I’d been a reporter for a decade by the fall of 1969 and somehow had figured out that the best way to tell a story, no matter how significant or complicated, was to get the hell out of the way and just tell it.
My first My Lai dispatch thus began, “Lt. William Calley, Jr., 26, is a mild-mannered boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname of Rusty. The Army says he deliberately murdered 109 Vietnam civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in March, 1968.” I deleted the word “Oriental” in describing the victims after getting assured by an official in Melvin Laird’s office that the army would do the same in its case against Calley. Laird, who would become a good friend after leaving office, did so out of fear—a fear I shared—that the overt racism of the initial charge would lead to random violence against GIs in South Vietnam who had nothing to do with the massacre.
I wrote the story to the best of my ability and then telephoned my editor friend at Life and said it was all theirs, if the weekly moved quickly. The editor called back within a few hours and said no. He had pushed for it, he said, but there was little interest for such a story by the senior management. I had been in touch earlier with Look magazine, another popular weekly that had discussed an assignment for me, and, at the request of an editor there, had written a two-page summary of where I assumed the My Lai story would end up. I called the editor and told him that I had taken it much further than I thought I would and filled him in on the Calley interview. He, too, passed. I was devastated, and frightened by the extent of self-censorship I was encountering in my profession. I feared I would have no choice but to take the My Lai story to a newspaper and run the risk of having editors there turn over my information to their reporting staff: in other words, to be treated like a tipster. In any case, I knew I needed a lawyer to review what I had written for libel. That led me to Michael Nussbaum, a classmate during my year at the University of Chicago Law School. Michael was as brilliant at law as I was opaque, but we nonetheless had become the closest of friends, and he was now a partner in a major law firm in Washington. He was an expert litigator and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War who had just written a handbook on how to avoid the draft legally.
I arrived late one night at his small house in Georgetown just as Michael, then a carefree bachelor, was shooing a woman out the door. He read the story I had written, asked me a series of appropriate questions, recommended some changes that I made, and said, yes, his firm would represent me and stand behind me in case of trouble. There was no talk of fees or obligation. Michael was not new to the world of the First Amendment: His clients included Ralph Nader and a number of Washington Post journalists. He would die of cancer in 2011, after representing me, always successfully, in seven libel proceedings during my career. In an essay I wrote after his death for The New Yorker’s blog, I told of a suggestion that made that first My Lai story work:
I’m not sure how it came up, but it was obvious to Michael that Calley’s interview with me could be legally disastrous for him, in that it would likely contradict what he had told the Army. Michael’s advice was to go back to George Latimer, Calley’s lawyer, and tell him everything Calley had told me.
So I did. Latimer was distraught, and said—how right Michael was—that Calley’s comments to me conflicted with his prior sworn testimony in the military proceedings….If I published the interview this way, Latimer told me, I possibly would be denying Calley his constitutional right to a fair trial. He offered a deal: if I would in some manner avoid saying outright that Calley’s comments were made directly to me…he would go over the story, line for line, and correct any factual mistakes he could….And so George Latimer and I spent a great deal of time on the telephone. He corrected dates, phrasing, the spelling of the names of others involved, etc. He was exceedingly precise, to the point, as I learned years later from an academic’s Freedom of Information request, that military analysts had concluded after publication of the first of what would become five freelance articles on My Lai, that I clearly had access to the most secret of Army files.
Latimer had one more inducement. He told me I could tell editors and reporters to telephone him, and he would confirm that he had reviewed the article and that, to the extent of his knowledge, what it said about his client, Calley, was accurate. He lived up to his commitment, although he and Calley never talked to me again.
David Obst was continuing to urge me to let his tiny news service handle the story, but that, even after the travesties with Life and Look, made no sense to me. I had stayed in touch with I. F. Stone through my recent travails, and he responded to my desperation by telling me that he knew Bob Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, would publish it immediately. (I had written another piece or two for the magazine since the serialization of my CBW book there.) I called Silvers—it was on the eve of the closing of an edition of the biweekly magazine—and so he had me dictate the story to someone there. Under Silvers’s leadership, the magazine had emerged as a voice of the anti–Vietnam War movement, and Bob, when he and I talked, told me how excited he was about the story and was planning to do what he had done only a few times in the magazine’s history—start the piece on the cover. Bob had only one significant editing request: Would I add a short paragraph up high in the piece to explain the meaning of the massacre, in terms of the day-by-day brutality of the war? I was familiar with editors wanting to put their scent on a good story, and laughed him off, saying that surely there was no need to tell readers the political importance of the case against Calley. Bob insisted. I said never. He said he would not run the story without adding the words he wanted me to write. I said good-bye, and that was that.
