Seymour Hersh

11. Stunning Triumph over Germs

116 CHAPTER 11 Stunning Triumph over Germs The End of “Dirty” Politics Leaving the McCarthy presidential campaign was not easy for Seymour Hersh. “I can hate him and I can love him,” Hersh said about the senator, but, mostly, “I love him.” Hersh had grown used to dealing with elected officialswholeftmuchofthepolicymakingtostaffmembers.ButMcCarthy was different; he was smart, and Hersh felt strongly about him, declaring, “I think he would have been a good president,” better than Robert Kennedy —and certainly better than Richard Nixon. Hersh also had guilt at how he had left the campaign, with a midnight resignation letter. It was not his style. “They could have gotten me out by simply asking,” Hersh said. “I was dying to get out of the job. I hated it. I believed in the campaign but I just couldn’t stand the job.” The night he resigned, Hersh wanted someone to talk him out of it, but campaign manager Blair Clark was weak and out of touch. And the “inane backbiting” from the old Senate staff and Mrs. McCarthy had worn him down. Hersh knew he could be easily replaced, but he felt the press operation would fall apart quickly when he left. Indeed, the event that followed almost immediately proved that.1 Surprised by the adverse reaction to avoiding civil rights, McCarthy’s staff made an about-face. Four days after Hersh left, McCarthy’s Wisconsin director announced the senator would visit Milwaukee’s black neighborhood. “There is not one iota of truth that Senator McCarthy has ducked the civil rights issue,” a staffer told the New York Times. To prove this a bus filled with reporters accompanied the senator to Milwaukee. It was the type of event McCarthy hated—a spectacle with little meaning beyond symbolism, an event more for the press. And he was uncomfortable wading into crowds. As the Times predicted, the senator’s reception STUNNING TRIUMPH OVER GERMS 117 in the Negro area was “subdued.” One McCarthy staffer called it sadly comical. The senator went on a street corner, and groups of blacks—seeing a busload of white people—ran the other way. McCarthy walked quickly though the neighborhood, shook a few hands, and then got back on the bus. He did his duty, but it was not an event that would win him black votes in the Indiana primary.2 Although Hersh thought being a press secretary was an “awful job . . . a disgraceful way to spend your life . . . a glorified travel secretary . . . [with] no cerebral thought at all,” he actually toyed with returning. In planning for Indiana McCarthy asked, “Can we get Sy to get involved in that?” Hersh entered a negotiation for returning. He met personally with McCarthy. “We’ll work you in, Sy,” McCarthy told him. And, Hersh said, “I was going to come back,” perhaps as a policy analyst. But it did not happen; it was over, or so it seemed. He received dozens of requests to be interviewed and lucrative offers to write a kiss-and-tell account. “I didn’t talk to anybody about it,” he said. Hersh turned his attention—by necessity—back to his freelance writing, and especially to the issue of chemical and biological weapons disarmament. Just as he was leaving the campaign, Chemical and Biological Warfare: The Hidden Arsenal came out in serial fashion in the New York Review of Books, a left-leaning publication read by intellectuals. Hersh was on the map, and when the book came out in September, he took to the lecture circuit mostly at college campuses. After a dozen speeches in a few days, he was more sympathetic to McCarthy, who became cranky during the campaign. “I was exhausted,” Hersh recalled.3 September brought another possibility. Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, the night he won the California primary. Although he felt the campaign was over after the assassination, McCarthy stayed in the race in a showdown with fellow Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, who eventually won. The Democratic convention in Chicago, of course, was a debacle, with out-of-control police attacks on demonstrators turning McCarthy’s dream of a triumphant march by antiwar partisans into a nightmare of brutality. When it was over, McCarthy took his family to France to recuperate. But some antiwar political activists were not done. The choice of Humphrey, a defender of the war, and Richard Nixon, a lifelong hawk, was a bleak one. Kennedy speechwriter Adam Walinsky [18.189.193.172] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...