Seymour Hersh

22. The Summer’s Literary Furor

247 CHAPTER 22 The Summer’s Literary Furor The Bashing Begins As 1982 ended, Henry Kissinger’s consulting business was snaring bigname , big-paying clients. Appearing regularly on ABC’s late-evening talk show Nightline, Kissinger was, as James Reston noted in the New York Times, “a one-man university . . . on the tube explaining in his amiable growl” how foreign policy and the world should work. But a time bomb was ticking. In the Atlantic’s December issue Hersh dropped explosion number two, revisiting another of his Times topics—the overthrow and death of Chile’s president Salvador Allende in 1973. He went back to old sources, especially Edward Korry, the former ambassador to Chile, and with new documents in hand and a more thorough look at the work of the National Security Council and the secret “40 Committee,” Hersh saw it more clearly. Kissinger and Nixon tried to block the election of the socialist Allende, and when that failed, they helped put in motion forces that led to his overthrow and death. Maybe Allende was even assassinated. Behind it all was the need to protect American investments in Chile. They are assertions historians continue to debate.1 Hersh leaned on at least ten books on Chile, but he relied primarily on the two-volume report on Allende’s death by a Senate committee, which had, in part, been spurred by his work. Hersh “marshals mind-boggling detail,” commented Washington Post reviewer Walter LaFeber. As usual, Hersh was able to find sources who fed him inside and gossipy tales. A former Chilean ambassador told Hersh he had met with Kissinger, before the overthrow, and insulted him: “You are a German Wagnerian. You are a very arrogant man.” Yeoman Charles E. Radford, a twenty-seven-year-old navy liaison between the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he saw shocking documents. 248 THE SUMMER’S LITERARY FUROR The Nixon administration was weighing options to prevent Allende from taking office in 1969, including assassination. “I realized that my government actively was involved in planning to kill people,” he told Hersh. Of course, Radford was also the man who surreptitiously copied and leaked National Security Agency documents to the military brass so they could spy on White House activities—originally also revealed by Hersh. It made him a suspect source, albeit one who had the inside poop.2 Some of Hersh’s critics yawned. “I am left with this vacuous feeling,” wrote Victor Gold, “of having been subjected to ‘Rocky XVI’ or ‘Superman XII’; that I’ve been in this theater before and heard it all.” Kissinger did not respond. Privately he set the tone for a response to Hersh’s Chile allegations. “The thrust of his Chilean critique is purely Marxist: that our policy was to defend rapacious American enterprise,” he wrote. “This was not its thrust.” The old Sy-is-an-untrustworthy lefty was the best Kissinger could do. Hersh’s trademark, Kissinger added, “is the viciousness and ruthlessness with which he goes after his victims and the tendency to extend the assault to the institutions which they serve.”3 Chimed in William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter who had become a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist, “The Hersh attack is a work of vengeance and self-justification.” None of this made Kissinger any more comfortable as his sixtieth birthday approached a month before The Price of Power was published. The two Atlantic installments had come out; everyone knew what was forthcoming. “Everybody talks about it except in front of Mr. Kissinger,” wrote Charlotte Curtis in the Times. Safire attended a gala sixtieth fete for Kissinger, sitting near Lady Bird Johnson and the Empress of Iran, along with Kissinger journalist pals Joseph Kraft and Marvin Kalb. Why, oh why, Safire wondered, is Sy “obsessed with getting The Man Who Got Away? What is it about Henry Kissinger that turns him into a white whale and transforms an investigative reporter into a monomaniacal Ahab?”4 The book was not out, but the bashing of Sy Hersh had begun. Juicy Journalism and Slimy Lies On June 13, 1983, The Price of Power hit bookstores—698 pages, 460,000 words. The front cover showed an illuminated White House in front of THE SUMMER’S LITERARY FUROR 249 a darkened sky. The back cover had a black and white photo of Hersh, wryly smiling, pen in hand, arm...