reading

Introduction

I am a survivor from the golden age of journalism, when reporters for daily newspapers did not have to compete with the twenty-four-hour cable news cycle, when newspapers were flush with cash from display advertisements and want ads, and when I was free to travel anywhere, anytime, for any reason, with company credit cards. There was sufficient time for reporting on a breaking news story without having to constantly relay what was being learned on the newspaper’s web page.

There were no televised panels of “experts” and journalists on cable TV who began every answer to every question with the two deadliest words in the media world—“I think.” We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered nonstop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.

Yes, it’s a mess. And there is no magic bullet, no savior in sight for the serious media. The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high cost, unpredictable results, and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive lawsuits. The newspapers of today far too often rush into print with stories that are essentially little more than tips, or hints of something toxic or criminal. For lack of time, money, or skilled staff, we are besieged with “he said, she said” stories in which the reporter is little more than a parrot. I always thought it was a newspaper’s mission to search out the truth and not merely to report on the dispute. Was there a war crime? The newspapers now rely on a negotiated United Nations report that comes, at best, months later to tell us. And have the media made any significant effort to explain why a UN report is not considered to be the last word by many throughout the world? Is there much critical reporting at all about the UN? Do I dare ask about the war in Yemen? Or why Donald Trump took Sudan off his travel ban list? (The leadership in Khartoum sent troops to fight in Yemen on behalf of Saudi Arabia.)

My career has been all about the importance of telling important and unwanted truths and making America a more knowledgeable place. I was not alone in making a difference; think of David Halberstam, Charley Mohr, Ward Just, Neil Sheehan, Morley Safer, and dozens of other first-rate journalists who did so much to enlighten us about the seamy side of the Vietnam War. I know it would not be possible for me to be as freewheeling in today’s newspaper world as it was until a decade ago, when the money crunch began. I vividly remember the day when David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, called in 2011 to ask if I could do an interview with an important source by telephone rather than fly three thousand miles to do one in person. David, who did everything possible to support my reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison horror in 2004—he paid dearly to enable me to publish reporting pieces in three consecutive issues—made his plea to me in what I thought was a pained, embarrassed voice, almost a whisper.

Where are the tough stories today about America’s continuing Special Forces operations and the never-ending political divide in the Middle East, Central America, and Africa? Abuses surely continue—war is always hell—but today’s newspapers and networks simply cannot afford to keep correspondents in the field, and those that do—essentially The New York Times, where I worked happily for eight years in the 1970s, constantly making trouble—are not able to finance the long-term reporting that is needed to get deeply into the corruption of the military or intelligence world. As you will read herein, I spent two years before I was able to learn what I needed to report on the CIA’s illegal domestic spying in the 1960s and 1970s.

I do not pretend to have an answer to the problems of our media today. Should the federal government underwrite the media, as England does with the BBC? Ask Donald Trump about that. Should there be a few national newspapers financed by the public? If so, who would be eligible to buy shares in the venture? This is clearly the time to renew the debate on how to go forward. I had believed for years that all would work out, that the failing American newspapers would be supplanted by blogs, online news collectives, and weekly newspapers that would fill in the blanks on local reporting as well as on international and national news, but, despite a few successes—VICE, BuzzFeed, Politico, and Truthout come to mind—it isn’t happening; as a result, the media, like the nation, are more partisan and strident.

So, consider this memoir for what it is: an account of a guy who came from the Midwest, began his career as a copyboy for a small agency that covered crime, fires, and the courts there, and eleven years later, as a freelance reporter in Washington working for a small antiwar news agency, was sticking two fingers in the eye of a sitting president by telling about a horrific American massacre, and being rewarded for it. You do not have to tell me about the wonder, and the potential, of America. Perhaps that’s why it’s very painful to think I might not have accomplished what I did if I were at work in the chaotic and unstructured journalism world of today.

Of course I’m still trying.

ONE

Getting Started

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago knowing not a soul in the newspaper business and having little interest in the world beyond that of the nearest ballpark and playground. But I did read sports pages and, on Sunday, the comics. My parents were Jewish immigrants—my father, Isadore, from Lithuania; my mother, Dorothy, from Poland. They arrived at Ellis Island in the years immediately after World War I and somehow found their way to Chicago, where they met and married. I do not think either one, once in America, managed to get through high school—there was always a living to be made and a family to feed. Four children, two sets of twins, came: My sisters, Phyllis and Marcia, were born in 1932, five years before me and my brother, Alan. None of us fully understood what compelled our parents to leave their family and birthplace for the long boat ride to America. It was a conversation we never had, just as we never talked about my parents’ lack of formal education.

