Review of Reporter: A Memoir By Seymour M. Hersh

Below is my Review of Seymour Hersh's Reporter: A Memoir as submitted to the editor of The Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine for the October issue.

Enjoy.

Just The Facts

Reporter: A Memoir

By Seymour M. Hersh

He is maybe the most important investigative journalist of the age. Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre, exposed Kissinger’s wiretapping of staff and told the world about the disgrace of Abu Ghraib.

Yet it almost never happened as Hersh notes in his recent book, Reporter: A Memoir .

Just out of the University of Chicago with an English degree and an indifferent academic record, the young man started at the law school and dropped out. Hersh needed work and was not getting offers.

He heard about City News Bureau from a friend. CNB was a service that provided stories, mostly about street crime to the big newspapers. Hersh applied and waited.

The young man had changed apartments and never updated his contact info for the job.

Hersh came back to his old digs for Friday night cards. Poker was not his game, and past midnight, his money was gone and he crashed on a couch. The phone woke him up and it was the news bureau with a job offer.

Next time mom warns you about bad habits such as gambling, tell her about Hersh.

City News Bureau was sort of a boot camp for its new hires. Luckily for Hersh, he was no stranger to hard work. Young Sy had to labor in the family dry cleaning business as he entered his teenage years and when not out of them, take it over upon his father’s death.

His first chores in the news game were routine drudgery, yet he was taken with the job. Hersh tells of what may have been the most important thing he learned at CNB, “check it out.” Before a story was called in to rewrite, the reporter had to be sure. To quote one of the senior men at the bureau, Arnold Dornfeld, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” It would stay with him.

It was not a straight line to the big scoops and fame and fortune. He got to see the corrupt underbelly of Chicago, and quickly realized he was not going to be the guy who cleaned it up. Understanding the parameters of reality is a useful lesson.

He would do a lot of journeyman work in the news trade, before getting to the big leagues.

Hersh was on his own when the My Lai story arrived via a tip, and he followed up with a lot of leg work. If you want a quick course on what it takes to locate the subject of your story, the chapter “Finding Calley” will do. The author kept at it and his sniffing around Fort Benning seemed a bit daring.

He got the story and now needed it published. Look and Life had expressed some interest, but passed on it. The New York Review of Books was willing, but set a condition Hersh could not agree to.

David Obst of Dispatch News Service wanted the story. Dispatch News Service was not a big player, but they took it and got it out into the world and Hersh would get a Pulitzer. The story is renowned to this day.

After that, the reporter’s star continued to rise. It was not always smooth, but he would keep at it and his byline appeared in the nation’s important journals. He had a relationship with the New York Times and editor Abe Rosenthal. Rosenthal was a giant and it could be contentious, but from the book, it’s obvious there was a lot of respect. Hersh hung up on Rosenthal, slamming the phone down twice before he even knew him.

Much of his work has appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books.

For the Times, he covered Washington and with that, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger does not come off well in Reporter. Hersh would say of him, “The man lied the way most people breathed--and worse.”

Kissinger set wiretaps on his own staff and though that might not have said much in the man’s favor, it led to some humor. Morton Halperin was a trusted aide that Kissinger had surveilled. His wife, Ina, suspected that, as she heard beeps and said so on a recorded conversation. “The agent monitoring her phone wrote, “There isn’t any beeping on the line. Ina has a complex her phone is being tapped.””

In the chapter where he discusses the Kennedy administration and research that led to his book about it, he was offered documents that would be important to include. In a too good to be true situation, Hersh kept up trying to be completely sure as to the genuineness of the material.

Finally, the papers were proved fraudulent. It was a blow, and who would want to admit to being duped. Hersh should not have felt too bad as most of us would have been bamboozled.

In the end, his thoroughness led to praise. Tom Powers in the Times Sunday Book Review wrote of TheDark Side of Camelot,“Hersh has done his legwork, he is not trying to smuggle things in from other books. He tells us what he’s found up front, making judgment easier for reviewers and blood enemies alike. The source notes in the back can be a little cumbersome, but compared with investigative reporters who provide no source notes whatever, Hersh is standing in the choir with Edward Gibbon.”

Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1788 is one of the most important works in the Western Canon. No accolade could be higher.

