My first day as a New York Times man was Monday, May 1, 1972, and I spent it at the newspaper’s headquarters on West Forty-Third Street. I was to stay most of the week in the third-floor newsroom to meet the editors and my fellow reporters and get a feel, from the inside, of the energy that went into every day’s edition. I had not been in a newsroom since I fled the AP in 1967, and I hung around the foreign desk early that morning, listening to the editors check in with their foreign correspondents to discuss story ideas and begin shaping the next day’s news. I played it cool and spoke only when spoken to, but it was a long way from my days covering midwinter manhole fires for Bob Billings at the City News Bureau.
The news from Vietnam that morning was grim. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, whose political wing was known as the National Liberation Front (NLF), were continuing to make headway in their monthlong offensive and were sweeping down Highway 1, the main north-south drag, toward Saigon. Abe Rosenthal rushed up to me late in the morning and asked if I had my passport with me. I said of course not and his answer was out of a Ben Hecht play, something like “Go home, get it, pack a bag, fly to Paris, talk to the North Vietnamese delegation at the peace talks, and find out what the hell is going on.” I was taken to an office and handed an American Express credit card, an international air travel card, and a list of telephone numbers that would help in case of trouble.
Abe apparently assumed that my reporting on My Lai would guarantee me access to the Vietnamese. I wasn’t sure of that, but I did exactly what Abe wanted. Paris meant a late-night business-class flight from Washington to Paris, a plush room at the five-star Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, a visit to the Times bureau, and my first meeting with two brilliant journalists, Anthony Lewis and Gloria Emerson. They took me to lunch at an offbeat joint near an outdoor French market, and we talked and talked about the war, about the paper, and, of course, about Paris. (Gloria later took me to lunch with Mary McCarthy, the famed novelist who hated the Vietnam War, as did Gloria, and was then writing incessantly about it.) Gloria and Tony would become dear friends and comrades in arms fighting the war inside the Times, but it never occurred to me that I would outlive both.
I had alerted someone I knew in Hanoi’s delegation to the United Nations of my trip to Paris, and shortly after my arrival I was invited to an off-the-record lunch—a commitment that is sacrosanct, or should be, in my profession—with Nguyen Co Thach, a senior deputy to Le Duc Tho, Kissinger’s counterpart at the talks. There were many reasons to agree to what could be seen as a courtesy meeting with the American journalist who had just returned from Hanoi. I was sure I would be told details of the current stalemate that were not publicly known, and at a minimum I would be able to privately fill in Rosenthal and the foreign desk about the impasse, as seen from the other side. The Times always had access to Kissinger, as Thach and his colleagues surely knew. I also guessed that at some point there would be at least one on-the-record meeting between me and a senior member of the opposition while I was in Paris, and what I learned from Thach would enable me to ask far more pointed questions.
The public dispute at the time between Washington and Hanoi still revolved around Hanoi’s insistence that President Thieu had to be replaced before serious talks could begin. The reality was that the war was being won on the ground by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong and no amount of American bombing and support for the outmatched and beleaguered South Vietnamese army was going to lead to a change in policy. The leaders of the North and Vietcong believed their people could withstand the American bombing and they were going to win the war. My extensive discussions two months earlier with Ha Van Lau and Hoang Tung in Hanoi had also left me with a solid understanding of their willingness to suffer to win the war.
