http://www.truthout.org/110508T
Sunday 19 October 2008
by: Rachel Cooke, The Guardian UK
He exposed the My Lai massacre, revealed Nixon's secret bombing of
Cambodia and has hounded Bush and Cheney over the abuse of prisoners
in Abu Ghraib ... No wonder the Republicans describe Seymour Hersh as
"the closest thing American journalism has to a 'terrorist.'" Rachel
Cooke meets the most-feared investigative reporter in Washington.
--
Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour
Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his
single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which
an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding
only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of
shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and
hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in
his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has
occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet
they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. 'Brad Pitt loved this
place,' says Hersh with a wolfish grin. 'It totally fits the cliché
of the grungy reporter's den!' When last he renewed the lease, he
tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not
be redecorated - the idea of moving all his stuff was too much. It's
not hard to see why. Slowly, I move my head through 180 degrees,
trying not to panic at the sight of so much paper piled so
precipitously. Before me are 8,000 legal notepads, or so it seems,
each one filled with a Biro Cuneiform of scribbled telephone numbers.
By the time I look at Hersh again - the full panorama takes a moment
or two - he is silently examining the wall behind his desk, which is
grey with grime, and striated as if a billy goat had sharpened its
horns on it.
And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai,
he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate
scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the
President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about their
scoop, they describe him - the competition. He was unlike any
reporter they'd ever seen: 'Hersh, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy,
showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed pinstriped shirt
that might have been at its best in his college freshman year and
rumpled, bleached khakis.' Forty years on, little has changed. Today
he is in trainers, chinos and a baggy navy sweatshirt and - thanks to
a tennis injury - he is walking like an old guy: chest forward, knees
bandy, slight limp in one leg. There is something cherishably chaotic
about him. A fuzzy halo of frantic inquiry follows him wherever he
goes, like the cloud of dust that hovers above Pig Pen in the Charlie
Brown strip. In conversation, away from the restraining hand of his
bosses at the New Yorker, the magazine that is now his home, his
thoughts pour forth, unmediated and - unless you concentrate very
hard - seemingly unconnected. 'Yeah, I shoot my mouth off,' he says,
with faux remorse. 'There's a huge difference between writing and
thinking.' Not that he has much time for those who put cosy
pontification over the craft of reporting: 'I think ... My
colleagues! I watch 'em on TV, and every sentence begins with the
words: "I think." They could write a book called I Think.'
But we must backtrack a little. Before the office, there is the
breakfast joint. Hersh and I meet at the Tabard Inn, a Washington
hangout so gloomily lit I could do with a torch. He has poached eggs
and coffee and 'none of that other stuff, thanks'. (I think he means
that he doesn't want potatoes with his eggs). Like everyone in
America just now, he is on tenterhooks. A Democrat who truly despises
the Bush regime, he is reluctant to make predictions about exactly
what is going to happen in the forthcoming election on the grounds
that he might 'jinx it'. The unknown quantity of voter racism apart,
however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does,
for Hersh this will be a starting gun. 'You cannot believe how many
people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next
president's inauguration],' he says, with relish. '[They say:] "You
wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then." So that is
what I'll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the
inauguration.' He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though
it won't change anything - 'They've got away with it, categorically;
anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes]
is kidding themselves' - it will reveal how the White House 'set out
to sabotage the system ... It wasn't that they found ways to
manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about
ending the right of Congress to intervene.'
In one way, it's amazing Hersh has anything left to say about
Bush, Cheney and their antics. Then again, with him, this pushing of
a story on and on is standard practice. Though it was Woodward and
Bernstein who uncovered the significance of the burglary at the
Watergate building, Hersh followed up their scoop by becoming one of
Nixon's harshest critics and by breaking stories about how the
government had supported Pinochet's 1973 coup in Chile, secretly
bombed Cambodia and used the CIA to spy on its domestic enemies. His
1983 book about Nixon, The Price of Power, is definitive. So far as
the War on Terror goes, Hersh has already delivered his alternative
history - Chain of Command, a book based on the series of stories he
wrote for the New Yorker in the aftermath of 9/11 and following
Bush's invasion of Iraq. Among other things, Hersh told us of the
bungled efforts to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; of the
dubious business dealings of the superhawk Richard Perle - a report
that led to Perle's resignation as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense
Policy Board (Hersh alleged that Perle improperly mixed his business
affairs with his influence over US foreign policy when he met the
Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in 2003. Perle described Hersh as
'the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist' and
threatened to sue before falling oddly silent); and of how Saddam's
famous efforts to buy uranium in Africa, as quoted by President Bush
in his 2003 State of the Union speech, were a fiction. Most
electrifying of all, however, was his triple salvo on the abuse of
Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It was Hersh who first revealed the
full extent of this torture, for which he traced the ultimate
responsibility carefully back to the upper reaches of the
administration. 'In each successive report,' writes David Remnick,
the editor of the New Yorker, in his introduction to Chain of
Command, 'it became clear that Abu Ghraib was not an "isolated
incident" but, rather, a concerted attempt by the government and the
military leadership to circumvent the Geneva Conventions in order to
extract intelligence and quell the Iraqi insurgency.' As Remnick
points out, this reporting has 'stood up over time and in the face of
a president whose calumny has turned out to be a kind of
endorsement'. Bush reportedly told Pakistan's president, Pervez
Musharraf, that Hersh was 'a liar'; after the third of his reports on
Abu Ghraib, a Pentagon spokesman announced that Hersh merely 'threw a
lot of crap against the wall and he expects someone to peel off
what's real. It's a tapestry of nonsense.'