We were lower-middle-class. My father owned a dry cleaning store at 4507 Indiana Avenue, in the center of what was then, and still is, a black ghetto on Chicago’s South Side. It was a 7:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m. job, with deliveries often keeping him out for another hour or so. By the time Al and I were barely into our teens, we were expected to work at the store, when asked, on weekends and busy evenings during the week. My brother and I lived in fear of our dad, who had a quick temper and whose idea of a fun Sunday was to rise early, grab the two of us, drive to the store, mop the floor, and then take us to a Russian bathhouse, long gone now, on Chicago’s West Side, where we would be sweated and then scrubbed down with rough birch branches. Our pleasure came afterward; there was a small pool to jump into, and fresh herring and root beer for lunch. Daddy was a man of mystery. I learned only six decades after his death that his hometown was Seduva, a farming village with a large community of Jews one hundred or so miles northwest of the capital of Vilnius. In August 1941, Seduva’s Jewish population of 664, including 159 children, was marched outside the village and executed, one by one, by a German commando unit aided by Lithuanian collaborators. My father never discussed Nazi Germany or World War II. In his own way, Isadore Hersh was a Holocaust survivor as well as a Holocaust denier.

My father did tell me, however, that he had earned a few precious dollars after landing in America in the early 1920s by playing birdsongs on a violin. It was just a story until, under much duress, my brother and I began taking violin lessons on Sunday afternoons with David Moll, who was then, at the end of the war, a violinist with the Chicago Symphony. Al and I would pathetically scratch around for an hour or so, and then Moll and our father would play duets, on and on. Our father really could play but never did so outside the odd hour or so with Moll. I remember only one other of his pleasures—monthly Saturday night card games with his landsmen, fellow refugees from Seduva who, like him, were small-business men who somehow ended up in Chicago.

My father never figured out America. When Al and I were sophomores in high school, we moved from our bare apartment in what we thought was a largely Jewish community on East Forty-Seventh Street to a new housing development miles away on the far South Side. It had to have been our mother’s idea. Our new home was a corner unit in a townhouse complex, replete with some new furniture inside, covered in plastic, and a small patch of grass outside. We hated it, even if it did have two bathrooms, because we were far removed from our friends and the playing fields we knew so well. Within a few days of moving in, I stood with my father as he dutifully, and very quietly—he was always quiet, until his temper flared—watered our lawn. At some point one of our new neighbors came toward us with a big smile. He was as Irish as could be, with a strong brogue. He said his name was McCarthy and welcomed us into the neighborhood. My father shook his hand and asked, very plaintively, “Do you happen to be of the Jewish faith, Mr. McCarthy?” I can still feel the mortification as I stormed into the house in utter shame. My mother must have struggled to adapt to America, too, but she found refuge, happily, I guess, in an obsession with cooking and baking. Food became her essential means of communication. Mom was, to be fair, a marvelous baker of cookies and pastry; I can still taste her apple strudel, even if I cannot remember sharing any private thoughts with her.

Dad smoked three packs of Lucky Strikes a day—I dreaded his constant coughing at night—and was diagnosed with acute lung cancer when I was barely sixteen. That kept me from smoking more than an occasional joint throughout my life. There was an unsuccessful operation, and the disease crawled along for more than a year, eventually metastasizing into brain cancer. I was the designated caretaker because I was less afraid of displeasing him and being whacked, as occasionally happened, by the leather strop he used to sharpen the straight razor with which he shaved every morning. One of my early memories is watching in awe as he sharpened and carefully shaved with the scary razor. My father remained incommunicative but was often inwardly enraged at his fate. And ours. You could sense it. He would pass away, at age forty-nine, in late July 1954, a month after my brother and I graduated from high school.

I barely made it, having slipped, along with my dad, into a funk. I had always been an aggressive learner, a self-starter who at the age of thirteen or so joined the Book-of-the-Month Club and dutifully mailed one dollar for the monthly nonfiction selection—more often than not an anticommunist diatribe written by J. Edgar Hoover or people who shared his views. But there were also delights—long histories of the Hapsburg monarchy and studies of the Roman Catholic Church and the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages. High school, though, had become increasingly irrelevant for me as my father slowly faded away. I cut classes, ignored homework, smarted off to teachers, and in all sorts of other antisocial ways displayed acute distress that no one picked up, in school or at home.

