“Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News,” President Trump tweeted last week, in his latest attack on the nation’s press. A week earlier, federal prosecutors revealed they had secretly captured years’ worth of phone and email data from journalist Ali Watkins, who broke several high-profile stories related to the Senate Intelligence Committee. A former top aide on the committee, James Wolfe, has been charged with lying to the FBI about his contacts with the press. Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders recently dropped the United States to number 45 in its annual ranking of press freedom. When the group first published its list in 2002, the United States came in at number 17. We speak with the nation’s best-known investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh. He has a new book out looking back on his more than half-century of scoops and digging up secrets. It’s titled “Reporter: A Memoir.”
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: “Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News.” Those were the words of President Trump last week. It was just his latest attack on the nation’s press. A week earlier, federal prosecutors revealed they had secretly captured years’ worth of phone and email data from a reporter, Ali Watkins, who broke several high-profile stories related to the Senate Intelligence Committee. A former top aide on the committee, James Wolfe, has been charged with lying to the FBI about his contacts with the press.
Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders recently dropped the United States to number 45 in its annual ranking of press freedom. When the group first published its list in 2002, the United States was at number 17.
Well, to talk about the state of the media and how—we spend the hour with the nation’s best-known investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh. In 1970, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on how the U.S. slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese women, children and old men in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. The event became known as the My Lai massacre.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh went on to expose many of the government’s deepest secrets, from Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia to the CIA spying on antiwar activists, to the CIA’s role undermining the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. Former CIA Director William Colby once privately complained about Hersh, saying, quote, “He knows more about this place than I do.”
Well, Sy Hersh has also helped uncover how the U.S. has secretly carried out assassinations across the globe. Hersh continued to break major stories after the September 11th attacks, most notably, in 2004, he exposed the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq that shocked the world.
Well, Seymour Hersh is out with a new book, looking back on his more than half a century of scoops and digging up secrets. It’s called Reporter: A Memoir.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you for the hour, Sy.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Glad to be back.
AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t we begin, before we go back in time at your remarkable investigative reporting, to your assessment of the press today in this era of Trump?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I’m ecstatic that, finally, the major media is no longer trying to cope with tweets, and digging into real news. What’s happened in Mexico, you know, it’s been going on for two months. It only took ProPublica to get a tape and to get the Democrats going. That it was a political issue was not seen. I don’t know what’s wrong with, what’s going on with the press. It took them a long time to get it.
You mentioned Yemen. You’re one of the few people, this program, that continually reports about Yemen. And it’s not just we’re aiding. We’re supplying intelligence. We’re refueling planes. We’re working very closely with the United Arab Emirates and, of course, the Saudis, who are doing most of the horrific stuff that’s going on.
And talk about—it’s terrible what’s happening at the border. My wife just gave a lot of money to some group, and it’s gotten everybody going. But it’s been going on for two months. And while the—what I’ve been screaming about is: Stop worrying about the tweets. I was at a conference of journalists in Orlando last week, investigative reporters and editors, and I spent a day talking—
AMY GOODMAN: With Juan.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, and 1,800 kids there, in a down time economically. There’s something going on. People understand the need for really good reporting. The things that the government are doing, this government are doing, below the surface, for example—I was talking to a lot of reporters about it, local reporters—they’re lowering the standards of safety for baby cribs, because some manufacturer went to somebody connected in the government and laid off—who knows, whatever, politically or economically. I mean, this is going on across the board.
And meanwhile, we’re focused on this man’s tweets. And the more we focus in the press—for months, I was going nuts, because he goes up in the polls. A lot of people in America that like the idea that there’s somebody out there that doesn’t care about the press. Anyway, they’ve got their teeth into something, finally, and it’s going. They treat Haley, this woman who wants—is running for president, seriously. I can’t believe they treat the woman—
AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. ambassador to U.N.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, my god! How can you possibly treat her seriously? She’s been a prop for over a year in the job. And so, I think things are changing. This could be a turning point. You know, I say that, but all he had to do is change the policy, and then we’re back into listening to tweets.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you describe yourself in your book as a survivor of the golden age of journalism. Could you talk about what was the golden age of journalism? And compare that to, as you’re saying, all of these hundreds and hundreds of kids that we saw this past weekend in Orlando seeking to become investigative reporters.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Right now what you have is such a division in the media that there’s no middle ground. There’s no—when I worked, I was a freelance reporter, and I understood, even then, a story was a story. And it wasn’t looked at as are you either pro- or anti-Trump or, you know, whatever. Right now you have a situation, because of the craziness of cable news, which takes any information they get and blasts it out there with no thought—we’re all driven. And the public has—they used to turn to The New York Times, my old newspaper, for which I worked for years, happily, in the ’70s, as an arbiter of integrity and truth. Right now, everybody is seen as either pro- or anti-. You don’t have a middle ground.
