Seymour Hersh

1. The Story No One Wanted

1 CHAPTER 1 The Story No One Wanted The Tip: “I Knew He Was a Tenacious Reporter” Geoffrey Cowan was a twenty-seven-year-old Yale Law School graduate working in Washington DC in the fall of 1969. He had just helped start a public interest legal foundation that became an important force in representing civil rights groups, women’s organizations, and labor unions. But Cowan was also following family tradition working part-time as a journalist, writing a column on politics for the quintessential alternative weekly newspaper, the Village Voice in New York City. His older brother, Paul, was a well-known progressive writer for the Voice who stayed in journalism his entire life. Geoffrey was only passing through on his way to a distinguished career as an academic, author, and director of the Voice of America. But in the tumultuous early fall days of 1969—just weeks after thousands celebrated peace and love at the Woodstock festival and just as Richard Nixon had secretly expanded the war in Vietnam into Cambodia—Cowan was coauthoring a Washington column, “The Seat of Government,” that was making waves. Cowan and Judith Coburn had written one column that uncovered one of the war’s darkest deeds, as least up until that point. They revealed details about “Operation Phoenix,” the secret American intelligence program that ordered the assassination of Vietnamese civilians who were supposedly providing support for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Probably because of that column, Cowan received a telephone call one day from a friend who had a secret source in the military. The friend said an American soldier was being charged with spearheading a massacre of a number of Vietnamese civilians. “The story won’t be told. It will be covered up,” the source said. Cowan tried to get the Washington 2 THE STORY NO ONE WANTED Post interested, but he had no luck. Cowan could have tried to publish it in the Voice, but he feared this well-known liberal newspaper would not be credible, and that the story was too important to be buried in a publication that might not be trusted. A lawyer working with Cowan at the Center for Law and Social Policy, Ben Heinenman, suggested Cowan call reporter Sy Hersh. Seymour Hersh. Seymour Myron Hersh. “I did not know him,” Cowan recalled, “but from what I had heard I knew he was a tenacious reporter and he might run it.”1 Indeed, although only thirty-two years old, Hersh had developed a reputation around Washington for his pugnacity. Born in Chicago to immigrant parents, Hersh had gone to the University of Chicago as a history major. Then he had drifted into journalism after failing law school. For a short period he published a weekly newspaper in suburban Chicago before working for the fabled City News Bureau. After a short stint working for the United Press International (UPI) in South Dakota, Hersh came east to cover the Pentagon for the Associated Press (AP), a time when he learned to ignore formal press briefings and wander the halls of the Pentagon, making friends with midlevel sources in the military’s sprawling bureaucracy. His time with the AP ended when it refused to run a long series of articles he produced on chemical and biological weapons. His first book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal , came out in 1968 to favorable reviews but small sales. “I knew his book,” Cowan recalled. Many others did also since it played a key role in the Nixon administration’s decision to ban the continued production of such lethal weapons.2 Hersh was also known in the journalistic community in Washington for another reason. He had left reporting for a three-month period in early 1968 to work on the antiwar campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota as he sought to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Lyndon Johnson. This aberration in Hersh’s journalism career ended when he had an argument with McCarthy. Now, in the heady fall of 1969, with thousands of protestors regularly amassing on the capital’s lawns, Hersh was a freelance reporter. He was working on a book about the Pentagon—tentatively called The Ultimate Corporation—but he took Cowan’s October 22 phone call and listened. “I’ve got a fantastic story,” THE STORY NO ONE WANTED 3 Cowan said. “There’s a guy down in Benning (Fort Benning...