Abstract
The golden age of journalism, as it is nostalgically named and recalled by those who took part, lasted roughly from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Newspapers were flush and reporters armed with company credit cards were set free, untethered to editors by cell phones and not yet second-guessed by round-the-clock cable news. Two bylines burst from the pack of great American investigative reporters and soared into the digital age.
One was Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. The other was Seymour “Sy” Hersh, best known for exposing the US army's massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.
They are very different people with different approaches to the craft. Woodward, middle class, Yale and navy officer, polished and punctilious, and always respectful to editors, found the Watergate story on his doorstep at The Washington Post, the newspaper he has never left and where he has continued to produce scoops and bestsellers about the US's political establishment.
Hersh, working class, Chicago, army grunt, unkempt, vigorously opinionated and permanently irreverent to editors, started as a copy boy and became a local reporter in a city where the police were on the take and the mob ruled. And the newsroom mantra was if your mother says she loves you, check it out. He moved to the Associated Press and became famous, as its Pentagon correspondent, first for exposing the US's hidden arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
Developing sources in the dark underbelly of America's secret military and intelligence world, he followed with My Lai and other national security investigations for The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Hersh talked about editors driving him “nuts” and editors talked about “managing Sy” and how they turned pale when he handed in his rough-hewn, several-thousand-word investigations, sprinkled with sources they had never dreamed of, and weren't sure what to do with. Any hint of altering or cutting the copy risked a torrent of abuse. At The Times, in Hersh's view, there was once an “ass-licking coterie of moronic editors” in charge of the business section. Hersh scolded, bullied and badgered reluctant editors with profanity-laden attacks mixed with tantrums (he once threw his typewriter through an office pane of glass at The Times). Editors either gave in or gave up.
Over the years, when there was a parting of the ways, Hersh turned freelance and wrote bestsellers, starting with Cover-Up, about My Lai. But editors, unable to resist his stories, gritted their teeth and invited him back. As Hersh, always his own man, admits memorably in Reporter: “I was aware that I was not, to put it mildly, everyone's cup of tea.”
Hersh has written a classic about journalism. The retelling of his journey from his immigrant parents’ drycleaner on Chicago's scrappy South Side to newsrooms with “shabby desks, dirty floors, old typewriters, marginal lighting and wise cracks from wise guys”, to the corridors of power in New York and Washington DC, and to conflicts in the Middle East and south-east Asia, is a wonderful story for any reader, especially those interested in the role the press played in US policies during the cold war and beyond.
And there are gems in Reporter for rookie investigative journalists. There was a reason why Hersh's stories earned a Pulitzer (for My Lai) and five Polk Awards (more than any other author). This may be a different age, but the old rules still apply.
Here's a summary. Read everything – some stories “hide in the open”. Follow anonymous tips where they go – sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't, and some of them will be false and you may have to make a correction. Know your interviewee and show how much you know, before you ask the core question. When you have the story, “get the hell out of the way, and just tell it”. And beware, investigative reporters wear out their welcome: “Editors get tired of difficult stories and difficult reporters.”
Hersh knew, even when he was on the police beat, that investigative journalism was in his blood. He was, as he puts it, very good at tracking down people who did not want to be discovered. “I had found my calling, it wasn't perfect. Neither was I.”
He arrived in Washington DC in the middle of the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam war. Early on, he met the investigative journalist, IF Stone, who, in his legendary weekly newsletter, had campaigned against McCarthyism and for civil rights in the 1950s, and, in the 1960s, was a persistent critic of the war. Hersh's brief army service, had left him with a healthy scepticism of the officer corps and its divided loyalties over Vietnam. “Some officers worked to uphold the Constitution, not the president, they deserved my respect, and they got it.” Hersh was determined to tell people the truth about Vietnam, and make them understand the consequences.
An opportunity came when Hersh, then a freelance in Washington, was tipped off about the court martial of a US infantry lieutenant, William Calley, who, in 1968, had led a platoon into the village of My Lai where they shot, bayoneted or blasted with grenades 347 (according to the army) unarmed South Vietnamese men, women and children. His chapter on “Finding Calley“ on the army base at Fort Benning, Georgia, is still a terrific read after all these years and an example of his doggedness in pursuit of a lead.
Government officials sometimes publicly denied his stories, calling him a liar and worse. But Hersh never stopped. A life's passion for exposing the abuse of government power led to his most effective revelation in the early 1970s – the CIA's domestic spying operations – before the internet and the Edward Snowdens of the world, and which led to congressional inquiries and oversight. His outrage continues, undiluted.
Inevitably, Hersh's anonymous sources bumped up against editors’ demands to identify them. Hersh told editors who they were, but insisted they could not be named in print. Otherwise, he argued, no one would leak and reporters would never get to the truth.
As he got older, so did his sources. At The New Yorker, Hersh wrote a story challenging the Obama White House's official version of the killing of Osama Bin Laden. The magazine's editor, David Remnick, told Hersh he did not think he “had” the story and was worried about him using “the same tired old source”. Remnick then ran an article about the raid by the navy seals who carried out the mission. Hersh was “enraged” and resigned. Remnick said he was still open to publishing the story.
Hersh resubmitted it, but Remnick insisted that without having a source on the record it would not hold up, leaving Hersh to mull over “the dozens of articles I had written for the magazine that were devoid of even one on-the-record source”. And he found a home for the story in the London Review of Books. That was the Hersh way. Some colleagues said Hersh was finished, now that he was having to publish abroad.
“It's a wonderful business, this profession of mine,” he says to end Reporter. “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.”
