What Sy Hersh Knows
By Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine
10 June 18
Seymour M. Hershs memoir Reporter is out this week, and its the story of
an epic career in journalism. Here is the son of Jewish immigrants, owners
of a dry cleaning store, taking to the streets of Chicago, a law school
dropout turned cub reporter, on the police beat, learning that you couldnt
report on a cop shooting an unarmed black man, even if the cop admitted it
and the coroners report said the man had been shot in the back. Here is
Hersh working for the Associated Press in the Pentagon, exposing the U.S.
bombing of civilian sites in Hanoi. Here is Hersh making a brief foray into
politics as press secretary for the antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in
1968, getting exasperated on a campaign swing through Wisconsin when
McCarthy ditches a fundraiser to see a film adaptation of Ulysses, and soon
thereafter quitting. Here is Hersh tracking down Lieutenant William Calley
in a condo in Columbus, Georgia, and listening to his account of the My Lai
massacre over beers and watching him vomit blood from an ulcer into a
toilet. Here is Hersh walking into the office of William Shawn at The New
Yorker and being offered a drawing account of $500 a week on the spot as a
staff writer. Here is Hersh pounding out stories on Watergate, Kissingers
crimes, and the CIAs domestic wiretapping for the New York Times, reporting
that would contribute to wide-scale national reckonings with state power and
executive malfeasance. And all of that is decades before the revelations of
the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
I have known Hersh for several years and I worked with him as an editor at
the London Review of Books (on pieces whose substance I wont discuss here;
you can read them, and about them, elsewhere). Editing Sy was a lot of fun,
and always involved lots of fighting over everything from commas, to
structure, to the timing of our daily phone calls, which could last hours.
Ive heard many of the stories he recounts in his memoir before.
Particularly, during line editing, Sy often referred to the experience of
being edited by Mr. Shawn, who after two clean galleys circled a single
cliché on page three and remarked in the margin: Mr. Hershpls use words.
This was an effective strategy to intimidate a young editor, which I was
then.
Hershs reports on national security require the utmost clarity and an
impersonal reportorial voice. But in his memoir, we read the real Sy, a true
storyteller who breathes history and writes in cascading cadences that have
not a little in common with other American writers born in the 1930s. On the
page, I think of him as a scrappier cousin of Renata Adler, Don DeLillo, or
Philip Roth.
I visited Sy last month at his office in Washington, where he works the
phones, hoards his notes and documents, and writes at his computer under a
photograph of Henry Kissinger stuffing his mouth with cake and looking ready
for a walk-on role in a sequel to Dr. Strangelove. Until a rotator-cuff
injury recently sidelined him, Hersh played tennis every day, and at 81 hes
irrepressible in conversation, a true steamroller. The exchange below has
been condensed and edited. At the end of our talk, Sy gave me a card for the
Washington metro so I could make it on time to my bus back to New York.
[Recorder turned on in the middle of conversation.]
I mean, come on, its all downhill, I dont know whats going to happen to
our fucking profession. Its fucking crazy.
Yes, its worrying.
I just read Stephen Kinzers book on the Dulles brothers [The Brothers: John
Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, 2013], and the
thing that got me: It was so fucking stupid what they did. Even the Korean
War, we now know that China started the war without talking to Russia. We
thought it was all Russia. The wrongness of us. So how do you deal with a
country that gets everything fucking wrong? [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo
today issued an edict today to the North Koreans. Basically it was a Cold
War edict. Were going to give you the stiffest requirements. You have to
cut off everything, do everything we say. And their answer was: Who do you
think you are? But how did we get so wrong? How did we get so wrong on
everything? I cant figure that out. Can you figure that out?
Im a literary critic.
What did literature do to help? What did Styron do? What did Mailer do? I
spend my life putting dead rats full of lice on peoples desks. And it does
pay off. George Saunders just wrote a lovely note to my agent, saying Im a
unbelievably wonderful read. Hes my true hero. What a read, he said, I can
show it to you. [He shows me the email.] I gave a talk with him once, but
hes the nicest man, you know. I wrote back, George could write himself out
of a Mengele experimental ward. [The phone rings.] This is money, I gotta
take it. [He takes it.] I get these calls all the time from strange people.