And what I meant by the golden age is you could write a story and get it published, and people would believe it. Now you can write a story and get it published, and people will say, “Well…” As many people, even in this—you saw, in your own broadcast, many—he still gets support from many people in America, when he starts talking this crazy, insane stuff about immigrants. And so, there’s no—there’s no national standard. The Times used to be a national standard. There’s so much division in the country right now, caused by him, but it’s been going on for a long time, sort of the secular—I don’t want to use the word “secular.” It’s the wrong word. But just the notion that you can take your choice: If you like Trump, you watch this; if you don’t like him, you watch something else. There’s no middle ground.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to take a break, and then we’re going to go back in time, because even as you talk about the golden age of reporting and journalism, when you had your My Lai exposé, this astounding story in Vietnam—and it wasn’t the only massacre, obviously, even not even the largest massacre—but your story was turned down everywhere, even as you continued to report it. We’re talking to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh for the hour. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh is our guest for the hour. The award-winning investigative journalist, based in Washington, D.C., has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, The New York Times, awarded the Pulitzer Prize as a freelancer in 1970 for his exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. His new memoir is just out. It’s called Reporter: A Memoir.
So, March 16th, 1968, Sy. We have students, classes coming through here every week. When you say My Lai, the vast majority of the kids have never heard of it. In a nutshell, tell us what it is you exposed. And this is amazing. You did this as a freelance reporter. Where were you working? How did you find this story out?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I had a little office in the National Press building. I had been a reporter for the Associated Press covering the Pentagon, ’66 and ’67. I got in trouble there with the management. But I learned then OJT, on-the-job training, from officers. There’s a lot of integrity in the service. There really is. A lot of people take the oath of office to the Constitution and mean it, not to their general and not to the president. And so, I learned from those people that it was a killing zone. It was just massacre. And I came away thinking, “My god.” And I started reading, of course. You have to—can’t write. You’ve got to read before you write. So I was ready to believe a tip, in ’69, that there had been a terrible massacre. The thing is, I didn’t know how bad it was until I got into it.
What happened is, a group of American kids, to their credit—they were just country boys. Those days, the kids in the street, we had more African Americans than in the population, more Hispanics than the population, a lot of rural kids, American kids, from small villages across the country. And we’re not talking about big city kids in this company, a few, but very few. And they were told how bad the communists were. There were told, one day, they were going to—tomorrow, you’re going to—they’ve been in the country for three months, lost about 30 percent of their people through snipers. They’d fall into pits with sticks with poison on them—I mean, horrible stuff. And so they began to hate. And they were allowed to hate. And there was a lot of ignorance about the society, about the culture of Vietnam. And they had—they were just in one of the worst divisions of the war, Americal Division. The way the war was, you could do anything you wanted, kill people, because it was always seen as a violation of rules and not as a criminal act. So that’s how they covered up stuff.
So, they were ready to go. They were ready. They were told they were going to meet the enemy for the first time in three months of being in country. They had never seen the enemy. They just were shot at. And they went into this village of about 500 people, possibly more, and they expected to see the enemy there. The intelligence, as it always is, was bad. There was no—the 48th North Vietnamese Division was nowhere near the place. That’s what they thought. And instead of meeting the enemy, there were just families, women and children and old men. And so they began to murder them. They put them in ditches. And they raped. They killed. They threw babies up—this was hard for me to even, in the first year—and caught them on bayonets. I mean, some of the stuff I kept out of the initial story, it was just so awful.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you initially heard that there was a lieutenant being charged with some of these atrocities? And talk about how you tracked him down.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Actually, what I first heard, it came from a wonderful man named Geoff Cowan, who was just out of law school, who was then in a—he was just in a new public policy group, social law firm, that—one of the first set up in Washington. And he heard this tip, and he figured I might do it. He didn’t know where to go. And I started chasing it. He said it was an enlisted man went crazy. And so, what I thought it was, from my—I had read the Russell Tribunal, which everybody poo-pooed. But the Russell Tribunal, Bertrand Russell Tribunal, published, I guess, in ’65 or ’66, had a long section on stuff going on in the war that was amazing. And I found one of the guys that testified, so I knew it was true. And so, I thought something bad happened. I thought maybe they threw rockets into a village. They used to have sometimes—even in as early as ’65, they’d go into a village, and there wouldn’t be any enemy there. And the soldiers would be frustrated. And the officers would say to the guys in tanks and the guys with machine guns, “You have an mad minute.” So they just shoot up everything in the village. Literally, that’s what’s going on, according to the Russell—and it was true. So I knew that.
What I didn’t know—I mean, we were censored in World War II. We all know that. We didn’t see the photographs. We didn’t know how bad it was. We didn’t know how both sides treated each other. So I didn’t know, either. And as I’m doing the story, I’m learning it’s not just some bombing or some mad moment. It’s a group of soldiers spending a day putting people in ditches, shooting them at will.
