Working on the AP’s new investigative team would have been a dream job if I hadn’t been abruptly pulled away from the dream job I had at the Pentagon. I’d emerged from my brief army experience as a private with skepticism about the officer corps; those for whom I worked were either at the end of an undistinguished career or just out of officer candidate school and inexperienced. The officers on duty at the Pentagon were more intense, more ambitious, and more in the world. I learned a lesson as a Pentagon correspondent that would stick with me during my career: There are many officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the Constitution and not the President, or an immediate superior. They deserved my respect and got it. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers.
There was a remarkable group of young reporters who would dominate the coverage in the Washington bureau by the end of 1967. Two of them, Gaylord Shaw and James Polk, would leave the AP and win Pulitzer Prizes for their respective newspapers in the next decade. A third colleague, Carl Leubsdorf, would become the chief political reporter for the AP and move on to have a distinguished career as a bureau chief and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. But those three were not on the AP’s investigative team in early 1967; my new colleagues were strangers to me. It mattered little because I knew enough about myself to know that I was not much of a team player, and the concept behind the new unit was teamwork. I also thought that the initial editor of the group, for whom I’d worked on night rewrite when I first got to Washington, was a misfit—an unambitious, incurious fellow who would take no chances and would not be a success.
I would survive, I thought, if I could get on the road, working on a long-term project that had some connection to the military and would put the Pentagon contacts I had made in play. I had already figured out the core lesson of being a journalist—read before you write—and was a follower of the reporting being done in the news section of Science magazine, a weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In mid-January 1967, a gifted reporter named Elinor Langer published a two-part series on the perils of the Pentagon’s chemical and biological warfare (CBW) research program, whose budget had tripled between 1961 and 1964. The program, centered on the U.S. Army, was responsible for the Kennedy administration’s growing use of defoliants and herbicides in South Vietnam, whose long-term side effects, as I had learned while covering the Pentagon, were not known. Some of the air force units that sprayed the stuff over contested jungle areas and combat zones had a slogan that reeked of sarcasm: “Only we can prevent forests.”
I knew that dealing with the pros and cons of CBW would be a safe pitch to make to my new editor. I assured him that the AP would not be the first to raise the issue; someone else had already done the story in a highly respected magazine, and there was a ton of declassified congressional testimony raising questions about the intent of the program. I got the go-ahead and headed back to the Pentagon, but not to Correspondents Corridor. I went to the Pentagon library with a list of the known army CBW bases, as published by Langer, and tried to dig up copies of the weekly newspapers at those bases. I had written for such a paper at Fort Riley and knew that every retirement party for a colonel or general routinely made it into print, invariably with details of where the old-timer planned to retire. I got a list of names and addresses, made some calls, and took off, full of my customary enthusiasm.
I spent much of the next two months on the road, visiting retirees as well as the small towns that were the locales for the secret CBW laboratories and production facilities. Small towns have newspapers, too, and given that the bases themselves were totally off-limits, those offices were my first stop. I learned about unreported deaths of laboratory workers and delivery boys who had gone into the wrong lab at the wrong time. I also learned about animals infected with the most deadly of diseases that had escaped—in one case to the mountains of Maryland near Camp David, the much-used retreat for American presidents. I was led to a newly retired colonel who had spent his career—much of it filled with doubts about the morality of his work—in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. It did not take long to understand that America was not merely doing defensive research in case of a Russian attack, as constantly claimed—vaccines and all that; additionally, there was an intense drive to develop chemical and biological weapons that had the potential of causing mass destruction.
The scientists secretly involved, I would eventually learn, included some of America’s best and brightest—among them, Harvard’s Dr. James D. Watson, a Nobel Prize winner who was then serving on a secret Pentagon CBW advisory panel. Watson had earlier won fame for his role in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA.
I ended up writing a five-part series for the investigative unit, totaling more than fifteen thousand words that built on the research Elinor Langer had done, and added to it by finding those inside the CBW program who knew that the program had gone way beyond its constantly stated goal of ensuring a defense against a Soviet attack. I turned in the series to the editor of the investigative team with a note summarizing what I found and why the new information was important. And then I waited. A week went by with no word. A second week. I spent the time pretending to be engrossed in researching a new project, but inwardly I was seething. What was up with the son of a bitch? Finally, the editor called me over, reached into a drawer in his desk, pulled out the CBW series, and told me it was much too long. There was no evidence that he had read the material or made any attempt to edit it. I did not know whether he was acting on orders from on high or whether he was going to show the bosses in the bureau that he knew how to handle Hersh.
