“Reporter” is less an autobiography that an account of how Hersh got his big stories. And how he got his big stories boils down to dogged determination to get to the truth.
By MATT NESVISKYErez Kaplan Haelion, CTO of Cyber 2.0US President George W. Bush applauds A.M. Rosenthal (right), executive editor of The New York Times, after he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on July 9, 2002(photo credit: REUTERS)
FOR NEARLY a half-century Seymour Hersh arguably has been America’s premier investigative journalist. He has also been consistently controversial, with critics sniping at his methods, his sources, his political and social biases, his involvement with government, military and intelligence personnel and much more.Hersh is, of course, the reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story about the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and against all odds tracking down its key figure, Lieut. William Calley. He uncovered countless scandals involving illegal actions by the White House (the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, unauthorized monitoring of American citizens’ phone and email accounts, assassination plots), rogue activities by the CIA and by huge corporations, on and on. His sleuthing also brought to light startling facts about Watergate and the Abu Ghraib prison outrage in Iraq.On top of all this Hersh is an especially prickly character, forever falling out with his editors at such publications as “The NewYork Times” and “The New Yorker” magazine, as well as with his book publishers. There is also his decades-long loathing of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and of former vice president Dick Cheney. With all this going for him, how could his new memoir, published as the author turns 81, not be an absolute delight?And an absolute delight it is. “Reporter” is less an autobiography that an account of how Hersh got his big stories. And how he got his big stories boils down to dogged determination to get to the truth even if it takes months or years. Hersh’s methods are the essence of good old-fashioned shoe leather reporting: following tips, tracking down sources, interviewing and reinterviewing, confirming information with multiple sources, cajoling reluctant individuals to share what they know, poring over mountains of documents, on and on.Many of Hersh’s revelations however depended on the use of anonymous sources, which is one of the most contentious issues in journalism. Responsible news organizations maintain they hate to use them but wind up doing so anyway. There are valid reasons for concealing a source’s identity: using the name might compromise the source, leading to the end of a career or the beginning of legal problems. And if the source’s information is deemed vital, and if it can be confirmed by other sources, the public’s right to know prevails.This of course still requires readers or viewers to take a reporter’s words on faith. We tend to trust a dedicated journalist likeSeymour Hersh. Yet “Reporter” may give one pause, considering the errors that occasionally crop up in the text. A particular howler is Hersh’s references to Mordechai Vanunu, a one-time employee at Israel’s topsecret nuclear facility – cheerfully known as the “textile factory” – near the Negev town of Dimona.Vanunu, a leftist, became a public figure in 1986 when he gave an interview about the site to the London “Sunday Times,” backed up by dozens of his photographs. He was subsequently tried in Israel and jailed for 18 years, and has frequently run afoul of Israeli authorities ever since his release in 2004.Hersh, who has written about Israel’s nuclear weapons program in numerous articles and in a previous book “The Samson Option” (1991), describes Vanunu here as “an Arab citizen of Israel.” That’s quite a gaffe, assuming an Israeli Arab would have ever been employed in the Jewish state’s nuclear weapons facility. Possible but not likely. Vanunu in fact had a yeshiva background and had been a sergeant-major in the IDF, serving in the Yom Kippur War. Didn’t Seymour Myron Hersh even consider Vanunu’s first name?Otherwise Hersh remains studiously neutral on Israel, reporting on it just as one of any number of Middle East nations. Beyond all this however, “Reporter” remains a treat, not the least for its many luminous anecdotes. Three in particular struck me, one poignant, one horrific, one hilarious. The first regards Hersh’s upbringing. He was born in a poor neighborhood in Chicago where the family, East European immigrants, ran a struggling dry cleaning establishment. Seymour was the youngest of five children. His two older brothers were outstanding students, and both went on to top universities and distinguished professional careers.Seymour was anything but a scholar and was forced to work in the family business even while in high school and thereafter. His duties soon increased when his father died. All the while Seymour was a voracious reader and suffered an enduring thirst for knowledge. His only recourse was to enroll at a nearby community college – a lowcost institution that would accept virtually anyone.Midway through his first semester his English professor, Bernard Kogan, asked to see Hersh after class. “What are you doing here?” the instructor demanded. Stammering Hersh explained his circumstances. Kogan stated that Hersh’s papers clearly indicated he was in the wrong place. He then promptly contacted an associate at the prestigious University of Chicago, who got Hersh enrolled. Hersh blossomed there. Fifty years later, Hersh met up again with his former mentor and told him how he had changed his life. Kogan merely shrugged, saying he had had the same impact on only one other student, who became a renowned surgeon. The horrific material centers on details of the My Lai massacre, which rank, although not by size, with the worst imaginable:a company of American troops earnestly bayoneting babies to death can only recall – what? Hersh is also good on his many visits to Vietnam, to Hanoi when it was being bombed by his countrymen, to My Lai with his family many decades after the slaughter.The hilarious incident concerns Hersh getting the clinching material on a story that the journalist had been working on formonths. Relishing his success, Hersh immediately called the home of A.M. Rosenthal, his editor at “The New York Times.” It mattered not to Hersh that it was 2 a.m.After a long moment Rosenthal’s wife Ann answered the phone. “I apologized for calling,” Hersh writes, “told her who I was, and said I needed to speak to Abe right away. Well, she said, with much bitterness, you’ve called the wrong person. Abe’s left me. You’ll have to call him at his girlfriend’s house. I’d staggered into a soap opera. And then – I was not going to give up. I called again and asked Ann if she knew the name of the girlfriend. I got an earful, but she was an editor’s wife, and she came up with a name.“I don’t remember whom I called next, but I came up with an unlisted number for Abe’s girlfriend. I called – it was close to three in the morning by this time.” A grumbling Rosenthal eventually got on the line, heard Hersh out and finally gave him the go ahead to run his story – a 7,000-word expose of the CIA that stunned the nation.Hersh was forever stunning the nation. “Reporter” of course will appeal mostly to the media set and to news junkies – no small audience. But this reviewer believes anyone would benefit from this sterling memoir.
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