I made a deal with Alan, who had been fascinated for years by the new science of cybernetics, led by Norbert Wiener of MIT, its guru, that he could flee Chicago for the downstate campus at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, two hours away by car. It was understood that in return he would take care of our mother after graduation. Al studied electrical engineering and made all in the family proud by going on to earn a doctorate in fluid dynamics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

I did not sulk because all along I had been much more engaged than Al in my father’s cleaning store, with its constant sweatshop smell from the steam generated by a pressing machine as it pounded away on suits and coats. I wanted to make sure the struggling business survived and would keep my mother in pots and pans and flour. Talk about dislocation. It did not matter that I and two others in my high school class had scored the same highest grade on a standardized IQ test in our senior year; the other two went off to Harvard, and I had no idea what I would do, other than continuing to run a family business. My sisters had fled the family much earlier, and so it was just me, my mom, a new home I hated, and the store. Being smart was, at that moment, irrelevant. But I was my own man and made the choices I thought had to be made, even if they kept me on Indiana Avenue.

I got an early lesson in business ethics a few weeks after my father’s death from Benny Rubenstein, the patriarch of the local temple in our old neighborhood—which none in our agnostic family went near, although Al and I had gone to Hebrew school there, essentially because it was adjacent to a great softball field. Benny, who survived the Holocaust, was a thin little guy in his late eighties or so with a big nose and huge tufts of white hair coming out of his ears. It was hot, a midsummer heat, and his apartment, like all others in our old neighborhood, had no air-conditioning. I was more than a little rattled about being summoned by Benny, and as I walked in, the old man flicked out his hand and caught a fly, squeezed it, and let it fall. Try it sometime. There is no way I could forget his words, said in the most Yiddish of Yiddish accents: “Seymour. You are now the man of the house, and you must take care of your mother. So let me give you some advice as a businessman. Fuck them before they fuck you!” I was nonplussed. Did he really say “fuck” two times? Was he talking about Nazis or a would-be business partner? I got out of that apartment as fast as I could.

A month later I followed the only path I had: I, a generalist who hated science but was consumed by novels and history, would go to a two-year junior college at the edge of downtown Chicago that had no admission requirement other than the ability to pay a forty-five-dollar semester fee for a locker. The school, known as Navy Pier, was opened by the University of Illinois immediately after the war in a former navy training base that jutted more than half a mile into Lake Michigan. It was meant to accommodate returning veterans with little money who were desperate for education. After two years, students had to transfer to the main campus at Urbana-Champaign to get their degree.

My weekday schedule called for me to open the store at seven o’clock and then, when help arrived, to drive a few miles south to the school to attend classes. I remember walking along a dim central corridor linked to dank wooden classrooms that had initially been used for teaching navigation and other skills to men going off to war. I especially hated the compulsory gym classes, which required all male students to run, or try to run, a quarter mile daily under one minute. I knew no one at the school and made no friends there. It was just driving, going to classes, running around a track, and driving back to the store.

And yet my life was changed there—perhaps salvaged—by an intervention that I managed to repress for three decades. Flash forward to 1983, in the months after I published The Price of Power, a very critical look at the White House career of Henry Kissinger. I was working in Washington, D.C., happily married with three children, and my days at Navy Pier had evaporated from my memory bank. The book made waves, lots of them, pro and con, and generated a flood of letters. One, carefully typed, was from a University of Illinois professor named Bernard Kogan who introduced himself by saying that he had been a recently frocked Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago who, in the fall of 1954, was teaching a modern literature course at Navy Pier. “Dear Mr. Hersh,” his letter began. “I am sure you do not remember me.” I did not, even after he explained his reason for writing. “I intervened with you in a way I have only done two times in my career. In one case it was on behalf of a young man who became a surgeon and has saved many lives. The other intervention was with you. I am proud of both of you.” I had no idea what the guy was talking about. And then, as I reread the letter, memory flooded back with a jolt, as did tears. It was three decades earlier and class had just ended. I was trying to hide in a back row, as always, and scrambling toward the door when Kogan called out my name and asked me to come talk to him. Total anxiety. Had I fucked up? I walked up and the first thing he said was “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” I remembered understanding exactly what he meant. It was a question I’d been asking myself for weeks. In response I mumbled something about my father dying and being left with no choice but to run the family business. I did not remember more until the editing of this memoir: Then I recalled that a week earlier I had turned in an essay comparing a novel by the British writer Somerset Maugham with a contemporary American work, perhaps an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and Kogan returned the paper to me marked A with a lot of kind comments scribbled on it. Kogan stunned me by asking if I would meet him at the University of Chicago admissions office as soon as possible. I did, took the entrance test given to all candidates that day, or soon after, was accepted, and immediately transferred, as the fall semester had just begun.

