Reporter
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This is a letter to me from marine lieutenant colonel Edison Miller written in May 1973, after his release from captivity as a POW in North Vietnam. He thanked me for my “frank reporting” on the war. Miller spent more than five years in captivity after being shot down, most of it in the infamous Hanoi Hilton jail.
The strong, silent Major Bo, detailed, clearly against his will, from the army of North Vietnam as my fellow traveler and watcher during my visit to Hanoi for the Times. We ended up as friends, though communication was difficult because he spoke Vietnamese and French and I spoke neither. But his dark eyes did a lot of talking.
© 1972 The New York Times
This May 11, 1972, interview, datelined Paris, was my first major piece as a full-time Times employee. It was published ten days after I formally joined the paper.
© 1972 George Tames/The New York Times
© 1970 John Hartnett/The New York Times
Courtesy of Judy Gelb
My three closest and most adored friends from my Times days: Anthony Lewis as he appeared in the mid-1960s; Gloria Emerson in 1970; and Leslie Gelb when we first met at the Times bureau in Washington in early January 1973.
© 1973 The New York Times
My Times splash on Watergate in the spring of 1973—five page-one news-making stories in six days, from May 2 through May 7. I still am not sure how I survived the week.
Courtesy of the Estate of Gene Spatz
My favorite portrait of Henry Kissinger.
A memo to Kissinger from two of his aides meant to spur efforts to officially challenge my reporting on events in Chile. I had written, accurately, that Kissinger, obviously at the behest of President Richard Nixon, was pressuring the CIA to be more aggressive in its activities against the socialist Salvador Allende, who had won the Chilean presidency in 1970.
© 1974 The New York Times
My December 22, 1974, CIA domestic spying story.
The cover of the program from Bob Kiley’s memorial service in New York City, 2016. He had been a special assistant to Richard Helms, the CIA director, and he had become increasingly troubled by American lying about the Vietnam War and the CIA’s most secret domestic spying program on dissident students. Thinking of his two grown sons who knew little of their father’s CIA years, I decided to talk at the memorial service about how important Kiley’s guidance was to me.
Richard Cheney’s handwritten memo of May 28, 1975, suggesting that the FBI get a search warrant “to go after Hersh papers in his apt.” I had written that U.S. submarines had been in Soviet waters, and obviously it hadn’t gone over well in some circles. Cheney was then an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, President Ford’s chief of staff.
One of many supportive letters David Halberstam wrote to me, with his warning about New York Times editors!
Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz
This photo of me, my wife, Elizabeth, and our two oldest children, Matthew and Melissa, was taken by a young Annie Leibovitz, on assignment for Rolling Stone, after being told by me that my family was off-limits. She shot it early in the morning through a window of our home in 1976, and I had no choice but to reward her cheekiness by letting the magazine publish it.
Two of many letters of praise for my reporting on Watergate from Times colleagues: one from Anthony Lewis sent to Clifton Daniel, then the Times Washington bureau chief, and one to me from Dave Jones, national editor.
Washington, D.C., police photos of four of the key players in the White House, clockwise from top left: Bob Haldeman, John Mitchell, John Ehrlichman, and Charles W. Colson, in 1974 at the time of their arrest for involvement in the Watergate affair.
© 1974 The New York Times
The front-page Times story on the Glomar Explorer. The vessel was the key element of a $750 million covert CIA program to recover the remains of a sunken Russian submarine that, it was hoped, would contain Soviet codebooks as well as nuclear torpedoes. It was a classic CIA boondoggle.
Associated Press
Sharing a sometimes argumentative panel with William Colby, then the CIA director, at the Associated Press’s managing editors’ annual convention in 1975. I had respect for Colby as someone who understood that the CIA would not survive, given its misdeeds, unless he and other senior agency officials talked honestly and openly, up to a point, about its wrongdoing.
This is one of hundreds of pages I obtained from Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was chief of naval operations in 1972, that described, from the inside, the insane level of bureaucratic turmoil in the National Security Council at a critical moment in the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam. Kissinger and his deputy in the White House, army general Alexander Haig, were constantly betraying each other’s confidences to President Nixon. After retiring, the admiral had the purloined data transcribed. The markings are mine.