I was adamant because I knew from my years of being immersed in the war, and the racism and fear that drove it, that the mass murder of civilians was far more common than was known and, most important, prosecuted. We now had a case where the army itself was drawing a line and finally saying, in essence, that there are some actions that cannot be overlooked. There was no way I would let even one paragraph that smacked of antiwar dicta pollute the straightforward report of a mass murder I had written, even if it was to be published in a magazine that was against the war.
The flap with Silvers, someone who was totally on my side, proved to me that there was no way I was going to get the My Lai story published the way I wanted, unless I somehow found a way to take responsibility for publishing it. What the hell, I’d started a newspaper when I was twenty-five years old, and the fact that Nussbaum and his prominent Washington law firm were behind me on libel questions was a good start. I called up David Obst and told him that he had the goddamn story and he’d better not screw it up. I also told him that Dispatch News Service was going to copyright the My Lai story and take full responsibility for publishing it. The newspapers that chose to publish what we wrote would pay a fixed fee for doing so; we settled on one hundred bucks per paper, no matter the size of its circulation—and that would be the extent of each newspaper’s responsibility. I somehow had faith that this twenty-three-year-old who could talk himself in and out of trouble with great charm and pizzazz could pull it off.
There were a lot of reasons I could have been wrong. David had been in the streets during the 1968 Democratic convention and was a veteran of hard-core antiwar activity in Berkeley, California, and while he could rattle off the good, and bad, effects of most street drugs, he was now going to be dealing with the senior editors of America’s largest newspapers—the same editors who had been ignoring the growing antiwar peace movement. In later years he would go on to help Daniel Ellsberg get the Pentagon Papers published, to become a literary agent for John Dean, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, to have his own publishing imprint at Random House, and even to have a role in the filming of Revenge of the Nerds, a cult film of the 1980s. But to convince the executive editors of newspapers to publish a mass-murder story?
In its own way, what David did was as much of a miracle as I had managed in finding Calley at Fort Benning. In his memoir, Too Good to Be Forgotten, published in 1998, David told how he went about selling the My Lai story, beginning early in the morning on Wednesday, November 12, 1969:
I got a copy of a book called The Literary Marketplace, which listed the names and phone numbers of all of the newspapers in America. I opened to A and began calling. It wasn’t until I got to the Cs that I got a hit. The Hartford Current [sic] in Connecticut said they were interested and requested a copy of the story….I hadn’t really thought out how I was going to get it out. I couldn’t just mimeograph it and mail it like I did for our Dispatch stories: it would take three days to reach the Current….Forget it, I’d figure out how to send it later. I had to sell it first.
As David went along, more and more editors were interested, aided by the fact that he could tell editors that the article had been read for libel by Nussbaum and that George Latimer, Calley’s lawyer, had read the story and would attest to its accuracy. One editor he befriended explained to him that my fifteen-hundred-word Calley story could be sent by telex and reach every editor within an hour. Of course, we did not have the money to do so, so the articles, once the editors agreed to read them, went out telex collect.
My only effort to sell the story that day ended in fiasco. I was a good friend of Larry Stern, a star reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post, and he invited Nussbaum and me to meet with Ben Bradlee, the Post’s magnetic executive editor. We arrived just after lunch and met in the tiny office of Phil Foisie, the foreign editor. Four or five editors and reporters gathered around as I distributed copies of the Calley story. There was quiet as all began to read. It was broken by the effervescent Bradlee, who literally flung the five or six pages he was reading at Foisie and said, “Goddamn it….I’ve got hundreds of reporters working for me and this has to come from the outside. Publish it. It smells right.” This was three years before Bradlee’s heroics during Watergate. I could tell at that moment that you either loved the guy or had to leave the paper. (I ended up playing doubles on Sundays with him throughout the 1980s and coming to understand why so many of his reporters admired him.)
