Seymour Hersh

8. Fighting His Editors

76 CHAPTER 8 Fighting His Editors Crusading for the Military The Pentagon was the world’s biggest military machine, but it also had the largest war public relations apparatus. The government spent more than $20 million a year in 1966 just to promote its activities—including the war in Southeast Asia—with three thousand people assigned to the Department of Defense PR staff. Many of the reporters who worked out of a small unglamorous Pentagon office were docile recipients of news doled out by the government. Fred Hoffman, although a thorough and reliable reporter, was a World War II veteran who was largely content with covering the stories that, to some degree, the Pentagon wanted covered. “There was a decided clash of culture,” Hoffman said about the WWII reporters and Hersh’s generation. “They accused us of being ‘toadies,’ but truly it did not happen. We had cordial relationships but there was a line drawn.” Behind his back the younger reporters called him “Colonel Hoffman” because they felt he was soft on the Pentagon. Reporters grumbled that when the Pentagon wanted to get a message out, they knew they could rely on Hoffman. In fact, when he left the AP in 1984, Hoffman went to work in public relations for the Defense Department, a common merry-go-round. “Sy and Fred were like oil and water,” said reporter Kenneth Freed. “Fred was a spokesman for the Pentagon . He probably had been there too long; he knew everything but did not see everything.” Hersh, meanwhile, “was operating on the fringes.” The sarcastic Hersh was a rumpled figure, his hair often askew, his shirt unbuttoned. “He was sloppy as hell as a dresser,” recalled Freed, “but as a reporter he was resourceful and smart as hell.”1 Hersh did not take long to jump in feet first as 1966 began. At first it FIGHTING HIS EDITORS 77 was coverage as usual: Defense Secretary McNamara says the Vietnam War is at a turning point; the Soviets protest American nuclear testing; more planes ordered to fight the war; a Navy Cross for an officer known as “Mr. Vietnam.” All were stories Hoffman would have covered. But Hersh wanted stories that did not come from the briefings or the press releases known as “blue tops” for their light blue coloring over a DOD insignia. “Many a determined young reporter,” wrote Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, “had been worn down by the Pentagon’s tight news-management producers and eventually became little more than an uncritical parrot of the military’s pronouncements.” It was easy to understand why.2 Reporters were cordoned off in a hallway known as Correspondents’ Corridor. The large press room was across from the reporters’ quarters. Reporters would troop in each day for a daily briefing at which a Pentagon spokesperson would deliver innocuous tidbits. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sydney Schanberg called the military briefings “the five o’clock follies,” because they often yielded little that was newsworthy and much that was PR bunk. Nonetheless, reporters were given so much information in reports and press releases and access to safe officials that they had no trouble coming up with stories—just not the stories that might reveal the inner workings of the military or of the war in Vietnam. Most correspondents—like the AP’s Hoffman—learned to accept the restrictions set by the military. Hersh would not; he developed a habit of asking an impertinent question at briefings, and when it was brushed aside, he wandered the halls of the world’s largest office building in search of sources and stories. Often he found high-ranking officers in their lunchroom —and they talked to him. The rumpled Hersh turned out to be a charmer—he readily convinced top- and mid-level Pentagon sources to talk. Pentagon officials began to call him “that little ferret,” deriding the fact that he “broke every rule of bureaucratic journalism.” Said Hersh in response: “I had more balls than most of the guys in the press room.”3 In September Hersh found another crusade: Navy officials—including, anonymously, Admiral Clarence A. Hill Jr.—told him that there were not enough planes or qualified fliers to fight the intensifying Vietnam War. The story came to Hersh because, after getting a tip, he simply asked 78 FIGHTING HIS EDITORS for documents that laid out the shortage that the Pentagon was trying to hide. When twenty-four...