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<\/p>\nSeymour Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0Sy Hersh. Knopf, June 2018, 368 pages<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n When people are comforted by government lies, trafficking the truth becomes hellishly difficult. Disclosing damning facts is especially tricky when editors en masse <\/i>lose their spines. These are some of the takeaways from legendary Seymour Hersh\u2019s riveting new memoir, Reporter<\/i>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Shortly before Hersh started covering the Pentagon for the Associated Press in 1965, Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, berated a group of war correspondents<\/a> in Saigon: \u201cLook, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you\u2019re stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid.\u201d Hersh was astonished by the \u201cstunningly sedate\u201d Pentagon press room, which to him resembled \u201ca high-end social club.\u201d<\/p>\n Hersh\u2019s 1974 expose on the CIA\u2019s illegal spying on Americans helped spur one of the best congressional investigations of federal wrongdoing since World War II. (Many of the well-written reports from the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities<\/a> remain regrettably relevant to the Leviathan in our time.) By the late 1970s, despite revelations of CIA assassinations and other atrocities, Hersh was chagrined that \u201c[n]o one in the CIA had been prosecuted for the crimes that had been committed against the American people and the Constitution.\u201d Welcome to Washington.<\/p>\n Any journalist who has been hung out to dry will relish Hersh\u2019s revelations of editors who flinched<\/strong>. After Hersh joined the Washington bureau of the New York Times<\/i>, he hustled approval for an article going to the heart of foreign policy perfidy. Bureau chief Max Frankel finally approved a truncated version of Hersh\u2019s pitch with the caveat that he should run the story by \u201cHenry [Kissinger] and [CIA chief] Dick [Helms].\u201d Hersh was horrified: \u201cThey were the architects of the idiocy and criminality I was desperate to write about.\u201d A subsequent Washington bureau chief noted that the Times<\/i> \u201cwas scared to death of being first on a controversial story that challenged the credibility of the government.\u201d<\/p>\n After Hersh exited the Times<\/i>, snaring high-profile newshole became more challenging. When he pitched a piece to the New Yorker <\/i>on the turmoil and coverups permeating the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, editor Robert Gottlieb told him to \u201cgo for it.\u201d But as Hersh was exiting Gottlieb\u2019s office, the editor added: \u201cSy, I just want you to know that I don\u2019t like controversy.\u201d<\/strong> Gottlieb had the wrong dude. Elsewhere in the book, Hersh slams a gutless specimen at Life <\/i>magazine, \u201cIf there is a journalism hell, that editor belongs there;\u201d he also clobbers the Times<\/i> business section\u2019s \u201cass-kissing coterie of moronic editors.\u201d On the other hand, throwing a typewriter through a plate glass window would perturb even the paper\u2019s non-moronic editors.<\/p>\n Hersh\u2019s career revived after 9\/11 with a series of New Yorker <\/i>expos\u00e9s on the lies, failures, and shenanigans of the War on Terror. He soon \u201cbegan to comprehend that 8 or 9 neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States\u2014with ease.\u201d Hersh eventually concluded that \u201cAmerica\u2019s neocons were a menace to civilization.\u201d But, with the exception of his explosive work on Abu Ghraib and the torture scandal<\/a>, his articles rarely received the attention they deserved. Hersh\u2019s reports on the war on terror have been far more accurate and prescient than the vast majority of the stories touted by cable news, but he is rarely credited for his foresight.<\/p>\n In recent years, Hersh has been criticized for writing articles that rely too heavily on too few, and not altogether authoritative sources. After his articles on the killing of Osama Bin Laden (he presented an alternative scenario that questioned the Pentagon\u2019s version of events) and \u00a0White House claims about a 2013 Syrian chemical weapons attack were rejected by American publications, he published them in London Review of Books<\/i><\/a> and has continued to publish his gumshoe reporting there and in places like Germany\u2019s Welt am Sonntag<\/i><\/a>. In his book, Hersh declares that \u201cinsider sources\u201d are \u201cwhat every reporter needs.\u201d But some of the sources he now relies on \u00a0may have long since retired or no longer have access to 24 karat insider information.