Despite Bradlee’s drama queen performance, the Post totally rewrote my story, adding denials from the Pentagon and other caveats, but did put its article on page 1. The early edition hit the street well before midnight. It was an ignoble beginning, made worse when Peter Braestrup, who had been assigned to rewrite my Calley story, woke me up a few hours before dawn to tell me that I was a lying son of a bitch: No one soldier could be responsible for the murder of 109 civilians. It was just impossible. I thought he was drunk, but he might not have been. I had a lot of trouble going back to sleep; I had seen no video or photographic evidence of a mass murder. I would soon learn that the My Lai story made a lot of people irrational. My telephone at home remained listed, as it still is, and for months after the story broke, I got calls from angry officers and enlisted men, usually drunk, telling me what they were going to do to my private parts. Braestrup’s was far and away the most stressful case, especially when I learned of his expertise. He was a former marine officer who had been seriously wounded in the Korean War, and was soon to be the Saigon bureau chief for the Post. I obviously anticipated pushback and anger from many in the government and the military, but Braestrup alerted me to the possibility that my fellow reporters would be equally resentful.
I knew I would survive the criticism from Braestrup and the others. Even today, I have flashbacks on stormy days about the wet and snowy mornings on which I, still in my teens, opened my long-gone father’s store on Indiana Avenue in the dark of a Chicago winter at 7:00, turning on lights and getting ready to deal with laundry and cleaning while sneaking in a few hours of homework for a later class at the University of Chicago. I survived that beginning, and I would survive any criticism of a story I knew to be true. The streets of Chicago somehow gave me a sense of well-being that stayed with me throughout my career and kept me from falling into a funk when my work was being savaged, as it occasionally was.
Obst and I would have no idea whether the fifty or so newspaper editors around the country who bought the story actually would choose to publish it—this was an era long before the internet—until the middle of the next afternoon, when out-of-town newspapers arrived at the newsstand in the National Press Building, where Dispatch now had an office. David created a miracle, and dozens of major newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Bulletin, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, prominently displayed the Calley story on the front page the next day, a few even making it the banner headline. The New York Times did not buy the story offered by Obst, but the New York Post did and gave it dominant play.
The major television networks did nothing with the story, in part because the Pentagon shrewdly refused to make any comment. I was not flooded with the calls that I had imagined would roll in—from energetic reporters eager for leads and from Vietnam vets who had their own horror stories to relay. After a few days, I was reminded of the self-censorship that seemed to dominate the media’s coverage of the war. A few editors, instead of assigning their reporters to dig up more dirt, were calling Obst and asking about follow-ups, and he was making promises of further reporting, to my dismay. There was a lively debate in the British Parliament about the Calley crimes, which was extensively reported by the Times. The only newspaper, in fact, to actively chase the story seemed to be the Times, which sent Henry Kamm, an experienced foreign correspondent, to the immediate area of My Lai, in what once, before the war, had been a beautiful farming community along the South China Sea. He eventually was flown to an evacuation area for the survivors of the massacre and filed a dispatch that was published on Thursday, November 13, quoting survivors as saying that as many as 567 men, women, and children had been massacred by the Americans. There was widespread skepticism elsewhere in the media about my Calley story, with many newspapers—including The Washington Post—noting the hardships U.S. soldiers were having in fighting a guerrilla war against an enemy who posed as farmers during the day. The subliminal message was clear: American soldiers were often in a position where they had to shoot first or become victims. Who was I to make such a harsh judgment about the war?
The breakthrough came Sunday night. Obst, in his zany memoir, vividly recalled the moment:
Sy came over to my house. We were both wondering what to do next—how to follow up. The story…didn’t have as much of an impact as we had hoped. Newsweek and Time both ignored it. We were looking over the ways the various papers had played the story…when Sy spotted another story in the Washington Post. It was an item about a guy named Ronald Ridenhour who had announced that he was responsible for initiating the army’s inquiry. Sy jumped out of his seat and began yelling, “The kid! The kid! The kid!” Suddenly it all made sense to Sy. He hadn’t been able to figure out why the army would air its dirty laundry about the killings. Why had the army charged Lieutenant Calley? Ridenhour was the answer.
Sy got on the phone and tracked the kid down. He planned to take the first flight to Los Angeles to meet Ron, now a student at Claremont College.