Reporter was a pleasure to read as a stroll down memory lane. It is almost a history of the years from before Vietnam to the current “War on Terror.” People who remember the events that Hersh covered will find the refresher useful. Those younger should read it to see the world from the vantage point of a man who did not start out in the era of the 24-hour news cycle. Indeed, it should be taught in colleges. Things are moving fast in media and no matter your politics, it is important to get more depth. It is also valuable to get it from a man who writes without cant or wearing his ideology on his sleeve. This is not to say the author is without a worldview, but it does not color his reporting.

If Seymour Hersh’s book says anything to this generation, it’s “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

His last chapter is “America’s war on terror” and the author has been reporting on that. As it is still ongoing, expect more as well as a book on Donald Cheney. We have not heard the last of the man.

Sire, the intellectuals are revolting - Review of The Death of Expertise.

Below is the review of The Death of Expertise by Thomas Nichols as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the June 2018 issue.  It has some good points, but from Mr. Nichols twitter posts, it is apparent he is a neocon and there is a theme of follow us experts, even if we occasionally err and start a dumb war.

At the Long Hill Institute we are happy to defer to expertise in fields as diverse as medicine or plumbing, though such disciplines occasionally see failures.

In areas such as foreign policy, to say the record is less than stellar is to be guilty of gross understatement.  The book is a defense of the class that Mr. Nichols is part of and is less than convincing.

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters by Thomas M. Nichols

Consumers of news programs might be surprised to learn expertise is dying.  After all, on television and radio and in print there is a surfeit of men and women who hold themselves out as possessed of special skill and are willing to discuss or indoctrinate at length on whatever arcane branch of knowledge they claim.

According to Tom Nichols there is a problem. His The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters documents the crisis.

Have graduate schools been shuttered by a regime bent on suppressing intellectual inquiry?  Not at all.  The problem is more that the non-experts do not properly defer to the specialist caste

Tom Nichols is an expert.  Many of the talking heads infesting the airwaves with the claim are not.  The author has a long list of credentials that include degrees and posts of importance.  Currently, he is a Professor at the US Naval War College in Newport, RI.  He also teaches at the Harvard Extension School.  Even more impressive, Nichols is an undefeated five-time Jeopardy winner.

Professor Nichols does provide example after example to prove his case.  He tells us we need experts well versed in their disciplines. 

He is especially upset with people who, after a google search, call out accomplished professionals with superficial online knowledge.  The anti-vaccine movement comes in for his ire.  A few celebrities get a hold of an idea and soon the usual inoculations we all got are questioned by people with law degrees and acting credits.  It is hysteria and he is dead on with that and other examples.

The problem is, it is not as new as Tom might have it.  There has always been something coming along to attack established knowledge.  Sometimes it actually turns out to be valid but more often, it is just a fad, and oft a dangerous one, but it is not new.

It was about 1975 and I had a passenger in my cab who wanted to tell me about a cancer treatment that what passed for big pharma at the time wanted to suppress.  The quack cure that was Laetrile was big and in its day, went as “viral” as could happen back then.  I had heard about it as it was hard to avoid and was at least thankful my fare was not a Moonie trying to convert me. 

Before the internet, the country was filled with mass fads such as new age crystals and bookstores had shelves filled with the self-help tomes that came and went.  In those primitive times the world was going to end because of “acid rain.”

Tom is a smart guy and a man as knowledgeable as he is should not be a victim of presentism.  Neither should we dismiss his concerns out of hand.  The internet, unlike the stacks in the library, will give us an answer in seconds.  Research is easy and easily wrong, but without technology, intellectual mischief is still possible.

Where he is on solid ground is his chapter on education.  The 34-page section amplifies the findings of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education reviewed in the April issue of this magazine.   

According to Tom, “““College graduate” today means a lot of things.  Unfortunately, “a person of demonstrated educational achievement” is not always one of them.”  After stating that, he then goes on to praise the university system for its strengths before getting back to what’s wrong.

Mass education means that there is an increasing “commodification” of college. Attendees are treated as “clients rather than as students”.  He is right, but it could not be otherwise in a buyer’s market.

Nichols teaches at the Naval War College in Newport and is thus more aware of the college scene in Rhode Island.  His observation as to what goes on at the most prestigious school in our sister state may be representative:

“Parents of students at Brown University, for example are shelling out some serious money so their children can take part in things like “Campus Nudity Week.” (One female Brown participant said in 2013 that “the negative feedback” about the event “has helped prepare her for life after college.”  One can only hope.)”

