai 4.

  AP Photo/Bob Daugherty

  In the barren Dispatch offices in Washington, D.C., I had just learned, in May 1970, that I had won the Pulitzer Prize for international journalism.

  Two months before officially joining The New York Times, I was sent by the paper to North Vietnam after a stopover in Paris. I was the second mainstream newspaper reporter permitted to report from Hanoi and elsewhere in the North in six years. I took this photo of schoolboys having fun with me in March 1972, outside the Reunification Hotel in Hanoi. They were excited to learn I was an American and made it a point to say “Good morning, sir” whenever we met.

  © 1971 Jack Manning/The New York Times

  At a news conference in 1971, the top men at The New York Times, left to right, executive editor A. M. “Abe” Rosenthal, publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., and general counsel James Goodale—all did their best to look somber after learning that the Supreme Court ruled that the Times could continue to publish the previously top secret Pentagon Papers. It was a decision, I heard more than once, that cleared the way for me and others at the Times to push hard on Watergate and issues of national security.