I worked around the clock during my week in Paris. There was a large Vietnamese expatriate community there—perhaps as many as twenty thousand, some of whom supported each side—and their leaders had lots of contact with the North and South delegates to the peace talks. I shared terrific Vietnamese meals with as many expat leaders who would see me and wrote a story about the community, and the split therein, before leaving Paris. I was granted a background talk with a significant North Vietnamese official at his delegation’s villa at Choisy-le-Roi, a Paris suburb. It was a kick listening to him as chickens cackled in a courtyard somewhere behind us. A background conversation, however, didn’t do for the Times foreign desk. My story about our conversation, with its new details about the impasse, would have made headlines if I could have named the official, but it was shunted to an inside page, where it belonged. I needed Le Duc Tho or someone of equal stature to give me the lowdown on the record. I’d had a coffee a few days earlier with someone known to the Times to be a well-informed member of the CIA station in Paris who was undercover as a consular officer. (Such info was one of the perks of being a Times man.) I told him what I thought was going on, and he, understanding I would not attribute any information and insights to him, gave me an honest, and negative, view of the prospects for a breakthrough in the talks. I of course had requested a meeting with Kissinger or one of his deputies at the peace talks, but it was not agreed to; Kissinger, I would learn, chose to do much of his talking, on background, with James Reston and Max Frankel.
On May 8, President Nixon responded to the on-the-ground military success of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong with expanded bombing of the North and a warning that the American escalation would include the mining of harbors in North Vietnam and an all-out effort to prevent the shipping of war goods from China and Russia to the North. He also called for an immediate cease-fire throughout Southeast Asia and the release of American prisoners of war in exchange for a commitment to withdraw all American troops within four months. I sensed I was going to get what I wanted even before I was granted an on-the-record interview two days later with Mrs. Nguyen Thi Binh, the charismatic head of the Vietcong delegation to the Paris talks. Madame Binh, as she was known, tore into Nixon and what she called his “speech of war” and mocked his conditions for a settlement—in the face of a successful enemy offensive—as even more bankrupt than previous offers.
Madame Binh’s criticism was unrelenting, and the story I filed later that day was equally so; I included none of the usual verbiage from Kissinger or someone in the White House suggesting that the President’s proposal offered a route to peace. The interview led the paper the next morning with a four-column headline, “Vietcong Turn Down Peace Plan,” and there was no effort by the editors to mitigate the Vietcong’s ferocious response to Nixon. I wrote a few more stories from Paris about the ongoing talks, including an analysis of the prospects for peace. Such opinion stories, not based on a specific news event, were known as Q headers inside the paper; they had rarely, if ever, been done by a reporter less than two weeks at the Times. I had made my presence known on the paper with a perhaps unprecedented splash, and I understood that Abe Rosenthal had made it happen. The paper’s coverage of the war itself, and the lack of progress, led by David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Charley Mohr, and others, had always been edgy, skeptical, and brilliant, and Rosenthal wanted more of the same from the Washington bureau. I sensed he was beginning to turn on the war and wanted his Washington bureau to do so, too, and I was to be his vehicle for change.
I finally got to my nirvana in mid-May: the Washington bureau of the Times. The city was humming with presidential politics. Many reporters were out of town, and I was given a temporary desk next to a longtime reporter for the paper, one of the few people actually at work in the bureau. There were a few pieces of mail for me and a large carton, full of books. It was from Erik Erikson, the famed psychologist and psychoanalyst whose first major book, Childhood and Society, with its concept of an identity crisis, had seemingly been on half the reading lists of the courses I took during my years at the University of Chicago. Erikson was preparing a series of lectures at Harvard and wanted permission to quote from my description, in the opening chapters of My Lai 4, of the slow descent into hell. It was not a surprise that Erikson was able to perceive what I had tried to do, aided by some sage advice from my psychoanalyst-to-be wife—describe without using any psychiatric or medical terms how a group of American kids could end up doing what they did at My Lai. I quoted Gregory Olsen, of Portland, Oregon, describing his shock soon after arriving in Vietnam when he and his colleagues “saw an American troop carrier drive by with ‘about twenty human ears tied to the antenna. It was kind of hard to believe. They actually had ears on the antenna.’ ” I wrote that a few weeks later “the company began to systematically beat its prisoners, and it began to be less discriminating about who was—or was not—a VC [Vietcong].” I quoted Michael Bernhardt, who grew up in a suburb of New York City, who said that the company’s officers thought that “everything that walked and didn’t wear any uniform was a VC.” It would take three months for Calley’s GIs to morph from occasional violence, always unpunished, to the massacre. In anticipation of my agreeing, Erikson wrote, he was sending me autographed copies of his published works. I was floored: Erik Erikson wanted to quote from my work.