I was at home there, with its focus on critical thinking and its core curriculum that relied not on textbooks but on original works of scholars and theoreticians. Most important, the final grade for many of the courses was based solely on a four- to six-hour written test. I could always write—say exactly what I wanted to say in one take—and that ability got me through college with better grades than I perhaps deserved.

As for the wonderful Dr. Kogan, within a few weeks or so of receiving his letter, I flew to Chicago to meet with him and give a talk, at his request, before the Chicago chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honors society, which he had founded in the late 1970s. I also made it a point from then on to be as available as possible for lectures or classroom discussions for those teachers in the Washington area who had questions about America’s foreign policy, whether in college or high school. Bernard Kogan and I had our last exchange of letters in 1998, when he told me he was ill. In late 1997, he had written, with an obvious sense of satisfaction, “One thing is crystal clear, Seymour, that you’re not now the fairly quiet young man whom I took aside and counseled outside the classroom one afternoon in the ’50s.” Thank you, Dr. Kogan.

My college days at the University of Chicago were exciting and fun. The university had more than its share of oddballs, many of them brilliant and iconoclastic, to be sure. I was not a Maoist, or a Platonist, or a Socratic, but I obviously was a fellow oddball, because I mixed education with continuing to run the family cleaning store and still sharing the townhouse with my mother. Nonetheless, I found time to study, play a year or two of varsity baseball, join a fraternity, try to figure out girls, and grow up. My mother, to her credit, had become more involved in the day-to-day running of the store, which was on a glide path steadily going down but still producing enough income to keep us afloat. I had nothing to do with journalism, other than learning to do the daily New York Times crossword, looking at headlines, and worrying about Ike and Nikita and the bomb. By 1958, with graduation for me and Alan approaching, freedom beckoned. Al, faithfully living up to the commitment he had made, took an engineering job in San Diego, moved there with his wife, and arranged a nearby apartment for our mother. The cleaning store was sold, for little money, to an employee. I moved into a twelve-dollar-a-week basement room in Hyde Park, the South Side neighborhood of the university, with a bathroom down the hall. It was glorious.

With my degree in English, but with no honors, for the next few months I couldn’t find a decent job. I was most interested in the Xerox Corporation, which was then a year away from marketing the first commercial copying machine. I don’t remember who gave me the heads-up about the company, but by the end of summer it was clear the company was not interested. One of my good friends in college was David Currie, a fellow baseball player whose father, Brainerd, was a leading legal scholar and professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He also loved baseball and spent hours hitting fly balls to his son and me. David had gone off to Harvard Law School the year before; he clerked for Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and went on to spend more than four decades teaching at the Chicago Law School. When I went to see his father and explained that, late in the summer as it was, I wanted to be admitted to the U of C Law School, Professor Currie got it done within a few days. He, like Bernard Kogan, saw more in me at that time than I saw in myself.

I got through a few quarters with reasonable grades, but found the law boring, and felt the same way about law school, with its emphasis on reading cases and memorizing them. I had pretty much disappeared by the end of the year and was kicked out of school by the dean, Edward Levi (who would reenter my life a decade later). I was far from troubled, because I knew the dean had done the right thing. My only regret was that Brainerd died in 1965 and did not live to see me make my mark in another field.

The next few months remain a blur. I thought about business school and went to a few classes. Nope. I had worked part-time while in law school selling beer and whiskey at a Walgreens drugstore in suburban Evergreen Park, in the far reaches of southeast Chicago, and began doing the same full-time at a Walgreens in Hyde Park. One evening two Chicago writers I admired greatly, Saul Bellow and Richard Stern, came in to buy some booze. Stern, whose seminar on writing fiction I had taken while in college—he personally picked the students—shamed me by essentially asking, as had Kogan, what are you doing here?