Courtesy of Jeffrey Gerth
My wonderful Times colleague and friend Jeff Gerth, whose ability to absorb and recall the most demanding of corporate documents was unparalleled. I had been led to him by aides of Robert F. Kennedy, who told me in 1976 that Gerth was the go-to guy if I was interested in reporting on organized crime, which I was.
Times managing editor Abe Rosenthal’s testy, albeit funny, response to my, in turn, testy complaint about the tedious editing of one of my stories.
A trio of photos of Abe Rosenthal as he read the Hersh/Gerth series on Gulf and Western, the conglomerate run by the sleazy—in our view—Charles Bluhdorn. Our reporting provoked anxiety because of Bluhdorn’s friends at the top of the Times management. Abe, who could be more than a little impish when he saw fit, sent the photos to me. He was reading during a power failure in New York City in 1977.
A New York Times Magazine cover story from 1982 about two former CIA operatives, Edwin P. Wilson and Frank E. Terpil, doing improper business with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. The story caused a furor inside the government.
National Security Adviser Richard Allen’s note to me about the Wilson-Terpil story, “a remarkable document,” in his words. He asked to meet with me. I knew Dick both as a presidential adviser and as a friend; the two did not mix well, and the only meeting we had while he was in the White House was a disaster.
Courtesy of The New York Times Licensing Bureau
The cover of The New York Times Book Review, with a provocative title, featuring Professor Stanley Hoffmann’s essay on my book on Kissinger, The Price of Power, in 1983.
Courtesy of Richard Guindon
A devastating cartoon of Kissinger by Richard Guindon of the Detroit Free Press that appeared upon publication of my book.
Another New York Times Magazine cover story, this one in 1987, on the attempted assassination of Qaddafi by U.S. bombers.
My only article for Life magazine, in 1991, on Panama’s despotic head of state, Manuel Noriega.
I was photographed for the front page of the London Times during my very public fight in 1991 with Robert Maxwell, the British publisher, over an allegation I made in The Samson Option, my book on the U.S. role in the making of the Israeli nuclear bomb. I won a large settlement from the Mirror Group for its complaints against me.
The Time cover referring to The Dark Side of Camelot, my very controversial 1997 book on John F. Kennedy
A stunningly cynical memo to JFK—uncovered by an academic and mailed to me—that
was written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., then a White House aide, a few days before the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. He recommended finding “someone whose head can later be placed in the block if things go terribly wrong,” to protect the President.
The cover of The New York Times Book Review featuring The Dark Side of Camelot.
In the late summer of 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was briefed on the Pentagon’s most recent assessment of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program—the famed WMD used by the George W. Bush administration to justify America’s invasion of Iraq. A second page read, in part: “Our knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”
A photo mailed to The New Yorker—“protect Seymour Hersh” the sign begins—showing a 2004 anti–Iraqi War demonstrator in Western Europe.
Courtesy of The New Yorker
A photograph taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, as published in The New Yorker.
Courtesy of The New Yorker
New Yorker editor David Remnick interviewing me at the 2007 New Yorker Festival in Manhattan. It was a serious talk about serious issues, but David, as is his wont, found a way to make it fun. I first wrote for The New Yorker in 1971, after being hired following an interview lasting no more than five minutes with the famed William Shawn, who edited the magazine for thirty-five years. After my Times years, I began writing again for The New Yorker in the early 1990s when Tina Brown became editor. My most significant years there came after Remnick was named editor in 1998.
Courtesy of Katie Orlinsky
A My Lai survivor, Pham Thanh Cong is now the director of the museum at My Lai, which opened in 1978. For decades I had turned down repeated invitations to visit the museum and chat with Cong, but I finally went, at the insistence of my family, in late 2014.
One evening during our visit to Hanoi, when I was at a meeting, my wife and children were given a tour of the best of the city’s family-owned “street food” restaurants, featuring great food and no pretension. From the right, my wife, Elizabeth; daughter Melissa; and sons Joshua and Matthew. None of us can remember the name of the smiling tour guide.
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