Washington, amid an unpopular war and with a disliked president, was teeming with stories, and within a few weeks I was in the middle of a good one. Many in the military and Congress were mystified in early June by the sudden dismissal and demotion of General John Lavelle, who ran the air force’s bombing operations in the war. Four-star generals rarely got fired in wartime, and the Pentagon, which announced his firing and demotion, was refusing to answer questions from Representative Otis Pike, a Democrat from New York and former marine pilot who was a member of the House Armed Services Committee. I got an early taste of the power of the Times when Pike, who was convinced there was much more to the story, telephoned me—I did not know him—and urged me to find the mysterious Lavelle, who had gone into hiding, and get the truth.
No one in the media had interviewed Lavelle, and officials in the Nixon administration were not talking. The action against him was unprecedented in modern military history: Lavelle had been summarily fired and demoted one rank, but he had not been prosecuted. I’m not sure how diligently anyone in the Washington press corps worked the issue—summer was coming—because it turned out to be easy to track down the guy. All generals have a personal aide or two—bright young captains with ambition—and Lavelle, in his climb to four stars, had served in many commands in Washington and abroad that published telephone books; I knew how important military telephone books could be from my reporting on My Lai. Sure enough, I found the names of a few captains who had served as his aide over the years, and one of them, now a major, was on duty in the Pentagon. I telephoned the major at home, explained that I was a reporter for the Times and wanted to find Lavelle and get his side of the story. Being direct with someone in the military, I’d learned, invariably produced a direct answer. The officer, who was as curious as Otis Pike about what had happened to his former boss, gave me the general’s home address and telephone number in suburban Maryland.
I reached the general by phone the next morning and, as he lamented to an air force historian six years later, “conned” him into meeting with me. My memory of our talk is much different, of course. Four-star generals do not get “conned” or bullied into an interview. In fact, Lavelle readily agreed to meet me at a local golf course later in the day. I found him there with his two sons practicing on the driving range and I joined them. After a while, he asked his two sons to wait in the car, and we went into the clubhouse for a beer. I remember Lavelle took a big swig out of a bottle of Miller High Life, and I figured what the hell and asked right off why he was fired but not court-martialed. I’ll never forget his answer, given with a smile: “When was the last time a four-star general was court-martialed?” At that moment, I began to like him. He said he would tell me what happened if I did not directly quote him, since he had been cautioned not to speak publicly for fear of undermining the war effort. Because of that issue, he said, he could not tell me the truth on the record. I agreed and was glad I had done so, for the truth was startling: The war was going badly, and he had been fired for ordering the pilots in his command to bomb strategic targets in North Vietnam that were not on the approved target list. He added that everything he did was known to all in the chain of command, who looked the other way when the unauthorized bombings became known inside the government. He had taken it on the chin for the war effort. I told him I had to raise the issue of higher authority and somehow suggest in print that he had attacked unlawful targets at the request of someone high up in the Nixon administration. Jack Lavelle knew that I was referring to Henry Kissinger.
My dispatch was splashed all over the front page of the Sunday New York Times a few days later under an imprecise headline stating, “General Bombed in North Before President’s Order.” Some of the targets struck by Lavelle—anti-aircraft missiles, fuel depots—were no longer restricted by the time I got into the story. There were rules authorizing air force pilots to take aggressive action if attacked by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft rocket fire or if there were signs of radar activity at the North’s more sophisticated and more lethal surface-to-air missile sites. The procedure was known as protective reaction. Lavelle’s pilots had been cheating for three months—bombing with or without a prior enemy response—before getting caught. This was at a time when all air operations over the North were under constant monitoring. There was something wrong with the Lavelle story, as I wrote: “Was it possible for a battlefield commander to grossly violate operation orders and not be detected for three months?”