There was one scene, they had maybe 80 people in a ditch, and a young man named Paul Meadlo, who I interviewed—I found him. And they sprayed bullets into it. And some mother—I didn’t share this story for a long time. Some mother had tucked a baby—everybody was killed, they thought, maybe, as I say, 80 people. There’s a famous photograph of the ditch. She kept her little 2-year-old baby protected. And about 10 minutes after they’ve done the shooting, they were having lunch, their K-rations, sitting there around the ditch. And this little boy, full of other people’s blood, crawled up to the top of the ditch, keening, screaming, and began to run away when he got to the top. And Lieutenant Calley said to Paul Meadlo, who had done most of the shooting, a farm boy from a place called New Goshen, Indiana, you know, had barely gotten through high school and was taken—the Army lowered its standards very quickly in the war, because they didn’t want bright kids there, because they would talk about what’s going on. I say that seriously. Seriously. That was the motive, McNamara, who was a psychotic liar. I figured that out when I was even in the Pentagon. Anyway, so this kid is running away, and Calley says to Meadlo, “Plug him.” And Meadlo, who had been shooting in the ditch, couldn’t shoot one. So, Calley, the great man of the world, ran up behind him with his—the officers had a smaller rifle and a carbine—and shot him in the back of the head, blew off his head.
AMY GOODMAN: The baby, the child.
SEYMOUR HERSH: The baby, in front of his own soldiers. I’m learning this. I say—
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Private First Class Paul Meadlo, speaking about his involvement in the My Lai massacre. In 1969, he spoke to CBS’s Mike Wallace on national television about what happened.
PAUL MEADLO: Well, I might have killed about 10 or 15 of them.
MIKE WALLACE: Men, women and children?
PAUL MEADLO: Men, women and children.
MIKE WALLACE: And babies.
PAUL MEADLO: And babies.
MIKE WALLACE: Why did you do it?
PAUL MEADLO: Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it. Well, at the time, I felt like I was doing the right thing. I really did.
MIKE WALLACE: You’re married?
PAUL MEADLO: Right.
MIKE WALLACE: Children?
PAUL MEADLO: Two.
MIKE WALLACE: How can a father of two young children shoot babies?
PAUL MEADLO: I don’t know. It’s just one of them things.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul Meadlo, saying, “It was just one of them things,” speaking on 60 Minutes in 1969. You—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you had some involvement in getting him there?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, my god. He was—I wrote—what happened is, I had got the tip. I found my way to Fort Benning, where Calley—I found my way to Calley. I had a—I saw a document in which he was initially accused of killing 109 or 111 “Oriental human beings.” “Oriental human beings.” And I remember going nuts. Does that mean one Oriental equals how many whites, how many blacks? And I did do something. The one thing I did, that made a friend of life for me with Mel Laird, the secretary of defense, a congressman who was then secretary of defense, who was appalled, too, by this, I did go to his people—to him, actually, pretty much directly, and said, “I’m going to take this out, because this is so friggin’ racist, that I think any American soldier walking down a street in South Vietnam could be executed for having done that.” So I did take it out. I didn’t write that. “Oriental human beings” is what they wrote.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you said you’re going to take it out.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I didn’t put that in.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re going to omit it from the story.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I just took out the word “Oriental.” I said, “I just—you can’t be that dumb. You can’t be that crazily racist.” And it was to charge him with. Anyway, that’s just a sideshow. I did it because I just thought too many American boys who had nothing to do with it would be executed, but just shot at random. It would create so much anger. And I don’t second-guess that. I mean, it was bad enough, what I had, believe me, what they did.
And I found Calley. And nobody wanted it. I had not only been a correspondent for the Pentagon at the AP, I had worked with—been Eugene McCarthy’s press secretary, wrote a lot of speeches for him. I had been known—all the reporters knew me. They had to deal with me. I also freelanced. And between ’67 and ’69, by this time, I had maybe written a dozen articles, including three or four for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, on all sorts of stuff. So they knew me. You know what it—even when I got to The New York Times in ’72, later, appropriating—you know, they hired me. I was at The New Yorker then, and they hired me away. Even then, there were some stories I did that what they wanted me to do is maybe somebody else should do it first, and then they’ll do the second-day story.
AMY GOODMAN: But go back. You went to The New York Times. They didn’t want the story.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, no, I didn’t go near The New York Times, because they would steal—I was worried about them taking it over. I went to people I had worked for. I worked for Life—I had a commitment from Life magazine. I had—Look magazine was talking to me. I went to The New York Review of Books. Bob Silvers wanted to run it. And I was a friend of Izzy Stone’s.
Izzy Stone had picked up—Izzy Stone had some sort of—I had been a reporter for the Pentagon for only about a month or two, and he saw something in my stories that made him—he used to go out Sunday morning to the major out-of-city newspaper stand at 6:00 in the morning to buy 20 papers. And one morning—I never—I knew who he was, through my mother-in-law, who had been a subscriber for years. One morning, about 6:30—I was just newly married. We had been partying, and it was Sunday morning. The call comes, and it’s Izzy, about—before 7:00, saying, “Have you seen page 19 of The Philadelphia Inquirer today?” “What?” So we became friends. And he would—we would take walks. And I will tell you, if you ever want a tutorial from anybody in the world, you want it from Izzy Stone. The whole idea of reading—all he did was read everything. He did it all by simply brainpower. He was amazing. Anyway, and so, he was a mentor.