As to what college has become for many all over the country he quotes a graduate of a California party school about, “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.”

Spending a good deal of time in the Pioneer Valley, your reviewer can attest to the truth of what the author writes about.  The college towns of Amherst, Northampton and South Hadley seem nothing so much as a theme park, an academic Disney World.  The locales are saturated with bars, restaurants and trendy shops.  There is an occasional bookstore, but hardly an overabundance.

Surely, however, the young are learning and will be able to carry on as experts to replace Tom and his class as the next generation.  Nichols’ writing does not inspire confidence.

The student today, he notes, sees him or herself as the professor’s equal.  They are insulted by a bad grade or correction. Undergrads expect professors to be available 24/7 via email and are demanding in tone on that medium.

Add to that grade inflation, almost everyone gets an A, and it does not bode well for the future of expertise.

Expertise itself is defended by the author vigorously.  He does admit that the cognoscenti are not without error.  Sometimes it as if he is saying, on the one hand we need the big thinkers, on the other hand, boy, can they blow it.  So why the book and why now?

Nichols was part of the nevertrump movement.  Trump, as he illustrates in Pages 211 through 213 was the anti-intellectual candidate.  As a member of the class of heavy thinkers, he would naturally be against the yahoo.  That does not mean Tom does not have a case.

The professor admits to his mistakes as an expert on Russia, but notes he was too young to be part of the prior cohort in the field who failed to see the fragility and coming demise of the Soviet Union.  A little research outside the book reveals that he was for the 2003 Iraq invasion.  Nichols does not really cover that other than to say that public skepticism is warranted when people who got that wrong return to give advice.  Ya think, Tom?

In fact, the vast majority of intellectuals were for the invasion and few if any careers suffered for their foolishness.  The great unwashed have every right to be skeptical, if not downright cynical about their betters.

Can we do without a stratum of intellectuals studying the great issues of the day?  You might think your reviewer is calling for “off with their heads.” 

No, as flawed as they may be, they are a necessary component of the body politic.  A road map tells us our position on land.  Political scientists, social scientists and historians and others tell us our position in time and in history.

We just have to remember their predictive track record will never be anywhere near flawless.

Bad Chemistry

The column below appeared in the May 2018 issue of The Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living.  The Long Hill Institute believes it is worth posting here.

Bad Chemistry

By Richard Morchoe

The good news is we did not have a nuclear war in April.  The bad news side of the equation is up for grabs.  Any time two nuclear powers have forces close together, with different agendas, Murphy’s Law should come into play.

So why did we not have global incineration last month?  Maybe because the president of the United States is not completely crazy.  Up here on Long Hill, we are not sure of the level of mental stability possessed by any office holder and we would never accuse Trump of sanity.   

Yet he huffed and puffed and threatened war and devastation and other than a few forlorn buildings that had been evacuated, the damage was almost non-existent?  What happened?

It can be explained as Kabuki Theater.  Now, Kabuki is elaborately costumed performers using stylized movements, dances and songs in order to enact tragedies and comedies.  What that all means we are not completely sure, but in geopolitics, it meant we throw some bombs some place the Russkies don’t care about.  They don’t have to nuke us over it and everybody pretends to have done the macho thing and that is that for now.

Did he and Vladimir Putin choreograph a ballet so that each got off the hook?  We referred the question to our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Geopolitics.  With their usual shoot from the hip style, they decreed, “Boy do we hope so”.

Maybe not.  Eminent historian and Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen said before the missile strike that “I am more worried than I have ever been in my life, at least since the Cuban missile crisis.”

Is he being an alarmist?  

I was in the eighth grade at the time and Professor Cohen was in his early twenties.  During the confrontation, the fear was palpable.  No American in any later generation has lived through anything like it,  

The missiles the Soviets sent to Cuba had only one target and we did not want them there.  As it would turn out, our missiles in Turkey were not a source of amusement to the Kremlin.  An agreement was made where both sides removed the offending weapons.  Afterward, came the era of detente and, with more than a few bumps along the way, relations improved.

Is Cohen right?

