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White hat, black hat
By Jeet Heer National Post May 13, 2004
The competing journalistic careers of Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh has a strong claim to be the world's greatest living journalist, but for most of his career he has lived under the shadow of rival Bob Woodward. Ever since he revealed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in 1969, Hersh has been steadily breaking important news stories in publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker. Woodward has only made one big expose: the Watergate break-in scandal he reported on with the aid of Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein. Watergate was, of course, so Earth-shattering it made Woodward into a celebrity reporter.
For three decades, Woodward has milked his Watergate cachet into a career as the author of a string of best-sellers that purport to give the lowdown on Washington politics. Although buttressed by access to powerful policymakers and politicians, many of Woodward's books have been thin gruel, essentially little more than transcriptions of the chit-chat of various administrations. So it must be extremely gratifying to Hersh that his most recent scoops, the two ground-breaking reports on the torture of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison, have eclipsed the hubbub surrounding Plan of Attack, Woodward's latest Washington tell-all tome.
In their parallel careers, Hersh and Woodward represent two very different models of how to practice journalism. Hersh is the reporter as outsider, the truculent loner constantly harrying the powerful by relentlessly hunting down facts that challenge the official version of history. Since achieving his Watergate fame, Woodward is the quintessential clubby Washington insider: His books are built on his access to the ruling class.
In a finely balanced and smartly written profile that ran in the July/August, 2003, issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Scott Sherman traced the trajectory of Hersh's remarkable career. Hersh came to prominence by uncovering a story that few Americans wanted to know about.
On March 16, 1968, a U.S. military unit under the command of Lt. William Calley slaughtered the inhabitants of the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. More than 500 souls -- men, women, children, even babies -- were brutally executed. Thanks to the work of whistleblowers, the army began an inquiry into the massacre, but these proceedings were shrouded in bureaucratic secrecy.
Although rumours of the atrocity were slowly leaking out, the U.S. press was reluctant to investigate -- the sheer horror of what happened made this a radioactive story. In 1969, while working as a freelance journalist, Hersh decided to follow the rumours to the source, tracking down Calley, who was then stationed in a military base in Georgia. Like a character out of Dostoevsky, Calley actually seemed relieved when he was confronted by the journalist. The blood-stained soldier needed to unburden himself and he gave a long interview to Hersh. Hersh's report on the My Lai massacre was one of the key events of the Vietnam War, forcing many supporters of the U.S. war effort to come to terms with the conflict's moral cost.
In 1972, Hersh was hired by The New York Times. During a stormy tenure Hersh became one of sharpest critics of the Nixon administration, breaking stories about how the U.S. government supported Pinochet's 1973 coup in Chile and used the CIA to spy on its domestic enemies. These were devastating revelations, but they paled in comparison to the reports of the Watergate break-in and cover-up, written by Hersh's competitors Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post.
Hersh couldn't help but notice that the Post duo made a small fortune off their 1974 book All the President's Men, later made into a movie staring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. "I wouldn't mind making a million dollars on a book," Hersh once told an interviewer from Rolling Stone. "Having Robert Redford play me wouldn't bother me at all."
After Watergate, Bernstein faded into a conventional journalistic career but Woodward continued to be a star. In a series of books, with titles such as The Commanders and Bush at War, Woodward has become the chief chronicler of contemporary U.S. politics. Ten out of the 12 books Woodward has written (or co-written) have hit the #1 spot on The New York Times best-sellers list.
By comparison to Woodward's big-shot status, Hersch continued to work in the trenches of journalism, initially at the Times and since 1992 at The New Yorker. Along the way, he has written serious and thoughtful books that have earned critical praise, but not, by and large, Woodward-style best-selling status. Hersh's miniscule sales can be blamed on the fact that his books deal with important but dry topics: for example, Israel's nuclear program and the downing of a Korean airliner by the Soviet military. Yet, at their best, Hersh's books are permanently valuable: If Henry Kissinger is ever prosecuted as a war criminal, the bill of indictment will be a summary of Hersh's 1983 volume The Price of Power.
After Sept. 11, 2001, New Yorker editor David Remnick has made Hersh the magazine's chief reporter on topical issues. In that capacity, Hersh has been phenomenally productive, producing more important articles than any other working journalist.
"It is too early for a definitive assessment of Hersh's work since 9/11, but it's clear that much of it has been superb," Scott Sherman notes. "Hersh's March 17, 2003, article on Richard Perle's business dealings was a direct hit, and led to Perle's speedy resignation as head of the Defence Policy Board. When the Bush administration insisted, earlier this year, that Iraq had received nuclear materials from Niger -- a claim that found its way into the State of the Union address -- the press, by and large, let the claim stand. Hersh, building on foreign press accounts, debunked the story. And Hersh was among the first to shed light on the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which provided key -- and perhaps dubious -- intelligence to the White House on Iraq's weapons capability."
With his recent reports on Abu Ghraib, Hersh is circling back to the dark territory he first uncovered in My Lai: an atrocity committed by U.S. troops. As with My Lai, Hersh deserves credit for his moral courage: While other reporters shy away from the painful truth, he is willing to confront his nation's darkest secrets. (It is worth noting that the CBS television program 60 Minutes II sat on the Abu Ghraib story, and only went public with it when they knew that Hersh's own account was about to be published).
How has Hersh been able to uncover so many stories? In part, he benefits from the fact he's willing to allow the Woodwards of the world to interview the President and the Cabinet. Hersh is more interested in talking to anonymous bureaucrats and middle management types, the people who are likely to know where the bodies are buried.
Hersh and Woodward have a very different relationship with the powers that be. "Seymour Hersh is a liar," President George W. Bush, that beacon of integrity, once said. (This nice quote can be found in Woodward's book Bush at War). By contrast, Bush affectionately refers to Woodward as "Woody."
Like all writers, Hersh is imperfect. Sherman provides a good inventory of Hersh's failings: An abrasive man, Hersh has been known to try to use his journalistic status to bully unco-operative sources. In his campaign against Nixon and Kissinger, Hersh unfairly maligned some of their underlings, notable former U.S. ambassador to Chile Edward M. Korry. Hersh's book on John Kennedy was too salacious and in places poorly documented. In his reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hersh has too often relied on the pessimistic assessment of disgruntled army officers and frustrated CIA agents, making his articles a tad unbalanced.
Yet for all his flaws, Hersh remains that rare figure, a genuine journalistic hero. Throughout the administration of George W. Bush, the U.S. news media have by and large behaved in a disgraceful manner. Cowering in fear of being labelled unpatriotic, the media have allowed Bush and his minions to prevaricate their way into an unnecessary war -- now fully revealed as a foolish and increasingly squalid imperialist adventure. All too many reporters, pundits and editorial boards have accepted fairy tales about weapons of mass destruction and the spreading of democracy into the Middle East. In a low and dishonest era, Hersh has remained faithful to the truth. In a more just world, all the renown enjoyed by Bob Woodward would be possessed by Seymour Hersh.
- Scott Sherman's profile of Hersh can be found at: www.cjr.org/ issues/2003/4/ hershsherman.asp
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