Seymour Hersh - journalist and writer - Interview

Progressive, The, Oct, 1998 by Saul Landau

I talked with Seymour Hersh in May at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. He was there to deliver a lecture on the state of journalism in the late 1990s. I followed up with a few questions by phone in August. Sy and I have known each other for more than twenty years. During most of that time, both of us lived in Washington, D.C. I first heard about Hersh when, as a freelance writer, he exposed the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam.

He went on to work for The New York Times in the 1970s, and as a reporter there he exposed the activities of the CIA in Chile. Hersh later wrote The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit Books, 1983), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, offering original insights into the imperial policies of Nixon and Kissinger. He also wrote The Dark Side of Camelot (Little Brown, 1997), showing how sex, crime, and corruption in the Kennedy family altered American politics. His other works include Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome, the War Between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government (Ballantine, 1998), The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (Random House, 1991), "The Target Is Destroyed": What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It (Random House, 1986), Cover-up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 (Random House, 1972), My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (Random House, 1970), and Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal (Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970, as well as four George Polk Awards, and countless accolades for his journalistic accomplishments. He is one of a very rare breed of reporters who continue to be driven by the desire to protect the public--the true function of journalism.

Q: What got you into journalism?

Seymour Hersh: I flunked out of law school.

Q: You were lucky.

Hersh: Yes, I hated law school. I was studying at the University of Chicago, a very fertile place for ideas, and a great university. One day I just ran across Pete Lacey, a friend of an old girlfriend, who was working as a police reporter in Chicago for City News Bureau. I had never written for the newspapers, never had any journalism experience, never thought I'd be interested in journalism. But Lacey told me City News Bureau was hiring.

The four Chicago newspapers and the Associated Press in Chicago set up City News to cover the courts and the city's enormous amount of crime. The goal was to cut down on the number of reporters that they needed by having a collective group. There's a wonderful play, Front Page, by Ben Hecht, that focuses on City News Bureau. They mainly hired Northwestern University school of journalism graduates. They also would just hire anybody with a college degree. You came in, and they paid you $35 or $40 a week.

I put my name down on a list. Nine months later, somebody called up, and God knows I wasn't going anywhere. They said, "Come to work." And I went to work. At first I was a copy boy, and then I became a police reporter.

Q: Did you get interesting stories?

Hersh: Chicago's a hell of a town to be a reporter in. For a while I worked the midnight shift, midnight to eight, at the main police headquarters.

I learned a lot in ways I didn't understand until much later. There was a terrible suicide-murder by a guy in Chicago's black ghetto. He'd gone crazy and killed his wife and three, four, or five kids, and burned down the house. Everybody was dead. So I ran to the site. By the time I got there, the fire department had already come in and taken out the bodies. And I remember when I got to the scene, they had arranged the bodies by size, wrapped up in sheets, tarps. And I had this little image, you know, like daddy bear, mama bear, and little baby bears. It was a horrific, amazing sight. Six, seven bodies.

I ran to the phone, and I'm dictating to a reporter, a guy named Casey Bukro, who later became an editor at the Chicago Tribune. And this old senior editor came on the phone. Very cynical, jaded. "Ah, my good, dear, energetic Mr. Hersh," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Are the last, poor, unfortunate victims of Negro descent?"

I said, "Yes, sir."

He said, "Cheap it out."

That meant one paragraph. That meant I wrote, "Eight people, all black, were killed in a fire that raged through a house on the South Side today." That was the story.

So, tell me about racism in America. It was important to see those things as a kid reporter. I had an amazing learning curve.

I also learned to forget these notions of boy hero in police reporting. Two cops reported that a prisoner had tried to escape and they'd shot him. And again, energetic Mr. Hersh ran down to the garage because I wanted to interview these cops first and write a good story on them killing this idiotic prisoner who had tried to escape. Two beefy, white Irish cops came out of a car. And one of the buddies said to the other: "So you got yourself a nigger." "Yeah," the other said. "I told him he was free, and he started running down the alley, and I plugged him." I hear this, with my ears.