Videoage International January 2019

6 Book Review January 2019 V I D E O A G E By Luis Polanco T raditionally, this feature deals with books about entertainment, the business of show business, and the people behind the scenes of TV shows and movies — not journalism or journalists. But when a book comes out written by one of the world’s most fearless, most forceful, most respected, and most feared journalists, such as Seymour (Sy) M. Hersh, tradition loses out. Thinkof anymajor political incident concerning the United States in the latter half of the 20th century and the outset of the 21st, and it’s more than likely that Sy Hersh was reporting on it. “I will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work,” writes Hersh, whose coverage of issues of national security and the abuses of governmental power has made him known as a fierce investigative reporter. Throughout his decades-long career, he made sure the public heard about such monumental events as the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War (for which his work received a Pulitzer Prize), Watergate, Kissinger’s White House, Korean Air Flight 007, Israel’s nuclear weapons program, Abu Ghraib, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and more. When he first sat down towrite this book, Hersh thought he’d focus on former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. But what emerged instead was a memoir. Reporter (368 pgs., Knopf, 2018, U.S. $27.95) is a sweeping record of his time in the field, starting from the early ’60s to the present day, and reads almost like a how-to book for aspiring journalists. But this information won’t really help today’s younger generation of journalists who work in a media landscape overrun by clickbait, data- driven journalism, and the 24-hour news cycle. For them, the experience of reading Reporter and the events inside will seem remote. In fact, Hersh admits, “I am a survivor from the golden age of journalism.” Today’s press, he believes, is in a sorry state. “We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered nonstop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.” When in the midst of catastrophe, the American media — rather than enlist in his brand of shoe-leather journalism — opts for “the immediate claims of a White House and a politically compliant intelligence community,” Hersh writes. In an interviewwith The Guardian back in 2013, Hersh said, “I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90 percent of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can’t control.” In the same interview, he added, “I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let’s start all over, tabula rasa.” Hersh has often been criticized for his inflam- matory remarks at public appearances, where, when in the moment, his words appear to lack the factual accuracy of his writing, and for his chro- nic use of anonymous sources. But as he attempts to clear up in his memoir, outing the hundreds of anonymous sources cited throughout his re- portage goes against his ethics. As he explains in coming to the conclusion to delay the publishing of his book on Cheney, Hersh writes, “The draft of the book contained much secret information, and I could not justify risking the careers of those who had helped me since 9/11 and earlier.” In his memoir, Hersh may lack some of that consideration for certain individuals. He tells the story of the night before his December 22, 1974 story on the CIA’s domestic spying scandal was published. It was two in the morning. He still needed at least six more columns, and he was desperately trying to get ahold of New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal. He finally called Rosenthal’s private number, and his wife picked up. She told him that Rosenthal had left her for his mistress, so he should locate her in order to find him, and ended the call. Hersh called back, this time to ask if Rosenthal’s wife knew the other woman’s name. “I got an earful, but she was an editor’s wife, and she came up with a name,” Hersh writes. Much of the book is devoted to play-by-plays of his groundbreaking reporting work. He describes long hours spent researching and combing through thousands of documents for that tucked- away detail, a host of back-and-forth phone calls, and hours and hours of time spent traveling for interviews. Each of these recollections glisten with his schoolmasterly proverbs. “I remain convinced that the key to being a good reporter and getting the story is, as I said in these pages, to read before you write, and especially before you do an interview,” he advises. Elsewhere, when recounting his first assignments at Chicago’s City News , Hersh remembers this tongue-in-cheek adage from a senior editor: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Another of his acerbic bon mots concerns the required distance between a journalist and his or her subject. In relating his second departure from The New Yorker , Hersh references the close relationship between the publication’s editor, David Remnick, and former President Barack Obama, on whom Remnick was to write a biography. He writes, “I had learned over the years never to trust the declared aspirations of any politician and was also enough of a prude to believe that editors should not make friends with a sitting president.” Speaking of presidents, it never mattered to Hersh whether the incumbent was red (conservative) or blue (progressive) — he never toed either party line. When Obama entered the White House with the expectation of a change in America’s foreign policy, Hersh observed that, “I was surprised to find that it was no easier to get senior officials of the incoming Obama administration to talk to me, although the President-elect and his men had no hesitation to deal with those reporters inclined to parrot what they were told.” Although this is amemoir, there’s scantmention of any biographical details relating toHersh’s own personal life. Aside from the brief chronicle of his family’s immigrant past and his lower-middle class childhood on the south side of Chicago, there’s very little written on his life outside of work. The few occasions his wife or children are brought up often refer back to whichever story he was working on at the time. For instance, when listening to U.S. soldiers’ accounts of the My Lai massacre of women and children, Hersh momentarily reflects on his own wife and then two-year-old son and he cries, asking himself, “For them? For their victims? For me, because of what I was learning?” Hersh was often on the job, or was at least always thinking about his next story, but it would have been illuminating to know how that affected other areas of his life. There’s much to take away from Reporter ’s dense rundown of the stories that made Hersh’s career as a maverick investigative journalist. As his memoir confirms, Hersh remained a man committed to “telling important and unwanted truths,” and to uplifting those whose voices were downtrodden, often at the price of angering editors or antagonizing the state and politicians in power. Hersh concludes, “I’ve spent most of my career writing stories that challenge the official narrative, and have been rewarded mightily and suffered only slightly for it.” Sy Hersh: A Hard-Nosed Journalist Who Went After Hard News, Not Fake News