It was in a what-to-do? mood that, while having a beer at a neighborhood bar, I ran into a guy whom I had met but could not place. His name was Peter Lacey, and he reminded me that he had tried to pick up my date a year or so earlier at a party. (Such thievery was known in Hyde Park as bird-dogging.) We shared a laugh and began talking over a few beers. What was I doing? Selling whiskey. Peter, in turn, told me he was now working for Time magazine, or wanted to work there, but had begun his career in journalism as a cub reporter for the City News Bureau (CNB) of Chicago. City News, as I subsequently learned, had been set up at the turn of the century by the Chicago newspapers to field reporters who would cover the city’s courts and police headquarters, sparing money and staff for the big boys. The bureau’s focus was on street crime—of which there was plenty in Chicago—and its reporting served as a tip sheet for the big dailies; the bureau was also a source of young, ambitious reporters. City News had been made famous, briefly, by The Front Page, the perennial hit play—later a movie—written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

It sounded like fun, especially because Lacey had also told me that City News had two recruiting vehicles for its constantly changing reporting staff: Half came from Northwestern University’s famed Medill School of Journalism, and the other half came from those with college degrees who applied. I have no idea today if this was so, but it was what I believed at the time. So I went to the City News Bureau’s office downtown and filled out an application. No references were sought and I gave none. I was told by a copyboy that I would be called when my name came up. A few months later I changed apartments, without giving a thought to the fact that City News now had an out-of-date phone number for me. A few more months went by, and I continued to sell whiskey, shamefully, and continued, without shame, to enjoy my freedom—a freedom I had not known since my father became ill. I spent my days reading the moderns and the not so moderns—William Styron, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Nelson Algren, James Farrell—and keeping a journal with all of the words I did not know, such as “amanuensis” and “sobriquet.” My favorite novel for a long time was Saul Bellow’s famed The Adventures of Augie March, about a Chicago boy, like me, who was not making it.

One Friday night, after work, I was invited to a poker game at the apartment I had recently left, which was now inhabited by a group of graduate students who knew, as I did not, how to play poker. I was busted by two or three in the morning and decided to crash on a couch in the dingy living room I knew well. The next morning, just after nine o’clock—I was dead asleep—the phone rang. I answered it. It was an editor named Ryberg at City News. He was looking for Hersh. I confessed. He asked if I still wanted a job as a cub reporter, pay thirty-five dollars a week, and, if so, could I start immediately. I could. Weeks later, as I was becoming more and more interested in the news business, I watched Walter Ryberg, the day city editor who spent five decades at City News, seek out a new reporter. He picked up the stack of applications and began dialing. If there was no answer, or the applicant no longer lived there, the application was shoved to the bottom of the pile. My newspaper career began because of a poker game at which I lost all the money I had.

TWO

City News

My first assignment at City News was humbling. I was assigned, as a copyboy, to the evening shift, from five o’clock on, and the demands on me were moronic. My most important task was to speedily churn out scores of copies of dispatches as they were produced. The stories, once edited, were typed onto a waxed-paper stencil that I would wrap around the drum of the office mimeograph machine. I would then begin cranking like hell. The copies I produced were routed into pneumatic tubes and sent flying to the bureau’s newspaper, radio, and television clients. It could be madness if there was big news—a double murder or a long-awaited jury verdict in a major criminal trial—and I would invariably be suffused by the end of my shift with the blue ink that I had to feed into the machine.

My other basic chore was even more inane. I could not finish my shift without doing a detailed scrubbing, with special soap, of the desk of Larry Mulay, the early morning editor who had been at City News since the days of John Dillinger and mob shoot-outs in the streets. I could have won three Pulitzer Prizes the night before and still be shown the door if Mulay’s desk did not pass his fastidious white-glove inspection the next morning. He would put on the gloves and run his fingers all over the desk, looking for signs that there was a copyboy who was not going to make it. An even more odious task came on Friday nights, when City News was responsible for forwarding the area’s high school basketball scores to all of its clients. I spent hours on the telephone recording scores for the bureau’s one-man sports desk, whose sullen editor took his miserable job far too seriously, as I would later learn.