So, I couldn’t get anybody to buy it. Bob Silvers wanted to do it. He was going to remake the magazine—I came to him late—and put it—I’ll never forget this. And I had done—they bought—I published a book on chemical and biological warfare that they had syndicated in ’68 or so. They had done—they had been friendly to me. I had done pieces for him. And I liked him. I liked the magazine and—much more radical. And what happened is, he wanted me to put a paragraph in, after the—he was going to run it on the cover, the story. I just wrote a straightforward AP story: Lieutenant Calley did this and this, and he murdered this. And he wanted a paragraph saying, “This shows why the war is bad.” And I said, “Bob, no, the story tells why the war is bad.” And we had a fight. I actually pulled it out, because I—and then, people ask me—one of the things they ask me about: How could you do that? Here’s a public place. Because the story deserved to be just there for everybody.
AMY GOODMAN: So, who published it?
SEYMOUR HERSH: A little antiwar news service, Dispatch News Service, which people don’t understand here. They had correspondents in Vietnam who knew Vietnamese, and they were a quite good service. And I was doing some stuff for them, because I really respected it. I gave it to them, thought, “Who knows?” And somehow they got 35 front pages, the story. The American press was open to the story. And it was 1969. It wouldn’t be now. Some papers would run it, and some papers wouldn’t, because of the division. It was a different time. And—
AMY GOODMAN: And you won the Pulitzer Prize for the story.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, but I kept on going. I found Meadlo. I got a company register. M-E-A-D-L-O. I knew he was somewhere in Indiana. I spent—I don’t know—10 hours calling every phone directory in the state, ’til I finally found a M-E-A-D-L-O in a place called New Goshen. And I remember flying from Salt Lake City to Chicago to Indianapolis, getting a car. And when I got there, it’s this kid that had—he had killed these people.
Let me just tell you this story. The next day, he had his leg blown off. And he kept on screaming. This was what made everybody remember this. His leg was blown off, and he had done all the shooting. And he said to me Calley–he was talking about Lieutenant Calley—had ordered him to do it. He said, “God has punished me, Lieutenant Calley, and God will punish you.”
So I find this kid. It’s a rundown farm in this rural area near Terre Haute, near the Indiana state line, or in Indiana near the Illinois state line. And it’s an old farmhouse. There’s chickens running around all over. The coops aren’t attending. His mother—I had called earlier and gotten his mother. And she confirmed that was the boy, Paul, who had lost his leg. I go out there. Here comes this farm woman. This is a hardtack place. She’s probably 50, looks 70. And I came out, and I have my little ratty suit on. I came in a car, rent-a-car. And I said, “I’m the guy that called. Is Paul—can I see him?” She said, “Well, he lives in that separate house there. I don’t know what he’s going to do.” And then this woman said to me, this woman who didn’t read newspapers, didn’t watch much news—she said to me, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.” I mean, are you kidding? And then I went in, and what I did with him—he had a leg, and I spent the first 20 minutes asking him to show me the stump, and how did they treat him. And then he started talking.
And then, my—I had a friend who was working with Dispatch, David Obst, who later became Woodward and Bernstein’s literary agent. He was the guy packaging the story and somehow selling them. And he called up CBS, and they said, “Bring him here.” And he agreed to come, with his wife. He flew from—we went to Indianapolis, and he flew to New York. And he wanted—it was expiation. And he went on TV. And Mike Wallace, who’s tough as nails, asked him—he asked him five times in that interview, “And babies?” Again, he kept on saying, “And babies?” And Mike was a very tough dude. And he got him there. And first, they were just interviewing—they were practicing. And he asked him a question. He began to talk, and he said, “Stop. Put on the cameras.” And the kid just did it. And that turned the story, because at that point he’s on television. It’s not Dispatch News selling stories to everybody for a hundred bucks. And it changed America.