All reporters operate on instinct, and I was convinced that this guy was straight; there was no way he would cheat so egregiously without knowing that he was doing what a higher authority wanted. My job, so I thought, was to find out who at the top had pushed Lavelle to violate the rules. I had flown to New York on Saturday morning to go over a proof of the story with Lavelle and to reassure him that he would not be directly quoted in the next day’s story. He took no issue with what I had written and even added an illegal target to the list I read to him. He had forgotten to mention it earlier, he explained. He was not ashamed of what he did.
I felt I was Abe Rosenthal’s hired gun and therefore free to make a crusade out of the Lavelle story. I wrote seven more articles about the issue in the next eleven days, aided by similar accounts from three present and former air force veterans who served under Lavelle in the Seventh Air Force. I had been given their names and contact information by an airman who was still on active duty in Southeast Asia. A former sergeant named Michael Lewis, then a student at the University of Michigan, who had been a photointerpreter in Lavelle’s command, described the activity as little more than a cover-up of obvious wrongdoing throughout the air war. That story led me to other photointerpreters who said that they were involved in the cover-up of as many as twenty illegal raids a month on off-limit targets in North Vietnam. I was contacted by a few Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who wondered, as I did, whether Nixon and Kissinger were somehow involved. A disheartened air force lieutenant on active duty then formally filed court-martial charges against Lavelle and held a news conference in Washington to voice his anger at the official cheating and breaking of rules. By now the story was getting widespread newspaper and television coverage, and the Times editorialized the next day that the officer’s charges should impel Congress “to take a harder and deeper look” at the Lavelle case.
My work brought me into contact with usually reclusive John C. Stennis, the conservative Democratic senator from Mississippi who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. I didn’t know Stennis but sensed that he would be appalled by the cheating that was going on, and keep his concerns to himself, just as I had correctly guessed years earlier that L. Mendel Rivers, the conservative chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, would be troubled by the massacre at My Lai. I was told Stennis was an early bird who got to his office by 7:00 a.m., so I called at that time one weekday and he answered the phone. He had been following my stories, and he and I began a series of early morning telephone conversations that went on for years. He would talk to me, he said at the beginning, about the Lavelle matter and my splurge of stories about it if we kept what was said between ourselves. It was reassuring to know that Stennis was deeply troubled by the command-and-control issues involved, especially because, as he said to me one morning, we were in a war that he thought had to be won. He said he was going to authorize hearings on the case and wanted me to know that if I kept going on the issue, as he knew I would, my Times stories could—I cannot forget these words—“destroy the Pentagon.” I suspected then that he knew that Lavelle had been given authority to conduct the bombings. It was a bit hard to fathom, given his reputation as defender of everything military, but Stennis repeatedly encouraged me to write the truth as I knew it.
The Lavelle story lingered through the end of the year. The Senate held a series of public hearings in the fall, and Lavelle finally acknowledged, during his testimony, that he had received higher authority. All above him in the immediate chain of command—the air force chief of staff, the army general in charge of the war effort, and Mel Laird, the secretary of defense—denied in subsequent testimony that they had any knowledge of Lavelle’s actions.
Decades later, the real story emerged in the White House tape recordings and it was ugly. In February 1972, Nixon had ordered his generals, through Kissinger, to expand the air war by bombing North Vietnamese anti-aircraft missile sites at will. By then, as Nixon and Kissinger knew, Lavelle had been attacking those sites, without a formal order, for months. On June 14, 1972, two days after publication of my first article on the issue, Nixon was upset about the leak of the illegal bombing and about Lavelle’s firing. “I just don’t want him to be made a goat,” he told Kissinger. Twelve days later, with the first stories about the Senate hearings, Nixon again expressed guilt about Lavelle and told Kissinger, “I just do not feel right about pushing him into this thing and then he takes a bad rap.” Kissinger urged him to stay out of it, and Nixon agreed to do so, saying, “I want to keep it away if I can, but I do not want to hurt an innocent man”—it was as if he had no power to intervene. Lavelle was drummed into an early, and unfair, retirement.
