Sy Hersh: The Reporter Is Back in the Maelstrom

Seymour Hersh, an oft-maligned investigative journalist who is enjoying something of a wartime revival, is passionate about tennis. So ferocious is his interest in the sport that on many mornings, he takes to the streets of his Cleveland Park neighborhood with racket, ball and golden retriever. Sy serves. Leo returns.

“He plays tennis like he does his reporting,” observes journalist Daniel Schorr, a friend, neighbor and former tennis partner. “He plays hard, and he doesn’t give up.”

Hersh, 64, hates this attempt to find meaning in his tennis habits.

“Why are you doing this? I’m aghast. Blah blah blah. It doesn’t seem very important to me, but you have to make a living. I might enjoy tennis. I might get my competition elsewhere. I do scream and yell at myself. I’d much rather play well and lose than play badly and win. Why am I commenting on your questions?”

After years of being journalism’s bad boy--his book charging President Kennedy with corruption (“The Dark Side of Camelot”) earned few positive reviews--Hersh is again on point. David Remnick, charismatic editor of the New Yorker who has steered the magazine back to serious journalism after its celebrity-laden Tina Brown tenure, called Hersh on Sept. 11 and told him: “You’re not doing anything else for the next year.”

In the weeks since, readers of the New Yorker have experienced jolts of breaking news in a weekly magazine better known for its fiction, its cartoons and its predilection for taking the long view of current events.

There was an article about corruption in the Saudi ruling family, complete with rarely shared U.S. phone intercepts of the royals’ conversations. There was a piece about how, on the first night of bombing Afghanistan, U.S. forces could have taken out Taliban chief Mullah Omar but for a lawyer’s opinion.

There was an article, the most controversial so far, claiming that on Oct. 20, U.S. Delta Force troops encountered much stiffer resistance from the Taliban than the administration admitted. For the magazine’s next issue, Hersh has penned something about the just-completed U.S.-Russian summit in Crawford, Texas.

To Hersh, who has little regard for the beat reporting that requires journalists to chronicle officials’ words instead of investigate their deeds, there is “no friggin’ mystery” about his ability to break news. “It ain’t that hard, folks,” he said, when a reporter showed up in his modest Connecticut Avenue office one day last week. “If you look at the New Yorker in the last four years, if you look at what I’ve written, you’ll begin to understand that the people I’ve been talking to are all involved in this thing.”

The Hersh opus includes stories on the failures of the National Security Agency, on President Clinton’s bombing of Sudan in 1998, on convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, on the CIA’s bungled handling of Saddam Hussein. Now, the world’s interests are locked onto his. “The audience is really tuned to him now, and that’s a big thing,” said author David Halberstam.

The Hersh persona--a bulldog who bludgeons sources into spilling their secrets with a combination of profanity, persistence and a tendency to call at 3 a.m.--is overdrawn, Hersh claims. “All a figment,” he said. “It’s a caricature. Get beyond the cliche.”

Hersh has made a career of getting beyond the obvious. In 1969, when other journalists were dutifully recording the body-kill counts reported by Pentagon officials in Saigon, Hersh wrote a piece sold to a virtually unknown news service detailing a massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by American troops in a village called My Lai. He won the Pulitzer Prize.

For seven years in the 1970s, he broke story after story in the New York Times about government wrongdoing--the CIA’s covert role in overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile, the secret bombing of Cambodia ordered by Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

Finally, the Times put him on the Watergate scandals, up against two of the Washington Post’s hungriest reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

“The New York Times was getting creamed by Woodward and Bernstein,” recalled Richard Reeves, author of “President Nixon: Alone in the White House.” No friend of Hersh (“He’s made a great contribution to journalism, but I wouldn’t want him marrying my daughter,” he said dryly), Reeves believes that if Hersh had been on the story from the beginning, “he would have beaten them.”

Such grudging respect is not uncommon among Washington journalists who enjoy debating the merits of the two biggest brand names in the business: Who’s better, Woodward or Hersh?

“Woodward’s very good at getting things out of people at the top. Sy’s ratcheting up from the bottom with aggressive questions,” said one journalist who has worked with both, wants to stay friends with both and so asked not to be named. “Often they get to the same point.”

David Corn, Washington editor for the liberal Nation magazine, and author of a book on the CIA, sniffs that at least “Sy hasn’t gone the way of Bob Woodward,” whom he describes as “the official in-house scribe of the elite.” Woodward, reached at his office Friday, declined to comment.

Hersh’s father emigrated from Lithuania in the 1920s and ran a dry cleaning store in Chicago. The family has two sets of twins--a pair of girls, then Hersh and his fraternal twin, Alan. After a brief try at law school,Hersh stumbled onto journalism.

He is married, with children, but since the first days at the Associated Press--including one memorable night when he watched muckracking journalist I.F. Stone pore over clips at the AP library--he has been married to his work.

Scott Armstrong, a former Washington Post investigative reporter and founder of the National Security Archive, a repository of government documents, thinks Hersh’s reporting strength is that he taps into his sources’ anger at hypocrisy.

“The common enemy is an ethical or professional breach by the government,” Armstrong said of Hersh and his sources. “They are offended that someone is doing something to advance a career that is hurting national security. They are willing to violate their oath of secrecy to tell him just enough to get corrective action.”