What David did not say was that the item about Ridenhour was a one-paragraph AP story, datelined Phoenix, Arizona, attached at the end of a long Post story about the dangers facing American boys in the war. On Monday, I got to Ron’s dormitory at Claremont, thirty-five miles east of downtown Los Angeles, in time for the two of us to have lunch. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, I was the first reporter to actually meet with him. The Times and wire services had chatted with him by telephone, but no one from the Los Angeles Times, the premier newspaper on the West Coast, had deigned to phone him, let alone drive the thirty-five miles to Claremont. Ridenhour and I talked for five hours. Ron had not been at My Lai; he served much of his year in Vietnam in an advance combat unit known as LRRPs, for long-range reconnaissance patrols. He told me he had flown over the My Lai area in late March 1968 and noticed the desolation—“not even a bird was singing,” he would later write—but did not learn what had taken place until late April, when a member of Calley’s platoon told him that few, if any, of the villagers at My Lai survived the onslaught. He was determined to find out more, but realized how dangerous his questioning would be. He told me that he did not take notes as he gathered information, out of fear for his own safety if they were found.
By November 1968, when his tour of duty in Vietnam was over, he had firsthand information from five members of Calley’s company who confirmed the extent of the atrocity. In March 1969, back at his family home in Phoenix, Ridenhour wrote a detailed two-thousand-word letter, replete with names and ranks, about the atrocity and mailed copies to more than thirty officials in Washington. His list began with President Nixon and included fifteen members of the Senate, five members of the Arizona congressional delegation, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of the Army, and three members of the House of Representatives, including the office of L. Mendel Rivers. Twenty-two of the offices later said they had no record of ever receiving Ridenhour’s letter, but the letter worked: The Department of the Army told Ridenhour in April that it had begun an inquiry. The former GI was urged to be patient; his information needed to be corroborated, and it could take many months to do so.
Ridenhour was fearful of a cover-up because he understood that many of those being interviewed—even perhaps some of those who had talked to him—had been participants in the slaughter and would have no incentive to be forthcoming to an army investigator. In late May, he decided he would tell the story of the massacre himself and contacted a literary agent who provided a number of publications with the essentials of Ridenhour’s letter, including Life, Look, Harper’s, and The Washington Post, owners of Newsweek magazine, but none responded. When we talked, Ridenhour recalled the name of the editor at Life who had been contacted by his agent; it was the same editor I telephoned four months later with a separate account of the massacre, as obtained by my reporting. If there is a journalism hell, that editor belongs there.
Ron was open about his failed journalistic ambitions and made it clear to me that he was ecstatic that I, someone he saw as a real reporter, had managed to find Calley and evidence that the army was ready to prosecute him. We both understood that the issue went far beyond Calley and that most of the men in Charlie Company had joined in the killing, and the cover-up. Ron gave me the names and addresses of those witnesses who might flesh out the story and, most important, dug out a 1967 Thanksgiving Day menu of Charlie Company, then training in Hawaii, that included the correct spelling of the unit’s officers and enlisted men. The two veterans I had to see, he told me, were Michael Terry and Michael Bernhardt. Terry was out of the army and living in Orem, Utah; Bernhardt was still a soldier, stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I left to catch a late flight to Salt Lake City, having made a lifelong friend in the courageous and generous Ridenhour, who did make it as a journalist after all and won a George Polk Award in 1987 after a yearlong inquiry into a tax scandal in New Orleans, his hometown. He died at age fifty-two, far too young, after a heart attack in 1998.
I had an address for Mike Terry but could not reach him by phone, and getting to Orem, forty-five miles south of Salt Lake City, turned out to be hellacious. There was a huge snowstorm, and I was driving in the darkness on twisting, snowy mountain roads of which I knew nothing. Lights were out all over the city, whose population then was twenty-five thousand, and I drove around aimlessly until I finally found an open gas station and got directions. The Terry home was extremely modest, made of wood and warmed, as I would learn, by an indoor oil heater. It was close to midnight when I began knocking. A young boy answered. I asked for his big brother, the one who fought in the war, and was ushered inside, no questions asked. A moment later out came Terry, in pajamas. It was as if late-night visitors were the rule in Orem. I told him who I was and about my visit with Calley and the talk with Ridenhour and asked him to tell me what he remembered. “Do you want me to tell you what I told the colonel?” he asked. Yes. Ridenhour had told me that he had been contacted after writing his letters by an army criminal investigator, a Colonel Wilson, who repeatedly urged him not to do what he had done with me—talk. Terry’s next line produced headlines all over the world. “It was a Nazi-type thing,” he said, in describing a ditch in which scores of women and children had been slaughtered. I took copious notes as we talked, while also keeping a wary eye on the parlous oil burner, a reminder of my days in Pierre.