The bureau chief and others surely knew, as did a few of my pals in the bureau, that I had transgressed two months earlier, shortly after the Vietnamese had ended their weeklong celebration of the lunar New Year. The annual event, known as Tet, was more important, for a week, than the civil war, and a cease-fire was in effect. My walks with Izzy Stone were continuing and had been augmented by occasional dinners with our wives. Stone had talked often of my finding a way to help him get into the AP’s files on the Vietnam War, which included verbatim transcripts of the daily press briefings that took place in Saigon. I had gently asked and was told they were only for AP personnel. I mentioned to Izzy that I was scheduled to work an eight-hour shift on a Sunday night in mid-February, a chore that was rotated among all on the staff. It would be just me and a teletypist in the bureau, with little to do, barring a crisis, except to produce a national weather roundup. Izzy insisted that this was the perfect time for access. We made a date and I opened the office door to him minutes after I arrived. He spent at least six solid hours poring over the daily briefings, taking notes amid yelps of joy. Izzy was an odd-looking duck, short, with thick glasses, unruly hair, and a constantly upbeat manner; he would thank me every few hours and reassure me that he needed nothing—no food or water—and was having a terrific time. At some point I felt I had to explain to the mystified teletypist who he was and what he was doing. Izzy published a piece a week or so later in his weekly newsletter showing that the United States, which heatedly accused North Vietnam of violating the truce, had in fact taken advantage of Tet by vastly expanding the amount of supplies and weaponry it delivered day after day into Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport, with no mortar fire endangering incoming cargo flights. It was typical Izzy, doing what he had been doing for decades: reading and reading and reading before writing. I was thrilled, like a teenager, at being able to help him write it. By opening a door.
In mid-April, my CBW series, shredded down to a single story of slightly more than one thousand words, without consultation with me, ran on the A wire just after midnight on a Sunday morning—the darkest of dark holes for wire service journalism. The lead of the series I had written noted that America was spending $230 million for an aggressive program on CBW research. The lead, as rewritten by someone in the AP, made the same point about U.S. spending but then added that the program was aimed at matching an equally aggressive Russian CBW program. I had no information to support that claim, nor had I made it.
At that point I asked to be reassigned to general assignment. The end was near, I knew, and I made it nearer. I met with Gilbert Harrison and Alex Campbell, the two senior editors of The New Republic magazine, whose stance against the Vietnam War had won a wide audience, and wrote a lengthy lead piece about CBW for the magazine, dramatically titled “Just a Drop Can Kill.” The article, published May 6, listed fifty-two universities and university research centers that were doing work on CBW under military contract. Much of the research was directly linked to the Vietnam War, I wrote, adding that such work also posed a domestic risk: There was a potential for calamity in case of accident to communities near CBW production centers. The article triggered campus protests and some renewed questions from Congress. I understood that I was violating a basic AP rule by publishing outside the news service without permission, and by so doing I put myself at risk of being fired. But it was then for me, and still is, all about the story, and to the credit of the AP’s leadership I heard not one word of complaint about my transgression.
The New Republic articles led to at least two serious offers for me to write a book on the CBW dilemma, and I chose a lesser offer from Bobbs-Merrill, primarily a textbook publisher, because the editor who approached me, Robert Ockene, was likable and knowledgeable. I also felt he had clout as executive editor at Bobbs-Merrill. My wife and I were expecting our first child, and the advance, a mere four thousand dollars, allowed me to cheerfully resign from the AP in June and begin crashing on the book. There was no attempt to keep me on the job from anyone in the Washington bureau. And no good-luck farewell party.
I wrote a second piece on CBW in July for The New Republic, reporting that I had been contacted since the first essay by dozens of campus newspaper editors who, when confronted by denials about dangerous research from college and university officials, wanted reassurance that my list was accurate. It was, and that led to more campus unrest. I also noted in that second essay that none of the major scientific societies had taken a stand for or against CBW. The debate over the morality of such work was spreading beyond the campus, but the debate was a nonissue for the nation’s mainstream media. I was not surprised at the inability of the press to comprehend that America was intent on developing a new strategic weapons system, for I had watched up close as the Pentagon press corps refused to face up to the implications of Harrison Salisbury’s reporting from Hanoi. It was much easier, I understood, to accept an official denial than to delve into a difficult and controversial issue.
I had a multitude of reasons to get the CBW book done quickly, and did so by early winter. Ockene did what good editors do: He emphasized outline and organization, and told me I had to have some idea about how the book would end before I began. The book was scheduled for publication in the spring; it was the first of many books I would write and the only one that was not published on a crash schedule. The last chapter quoted Matthew Meselson, a prizewinning biologist at Harvard, as warning in early 1967 that “we have here weapons that could be very cheap, that could be particularly suitable for attacking large populations, and which place a premium on the sudden, surprise attack….You could almost not ask for a better description of what the United States should not want to see happen to the art of war. And yet of all the countries in the world it is the United States which conspicuously pioneers in this area.” Our first child, a boy, was born that fall, and my wife told me that she wanted to name him Matthew. I thought it was perfect.