Nonetheless, I was smitten. Most of the editors and reporters were cynics and wise to what can only be described as the Chicago way. The cops were on the take, and the mob ran the city. The City News reporters, with rare exception, ignored the corruption and, in return, were given access to crime scenes and allowed to park anywhere they wished as long as they displayed a press card on the dashboard. Chicago’s Outer Drive, its main south-to-north highway, was famously depicted by comedian Mort Sahl as the last outpost of collective bargaining. The bars stayed open after hours, and the cops got more free drinks than reporters did. Lenny Bruce was doing his thing a few blocks away at Mister Kelly’s nightclub on Rush Street, and Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk could be heard, over a beer, at the Sutherland Lounge on the South Side. The ambitious young reporters working the courthouses and police beats understood their mission was to live within the system and somehow help make the city work. The City News street reporters were, so I thought, the ultimate citizen cynics—wise guys full of badinage and constantly mocking all (especially a new copyboy). They lived totally in the moment. I, who spent so much of my life feeling as if I had little control of anything, was dazzled.

My eagerness to get on with it—to escape from desk cleaning and mimeographing and move out onto the streets—was annoying to the editors, especially to Bob Billings, the night editor, my night editor, at City News. Most of the reporters worked outside the main office, with its shabby desks, dirty floors, old typewriters, and marginal lighting. There was a copyboy, an editor, and three or four rewrite men; the important stories were phoned in to the office by the reporters scattered through the city, and put together by rewrite. The life-and-death rule was check it out before calling it in. One of the senior editors, Arnold Dornfeld, who lived outside the city and sometimes wore muddy boots that, to my horror, he enjoyed parking on Larry Mulay’s desk, had famously told a reporter, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The guys on the street who did not get their facts straight or were consistently being out-reported did not last long. One of my jobs as a copyboy was to read all Chicago dailies for stories or details that our reporters missed, and paste copies of their better stories on the office bulletin board. The notices were known as “scoop sheets,” for obvious reasons, and I confess to being delighted to scoop away. There was a constant shuffling of reporters and I wanted in.

There was lots of time for chitchat, which was good, but Billings was almost constantly on my case—partially out of boredom and partially because I was a good foil. I initially saw Bob, a big guy with a square jaw, as a cliché in action. He had played football at the University of Illinois, talked tough, and was dating, as all of us somehow knew, the estranged wife of a Chicago police captain—an awesome feat that, given the reputation of the cops, put him at peril of his life. Bob, then in his late twenties, repeatedly made it clear to me that he was totally incompatible with a punk Jew from the University of Chicago who could not get sandwich orders straight and churned out blurry copies on the mimeograph. But I had begun reading the four Chicago newspapers daily, as well as The New York Times, and would occasionally point out information therein that our reporters did not have. I also always had a book, and Bob invariably wanted to know what I was reading. He would then loudly pronounce that the book, especially if it was a novel, was not going to help make me a good reporter. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that Billings was well read, far brighter and more open than he wanted others to see.

His interest in me provoked torture, too. One insanely miserable night in Chicago—heavy snow, a vicious wind off Lake Michigan, temperature well below zero—there was a police report of a routine fire in a manhole a few blocks from the office. I jumped when Bob asked if I wanted a reporting assignment—my first—outside the office. Cover the fire, he said. I dressed as warmly as I could and eagerly dashed to the scene of the crime, showed the deputy fire chief in charge my press card, and, taking out a notepad, asked, “What’s up?” The chief was mystified. It was just a fire in a manhole. No one was hurt. There was no story. Get the hell out of here, he told me. I returned to the office and reported the nonstory to Billings. What was the name of the fire chief? I didn’t know. Get out there and get it, he said. I did so. Write it up, said Bob. And so I did, treating the manhole fire with dignity and extensively quoting the deputy fire chief. Billings edited the story and had me run copies off on the mimeograph—all of which he trashed, as I knew he would.

A few weeks later my days as a copyboy were over. I was initially assigned as the overnight reporter at the central police headquarters just south of downtown, a promotion that clearly emanated from Billings. Over the next few months, I would learn the basics, both good and bad, of my newfound profession while always keeping the faith.

Lesson one came within a few weeks. A squawk on the police radio well before daylight said there were “officers down”—a double shooting on Roosevelt Road, a main thoroughfare just south of downtown. I had a ten-year-old Studebaker that needed a lot of care in the winter—four hours in the cold was more than enough to freeze the battery, and I spent night after night having to run the car every four hours, whether at home or at police headquarters—but luckily it was ready to go. I sped the mile or so to the scene.