Earlier this year, Hersh turned his attention to Iran: to Bush's
desire to bomb it and to America's covert operations there. But while
Hersh believes the President would still dearly love to go after
Iran, the danger of that actually happening has now passed. Events,
not least the sinking of the global economy, have moved on. So he is
shortly to write about Syria instead, which he has recently visited.
In the dying days of the Bush administration, he says, it is
noticeably easier to meet contacts - Cheney, the enforcer, is a lot
less powerful - and the information he is getting is good. By
coincidence, it was in Syria that he first heard about what was going
on inside Abu Ghraib, long before he saw documentary evidence of it.
'I got in touch with a guy inside Iraq during the Prague Spring after
the fall of Baghdad, a two-star guy from the old regime. He came up
to Damascus by cab. We talked for four days, and one of the things we
talked about was prisons. He told me that some of the women inside
had been sending messages to their fathers and brothers asking them
to come and kill them because they'd been molested. I didn't know
whether it was GIs playing grab ass or what, but it was clear that
the women had been shamed. So when I first heard about the
photographs, I knew they were real. Did I think the story would be as
big as it was? Yeah. But was it as big as My Lai? No.' Only a handful
of relatively lowly military personnel have so far been punished for
their part in the abuse, and Colonel Janis Karpinski, the commander
of the Iraqi prisons, was merely demoted (from Brigadier General), in
spite of the fact that the Taguba Report, the internal US army report
on detainee abuse that was leaked to Hersh, singled her out for
blame. 'And John Kerry wouldn't even use it [Abu Ghraib] in his
campaign. He didn't want to offend the military, I assume.'
Four decades separate My Lai and Abu Ghraib. You have to ask:
wasn't it appalling for him to be investigating US army abuses of
civilians all over again? Didn't he think that lessons might have
been learnt? Yes, and no. It made him feel 'hopeless', but on the
other hand, war is always horrible. In 1970, after his My Lai story,
he addressed an anti-war rally and, on the spur of the moment, asked
a veteran to come up and tell the crowd what some soldiers would do
on their way home after a day spent moving their wounded boys. With
little prompting, the traumatised vet described how they would buzz
farmers with their helicopter blades, sometimes decapitating them;
they would then clean up the helicopter before they landed back at
base. 'That's what war is like,' he says. 'But how do you write about
that? How do you tell the American people that?' Still, better to
attempt to tell people than to stay feebly silent. What really gets
Hersh going - he seems genuinely bewildered by it - is the complicit
meekness, the virtual collapse, in fact, of the American press since
9/11. In particular, he disdains its failure to question the
'evidence' surrounding Saddam's so-called weapons of mass
destruction. 'When I see the New York Times now, it's so shocking to
me. I joined the Times in 1972, and I came with the mark of Cain on
me because I was clearly against the war. But my editor, Abe
Rosenthal, he hired me because he liked stories. He used to come to
the Washington bureau and almost literally pat me on the head and
say: "How is my little Commie today? What do you have for me?"
Somehow, now, reporters aren't able to get stories in. It was
stunning to me how many good, rational people - people I respect -
supported going into war in Iraq. And it was stunning to me how many
people thought you could go to war against an idea.'
As for the troop 'surge' and its putative success, he more or
less rolls his eyes when I bring this up. 'People are saying quietly
that they are worried about Iraq. This is nothing profound, but by
the time the surge got going, ethnic cleansing had already happened
in a lot of places. There was a natural lull in the violence. The
moment we start withdrawing, and relying on the Shia to start paying
members of the Awakening [the alliance of Sunni insurgents whose
salaries were initially paid by the US military, and who have helped
to reduce violence in some provinces] ...' His voice trails off. 'And
the big bad bogeyman is Saudi Arabia. There's an awful lot of money
going to Salafist and Wahabist charities, and there's no question
they'll pour money into the Awakening, and they're so hostile to
Shi'ism and to Iran that how can you possibly predict anything other
than violence? How do we get out of this? There is no way out. We
have a moral obligation to the people of Iraq that goes beyond
anything that anyone's talking about. The notion that it's their
problem, that we should just leave ... I mean, can you believe what
we've done to their society? Imagine the psychosis, the insanity,
that we've induced.' He stabs the yolk of one of his poached eggs,
and sets about his toast like he hasn't eaten in days.
