{"id":138924,"date":"2021-04-28T10:58:06","date_gmt":"2021-04-28T18:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138924"},"modified":"2021-04-28T11:04:27","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T19:04:27","slug":"reporter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138924","title":{"rendered":"Reporter"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the New York Review of Books<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* A merit of Reporter is the way in which it divulges Hersh\u2019s trade secrets: Be a bookworm (\u201cread before you write\u201d); work the graveyard shift (late one evening in 1967, he allowed Stone to slip in and ransack the AP\u2019s files); scrutinize the retirement notices of government and military officials (some of them will sing); be alert when meeting sources in restaurants (they may leave secret manila envelopes on chairs); behave as though journalism is a bazaar (when CIA Director William Colby asked Hersh in 1973 not to publish a story, \u201cI told him I would do what he wished, but I needed something on Watergate and the CIA in return\u201d); and, lastly, assume your job is precarious (\u201cInvestigative reporters wear out their welcome\u2026. Editors get tired of difficult stories and difficult reporters\u201d).<\/p>\n

* The My Lai story earned Hersh a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 and the recognition he craved. Random House wanted a book, which became My Lai 4, from whose newspaper syndication rights alone he earned $40,000. He began to lecture on campuses, galvanizing students with blistering vignettes of the My Lai carnage, and has continued to give lucrative speeches ever since.<\/p>\n

Hersh\u2019s aspiration had long been to work for The New York Times, and he arrived in its Washington bureau in 1972. It wasn\u2019t a logical destination: the Times had no tradition of muckraking. But The Washington Post was beating it to the story of the Watergate scandal, and the Times\u2019s executive editor, A.M. \u201cAbe\u201d Rosenthal, needed a master reporter to match Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.<\/p>\n

* \u201cI keep thinking of all the money Woodward and Bernstein got,\u201d Hersh told Downie. \u201cBut then that\u2019s what helped to create the mystique about investigative reporting. I can\u2019t really complain. It\u2019s put money in my pocket, too.\u201d In a long, fascinating interview with Rolling Stone in 1975, Hersh alluded to the film version of All the President\u2019s Men and proclaimed that \u201chaving Robert Redford play me wouldn\u2019t bother me at all.\u201d There has never been a film about Hersh\u2019s journalistic adventures, but he profited nevertheless, getting ever higher fees for his speeches.<\/p>\n

* Vietnam and Watergate had receded; the press was becoming more restrained and centrist; by 1979, it was time for Hersh to move on. Editors at the Times were uneasy about his use of anonymous sources and his aggressive tactics for getting information. Hersh contends that he didn\u2019t abuse sources on the telephone, but one of his editors at the Times, Robert Phelps, told me incredulously sixteen years ago that \u201che would call people and he\u2019d say, \u2018I\u2019m Seymour Hersh, I\u2019m doing a story on this\u2026If he doesn\u2019t call me, I will get his ass.\u2019 They\u2019d call back.\u201d \u201cHis ability to make people cower on the phone was unbelievable,\u201d the influential Times editor Arthur Gelb remembered in 2011. Woodward has said that Hersh\u2019s reporting techniques at The New York Times in the 1970s would not have been condoned at The Washington Post.<\/p>\n

* In 1993 Little, Brown offered Hersh and a coauthor a $1 million contract for a book on John F. Kennedy that would illuminate his sexual escapades; he also obtained a lucrative TV deal for the same project. \u201cI started the book on Kennedy,\u201d Hersh told an audience at Harvard in 1998, \u201cfor a couple of reasons. One, I had a publisher who was going to give me a lot of money to do it. That\u2019s very important, you know, these days.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Hersh\u2019s first work of tabloid journalism. Early in his research, he was offered an astonishing trove of handwritten documents about JFK\u2014some of which seemed to be written in Kennedy\u2019s own hand\u2014showing, for instance, that he had paid hush money to Marilyn Monroe, given bribes to J. Edgar Hoover, and given instructions to employ the mobster Sam Giancana to manipulate the 1960 election. But the documents were forgeries, and Lawrence X. Cusack, one of the men who peddled them to Hersh, was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison for fraud. The resulting book (minus the forged material), The Dark Side of Camelot, was savaged: in these pages, Garry Wills wrote that Hersh had \u201cobliterated his own career and reputation.\u201d Hersh admitted to the journalist Robert Sam Anson in Vanity Fair that he\u2019d fallen for \u201cone of the great scams of all times,\u201d but he pointed to the occupational hazards faced by investigative reporters: \u201cAny investigative journalist can be totally fucking conned so easy. We\u2019re the easiest lays in town.\u201d When I interviewed Hersh in 2003, he expressed grave doubts about the book, which featured salacious details from members of JFK\u2019s Secret Service team. \u201cI wish they hadn\u2019t spoken on the record,\u201d he told me. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have used it.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Hersh told Vanity Fair\u2019s Anson in 1997, \u201cYou think I wouldn\u2019t sell my mother for My Lai? Gimme a break.\u201d In what seem to be some hastily composed pages near the end of the memoir, he affirms that journalists \u201ctend to like those senior officials and leaders, such as Assad, who grant us interviews and speak openly with us.\u201d Apparently one can kill hundreds of thousands of people and still be a valued source. Hersh tells us that \u201cRemnick was far more skeptical than I was of the integrity of Assad.\u201d The journalist who documented war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia has overlooked them in Syria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the New York Review of Books: * A merit of Reporter is the way in which it divulges Hersh\u2019s trade secrets: Be a bookworm (\u201cread before you write\u201d); work the graveyard shift (late one evening in 1967, he allowed … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t