Seymour Hersh

5. Selling, Publishing, Failing

55 CHAPTER 5 Selling, Publishing, Failing Hersh, the Money Man Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is known more for its federal penitentiary than for the fact that it has the oldest active U.S. Army base west of the Mississippi . Occupying 5,600 acres and 7 million square feet in a thousand buildings, the base is sometimes known as the “intellectual center of the Army.” But for Sy Hersh, Leavenworth was just a very hot place where he had to spend three months in basic training to avoid a two-year stint as a draftee. “It was 100 degrees every day,” Hersh recalled, “And we had no money.” So the soldiers, when not learning the basics of going to war and doing push-ups, drank liquor from local stills. “Homemade hooch,” Hersh called it.1 The hooch made the rigor of training easier and helped pass the time since his girlfriend, Elizabeth, was back in Chicago. Hersh’s biggest challenge was learning a simple army rule: keep your mouth shut, never an easy task for a cocky young man whose mind and mouth were always working. Nonetheless, Hersh was obedient and sober enough to make an impression . Knowing that he had worked for a news agency and had a university degree led the army to assign him to the public relations office at Fort Riley, Kansas, a huge base in northwest Kansas. “I think also that there weren’t that many people around who could write,” Hersh said. With 215,000 personnel at the base, Fort Riley was akin to a small city—and was a good place for Hersh to learn how information and people move around a military facility. It did two things—it gave him a primer on what the military does with people, allowing him to be prepared to tackle Fort Benning nine years later in search of Lieutenant William Calley, and it also gave him a glimpse of the military PR operation.2 56 SELLING, PUBLISHING, FAILING The work likely surprised Hersh. The military was spending in the neighborhood of $20 million to promote itself, sending, for example, press releases to every hometown newspaper every time a local soldier was promoted. “Seymour Hersh, the son of Isador and Dorothy Hersh, of 835 E. 47th St., Chicago, has been appointed by the U.S. Army to the Public Affairs unit as an Information Specialist at Fort Riley, Kansas, the base commander announced yesterday.” That kind of “news” release—or something like it—was then sent to every Chicago newspaper and all local weeklies. Often newspapers ran the releases in roundup columns on “locals in the military.” Hersh learned how the army PR machine worked, and it was good insight to have for the time in five years when he worked for the Associated Press in the Pentagon. When Hersh left the army he hoped to return to the City News Bureau. They would not have him, which was unusual, but his feuds with editors and his recalcitrance to do scut work came back to haunt him. So, even though he hated business school, he decided to try his hand at business as the owner and publisher of his own newspaper. After all, his father had run a small dry cleaner for years, and Hersh and twin brother Alan had helped around the store. Now he set out to publish a weekly newspaper in Evergreen, a suburban Chicago village of 3.2 square miles with fewer than twenty thousand people, most of whom were white. Hersh’s partner , oddly enough, was Bob Billings, the burly editor at City News who had so gruffly pushed him around. They had become golfing partners and saw the chance to make money in this affluent southwest suburb. Billings “had the money,” Hersh recalled, “and I had the energy.” The Evergreen Dispatch seemed to fill a void—news about the library, schools, the Girl Scouts. Murder, mayhem, and the Front Page it was not. “I was used to rushing to shootouts at City News Bureau but this was more of the bake sale to benefit the library stuff,” said Lee Quarnstrom, who was also at City News with Hersh and became a well-known columnist at the San Jose (California) Mercury News. Nonetheless, “we had a lot of fun,” Hersh recalled. Paid circulation went up to 14,000, they were delivering 25,000 copies of the paper to 250 news delivery boys, and the paper began to attract national advertisers. “I could sell and...