Thats life in the fast track. When I get pissed off is when people say
you know, the feat of all time, as I think about it, was telling Abe
Rosenthal that on April 20th, 1976, I got this story about the CIA
wiretapping Americans Ive been working on for two years. The CIA knew two
years before. They were watching me two years before. Its in this. This is
where it comes from. [He pulls out an internal history of the CIA and points
to a reference to himself from 1974.] They have a whole section on me. As
far back as December Hersh told the House Intelligence Committee that he had
information the agency was engaging in extensive domestic operations. I
barely knew myself at this time that I was doing it. Id heard something. So
every conversation I had with [CIA Director William] Colby was wired. Every
one, in his office, at home at night, was wired. And every conversation I
had with the Justice Department was wired. It was the 70s and were not
even at war. Theres no war. What can I tell you? And so I tell Abe
Rosenthal I got this story. He doesnt know a frigging thing about it. He
said, What, were spying on Americans? Come on. And I said, No, its a
real story. He said, Well, write it. I said, Its a big story. He said,
Just go write it. So I go to the office, I go home. Thats when I called
his wife up. What she said was a little more earthy than what I put in the
book, but thats okay. I mean, it did happen.
You called his wife or his girlfriend?
I called the wife first, who then told me about the girlfriend with some
asperity. As it turns out, he was a tomcat. I guess I didnt know that he
was a big buddy of Roy Cohns. I learned that much later. Yeah, they used to
go to parties together. I had no idea. None of my business. So I spend three
hours on it. I saw Colby at 10 oclock and he cashed in on me. He claims
that he just diminished it. He said, Well, they wanted 110 wiretaps and
they only got 74. And its a ticket to ride. And [CIA counterintelligence
chief James Jesus] Angleton is going to be done with this story. And Colby
knows that he wants to get rid of him. And in a way Colbys probably using
me to get rid of Angleton. Angleton then tells me that he didnt really do
it, and he names a guy named [Richard] Ober [head of the CIAs Operation
CHAOS]. I dont know if these people are still alive. [They are all dead.]
In those days its hard to believe how naïve we are. CIA people who were
undercover used to all live in Virginia and Maryland with their phone
numbers in the book because their wives wanted to belong to clubs and stuff.
So I called up this guy Ober on Saturday morning, or Friday afternoon. Ober
ran the program. And I say to Ober, Angleton just dumped all over you and
said you did everything. He said, I dont know what youre talking about.
I said, You can say whatever you want.
Heres my name and number and Im going to tell what Angleton said. Then I
told him one or two facts that Angleton told me and an hour later he calls
back and says, Im not taking the fall for Angleton. And so we have this
conversation and the whole time hes talking to me, Angletons talking to
me. Three other guys, four other guys are talking to me. They all dont say,
of course youre not using my name. Its understood. Do you know what I
mean? Were on that level.
They understood and I understand. So I have, as I said in the article, I had
seven sources. I finished the story about 11 or 12. Ive stayed up all
night, Ive got 7,000 words. Ive been thinking about the story for years
and I thought it through
I understood where I was going. Its not like a
novel where sometimes the characters take over. I just knew I got the
chronology going and I knew where I was and I knew where it would end, you
know? And so and so, the story goes, and the only debate, the only concern
was about the word massive.
What did you say?
I said its 100,000 people. How do you describe it? Larger than life. I mean
its just one word, and so then he did, and we thought that wed be attacked
for that word, but anyway it gets into the paper. They never talked to the
lawyer. I never talked to Jimmy Goodale [former vice-president and general
counsel of the New York Times]. Abe never calls me and says, who are the
sources? Talk about an amazing thing for the New York Times to lead a
paper with that. They added an extra page in the middle of the night. Abe
got mad at me because I didnt know the phone number I was calling from. He
got really mad at me, What do mean you dont know your fucking number? I
remember that. I can remember all these things. Anyway, I remember all of my
conversations with you, all of our fights. I can remember every fight we had
and where they went.