Though one of the most accomplished reporters of his generation, Hersh has critics, many of whom think that he has an anti-government bias that colors his work. They say he sets up a villain in every piece to blame for the ills of government. And they warn that he is not above marshaling a detail or fact that is truthful in the cause of a thesis that is not.

“Sy suspects always that there is government duplicity,” said Marvin Kalb, the former CBS correspondent and onetime head of Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. “Often he’s right. But not always. And if you are always on the lookout for government duplicity, there are times when you are going to be wrong.”

His reporting on the My Lai massacre, which helped turn public opinion against the war in Vietnam, is still considered his best. To Hersh, the story was out there for anyone to pursue. To Kalb, it is clear that the government lies during Vietnam made a lasting impression on Hersh. “He started in the Vietnam War,” said Kalb. “He has never left it, and it has never left him.”

The Marilyn Monroe hoax was probably his worst moment professionally. Hersh was seduced by fraudulent documents purporting to show that President Kennedy had set up a trust fund of $600,000 for Monroe’s mother, hush money to buy silence for his affair with the actress.

Hersh emphasizes that he disclosed the hoax himself--and deleted it from his book before publication--the only recourse of an honest reporter. As he explained at the time to the Washington Post, “That’s journalism.”

The larger question about Hersh, the one that plagues his career and divides his reading public, is whether he always gets the big picture right. Brilliant at badgering people until they talk, he uses their often unattributed quotes, goes the charge, to give voice to his own bias.

“He’s a gifted writer who gets a lot of details right but gets the gestalt wrong,” said Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former drug czar who was the subject of an infamous Hersh expose. “His stories are riddled with assertions that are wrong.”

McCaffrey, like Kissinger before him, has experienced the heat of a Hersh full-court press. “For four months he stalked me,” McCaffrey recalled. “Dozens of people were calling me in alarm.”

Hersh alleged that 10 years earlier, during the Persian Gulf War, McCaffrey ordered a four-hour assault on retreating Iraqi troops. McCaffrey contends that the Iraqis fired on the 24th Infantry, which acted in self-defense. Several military investigations cleared McCaffrey.

And in a rebuttal published by the Wall Street Journal, McCaffrey said Hersh’s real aim was to discredit his efforts to involve the U.S. military in the drug war in Colombia. To many who knew Vietnam, Colombia looked like it might be another quagmire--graveyard for America’s political intentions and soldiers. Hersh stands by his Gulf War story. The assault in Iraq, he wrote, was a turkey shoot that destroyed 700 tanks, armored cars and trucks.

“In my 10 years of dealing with the media, I’ve encountered only three reporters who lack integrity,” said McCaffrey, now an NBC analyst and a professor of national security studies at West Point. “And Hersh is in a class by himself.”

In Washington, many critics are still buzzing about Hersh’s assertion in the New Yorker that Delta Force troops encountered far stiffer Taliban opposition than the Pentagon admitted in an encounter in Afghanistan on Oct. 20. As someone who reports on intelligence and special ops forces, author John Weisman thought some of Hersh’s first pieces--such as the one criticizing the CIA for its failure to anticipate the World Trade Center attacks--were “dead on.”

But to Weisman, with Richard Marcinko co-author of the popular “Rogue” Warrior series on counter-terrorism units, the story about the Oct. 20 raid “just didn’t ring true.” Still, he is hardly judgmental. “Sy’s a long ball hitter,” he said. “He’s a Mark McGwire. He’s gonna strike out a lot.”

In the aftermath of the Pentagon’s denials (“There was no resistance,” said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Nov. 4. “The Taliban were in complete disarray.”) Hersh used an usual defense. Appearing on CNN the following evening, Hersh seemed to confirm the hypothesis of both those who like him and those who don’t that there is a mission at the heart of his reporting, one shared by sources risking much to talk to him.

“Delta Force doesn’t deal with reporters very often,” Hersh told CNN anchor Judy Woodruff. “They were upset about what happened. This isn’t the way you run Delta Force.”

Complaining that the Pentagon command, with air cover and auxiliary forces, had all but announced the arrival of the Delta Force troops, who prefer to maneuver by stealth, Hersh talked about his sources. “They’re throwing a message over the fence, to the leadership, really, through me,” he said. As for the Pentagon’s reaction, Hersh added, “It doesn’t matter what they say publicly as long as they fix it in private. They’ve got to fix it.”

Remnick, the New Yorker editor, seems delighted to have Hersh at his side for this war. Shortly after Sept. 11, Remnick asked to see everything the magazine had done in the days after Pearl Harbor. He was surprised at how slow the New Yorker was to understand the enormity of World War II and proud that, once energized, the magazine really came into its own. The publication, at war’s end, of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”--an account of six residents who survived the atomic bomb the U.S. leveled on Japan on Aug. 6, 1945--was one of the magazine’s most poignant contributions to American journalism. “Sy’s presence in the New Yorker helps deepen our knowledge of what is going on,” Remnick said. “Is he volcanic? Yes. Is he lovely? Yes.”

Even Hersh might demur on that one. Known, although he insists otherwise, for his disheveled clothes (“Sy has been known to walk into a party wearing shirts rejected twice by the Salvation Army,” said Armstrong), Hersh pities the beat reporter, required to file the utterances of officialdom instead of having the time to look beyond the obvious.

“We’re in a new war, a strategic war against a group of fundamental terrorists who want to destroy America,” he said. “It’s an incredible moment. A great story.”