I left after a few hours, grabbed some sleep at an airport motel in Salt Lake City, and called Obst and gave him the go-ahead to alert editors all over the world—we’d had inquiries from abroad—that I had another story in the works. I flew to Philadelphia, drove an hour to Fort Dix, and met with Michael Bernhardt. He talked about seeing more than he ever wanted to see and shredded Rusty Calley’s self-serving story of a major firefight (as did Terry’s account). Ridenhour, Terry, and Bernhardt each recalled—more than that; they needed to share—stunning details of crazed soldiers taking special pleasure in killing little boys and girls by bayonet and other means. It was Bernhardt’s first search-and-destroy mission and he said, “It was as if I’d missed a couple days in basic training and this was the way war was, but they never told me. It was like an old joke: You miss something in second grade and you never learn to spell. I got to see everybody killing everybody.”
Obst sold my second story. It was especially big in London, following the debate over My Lai in Parliament. The Daily Mail headline said, “The Story That Stunned America.” Louis Heren, the American editor for the august London Times, had praised my earlier work on CBW, and my story ran there, on the front page: The Times splashed the Terry/Bernhardt interviews under a triple-deck headline, “US Soldiers Say ‘We Saw Massacre’; ‘Women and Children Shot Down.’ ” The New York Times chose once again not to pay Dispatch one hundred dollars, and so we sold the eyewitness story, as before, to the New York Post. Editors all over America kept calling Obst and asking when the next Hersh story was coming. Given my problems in getting the story in print, I was not surprised that no one else in the American press corps, save for some reporters on the Times, seemed to be chasing the story.
I kept on going. I knew there was yet another story that, so I thought, would end any resistance to the obvious truth of My Lai. Terry, Bernhardt, and other platoon members I had talked with told me about a soldier named Paul Meadlo, a farm kid from somewhere in Indiana, who had mechanically fired clip after clip of rifle bullets, at Calley’s orders, into groups of women and children who had been rounded up amid the massacre. Calley’s company moved on in the late afternoon toward the South China Sea a few miles to the east. Early the next morning Meadlo stepped on a land mine and blew off his right foot. As he was waiting to be evacuated, he chanted, again and again, “God had punished me and God will punish you, Lieutenant Calley, for what you made me do.” Calley was shaken and began screaming for the helicopter. I knew how to spell Paul’s name, courtesy of Ridenhour’s Thanksgiving menu, and I spent hours dialing Indiana information operators, beginning with cities in the north, looking for a listing for Meadlo. I found one in New Goshen, a small village near Terre Haute, and called. It was the right Meadlo residence, and Paul’s mother, speaking in a scratchy southern accent, said it was okay with her if I came to visit, but she had no idea what her son would do.
I don’t remember how I got there—I think I flew to Indianapolis via Chicago and drove east for two hours—but I got to the Meadlo farm midday. It was a run-down mess, with clapboard siding and chickens crawling in and out of torn coops, and lots of obvious repair work had not been done. As I pulled up in front of the house, Paul’s mother, Myrtle, in her fifties but looking much older, came out to greet me. I introduced myself and asked if I could visit with Paul. She pointed to a second, smaller wooden frame house on the property, and said he was inside. And then this long-suffering mother, who did not follow the news and knew little of the war in Vietnam, said it all: “I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”
I began my talk with Paul by asking to see his stump. He took off his boot and prosthetic device and talked openly and with animation about the treatment he had received in the field, in Vietnam, and the long recuperation he went through at an army hospital in Japan. We turned to the day of the massacre. Paul told his story to me without overt emotion; it was as if he’d clicked from on to off. He’d been asked to stand watch over a large group of women and children, all terrified survivors of the carnage, who had been gathered in a ditch. Calley, upon arriving at the ditch, ordered Meadlo and others to kill all. Meadlo did the bulk of the killing, firing seventeen-bullet clips—four or five in all, he told me—into the ditch, until it grew silent. I would be told later by other soldiers that a moment or two after the firing stopped, and the ditch grew quiet, the GIs heard the sound of a child crying, and Calley’s men watched as a three- or four-year-old boy, who had been protected by his mother, crawled to the top of the ditch, full of others’ blood, and began running toward a nearby rice paddy. Calley asked Meadlo to “plug him.” Meadlo, flooded with tears and confronted with a single victim, refused and so Calley ran up behind the child, with his carbine extended, and blew off the back of his head.