And here’s what also killed me. After that—it was the third story I did. I did two more. It was a Thursday, I think. It was on Walter Cronkite. Remember? We had—we had CBS News, was against the war. We had something—we had a network news agency that actually took a stand on something. I mean, I don’t know what they’re doing with this, the Mexico thing, but I’m sure they’re being objective. Anyway, there’s no objectivity in this one. And so, what happened is, that Sunday, about 10 papers had their correspondents who had been in Vietnam. They told the story about what—of a massacre they witnessed. So we’re dealing with self-censorship to a degree. And I learned a lot. You know what I learned? I learned I could handle them. I could run them. They could be mine.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to go back, before My Lai, and talk about a section of your memoir, which I really didn’t know that much about: your time with the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy. And you have this gripping account of you and McCarthy and the poet Robert Lowell going from town to town, drinking whiskey out of a flask while in between speeches of McCarthy. Talk about what drew you to the McCarthy campaign and why you eventually resigned.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I had left the AP, because my coverage on the war didn’t make the bosses happy, and they reassigned me from the Pentagon to Health and Human Services. I got the message, so I quit. I was freelancing. I had done stuff on chemical and biological warfare by then, doing—so I did what I did. And in late ’67, I hoped, like everybody else, Bobby would run against Johnson, because Johnson was simply gone on the war. He wasn’t going to quit, and everybody knew it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Bobby Kennedy.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah. And Bobby didn’t go. And my next-door neighbor was—across the street, was Mary McGrory, a wonderful columnist. And Mary came to see me and said, “Gene, Gene McCarthy, is going to run.” I didn’t know McCarthy. He was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, but he was a very diffident guy. I knew he was bright. I went to see him. She said, “You’ve got to go see him. He needs help.” And I go to see this guy, and he couldn’t care less about the press. But I didn’t know what to do. And I was finally convinced to go listen to him give a speech. He gave a speech in New York, and I was knocked out.
You know what he talked about? He talked about the Constitution, about what Lyndon Johnson was doing. He was a Benedictine, very religious. And then he said, “This war is immoral.” And I’d never heard a politician say something that was so profoundly true to me. What’s morality other than the mass murder that was going on? And so I signed on. And I didn’t—the staff hated the campaign, but I got along with him. I’m smart, and I did a lot of work, and he liked me, you know. And he was an amazing man.
And what happened, that shaped my life—he was from Minnesota. He was the Farm-Labor Party. He was from a—Humphrey was a typical prototype of the FDL, they call them. They were very conservative, anti-communist, but very liberal. And McCarthy was that way. He had been in a monastery, very interesting guy. I liked him a lot. But there were a lot of guys hanging around, fellow Irish Catholic buddies. And one of them, I knew, had been chief of station for the CIA in Laos. Don’t ask how I knew those things, but I was getting into it. So I asked him one day, “Why are all these guys from the CIA around?” And he told me—he said, actually, well, he did favors for Jack for the CIA as a senator. We’re just—the best—
AMY GOODMAN: John Kennedy.
SEYMOUR HERSH: John—the best time I had was in the plane with him. And he had a wonderful daughter named Mary. And I used to—the morning, I’d check, because he was a very difficult man, very private, very, very smart. I’d say, “How is he today?” One day, Mary, his oldest daughter, said to me, “Alienated as usual.” She was his daughter. But so, he was just difficult. He didn’t like doing interviews. He didn’t think the kids that were supporting him en masse, shaving their hair for Gene—he didn’t think he owed them anything. “They’re not there for me. They’re against the war.” I had these fights with him all the time. But he explained to me that he was anti-communist. And he would sometimes take bags of money down to certain Catholic officials, public leaders, and particularly in Latin America. What? And I got to know a lot of guys in the CIA through him. So, if you wonder why, when Colby says he—that little bit, that’s from an internal paper they did. They did a history of Colby. And there’s actually a long chapter on me. And he does say that, because I was doing domestic spying and all—
AMY GOODMAN: He says you knew more about the CIA than the CIA director, Colby, did.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I didn’t, but that’s all right. I would get him mad, because I would call up about things he didn’t want to talk about. But I got to know, through McCarthy, about the CIA, and then—a strangest sort of connection. And so Gene was this—anyway, it was a learning curve, and a great learning curve.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And why you resigned?
SEYMOUR HERSH: We won in—we did—we knocked out Johnson. Johnson quit in New Hampshire because we got almost 42 percent in a write-in vote. And actually, with the ballots from—that came in later, we beat him. And that was enough for Johnson. He quits. And then, of course, Bobby jumps in. Heroic Bobby. And they tried to hire me, and I wouldn’t go near him, because he didn’t come in when he should have. I’m a purist. And so, I went back to being a reporter, happily. Politics is awful. And what happened is, we’re in Wisconsin, and he’s going to win the election big there. And there’s a lot of polling. And the polls showed that if he stayed away from the black community in Milwaukee—
AMY GOODMAN: McCarthy.