I was never in touch with Jack Lavelle again—he passed away in 1979—but his wife and two of his children did occasionally write to me, including a son who told me that he was one of the two boys who had waited an hour in the family car as his dad and I talked at the golf course. In late October 1972, when it was clear that there would be no absolution for his father, the oldest boy, Jack Lavelle Jr., wrote me a note that I will keep forever. “It is amazing how things can be distorted in the free press,” he said. “I guess that implies freedom from accuracy and license to accuse from the hip if you’re aiming below the belt. Gen. Lavelle didn’t ask for mercy, just honesty. You were fair and honest…didn’t moralize or make implications. On behalf of my family and myself, I thank you…for your impartial hard work.” One letter like that in a decade is all a reporter can ask for.
My initial splash of Lavelle stories ended in late June, just as the first Watergate story broke in The Washington Post. By then, I had been moved into the bureau’s foreign policy cluster and was sitting across from Bernard Gwertzman, the very competent point man for stories involving Henry Kissinger and his National Security Council (NSC). There was a near-daily ritual involving Bernie that stunned me. On far too many afternoons around 5:00, Max Frankel’s secretary would approach Bernie and tell him that Max was at that moment on the phone with “Henry” and the call would soon be switched to him. Sure enough, in a few moments Bernie would avidly begin scratching notes as he listened to Kissinger—he listened far more than he talked—and the result was a foreign policy story that invariably led the paper the next morning, with quotes from an unnamed senior government official. After a week or two of observing the process, I asked the always affable and straightforward Bernie if he ever checked what Henry was telling him with Bill Rogers, the secretary of state, or Mel Laird at the Pentagon. “Oh no,” he said. “If I did that, Henry wouldn’t speak to us.”
Frankel was paying little attention to me, but I worked closely with Bob Phelps, the deputy bureau chief and a wonderful editor whom I came to trust totally. I continued to focus on everything that was wrong with the war, and Frankel seemed to have no issues with that. I wrote a few front-page stories that summer about the CIA’s alleged role in running drugs as part of its covert operations in Southeast Asia, as reported in a new book by Alfred McCoy, then a graduate student at Yale University. An academic publishing a book is one thing, but for the Times to give wide exposure to his findings was unexpected and traumatic for the CIA. As a result, I received a visit from a senior officer in the Directorate of Operations—the Agency’s so-called dirty tricks bureau—who could not quite understand why I published such stories given that the Agency had denied it all. It did not help, I guess, that I had quoted a former CIA officer with years of experience in Vietnam as saying that McCoy’s work was “10 per cent tendentious and 90 per cent of the most valuable contribution I can think of.” It was clear that from the CIA’s point of view I was running amok.*
In early July, I wrote an article that led the paper about the Pentagon’s previously unknown cloud-seeding program in Southeast Asia whose goal was to create storms that would hinder, so the military hoped, enemy troop movement and suppress anti-aircraft fire. It turned out, as I wrote later, that Secretary of Defense McNamara had in 1967 ordered an end to such efforts, whose long-term impact on the environment was not at all understood. The Pentagon, however, continued to seed clouds until late 1971. There was another summertime series of articles dealing with allegations that the United States was targeting dikes in North Vietnam. In fact it was the anti-aircraft sites built on top of the dikes that were the targets. In late July there were more front-page stories based on testimony from war veterans who told of knowingly targeting North Vietnamese and Vietcong hospitals. I wrote a long piece for The New York Times Magazine about the exploits of a former air force captain who had spent eighteen months working out of a secret office in Laos on the clandestine bombing campaign there. The magazine, like the daily paper, was totally supportive of me. The headline of the story was “How We Ran the Secret Air War in Laos.” By the end of the summer I had become the point man for those in the military and, more important, for those inside the CIA who were troubled by what they knew.