Seymour M Hersh (the M is for Myron) was born in Chicago, the
son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Lithuania and Poland (he has
a twin brother, a physicist, and two sisters, also twins). The family
was not rich; his father, who died when Seymour was 17, ran a
dry-cleaning business. After school he attended a local junior
college until a professor took him aside, asked him what he was doing
there and walked him up to the University of Chicago. 'Chicago was
this great egghead place,' Hersh says. 'But I knew nothing. I came
out of a lower-middle-class background. At that time, everyone used
to define themselves: Stalinist, Maoist, whatever. I thought they
meant "miaowist". Seriously! Something to do with cats. Among my
peers, they all thought I would write the great novel, because I was
very quick and cutting. I've just read Philip Roth's new novel
[Indignation], and the arrogance of his character reminded me of that
certitude. I was always pointing out other people's flaws.' He went
to law school but hated it, dropped out and wound up as a copy boy,
then a reporter for the local City News Bureau. Later he joined
Associated Press in Washington and rose through its ranks until he
quit for a stint working for the Democrat senator Eugene McCarthy.
Pretty soon, though, he was back in journalism. 'Using words to make
other people less big made me feel bigger, though the psychological
dimension to that ... well, I don't want to explore it.' His wife of
40 years, Elizabeth, whom he describes as 'the love of my life' in
the acknowledgements of Chain of Command (they have three grown-up
children), is a psychoanalyst. Doesn't she ever tell him about his
ego and his id? He looks embarrassed. 'No, no ... marriage is ...
different. When you live with someone you don't ... The hardest part
for her is when she tells me to take out the garbage and I say:
"Excuse me? I don't have time. I'm saving the world."' Later,
however, he tells me that journalism, like psycho analysis, is about
'bringing things into focus'.
He was a broke freelance working for a new syndication agency
when he got wind of My Lai. A military lawyer told him that a soldier
at Fort Benning, a Georgia army base, was facing a court martial for
murdering at least 109 Vietnamese civilians. Hersh rocked up in
Benning and went on a door-to-door search, somehow avoiding the
officers on base, until he found Lieutenant William L Calley Jr, a
boyish 26-year-old otherwise known as Rusty. He asked the former
railway pointsman if they could talk, which they did, for three
hours. They then went to the grocery store, got steaks, bourbon and
wine, and talked some more at the apartment of Calley's girlfriend.
Calley told Hersh that he had only been following orders, but
nevertheless he described what had happened (it later turned out that
soldiers of the 11th Brigade killed 500 or more civilians that
morning). Soon after, 36 newspapers ran the story under Hersh's
byline. Some, however, did not carry it, in spite of the fact that
Calley's own lawyer had confirmed it, among them the New York Times.
The scoop caused not only horror but disbelief. Hersh, though, was
not to be put off. 'By the third story, I found this amazing fellow,
Paul Meadlo, from a small town in Indiana, a farm kid, who had
actually shot many of the Vietnamese kids - he'd shot maybe 100
people. He just kept on shooting and shooting, and then the next day
he had his leg blown off, and he told Calley, as they medevac-ed him:
"God has punished me and now he will punish you."' Hersh wrote this
up, CBS put Meadlo on the TV news, and finally the story could no
longer be ignored. The next year, 1970, he was awarded the Pulitzer prize.
How does Hersh operate? The same way as he's always done: it's
all down to contacts. Unlike Bob Woodward, however, whose recent
books about Iraq have involved long and somewhat pally chats with the
President, Hersh gets his stuff from lower down the food chain.
Woodward was one of those who was convinced that WMD would be found
in Iraq. 'He does report top dollar,' says Hersh. 'I don't go to the
top because I think it's sorta useless. I see people at six o'clock
in the morning somewhere, unofficially.' Are they mostly people he
has known for a long time? 'No, I do pick up new people.' But with
new contacts he must be wary; there is always the danger of a plant.
His critics point to what they regard as his excessive use of unnamed
sources. Others accuse him of getting things wrong and of being
gullible. A low point came in the Nineties, when he embarked on a
book about Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot. Hersh was shown
documents that alleged the President was being blackmailed by Marilyn
Monroe, and though he discovered that they were fake in time to
remove all mention of them from his book, the damage to his
reputation had already been done - and the critics let rip anyway,
for his excitable portrayal of JFK as a sex addict and bigamist.