SEYMOUR HERSH: McCarthy—the Polish, the ethnic vote would be higher. He would get 62 percent against Johnson. But if he did the—if he marched with the black—there was a march scheduled in the black community. If he marched, he would go down to 58 percent. And they convinced him not to do it. And I had heard about it. You know, I’m running around with people like Lowell and Paul Newman, who was working, Robert—movie stars. They were really—Bob Ryan, Robert Ryan, all very bright, very committed. And we were working out of my office, giving speeches. And I couldn’t believe it. So I woke him up at 6:00 in the morning. And guys don’t like being woken up at 6:00 in the morning in the campaign. And I said—and he said, “It’s none of your business.” And I quit. I’m not going to—
AMY GOODMAN: He said he wasn’t going to—
SEYMOUR HERSH: He didn’t—he wasn’t going to change his—I thought he didn’t know what the staff was doing. There were a bunch of political guys who were already dreaming of what job they were going to have in the White House, that kind of—
AMY GOODMAN: So he canceled the speeches in the black community.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, I left. That was it. But it got noisy, because somebody told The New York Times about it. And so, it got noisy for a day or two. But I didn’t talk to anybody about it. I talked in the book about it, decided, “Hell with it. Why not tell the story?” It was a bad move to make. But he was sure Bobby would win. He had given up sort of, I thought, too. Anyway, what a learning experience. I’m barely—I’m 31, 32, and I’ve already learned all this stuff about the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Before we go to break, talk about what you learned about Richard Nixon that you didn’t report.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, god. In 1998, I used to do—go quite often to the Nieman fellows. A former editor of mine named Bill Kovach was the chairman, the editor of it. Bill, wonderful man, very tough guy, I loved him. And he was the head of the Nieman Foundation. So, for about 10 years, I would go once a year. And off the record, I was talking. I was asked at this—with a bunch of these maybe 20 journalists from America and 15, 20 foreign journalists—even then, a considerable number of women. I was asked about stories I didn’t write.
And I said, “Oh, god, I remember when I was at The New York Times, and I was pulled off”—I was hired to do Vietnam, by Abe Rosenfeld, then the editor. He knew our coverage of Vietnam sucked. Watergate happened, and I stayed away from Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein were running amok. I didn’t want anything to do with it. And at some point late in ’72, I was told I had to do Watergate. You try and change in the middle. It’s not so easy. But I got going. And I got to know the people in Watergate. And in ’74, when Nixon left, about five days afterwards—I was well known for my Watergate coverage, too, in The New York Times—I got a call with empirical information about Nixon had slugged his wife a couple of times when he left, and when came back to San Clemente, within a week, she was in the emergency room getting treatment.
AMY GOODMAN: He beat her. He beat Pat Nixon.
SEYMOUR HERSH: He punched her. That’s what she said.
AMY GOODMAN: He punched her.
SEYMOUR HERSH: She came in, and I got a call. And you have understand, the first problem you have is, if I write it, I destroy a hospital, because somebody violated—somebody who didn’t like it, in the hospital, knew directly what happened. I mean, it was empirical information—not charged, but empirical information. And so I just—I was telling this—in 1998, I was telling the Nieman Foundation about it. And so, I didn’t know what to do with it.
I called Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman, John Ehrlichman, was one of the four people indicted, along with Haldeman and Mitchell and Colson—John Mitchell, the attorney general. And believe it or not, when you’re covering a story like that, even though he did jail, he came out of jail, this is—I stayed in touch with these guys, because they know more than—and I was never—I was always—if I wrote—I wrote a lot of bad stories about them. I’d always call them up the night before and say, “You’re going to hate me again even more.” And that always—you know, at least you’re straight about it. So that’s one thing I always did. No sandbagging. And so, we got along. And I called him. I said, “What’s this about beating?” He said, “Oh, he’s done that a couple of times.” And he told me some times about it.
And when I told the students in ’98, I didn’t say I couldn’t write it because of the—it came from inside, I didn’t want to do that. What I said was—I made a joke. I said—I was totally insensitive to the notion that that’s a crime. I just wasn’t in my—I was doing foreign policy. What I said was, “Well, I figured if Nixon—if it had been one of those days and Nixon wanted to punch out Pat, he went looking for her and couldn’t find her, then bombed Cambodia instead, I got a story,” because there’s—I was just being a wise guy. They published it in a—I don’t know why. They published the transcript in something called the Nieman Reports.
And I wrote about it in my book, because I was obtuse to the notion that it was a crime. And so, I wrote about it because I thought, “What the hell? I might as well”—you know, this is something that was very troubling for a lot of the women. And you could almost see the #MeToo movement coming, because these women, these reporters, really were mad at me. And I didn’t get it. I mean, I did, but I didn’t. Do you know what I’m saying? And so—and it’s very interesting. It’s a minor, to me—the real problem is, I never could have written it because of how I learned what happened. And I knew more than I wrote, even more than I told. You understand.
AMY GOODMAN: You mean your source.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I’ve got a—you know, yeah, I’ve got a—
AMY GOODMAN: Who was your source?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, somebody obviously who had something to do with taking care of her, let’s put it, maybe. I didn’t want to say.
AMY GOODMAN: A doctor who treated—
SEYMOUR HERSH: No, don’t—you can’t ask me that question. I have a wife that’s a doctor and a daughter that’s a doctor. And they take this idea—patient confidentiality—seriously, as all doctors do.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, then come back to this discussion. Our guest for the hour is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. He’s just written his memoir. It’s called Reporter. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: “I’ll Move On Up a Little Higher” by Mahalia Jackson, yes, a woman, remarkable artist, who Seymour Hersh knew as a child. Seymour Hersh, award-winning investigative journalist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, he has written for The New York Times, for The New Yorker. His memoir is just out. It’s called Reporter. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sy, I wanted to ask you—in your memoir, you have several chapters devoted to your period at The New York Times. And one of the most interesting to me was your account of the relationship of Henry Kissinger to key people at the Times, like Abe Rosenthal, and how he fed stories to the Times. And could you talk about that?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I’m hired in ’72 by Rosenthal. And at the august—and I always wanted to work—the Times then was—if you were a journalist, it’s the place to work. It still is. It’s still a great newspaper. I hate their coverage of Trump. I wish they’d get off the tweets and do the kind of stuff that they’re doing now. That story was there two months ago. Come on. You missed it.