<\/p>\n There are some excellent investigative journalists at New York Times<\/i><\/a>, USA Today<\/i><\/a>, and elsewhere, bu Reporting nowadays rarely penetrates the Leviathan\u2019s armor.<\/strong> Fourteen years after Hersh broke Abu Ghraib, many of the details of the post- 9\/11 torture scandal remain unrevealed. Could anyone imagine Liuetenant William Calley, who was convicted of mass murder for the 1968 My Lai carnage, subsequently becoming a favorite media commentator on military ethics, foreign policy, and democracy? No. But the main culprits in the torture scandal and coverup\u2014from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, to former CIA chief John Brennan\u2014are all regularly touted these days as founts of wisdom. The veneration of Bush, Cheney, and Brennan is one of the starkest measures of the failure of journalism in our time.<\/p>\n Hersh\u2019s Reporter<\/i> has plenty of tips for journalists willing to vigorously hound government wrongdoing. But finding good venues for smoking guns may be more difficult now than ever<\/strong>. As Assistant Pentagon Secretary Sylvester scoffed at reporters<\/a> in that 1965 Saigon briefing, \u201cI don\u2019t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.\u201d Unfortunately, there are too many editors and publishers who would rather kowtow than fight.<\/strong><\/p>\n James Bovard is the author of <\/i>Lost Rights<\/a>, <\/i>Attention Deficit Democracy<\/a>, and<\/i>Public Policy Hooligan<\/a>. He is also a <\/i>USA Today contributor. Follow him on Twitter <\/i>@JimBovard<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Somebody was asking about this piece recently so I’m sending it for another lap around the track (or at least the blog).\u00a0 An editing error in the posted version stated that Hersh won the Pulitzer for his 1972 New Yorker article on the My Lai massacre.\u00a0 My original submission correctly stated that Hersh won the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12999,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,129,946,2466,2467,1681,1495,121,434],"class_list":["post-14929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-iraq","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-my-lai-massacre","tag-neoconservatives","tag-seymour-hersh","tag-truth","tag-vietnam","tag-washington"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Politicians-speak-truth-to-power.jpg\")
<\/a>Hersh never signed on to that stenographers\u2019 pool. He was soon shocked to realize \u201cthe extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect their losing hand.\u201d Hersh did heroic work in the late 1960s and early 1970s exposing the lies behind the Vietnam War. His 1969 articles on the My Lai massacre scored a Pulitzer Prize and put atrocities in headlines where they remained till the war\u2019s end.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/BETTER-Truth-will-out\u201d-is-the-biggest-fairy-tale-in-Washington.-We-need-whistleblowers-to-rescue-democracy-from-Leviathan-800x671.jpg\")
<\/a>Despite superb demolitions by Hersh and other reporters, the credibility of government agencies soon revived like a salamander growing a new tail.<\/strong> After Nixon was toppled, \u201cthe pendulum had swung back to a place where a president\u2019s argument that national security trumps the people\u2019s right to know was once again carrying weight with editors and publishers,\u201d Hersh noted. A few weeks before the 9\/11 attacks, New York Times <\/i>columnist Flora Lewis, wrote that \u201cthere will probably never be a return to the\u2026 collusion with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well.\u201d But the collapse of the World Trade Center towers made the media more craven than at any time since Vietnam. Washington Post <\/i>Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained that<\/a>, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, \u201cThere was an attitude among editors: \u2018Look, we\u2019re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/jpb-quote-jpeg-truth-to-power-usa-today-5-16-2018-2.jpg\")
<\/a>t the most visible media venues have often ignored the most potentially damning stories. The mainstream media continues to pursue Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign like Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick. At the same time, they almost completely ignore how U.S. government manipulations are paving the path to war with Iran. Most of the American media coverage of the Syrian civil war has been appalling, touting a fairytale of terrorist extremists as freedom fighters, and ignoring the flip-flops and contradictions in U.S. policy. In a 2013 interview<\/a>, Hersh derided the American media\u2019s fixation on \u201clooking for [Pulitzer] prizes. It\u2019s packaged journalism so you pick a target like are railway crossings safe and stuff like that.\u201d<\/p>\n