There was also the time, in 1974, when he accused the US ambassador
to Chile, Edward Korry, of being in on a CIA plot to overthrow
President Allende. Some years later, Hersh had to write a long
correction; it ran on page one of the New York Times. As a Jew, his
mailbag since 9/11 has also included letters from readers who
denounce him as a self-hater (later, at this office, he shows me one
of these: its author, an MD with a Florida postcode, accuses him of
being a 'kapo' - the kapo were concentration camp prisoners who
worked for the Nazis in exchange for meagre privileges).
His supporters, though, believe that his mistakes - and even the
wilder allegations he sometimes makes in speeches - should always be
put in the context of his hit rate. A former Washington Post
reporter, Scott Armstrong, once put it this way. Say he writes a
story about how an elephant knocked someone down in a dark room. 'If
it was a camel, or three cows, what difference does it make? It was
dark, and it wasn't supposed to be there.' Hersh himself points out
that, since 1993, he has been up against the stringent standards of
the New Yorker and its legendary team of fact checkers. 'By the way,
all my inside sources have to deal with the fact checkers, and they
do. People find it hard to believe that, I don't know why.' And then
there is his editor, David Remnick. 'I never love editors,' he says.
'But David is smart and he has great judgement.' How often does he
check in with Remnick? 'I'm sure he would tell you less often than I
should. He gets pretty angry with me. Sometimes we have these rows
where I won't take his calls. He says no to a lot of stuff - stuff I
think the editor would die for! Admittedly, it is not the Seymour
Hersh weekly. But sometimes he'll say: "We are not going to publish
this kind of stuff 'cos it's frigging crazy."' It was Tina Brown,
formerly of Tatler and Vanity Fair, who brought him to the New
Yorker. 'What's-her-name... yeah, Tina. She gave me a lot of money,
and she said: "Just go do it!" But she used to worry. She'd call me
up and say, "I sat next to Colin Powell at dinner last night and he
was railing about how awful you are." So I would say, "Well, that's
good." And she'd say, "Is it?" And I'd tell her, "Yes, it is."'
Does it worry him that he is sometimes described as the 'last
American reporter'? Who is coming up behind him? 'A friend of mine
wants to put $5m into a chair for investigative journalism for me,
but why would I want to do that? Look, the cost of running my kind of
work is very high, and a lot of stories don't even work out. I know a
wonderful journalist who works on the internet. I called friends of
mine at the Times and the Post. But he hasn't been hired because he
would cost a lot of money.' But Hersh is in his seventies (he is a
year younger than John McCain, though you'd never know), he can't
keep going forever. Or can he? Most reporters start out hungry but
somewhere along the way are sated. Not Hersh. 'I have information; I
have people who trust me. What else am I going to do? I love golf and
tennis and if I was good enough, I'd be professional. Since I'm not,
what am I gonna do? Why shouldn't I be energetic? Our whole country
is at stake. We have never had a situation like this. These men have
completely ruined America. It's so depressing, my business!' Yet he
seems chipper. 'No, I'm not chipper. I don't know how to put where I
am... I don't take it that seriously. I've been there: up, down, back
up. I do a lotta speeches, I make a lotta money, I proselytise.' Does
he like making money? 'Are you kidding? I do!'
After we finish breakfast, he takes me to the office. He is
eager to put off the moment when he must get on with his Syria piece.
The more time he wastes with me ... well, the morning will soon be
over. Inside he points out a few choice interior-design details - the
Pulitzer (it nestles among dozens of other awards), the framed memo
from Lawrence Eagleburger and Robert McCloskey to Henry Kissinger,
their boss at the State Department, which is dated 24 September 1974,
and reads: '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.' Then he roots around in a
cairn of paper for a while - quite a long while - eventually
producing a proof of one of his articles with Remnick's editing marks
on it. I've never seen anything so harsh in my life. Practically
every other sentence has been ruthlessly disembowelled. 'Yeah, pretty
tough, huh?' He also shows me one of his own memos to a contact. It
makes reference to the current administration. 'These guys are
hard-wired and drinking the Kool-Aid,' it says, deadpan. He laughs.
He's getting cheerier by the minute. Soon it will be time for lunch!
Now he puts his feet on the desk, removes one training shoe and
jauntily waves the sweaty sole of a white sock at me. A couple of
calls come in. He is concise bordering on cryptic. Finally an old
Times colleague arrives. 'I knew this guy when he had hair!' Hersh
shouts as this fellow and I pass in a small area of floorspace not
yet covered by books or papers. I'm leaving, but Hersh doesn't get up
and he doesn't say goodbye. A breezy salute - and then his eyes fall
ravenously on his pal.
.
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