The huffing and puffing is the worst we have seen since the implosion of the Communist regime.  We are in a war theater with troops, if not cheek by jowl, too close for comfort.  Yet the alarm is not all that loud.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, life was primitive.  There were at most only three TV channels and in many markets, just two.  The only national newscasts of any authority were CBS with Walter Cronkite and NBC with Huntley and Brinkley.  Everybody got their news from those outlets plus newspapers and a couple of newsmagazines.  We were all on the same page.

Today, the landscape is different.  The old networks still exist and are joined by cable news.  Add to that talk radio and online outlets.  There is a plethora of sources for news and yet precious little diversity of opinion that one might expect.  The narrative goes something like this: Syrian President Assad is evil and uses chemical weapons on his own people, ergo the Donald has to slap him down or he is complicit.  Putin backs Assad and thus is bad and The U.S. must oppose Putin with an appropriate level of force if necessary. 

Not completely absent from the discussion is the possibility that an explosion could occur that is measured in megatons, but it might as well be.  Indeed, there is a blitheness to the danger in the coverage.

You have to search it all out to get any mention of the risk.  Well regarded as Professor Cohen is, to quote Rodney Dangerfield on the subject at hand, he “don’t get no respect.”

So, what is the justification for wanting to bomb Syria.

That is something that is usually explained with a heavy dose of obfuscation.  There was no hard evidence found or even an investigation beforehand.  The indispensable Consortium News reported that General Mattis had been pressing for evidence almost up until the attack but was overruled.  According to Consortium News,

“The Pentagon conducted a briefing immediately after the US strikes the next day, on April 13. One reporter asked: “What’s your evidence it was delivered by the Syrian regime? Are you quite clear it was?” Mattis dutifully responded: “I am confident the Syrian regime conducted a chemical attack on innocent people in this last week, yes. Absolutely confident of it.”

Another reporter queried: “So up until yesterday, and I’m going to quote you here, you said, ‘I cannot tell you that we have evidence.’ So when did you become confident that a chemical attack happened?

Mattis: “Yes, yesterday.”

Reporter: “Since yesterday, after you said that?”

Mattis: “Yes.”

And those inspectors Mattis had only the day before made clear to Congress would be coming “probably within the week?”  They were just hours away from starting their work in Duma(sic) when the first U.S. cruise missile hit its target.” 

The president had been tweeting and had to do something and at least did the least stupid thing he could, and who knows, doing that might appease some in the howling mob, but not everybody.

On April 16th, NPR Morning Edition’s, Noel King spoke with Kori Schake.  Ms. Schake served on George W. Bush’s National Security Council and King asked her about strategy in Syria after the airstrikes.

She would definitely want Assad taken out of power but does not address what would happen after his removal.  Kori would love to see a more active policy.  Ms. Schake speaks from the same playbook as the rest of the media,

“every time Bashar al-Assad needs a battlefield victory that he can't achieve by conventional forces, he employs chemical weapons to try and terrorize the rebels into submission.”  

The kindest thing one can say about the woman is that she does not display absolute fidelity to the truth.  The regime had liberated Aleppo, without chemical weapons.  It had cleared all the pockets east of Damascus other than the one in question and was on the verge of doing that. Sans chemistry.  Why would they have risked the trouble the nerve agents would have brought them and if the purpose was to achieve victory, why would they have targeted civilians instead of combatants?

Maybe looking into what Kori does now would give us a hint about where she is coming from.  She is Deputy-Director General of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.  

 the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) is a think tank based in London that does think tank stuff, but has interesting funding.

It appears that they have secretly taken a lot of money from the Bahraini royal Family.  Now Bahrain is an island country where the Sunni Royals lord it over a not too happy Shia majority.  Also, they are buddies of the Saudis who back the destruction of the secular Syrian state and are waging genocidal war in Yemen.

That did not get mentioned when Noel King was speaking to the sinecurista.

We asked The Long Hill Institute* to opine on what this says about journalism in this day and age.

The finding is: News is propaganda.

If you do not believe that, please contact the Long Hill Institute as to the location of the Weapons of Mass Destruction that the media promised us were surely present in Iraq back in 2003.

*As we have often mentioned, The Long Hill Institute, our official think tank is the only think tank not in the tank.  We have never received donations of millions of dollars as has the IISS.  Not that we are complaining...too much.