I called Obst late in the afternoon and told him to let editors know we had done it again and now had a front-page story for the world—a firsthand account of the massacre, on the record, from a shooter. I spent the night at Paul’s house, with his wife and young son, outlining the story and grabbing a few hours’ sleep on a couch. His wife told me how hard it had been when Paul returned from the war without his right foot, and to a little boy he had never met. He did not talk about his experiences in Vietnam, but he was often uncomfortable around the child. One night, shortly after his return, she said, she woke up to hysterical screaming in the baby’s room. She rushed in and found Paul violently shaking the terrified infant. It had happened before. I could not help but wonder whether Myrtle was referring to Paul’s violence toward his son when she told me that Vietnam had turned her son into a murderer.
Obst, meanwhile, had somehow convinced CBS’s flagship nightly television news show, anchored by Walter Cronkite, to pay ten thousand dollars to Dispatch for an exclusive interview with Meadlo the next night, hours before my My Lai story was to be published. There was a huge argument for television exposure, if Meadlo would agree to do an interview, but it would be completely unethical, in the newspaper world, to pay him to do so. You cannot pay for information that the public has a right to know. I’m not sure Obst understood that, but I did. And so I asked Paul if he would do it, and also made it clear he could not be paid for the interview, and that I and Dispatch would be. There was an inducement: I told Paul that CBS would fly him and his wife to New York City and put them up in a good hotel. I was not surprised when Paul readily agreed; he somehow knew, or sensed, that it was time to open up. I flew with Paul and his wife early the next morning to New York, first class, courtesy of CBS.
In his memoir, Obst somehow managed to gloss over the fact that he had made a commitment to produce Meadlo for CBS before we had a commitment. It was all magical:
As a typical baby boomer, I instinctively knew that nothing was real in America until it was on TV. I picked up the phone and called CBS Evening News. I told them what we had and they wanted it—badly. When I told them that we needed our expenses covered, they hesitated. “We’re not into checkbook journalism,” said the CBS Evening News managing editor. I politely asked him for NBC’s phone number. He asked me where I wanted the check sent.
Sy brought Paul Meadlo to New York. On the way he wrote another installment of the story and we sent it out for morning release to all of our papers….
Sy came over….The phone rang moments after he arrived. It was Abe Rosenthal, head man of the New York Times. I’d sent him a copy of our story figuring they’d have no choice but to run it. It was too big a story to ignore and they were America’s paper of record. Mr. Rosenthal couldn’t have been nicer. He complimented me on the great job Dispatch and Seymour Hersh had done on uncovering the story….Rosenthal continued his banter and then casually mentioned that since the Times was the paper of record, he’d kind of like to have one of his reporters come over and interview our star witness. Sy grabbed the phone out of my hand.
“Mr. Rosenthal, it’s Sy Hersh. Listen, you want an interview with Paul Meadlo? Well, he’s somewhere in New York—find him.” Sy slammed the phone down. I stared at him in awe. He’d just hung up on “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Seconds later the phone rang again. Sy grabbed it.
“Mr. Hersh,” Abe Rosenthal yelled, “do you know who I am!”
“Yes,” replied Hersh and hung up on him again.
That night Paul Meadlo led the CBS Evening News. Mike Wallace interviewed him and Paul calmly told America how he had shot women and children in the ditches of My Lai. It sent a shudder through the nation.
The Times ran an account of Mike Wallace’s interview with Meadlo on its front page the next day, crediting CBS all the way, with no mention of me or Dispatch. I did not care: I was not going to let Rosenthal and the Times turn my Meadlo story into their Meadlo story. I thought I was doing just fine by myself. I would have a testy relationship with Abe Rosenthal and the Times for the next two decades. Paul Meadlo’s confessional did change America, as I and David Obst hoped it would. His CBS appearance was broadcast on November 24; on the same day the Pentagon announced that Calley had been formally charged with the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians. (Richard Nixon chose to announce on the same day that America would unilaterally give up the use, even in retaliation, of biological weapons.)