What a scene. My police pass got me inside a marked-off perimeter, and someone told me the victims were Feds, two postal inspectors. An unmarked four-door sedan was crumpled up against a light pole. Bullet holes were all over the windows and doors. Two men were inside, heads back, with blood all over. I had only seen one dead man in my life—my father in his coffin before burial—but these two were goners. A very angry Chicago police sergeant was in charge, and I approached him, chirping out, “City News.” He said nothing. I asked if the victims were dead. The cop grabbed me by my jacket and shoved me, hard, up against a squad car. “Not unless they’re pronounced,” adding “you asshole,” or “you fuck,” or “you shithead.” He meant pronounced dead by a police coroner. No coroner was on the scene yet. What to do? I had a scoop, of sorts, because no other reporter had yet arrived. Should I dash to a pay phone and call it in? I was sure my mother loved me; did I need to check it out?

So I waited. The coroner came and made the foregone pronouncement. I then called it in, describing the scene to a rewrite guy and explaining that the names of the two agents—obviously undercover cops, because they were wearing street clothes—were not immediately available. I stayed away from the sergeant, but the coroner was nice.

The lesson? Being first is not nearly as important as being right, and being careful, even if it did not matter in the case at hand. That was in late 1959. The mistakes I made over the next five or so decades—and we all make them—would have been avoided if I always kept in mind what the sergeant had said about waiting for an official pronouncement.

The second lesson came a few weeks later, while on temporary night assignment for a week or two at police headquarters in Hyde Park, near the university. The process had quickly become familiar: hang around with other reporters; ingratiate yourself with the desk sergeant; buy him all the coffee he wants; help him, if he asks, with last week’s Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle; and wait for the radio to sound off. Late at night comes a report of a deadly fire in the black ghetto a few miles to the west, with many victims. Off I go.

A shabby wooden frame house, twenty or so blocks north of my dad’s cleaning store, was a pile of embers by the time I arrived. A cluster of bodies, wrapped in white sheeting, was lying in perfect order on a small lawn. They were wrapped by size—daddy bear, mommy bear, and three or four little bears. I was horrified. A distressed fire chief—or was it a cop?—told me that the best guess was that a father had gone berserk and set fire to the home, killing his wife and children, if they were his wife and children. I asked a lot of questions, but essentially got nowhere, though someone—perhaps a neighbor—gave me the names of those thought to be the dead, and some details about the family, if that was the family lying under the sheets.

What a story, I thought, but I knew how much I didn’t know. Still, I had to get to a pay phone and dictate what little I knew to rewrite. It was, I thought, a story that could end up on the front page. As I was yapping away, Mr. Dornfeld, he of the sometimes muddy boots, cut in on the call. There are traumatic events we remember all of our life, and I remember every word he said: “Ah, my good, dear, energetic Mr. Hersh. Do the, alas, poor, unfortunate victims happen to be of the Negro persuasion?” I said yes. He said, “Cheap it out.” That meant that my City News dispatch would report the following, give or take a phrase: “Five Negroes died in a fire last night on the Southwest Side.” It might also have included an address.

I thought, having worked for years in a family store in a black area, that I knew something about racism. Dornfeld taught me that I had a lot to learn.

There was one final lesson to learn just before I would go off for compulsory army training, after only seven or so months on the job at City News. It was my shameful, but unavoidable, involvement in what we now call self-censorship. I was back on overnight duty at the central police headquarters when two cops called in to report that a robbery suspect had been shot trying to avoid arrest. The cops who had done the shooting were driving in to make a report. Always ambitious, and always curious, I raced down to the basement parking lot in the hope of getting some firsthand quotes before calling in the story. The driver—white, beefy, and very Irish, like far too many Chicago cops then—obviously did not see me as he parked the car. As he climbed out, a fellow cop, who clearly had heard the same radio report I had, shouted something like “So the guy tried to run on you?” The driver said, “Naw. I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.”

I got the hell out of there, without being seen, called the bureau, and asked for the editor on duty. (It was not Billings.) What to do? The editor urged me to do nothing. It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did. So I waited a few days and then asked for and got a copy of the coroner’s report. The victim had been shot in the back. I took a copy of the report to an editor. He wasn’t interested. No one was interested. I had no proof that a felony murder had been committed other than what the killer himself had said, and he, of course, would deny it.

So I left the story alone. I did not try to find and interview the cop who bragged about doing the shooting, nor did I seek out his partner. Nor did I raise hell at City News. I shuffled off to six months of army training, full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship. I’ve hated both practices ever since while more than once having gone along with looking the other way. I had found my calling and learned, very quickly, that it wasn’t perfect. Neither was I.

Seymour M. Hersh

REPORTER

A Memoir

ALLEN LANE

Contents

Introduction

ONE

Getting Started

TWO

City News