AMY GOODMAN: Migrants on the border.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, yeah, and Yemen. They’re missing it. I mean, they’re doing some stuff on it, but it’s really—the American role is so much deeper than they know. Anyway, keep on coming back to it.
AMY GOODMAN: Tune in to Democracy Now!
SEYMOUR HERSH: I joined the Times, and I’m just—I’m just minding my business. I get a place. I’m sort of the commie reporter. I hired May 1st, and I was sent to see—late October, I went to the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris and wrote stories. Within a week or 10 days of being on The New York Times, I’m interviewing Madame Binh, this marvelous woman that headed the National Liberation Front, who I went back—I went back to Vietnam a few years ago and had a long coffee with her, at 89, as sharp as ever. I mean, this amazing, beautiful, dark-haired—everywhere she went in Paris, women applauded her, a leading, just amazing woman.
Anyway, so I get back to the Washington bureau, and I’m seated—I’m just randomly given a seat next to a guy who did foreign policy. And I’m minding my business. And every day at 5:00, the secretary to the bureau chief would walk out. And the reporter was Bernie Gwertzman, who was a very competent, professional journalist. And she would say—Max Frankel was the bureau chief. She would say, “Max is done. Henry’s called. And we’re coming to you now.” And then, the next thing you know, Bernie would take notes. He would laugh and talk to Kissinger, and then he would write a story. And I’m watching it. And the story the next day would lead the paper and say, “Government sources said so and so.” About the third or fourth day, I said, “This is a pattern.” It was a moment—there was a moment when somebody going in diplomatic. But every day, Kissinger’s—would come from Kissinger through the bureau chief to Bernie, who was the chief foreign correspondent, into the front page of The New York Times without a hint of who. I mean, everybody sort of knew it was Kissinger. And so, I asked him, about the third or fourth day. And he’s a very straightforward guy. I said, “Bernie, do you ever talk to Mel Laird?” If you remember, I had a relationship, and I knew Mel was against some of the policies. “You ever talk to Secretary of State Bill Rogers?” who I didn’t know, the secretary. But Rogers was state, and Laird was secretary of defense. And he said, “Oh, no.” He said, “If we did that, Henry wouldn’t talk to us.” I’m just—this is, you know, out of the old verbatim dialogue that used to be in The Village Voice, remember?
AMY GOODMAN: So, Gwertzman is getting a daily call from Henry Kissinger.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, not—it was—that week, it was daily.
AMY GOODMAN: A regular call.
SEYMOUR HERSH: A call when there was a crisis that involved that stuff. I mean, it was like, “What?”
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read you a quote from the late chef and TV broadcaster Anthony Bourdain, who just took his own life. He was talking about Henry Kissinger. He wrote, in his 2001 book, A Cook’s Tour, quote, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.”
SEYMOUR HERSH: Wow!
AMY GOODMAN: That was Anthony Bourdain, who just killed himself.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Wow! Wow! I did not know that quote. The only thing I remember is I wrote this long book about Kissinger, which we talked about at length on this show. And somebody called it an indictment or bill of attainder. And I remember, the next year, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—to which no rational journalist should go to. Celebrating a president, it’s not our job. It’s not our job. And by the way, my complaint with The New York Times was, we shouldn’t recognize America. We’re not America first. We’re a news—an international newspaper. Why the America first focus? But that’s a more subtle issue. And everybody would want Kissinger, even the next year, at their table. What I always said about Kissinger, publicly, and again and again, is that when people have to count—they can’t sleep and they count sheep, I think Kissinger has to count burned and maimed Cambodian and Vietnamese babies the rest of his life. But, of course, he doesn’t.
AMY GOODMAN: Because of what he was in charge of.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Because, oh, my god, not just Cambodia, in Vietnam—you tell me where it is. I mean, come on. I mean, we’re talking about—we’re talking about—this is, in any other society, he would be in the dock. He’d be right there—he’s absolutely right—in The Hague with Milosevic. War crimes. These were war crimes that were going on. And the Christmas bombing, when there was a peace settlement, and Nixon wanted more, he wanted—he was afraid. He wanted—Nixon was just—he wanted to shore up his support in Middle America, I guess they called it. So they drop—they do a Christmas bombing, that has nothing to do with the peace process. Come on. What is that? That’s just murder.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about, of course, another of your many exposés that received international attention: Abu Ghraib. Could you talk about how you got onto Abu Ghraib and the impact that that story had, not only in the United States, but across the Muslim world?
