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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
