Seymour Hersh Quotes

Over the past half-century, Hersh has been one of America’s premier investigative journalists. But unlike, say, Bob Woodward, who specializes in getting those in power to talk, Hersh has been an untethered operator whose scoops have resulted from veering from the pack. In describing how it’s done, Reporter [Reporter: A Memoir (Autobiography). New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 2018 ISBN 978-0307263957] offers a best-practices guide to journalism as well as an implicit critique of the way it’s practiced today... Reporter exposes a structural weakness in American journalism.. Hersh first encountered this weakness while working at the City News Bureau in Chicago... As Hersh writes, learning to fit in in that neighborhood would make it possible for him to mix easily later in life with a wide variety of people, including scientists, generals, legislators, and intelligence officers.

It is not long before we discuss contemporaneous events including the alleged Russian hacking of the US presidential election. Hersh has vociferously strong opinions on the subject and smells a rat. He states that there is “a great deal of animosity towards Russia. All of that stuff about Russia hacking the election appears to be preposterous.”... Hersh quips that the last time he heard the US defense establishment have high confidence, it was regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He points out that the NSA only has moderate confidence in Russian hacking. It is a point that has been made before; there has been no national intelligence estimate in which all 17 US intelligence agencies would have to sign off. “When the intel community wants to say something they say it… High confidence effectively means that they don’t know.”

Hersh grew up in the Chicago suburbs and was forced to take over the running of the family laundry business in his teens after his father died of lung cancer. He did not shine at school and was not destined for an intellectual life, seemingly stumbling into a career as a newspaper man. Serendipity would have it that he answered the phone the morning after an all-night poker game in which he lost all of his money. The call was from City News. He happened to be staying at his old apartment that night having forgotten to inform his future employers that he had changed address. And so began inauspiciously one of the most remarkable careers in journalism. If it was not for Hersh’s penchant for all-night poker games, we may never have known about all manner of deep state malfeasance.

How did Hersh get the stories that other reporters seemed to miss? The first point is his attitude. He cultivated scepticism about governmental and corporate power. Hersh was not awed by the leadership or eager for its approval. This allowed him to ask questions that it did not want asked and that it prevented from being asked by using every means. It is because he did not believe that the U.S. was always good or right that he was able to do the landmark stories that he did. Hersh’s Reporter should be read by young journalists. It is itself an education. There is buried in this book a manual for how to do good journalism.

His story of how he uncovered the My Lai atrocity is one of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism and doggedness. Back in 1969, he got a tip about a 26-year-old platoon leader, William Calley, who had been charged by the army with alleged mass murder. Instead of picking up the phone to a press officer, he got into his car and started looking for him in the army camp of Fort Benning in Georgia, where he heard he had been detained. From door to door he searched the vast compound, sometimes blagging his way, marching up to the reception, slamming his fist on the table and shouting: "Sergeant, I want Calley out now." Eventually his efforts paid off with his first story appearing in the St Louis Post-Despatch, which was then syndicated across America... He was hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years later, Hersh made global headlines all over again with his exposure of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Despite his concern about the timidity of journalism he believes the trade still offers hope of redemption... For students of journalism his message is put the miles and the hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their families asking them to come and kill them because they had been "despoiled".

He is certain that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden "changed the whole nature of the debate" about surveillance. Hersh says he and other journalists had written about surveillance, but Snowden was significant because he provided documentary evidence – although he is sceptical about whether the revelations will change the US government's policy... He isn't even sure if the recent revelations about the depth and breadth of surveillance by the National Security Agency will have a lasting effect...

What’s courageous about telling the truth? Our job isn’t to be afraid. And sometimes it gets ugly. There have been times in my life, when — you know, I don’t talk about it. Threats aren’t made to people like me; they’re made to children of people like me. There’s been awful stuff. But you don’t worry about it — you can’t. You have to just do what you do.

Joe Biden decided not to blow them up. It was in early June, five months into the war, but then, in September, he decided to do it.

I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers.

As for the source question, you know, I’ve been doing this so long.... you know, I’m lucky. I’ve had, for 20 or 30 or 40 years, people inside who not only are faithful to what they’re doing, but also are not afraid to be critical of it. And so, that’s the kind of source that, you know, reporters dream about. And I’ve had people like that for forever. And I still do.

I think the consequences politically for us in the long run, looking at even potential some countries walking out of NATO. If that’s what he thinks, that our being cold is less important than him keeping a war going that he’s not going to win

I know people that are paying five times as much now for electricity. People are paying three or four times more for gas. There’s not enough of it. It’s very expensive.

It’s going to undercut NATO, which I always found to be supremely useless,

And I think the consequences of this for the Europeans are going to be horrific. They really — this has cut into the notion that they can depend totally on America, even in a crisis.