SEYMOUR HERSH: There was nothing that I wrote that wasn’t known and been reported by Human Rights Watch—a wonderful guy named John Sifton was just brilliant—Amnesty International, were writing—doing reports, talking about torture. It’s the same thing that I was reading in the ’60s about Vietnam, that—by church groups who were writing books about it, that didn’t make the media. And they were doing torture.
And I couldn’t find a—and in the fall of 2003, in December—what happened is, we won the war, we thought, quickly, and it turned out we didn’t win. What Don Rumsfeld, that man, called dead-enders—once we thought the war, in two months—what he called the dead-enders turned out to be the guys ready—the Baath Party people we thought we got rid of. And we were in a civil war, and we were being chopped to death.
In that December, I was in—I went to Damascus, and there was a two-star general. We grabbed most of the generals. Most of the generals who served in the Iraqi Army, we grabbed. We either killed them, or we turned them around and put them in the units that became killer units, or we used them for intelligence. This guy was missed. He was a linguist, a two-star. And I got him to Damascus. I think it cost 700 bucks for him to take a car—you could do it then. It was safe. There was a period, still then. He took a car from Baghdad to Damascus. He had a daughter in med school. He had to stay there, because she didn’t know English, and she wanted—the medical school was in Arabic, and she could do it. I don’t know what happened to him. And I spent four days with this two-star general, who was in signals intelligence and knew everything. And I’m debriefing him, writing—I don’t put anything in the computer.
And about the third or fourth day, he said, “And let me tell you about that prison, Abu Ghraib,” which I had read stuff about. He said, “My friends’ wives and daughters are writing and saying, ‘You must come and kill me, because I’ve been defiled.’” You know, in that part of the world, they deal in shame. We deal in guilt here, in this part—guilt and denial here. But they dealt in shame. And they said they had been defiled. The GIs have done things to them. I’m not sure to what extent. “And you’ve got to come and kill me, because I’m no longer fit. I can’t be a wife, and I can’t—I can’t be a wife, and I can’t be married.”
And so, what’s going on? So I got into it. I mean, I knew then, maybe I could find a way. And then I heard about photographs. And then I heard that CBS had some photographs. There had been a report written, a secret report. And once I got that—I got it. I got the report, written by a brilliant officer named Antonio Taguba, who was fired over it, because Rumsfeld thought Taguba had to give it to me. How dumb is that? I didn’t see him. I didn’t know him for two years. I’m his dear friend. I have lunch with him. He’s a most wonderful man. I would go in a foxhole with him. And there are these people.
AMY GOODMAN: The general.
SEYMOUR HERSH: He just wrote a two-star report, that—he was ready for a third. He was a Filipino. He got out of college, weighing—five-foot-three, weighing 115 pounds. And three times he had asked the Army, as he was in a career, military career, to help pay for graduate school. And they said to him, “You don’t even speak English well. You know, you’re just some little yellow guy.”
AMY GOODMAN: We have a minute and a half.
SEYMOUR HERSH: So, what happened is, I got the report, and it was devastating. And it was all because he had told me how bad it was. And The New York Times published it. And CBS had the same photographs I had, and it had refused, for two or three weeks, to publish them. It was just a terrible story.
AMY GOODMAN: These are the photographs of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Right. They had had it for two weeks.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And they didn’t run it.
SEYMOUR HERSH: But, you know, the people doing it, the reporters, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, the producers, wanted to. But the suits stopped them. And so I actually worked out a deal, where they publish it, 60 Minutes on Thursday, before I did the report on Sunday.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The same reporters that ended up being fired, in essence, by CBS later.
SEYMOUR HERSH: It’s too bad. It’s not good to be good at your job in network television. That’s my theory.
AMY GOODMAN: You also wrote in your book, “There was a widespread understanding that those who died in interrogation were not to be buried, lest the bodies be disinterred later, but had to be destroyed by acid and other means.”
SEYMOUR HERSH: That’s what I wrote. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Yes, it was understood. This is early in the war. There was—excuse me. Do you think it stopped? Do you know how many warfare places we’re in right now? Seventy-six. The United States is conducting war in 76 countries now. If you don’t think assassinations are going on just as much, they are.
AMY GOODMAN: You also wrote about the use of fire ants.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I didn’t write. It was a story we didn’t publish, because it just—it was one of the fights I had with the editors. And he may have been right.
AMY GOODMAN: But the assassinations you’re talking about, in our last 15 seconds, and then we’re going to do Part 2.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I mean, when you have the special operations forces operating all over Africa, if you think they’re telling the truth about what happened anywhere, in Mali or else place—it may be 70 different—we’re all over Africa. Nobody controls what they’re doing. It’s a big problem. And this president, of course, doesn’t know and doesn’t care, you know. But there are people there. There are people behind him who do care. But it’s going to be a long process.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Seymour Hersh, and we’re going to continue with a web exclusive at democracynow.org, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, exposed the My Lai massacre. His memoir is just out. It’s simply called Reporter.
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