I remember them too, Sy.
It was for you and me to resolve. You may have been right about a few
things. Im not worried about it. It happened. I say to people, Do you have
any idea how hard it is to do that, to write 7,000 words in 10 hours or 12
hours for the front page of the New York Times and to know that they trust
you so much that that its going to lead the paper. Its hard. I mean, its
a feat. I dont think Ive ever done anything nearly that close in all my
years. The second and third pieces I did for The New Yorker on Abu Ghraib
were on the fly, but nothing like that.
What was the aftermath of the CIA story? How long did it take over your
life?
The CIA took over my life for a long time. One of the problems was that
afterwards, nobody followed it and so I had to keep going. Nobody followed
it. Once again, its the same thing I talk about with the Pentagon press
corps. I saw the Pentagon press corps smoking pipes. In all fairness to
reporters, every time you went to see somebody above a colonel or higher,
you had to sign in. So if I got a good story from somebody, I just spent
three days seeing ten other people to protect my sources. That was too many
for them to cope with it. Five and they might have gone after five. I had to
pretend to do interviews on other stuff to throw them off the trail. It was
really hard. [Pentagon Press Secretary] Arthur Sylvester and [Defense
Secretary Robert] McNamara? I knew him from the very beginning. McNamara was
a fucking psychotic liar.
Is there anyone like him now?
Whats going on today in terms of the U.S. and Russia, its pretty nasty
now. Journalism can be a lot more interesting than what were seeing. I hate
to see the way journalism is devalued. We have to feed the machine, we have
to feed the Trump outrage machine, to feed the anger against Trump, to feed
the New York liberal anger. The New York Times does this, and the Washington
Post does the same thing, only to a lesser degree. The story is just, Trump
clearly lied again when he said such and such. But those arent front page
stories, yet there are three of them on the front page. [At this point, we
went through the stories on the front pages of the Times and the Post,
several of which were about statements or tweets by the president.] Its
really sort of dishonest.
Was it like that with Nixon or Johnson?
Not as bad. Not nearly as bad. In fact, not nearly as bad with George W.
Bush either. And not nearly as bad, certainly not, with Obama. He didnt get
into any of the trouble he could have gotten into and he got a big ride from
people. So heres where we are at. All the Mueller stuff, all the Russia
stuff. Its catnip for liberal outrage.
Do you think Trump is doing as much damage as Bush and Cheney?
Not nearly. Hes a clown. Hes not serious. I wrote a lot about Cheney in
The New Yorker, but I wrote very little of what I know. The only time I ever
mentioned what he ever said at a meeting was when there were many people
there who were not insiders, you know, other people not in the government,
so my sources would be protected. So sometimes hed show off a little bit
and talk about building a new alignment in the Middle East, what things go
together and how they never fit. They always never fit. Cheney would go off
on the 1917 Balfour declaration. He knows a lot and hes a reader, and he
aint dumb and hes got a great memory. They caused irreparable damage.
How did you get hired at the New York Times?
Abe Rosenthal hired me because the Times Washington bureau was falling on
its ass on Watergate and he didnt even know about Watergate. The bureau
wasnt doing it and it wasnt doing Vietnam. As much as we had bad blood, he
knew he needed me.
You had gotten a visa to go to Hanoi, right?
Somebody at the Times picked up on my New Yorker articles. Theres this
story where I hung up on Abe and told him to go fuck himself. Its true. It
was when I was conducting an interview on My Lai for CBS. And the Times is
coming to check quotes to clean my My Lai story out.
And so the next day after I hung up on Abe, they ran only the CBS interview.
They mentioned, but although they bought our story, they didnt mention it.
They paid 100 bucks like everyone else for a story after not buying it for
weeks.
