OPINION:
If Seymour Hersh received a report card in kindergarten, I’d be willing to bet that he flunked “plays well with other children.” He is by his own admission egotistical, arrogant and not a team player. He has left almost every publication, including one he founded, under some kind of a cloud of controversy. Consequently, his memoir “Reporter” makes very interesting reading, and I found it compelling.
Mr. Hersh was raised on the South Side of Chicago by Polish-Jewish parents. His father was a practitioner of tough love, and Seymour had to run the family dry-cleaning business after his dad passed away. He worked his way through junior college and later the University of Chicago, where, along the way, he found time to play varsity baseball. He has always been a pretty good athlete; at 81, he remains an avid hiker and tennis player. Entering journalism as a cub reporter, he worked his way up the newspaper food chain. Young Hersh learned journalism the hard way, and he turned into an aggressive and enterprising reporter.
By the 1960s he had become a practitioner of advocacy journalism and was an early activist against the Vietnam War. It is a form of the profession that I have never approved of and have always taken his stories with a grain of salt no matter how well researched. Nevertheless, Mr. Hersh is a hard working — and some would say ruthless — investigative reporter. Once on a story, Mr. Hersh is relentless and innovative in finding cross-verifiable sources. His politics have hurt his career, and his work as press spokesman for Eugene McCarthy’s bid against Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 was a debacle.
However, that failure allowed him the opportunity to get back into journalism in time to investigate the My Lai massacre. That effort gained him a Pulitzer Prize and future assignments for The New York Times, which included the Watergate scandal and CIA involvement in domestic spying.
The book involves some fascinating yarns from the author’s adventures. Along the way, Mr. Hersh has accumulated an impressive enemies list; it includes Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Clintons and Barack Obama. Not bad for a son of immigrants from South Chicago.
Although some, including me, have thought him reflexively anti-military and anti-intelligence community, Mr. Hersh actually seems to have had a fairly good tour as an Army draftee in the 1950s. He claims that he has a great deal of respect for real military and intelligence community professionals and that he has only gone after those who have broken the law or exceeded their agencies’ charters. Some of his best sources have been military members or intelligence professionals.
The ’60s and ’70s were the high point of investigative journalism — particularly advocacy reporting. The military and the CIA made lucrative targets at that time. Through a declining of lack of media interest in government scandal and his combative personality, Mr. Hersh has had a difficult time staying with one newspaper or outlet in the last couple of decades despite coming up with some good work on organized crime and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq; despite that, he has had challenges in getting traction for his stories in the American mainstream media. He was reduced to printing his latest project on the Osama bin Laden killing in the London Review of Books.
I would recommend this book to aspiring journalists for positive and negative reasons. On the good side, Mr. Hersh is a practitioner of the shoe leather school of journalism. He has a solid work ethic and pursues his stories with dogged determination. His memoir explains some tricks of the trade that are still relevant in the information age for those seeking a profession in journalism.
The cautionary tale for aspiring journalists is that trust is a terrible thing to waste. Somewhere along the line, Mr. Hersh has lost the confidence of mainstream American editors. Mr. Hersh’s research on the Obama administration’s supposed collaboration with the Pakistani intelligence community in killing bin Laden after the Pakistanis had been holding him for years would have been the Watergate scandal of the early 21st century if it had been broken by a respected national security reporter such as Tom Ricks, Martha Raddatz or Greg Jaffe. I’ll leave it to readers to decide how Mr. Hersh lost that trust.
You don’t have to like a memoir writer’s politics to recommend his or her book. I’ve read “Reporter” and “Mein Kampf.” “Reporter” is a much better book.
• Gary Anderson, a retired Marine Corps colonel, lectures at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
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