Seymour Hersh

16. Hunting the Coup Plotters

169 CHAPTER 16 Hunting the Coup Plotters A Dandelion in a Windstorm By the fall of 1974 Sy Hersh was the Golden Boy of the New York Times, but he had his share of flubs and missed stories. As he pursued Watergate and wider corruption in the White House in late 1973, one source filled Hersh’s ears with sketchy details about some sort of taping system in the Oval Office. Something about the president bugging his own conversations. Hersh was getting nowhere on the story until the source hooked him up with a Secret Service agent. “Secret Service guys rarely want to see reporters ,” Hersh pointed out. This one did. He brought Hersh to a crowded noisy discotheque, where he took Hersh on the dance floor. “We did not dance,” Hersh said. The agent told Hersh the president was sitting in his office listening to tape recordings of his conversations. “It’s the craziest thing,” the agent said, “the President just sits in his office all day listening to tapes. He’s got hundreds of tapes.” Nixon was trying to figure out what evidence his own conversations would offer investigators about Watergate. Hersh returned to his office to work the phones. He called Nixon’s counsel , J. Fred Buzhardt, who declared, “Come on, I’d know about a taping system.” Hersh turned to top Nixon aide John Erlichman, who “swore up and down there was no taping system.” Erlichman “often didn’t tell me the truth,” Hersh said, “but he never lied to me.” Finally Hersh went to “The Big Lying Machines,” Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and three other inside sources. They all denied it existed. And they were not lying; they did not know. So Hersh dropped the story. The tapes were not revealed until congressional testimony by Alexander Butterfield on June 25, 1973, shocked the nation. “It was probably good that the story came out later,” Hersh said. “We might still have Nixon.”1 170 HUNTING THE COUP PLOTTERS Hersh missed another major story. John Darnton was a novice thirtytwo -year-old working in the Times New York office in early 1973, years before he won a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Poland. A source told him that that Vice President Spiro Agnew was accepting bribe money from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Darnton did not know what to do with it or how to track it down. An editor told him to call Hersh and turn it over to the ace investigative reporter. Hersh returned Darnton’s call. In his staccato style, he asked, “What you got?” Darnton told him. Hersh asked a series of lightning quick questions. And then declared, “It doesn’t sound right. Not a story.” Darnton and Hersh moved on, the Agnew story ignored. On October 10, 1973, Agnew resigned and pleaded no contest to federal income tax evasion for failing to report $29,500 in income that was, essentially, bribe money he received while he was governor of Maryland. Hersh missed the chance to bring down a vice president.2 A few misses did not affect Hersh. He was nonstop in pursuit of scoops. “He rarely completes a sentence and is almost continually on the telephone ,” noted a story in the Times archives that called him “as active as a dandelion in a windstorm.” He was an amusing figure in the DC office. His sandy blonde hair was parted on one side, looking, one observer said, like it “sees a comb just once a day.” Black horn-rimmed glasses sat on a sharp nose, and three brownish moles were visible on the left side of his chiseled jaw. He wore button-down collar shirts, the sleeves rolled up, and a tie that was always open at the collar. His three-sided desk was adjacent to a window. A typewriter sat on one side. The rest was piled high with manila folders stuffed with notes and newspaper clippings, legal pads, a Rolodex, and a small calendar. Thick government reports, half open, sat awaiting the reporter who knew that talking to people was not enough. He had to read everything.3 But the phone was still his key weapon, crooked in his neck like an appendage. Like all reporters, Hersh was always coy about his sources. Once he told me, “I don’t discuss sources,” but strictly speaking that was not true. At times he would be clear that a certain person was not his source or that a story did...