The harrowing Meadlo account ended the debate, if there was a serious one, about what had happened at My Lai, and it also spawned a wave of Sunday feature stories by journalists about American massacres and atrocities they had witnessed in Vietnam. The one that troubled me the most was filed by an experienced and competent AP foreign correspondent who wrote in great detail of an incident he had witnessed in July 1965, just a few days after a contingent of combat marines hit the beaches in Da Nang, South Vietnam, pursuant to orders from President Johnson. The AP dispatch told how a few marines had gone on a rampage within days of wading ashore and killed a cluster of civilians who had taken refuge in a cave during a firefight. Hand grenades were thrown, and the post–My Lai AP story quoted a marine as calling out, “Whoosh, I’m a killer today. I got me two.” A second marine said, “Kill them, I don’t want anyone moving.” My first angry thought was why hadn’t these stories been published at the time; perhaps doing so would have set a precedent and saved untold thousands of Vietnamese lives. After all, I had gotten tough stories published about the war in real time while at the AP, telling of American bombing of North Vietnam and high-level lying about it. It didn’t take many days for me to be more charitable; my controversial stories had been written in an office far from Vietnam. Publishing a story from the scene about the needless killing of civilians in mid-1965 would have been seen by many as disloyalty, and the reporter’s story immediately debunked by all, including many of the most prominent newspapers.
I continued to race around America well into December, tracking down My Lai participants and witnesses, and produced two more articles on the massacre and its aftermath for Dispatch. There was more than a touch of madness involved. I had arranged to have dinner a few days after Christmas with one of the massacre participants who lived in central New Jersey, seventy miles down the New Jersey Turnpike from New York. My family and I were celebrating the holidays with my in-laws in a suburb of the city. A severe snowstorm hit midmorning, and by afternoon nearly two feet of snow had piled up, with more coming. I took off anyway in my father-in-law’s new stick-shift station wagon and somehow made it to the deserted turnpike and to my dinner, constantly gunning the car through snowdrifts. I had a terrific interview with a former GI who desperately needed to tell the truth; he, like many returning members of Charlie Company, was working a job that required little contact with others. I made it back to the snowy suburbs a few hours before dawn but burned out my father-in-law’s clutch doing so.
I of course had been in touch with Bob Loomis from the moment I found Calley, and there was no question that a book-length study of My Lai had to be written. Thankfully, there would be no book by me on the Pentagon; I had yet to find a penetrating way into the subject. David Obst was desperate to make my participation in Dispatch a permanent one, and he began talking at the end of the year to other journalists, and newspapers—many of them first-rate—about expanding Dispatch into an independent news organization. It was not for me. I spent the next few months writing, tracking down My Lai participants, and continuing to make scores of antiwar speeches at colleges and political events across the nation.
It wasn’t always as easy as the words above suggest. At one point, while writing the book, which was based on scores of interviews with those involved, I wrote Bob Loomis a sad note:
Some will claim that I have attempted to exploit some dumb, out of service, overly talkative G.I.s. But few men are exposed to charges of murder…it is not a “naming names and telling all affair.” In fact, one of the strengths is that discriminating readers will know how much more I know—and did not tell. I’m convinced that to give the name and hometown of a G.I. who committed rape and murder that day, or one who beheaded an infant, would not further the aim of the book. It is an exposé, but not of the men of Charlie Company. Something much more significant is being put to light….Both the killer and the killed are victims in Vietnam; the peasant who is shot down for no reason and the G.I. who is taught, or comes to believe, that a Vietnamese life somehow has less meaning than his wife’s, or his sister’s, or his mother’s.
I believed those words then, and still do, but it was a hard-earned belief. One GI who shot himself in the foot to get the hell out of My Lai 4 told me of the special savagery some of his colleagues—or was it himself?—had shown toward two- and three-year-olds. One GI used his bayonet repeatedly on a little boy, at one point tossing the child, perhaps still alive, in the air and spearing it as if it were a papier-mâché piñata. I had a two-year-old son at home, and there were times, after talking to my wife and then my child on the telephone—I was often gone for many days at a time—I would suddenly burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably. For them? For their victims? For me, because of what I was learning?