How much did you end up getting for those first My Lai stories you put out
through the Dispatch News Service [a small antiwar news agency run by
Hershs neighbor David Obst that syndicated Hershs My Lai reports to
newspapers across the country]?
Well, I got paid. I got enough. I got paid. I dont know how much David made
because he later made it a business. If you have 30 papers, paying 100 bucks
each, thats what, $3,000, and Im flying all over, and I dont think I made
a lot of money off that. I shared a big chunk of the $10,000 CBS paid. I
didnt handle any of the money. I had to hire lawyers and stuff like that. I
got enough money to make a down payment on a house. You know this business.
Come on! Theres no big payday.
Certainly not for book critics.
This is my Cheney book. Remember I told you I dont put anything on the
computer? This is the book right here. [Hersh points to his desk: several
stacks of dozens of yellow legal pads filled with interviews for his ongoing
book on Dick Cheney and the war on terror.] This one is the history behind
the early decision to bomb the Taliban in October 2001. We werent at war
with the Taliban. Why would you want to go war with the Taliban? Some of
those Taliban guys had worked with us against the Russians because they
hated the Russians, and they were all calling CIA guys that talked to me
between 9/11 and when we started bombing six weeks later in October. They
were saying that in Pashtun society that Bin Laden was a guest and you dont
kick out a guest. But after about a month, they began calling people in the
CIA who Ive talked to about it more than one of them and they said, Bin
Laden and Al Qaeda, theyre no longer our guests. You know where they are.
You do know where they are. Hit em there. Instead, we went to war with the
Taliban. Incredible decision.
And now its been 17 years.
How we doin? Everythings rosy. Everythings wonderful in Kabul, right? My
son was there and he said when he used to jog, and the smell of dung would
penetrate everywhere and get right into your lungs. Youve seen the crap I
get, right? Youve seen the documents.
[Hersh rifles through documents on his desk. He pulls up a 2002 memo from
Donald Rumsfeld referring to an entity called Grey Fox.] Grey Fox? What
the fuck is that? Who? What? Ever heard of Grey Fox? No. Okay. What are we
talking about? I mean, whats going on in this secret world? And whats
secret titrant? T-I-T-R-A-N-T? What the fuck does that mean? That means
something important. And again, how about this one? I mean, I get this shit.
Theres one thats just amazing. [We looked at a one-line memo from Rumsfeld
to Douglas Feith, which caused us both to laugh.] I mean, what are you going
to do with this stuff? First of all, they would nail the guy that gave it to
me, Im sure. Here Rummy says the trouble with these fucking army guys is
that when you send them on missions the only thing they want to do is be
sure they have the right people, the right targets. He said, Well, you, no,
we dont have to do that. Thats why weve got to get Special Forces in
there. Get rid of Grey Fox. I found out what it was. Its a fucking black
unit. The names changed a thousand times times. None of these I ever used,
not one word. These guys are really serious about killing a lot of people.
Theres a document where theyre talking about problems they have with
detainment, and this is the kind of stuff that drives you crazy. [Shows
another memo.] They love the idea! Man, we could go out and start killing
fucking people! Fuck all this dumb shit about the Geneva Convention. Fuck
all that. This is war. They said the problem is we have a lot of detainees.
This is in late 2001. Weve got detainees and weve got a real detainee
problem because among the detainees we have who we dont know what to do
with and we think theyre all bad guys are anywhere between 800 to 900
Pakistani children between the ages of 13 and 15. Theyre in a prison in
Afghanistan
Theyre talking them about sending them to one of the islands
in the Pacific where we did all the nuclear testing because theres nobody
there anymore because of radioactivity. They think its okay now. In the end
they decided to put them in Guantánamo.
What was the process of researching your memoir. Was it all here in notes
and documents and clips?
People are amazed that I remembered so much. But youre not. You know Ive
got a good memory.
It seemed to me that a lot of the stories in the book youve rehearsed over
and over again in conversations.
