Seymour Hersh

7. At War with the Pentagon

67 CHAPTER 7 At War with the Pentagon The Young Turks Chafe Sy Hersh arrived in Washington with wife Elizabeth in the summer of 1965. Hersh was part of a remarkable group of young reporters who had joined the AP—James Polk, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974; Gaylord Shaw, a Pulitzer winner in 1978; Carl Leubsdorf, who became one of the nation’s best known political writers; and Barry Schweid, who covered diplomatic and world events for the next four decades. But controversy was soon to follow these “young Turks” who, like Hersh, were impatient to make their marks on the world of journalism and to challenge the conventions of the profession that tied their hands in explaining an America on the verge of chaos and upheaval. But to do so they had three hurdles to overcome. The first was to get off the mandatory overnight rewrite desk where all newcomers were lodged, and where they did little reporting and lots of revising of other people’s stories. Hersh had not come to Washington from the powerhouse AP Chicago bureau to work for very long from 11:00 at night to 7:00 in the morning, poking around in the work of others. If they could get past the probationary rewrite desk, Hersh and his aggressive colleagues could then dip into the exciting public policy world that awaited them in the capital. Their reporting goal was simple: to write the kind of big stories that would be chosen to run on the AP’s coveted “A” wire, the main feed to the nation’s powerful daily newspapers. And once the “A” wire stories had made their mark, the prestigious capital “beats” that lured reporters to Washington in the first place would beckon—the White House, the Pentagon, the Supreme Court, the State Department, the Capitol. Unfortunately for Hersh, change did not come quickly at the 68 AT WAR WITH THE PENTAGON Associated Press, where many World War II generation reporters were not about to make room for the upstarts. Hersh was “impatient,” recalled Schweid, who worked at the AP for fifty years and came to Washington five years before Hersh. He was just “chafing at the snail’s pace of change, at being confined, and at the lack of movement,” Schweid added. “If you were patient, you had a chance.” But Hersh was never known for his patience. Certainly it was understandable why he would want to move off night rewrite. Reporters mostly worked over other people’s copy, getting it ready for the nation’s afternoon daily newspapers by condensing, revising, and perhaps updating. The bureau centered around black teletype machines lined up in rows. All day and night they drummed out copy, like hypnotic music, pulsing out bulletins and updates as news filtered in from around the world. The goal, of course, was to get out the news before the arch-rival United Press International.1 Meanwhile, inside the room on Connecticut Avenue about a block from Dupont Circle, Hersh’s goal was more limited—trim stories so Americans could get their news in digestible versions, an important task since the AP was the main source of information for much of what America consumed . But, to his chagrin, there was very little reporting, except for an occasional phone call to check a fact, if that was even possible at 3:00 in the morning. “When rewrites were done, you were on guard duty,” said Shaw, who came to Washington about the same time as Hersh. “Guard duty” simply meant that you waited—and probably hoped—that some disaster might strike in the wee hours that would get you out of the office and into the real adventure of reporting. The mayhem of Chicago was much more exciting than rewrite. How could this be fun? “You were not reporting,” said Leubsdorf, a colleague who worked at the AP for fifteen years and then became a political columnist in Dallas.2 Reporters only left the office to go out for “lunch,” an evening ritual that often called for them to traipse around with night editor Joe Kane, who would fill reporters’ heads with his wisdom on journalism. “Sy took one walk with Kane,” recalled Shaw, “but never went again.” He was simply not interested in kowtowing to an editor, especially one whose view of journalism was known to be cautious. Hersh often went alone to the famous Eddie Lawrence’s Sandwich Shop and then hustled back in [3...