I tried to avoid sharing the worst in my speeches, but did not always do so. A long-scheduled talk at Tulane University in New Orleans that winter was preceded by a front-page editorial in The Times-Picayune, the city’s morning newspaper. The editorial was bordered in red—for communist sympathizer, I assumed—and advocated against my appearance. The intervention provoked more interest in my talk, as usually happens, and I ended up speaking to a sea of people in the university’s basketball stadium. I saw a large number of Vietnam veterans in the crowd, easily spotted because they wore faded army fatigue jackets laden with VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) stickers. I was learning more and more about the air war in South Vietnam, and its lack of discipline, and I was more than a little pissed off at the cheap shot in The Times-Picayune, and so I improvised with a purpose in mind.
I began my talk by asking if any of the vets in the audience had served in a helicopter unit that saw combat in 1968 or 1969 near the hotly contested city of Quang Ngai, a provincial capital a dozen or so miles from My Lai. A few hands were raised. I asked one of those vets, at random, if he would come onstage and answer a few questions. He came up. After I assured him I was not interested in his name, he told me that he had been a door gunner on a chopper in the right unit at the right time and at the right place. There were lots of tough operations, I said. He agreed. I suggested he often ended his days ferrying dead and wounded Americans from combat zones. He agreed. And after a particularly horrific day, I asked, what did his crew sometimes do—just to cope with the rage—on the way home? I didn’t do it, he said, but I know what you’re talking about. Is it not a fact, I asked, that choppers in those years and after one of those missions would spot a farmer at work in his field and make a dive toward him? The farmer would begin running, of course, I said, and the pilot, flying lower and lower, would tilt the chopper and try to decapitate him with the propeller blades. There was a long silence. I didn’t do it, he said. I assured him that my questions were not about him but about what the war does to otherwise decent men. Did he have any idea what the choppers, once bloodied, would do before returning to home base? The veteran gave his first extensive answer: He understood that the pilot would land outside the unit’s landing zone and wash the blood off the rotors. Who would do the washing? I asked. I do not remember if he answered my question or if I just went on to say that the chopper pilot and crew would pay local Vietnamese to wipe off the blood. I did not like what I did to the vet, who was stunningly honest, but I wanted to get back, in some way, at The Times-Picayune.
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath, my second book, was published on June 1. Its publication, to the dismay of many at Random House, was overshadowed by Harper’s magazine, which published a thirty-thousand-word excerpt of my book, on a different grade of paper from the rest of the magazine, in its May edition, which appeared weeks before my book was available in bookstores. I knew that Willie Morris, the canny editor of Harper’s, had bought the rights to publish an excerpt of the book from my agent, Robert Lescher, but I had no idea of Morris’s definition of excerpt. Neither, apparently, did my literary agent, though he should have. To further hype his coup, Morris titled the May edition a “Harper’s extra.” My shock was tempered by the fact that there were literally lines of magazine buyers outside drugstores and bookstores on the morning the magazine was released. Morris’s coup left Random House with a sure bestseller that did not become one, but his instinct about the importance of the story was a boon for the antiwar movement.
There was another plus of sorts: I was telephoned a few days after the excerpt was published by Robert McNamara’s twenty-year-old son, Craig, who opposed the war and told me that he had left a copy of Harper’s, with the My Lai story splashed on the cover, in his father’s sitting room. He later found it in the fireplace. (Thirty years later, a senior Pentagon official told me that McNamara had been troubled in 1967 by newspaper reports of American atrocities in Vietnam and ordered the Pentagon’s inspector general’s office to study the issue. The subsequent 208-page study found that a majority of American troops in combat did not understand their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, which set standards for humane treatment of prisoners of war. The report, turned in on August 15, 1967, seven months before My Lai, was ordered rewritten and never published.)
My five pieces on the massacre earned me the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, a rarity for a freelance journalist; as well as a George Polk Award, given by a panel of my peers; the Distinguished Service Award of Sigma Delta Chi (the journalism fraternity); and the Worth Bingham Prize. They also brought me fame and enough money to make a down payment on a small house in Washington. My family were no longer renters. I still wanted a newspaper job, and I had more to say, much more, about the My Lai massacre, how it was covered up, and the many flaws of an internal Pentagon inquiry into the tragedy that finished its work in mid-March 1970. I had been tracking that investigation, known as the Peers Panel, for its director, army lieutenant general William R. Peers, since it began its work in December 1969.
I still had the same dilemma, Pulitzer Prize or not: where to publish and where to work?