Ive told the stories a hundred times, so they were in my head. But I had to
do immense fact-checking. Youve been thinking something was one way for
decades. Turns out it was something else. What I did is I went back and I
got almost everything I ever wrote. The AP was great. I didnt know I was
gonna be a writer when I started out. I didnt keep diaries and intake books
on it, but I have a good memory, and all that stuff from Chicago, I remember
like it was today because it was so traumatic for me. And also dont forget
I drove a car with just the press sticker. We could go anywhere. The deal
with the cops was you can do anything, you can report anything as long as
you stay away from the whole Worth Street mafia stuff. In other words, if
theres some guy who was found in the street with 12 bullet holes in him,
and the local police station reported it was a traffic accident. You didnt
fuck with them, just like you didnt fuck with it. So I knew what tyranny
was, in a funny way, very early because there were limits. Otherwise, the
city was your oyster. Chicago was great then and I just drove around. I
could do what I wanted, but there was a limit. You couldnt really tell the
truth, like who shot somebody in the back, which they were doing all the
time, killing black men. You couldnt get into it. And so I was glad to get
out of there. So I went and got everything I ever did and read all the
stories.
You read them all?
Theres one from 16 years ago I wrote about John Walker Lindh, who they
tortured. We all knew what they were doing. They were torturing and killing.
There was no secret about it, you know, I wouldnt have done it if Id been
in the CIA, but, I might have, you know, I dont know. Certainly that was
the atmosphere. It came from the top. They threw this kid for five days,
seven days he was naked in a container used for shipping bombs. Its a
big steel container and they took the top off it and placed it on the
ground. This was in Bagram and it was over 100 degrees and they drilled
holes in it, big holes like port holes, so the GIs could come by and scream
things at him. And one of the things they tried to do is piss far enough
he was off in a corner they would try to get the piss on him. People wrote
about it as if he deserves it. The 19-year-old Taliban, he got 20 years.
Hes coming out in two years, and needless to say, hes a little bitter.
Hes got one year off, two years off. So hes gonna serve 18-and-a-half
years. I wanted to go talk to him, but hes too bitter, man, and half-crazy
anyway.
Is he still religious?
I dont know. I know hes still angry at America. He doesnt like America.
He wants to get out. His mother and father are trying to talk to him. They
separated when he was a kid. You know, 17-year-old kid and his parents
divorced. He didnt go do drugs. He joined the Taliban. It was just
murderous. There was a CIA guy, but he wasnt really. He was an ex-Special
Forces asshole that was recruited by the CIA for this war because they
didnt have enough people. It wasnt a military war in the beginning, it was
CIA guys growing beards, riding horses with sandals and all that shit, and
they recruited him. We took over some town and nobody would talk and they
flooded water into a basement there and they got the prisoners all wet. They
scared them with drowning and somebody talks, told them that there was an
American there, so he found out who he was and he goes up to him and starts
speaking English and of course the kid knows if he indicates to his peers
that he knew English, hes a dead man, theyll think hes an American spy.
So he of course said nothing. So they roughed him up and dragged him and
threw him in this thing. In the New Yorker I wrote a story describing some
of the Geneva Convention violations. But it was like I was banging in the
wind. What the fuck? I know in the first four or five months of Guantanamo,
when they assured everybody that all the detainees got one hour of R&R every
day. You know what the R&R was? They put them in a straight jacket in the
middle of the afternoon it was 103 degrees and they throw them out onto
the grass outside for an hour. I didnt write that either.
How do you rate the main antagonists of your career: McNamara, Kissinger,
Cheney?
Cheney, hes the smartest and he caused the most damage.
Smarter than Kissinger?
No, Kissinger, for all of his being wrong, Kissinger really was dexterous.
Cheney didnt have any of that. He was just plowing straight ahead, but he
just, he was well read. I mean, he spent years trying to reorganize the
Middle East. But you talk about antagonists, I thought you would name my
colleagues! Im so glad you didnt. If you notice in the book I was very
generous. This isnt a payback book.
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