I was making Rosenthal happy—and more than a little anxious about my personal politics. At one point in the fall, while visiting the Washington bureau, he snuck up behind me, ruffled my hair, and said, “How’s my little commie?” He then added, “And what do you have for me today?” It was his way of telling me he knew I was keeping my personal politics out of my reporting. There was always residual anxiety about those of us on the paper who were open about their dislike of the war. At one point in the mid-1970s, with Saigon on the verge of falling to the North, I was going to lunch in New York with Gloria Emerson, Tony Lewis, and Richard Eder, a brilliant colleague who shared our feelings, and we bumped into Abe and Arthur Gelb, the city editor, who was Abe’s close friend. “Ah, the cell is meeting,” Gelb said. My hatred of the Vietnam War stemmed not from an ideology but from what I had learned in reading and reporting on it—on-the-job training, in a sense.
I stayed busy and kept the hell away from the Watergate story. I knew nothing about the Nixon White House or the presidential aides who worked there. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post whiz kids—neither one was thirty years old in 1972, and I was all of thirty-five—were onto an issue that I felt could doom the Nixon presidency. The Times Washington bureau, though, was doing little on the story. Frankel and his senior editors seemed unperturbed as the Post kept on banging away. Gwertzman told me more than once that summer that Frankel and other higher-ups in the bureau had been assured by Kissinger that the Post was making a huge mistake in pushing the stories by the two young reporters. There was nothing to it, and the Post would be embarrassed.
The tension between the Washington bureau and the home office in New York had been the stuff of gossipy magazine and newspaper reports for nearly a decade, but I did not understand the depth of those feelings until 1980, when Harrison Salisbury, who spent more than twenty-five years at the Times, wrote Without Fear or Favor, a book on the paper’s history that he described as uncompromising. By the end of the day on Saturday, June 17, 1972—the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington took place early that morning—the Post, Salisbury wrote, had eight reporters assigned to the story. At the Washington bureau of the Times,
no alarm bells rang….Not many members of the forty-man Washington bureau worked on Saturdays. It was an assignment everyone tried to avoid. They wanted to be away for the weekend, to their houses in the West Virginia hills, the Blue Ridge of Virginia, the eastern Maryland shore, or by mid-June in Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket where half the staff spent the summer….Nothing was more un-chic than to stay in grubby Nixonian Washington over a weekend at any time from June 15 to September 15. Nobody worth knowing possibly could be in town.
Salisbury was exaggerating, of course. Frankel had brought a bunch of first-rate young reporters onto his staff—among them, Walter Rugaber, John Crewdson, and Christopher Lydon—who were chasing the Watergate story, but the Post had the inside track and was holding it dear. Salisbury’s mean-spirited words were imprecise, but the gist of what he wrote was not. Abe Rosenthal was enraged and embarrassed by the success of his main competitor, and changes were coming. I knew nothing of this.
THAT FALL, after a family vacation that included a visit with Erik Erikson and his son Kai, then teaching at Yale, my merry way with the Times got more complicated. I was continuing to report on the Senate hearings on the unauthorized bombing issue, watching sadly as one senior general after another dissembled in a successful effort to put the full onus for the unauthorized bombing on the disgraced Jack Lavelle. By then I had become friendly with Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers fame, and he, as one of Kissinger’s early advisers, told me that the Pentagon, at Nixon and Kissinger’s insistence, had systematically bombed Cambodia in secret for more than a year in an effort to deny the Vietcong a sanctuary. I talked to former Kissinger aides who knew the story—the illegal bombing would later become an item of impeachment for Nixon—but none of them would go on the record. I was aware that someone had to be quoted by name to enable the Times to publish a story of such import within two months of an election that Nixon was heavily favored to win.
I was invited to a dinner hosted by one of Eugene McCarthy’s Irish Catholic cronies from the 1968 campaign, a retired senior operative for the CIA. I had made contact earlier with a number of former and present CIA officers with a story or two to tell; the fact that I was able to publish the critical stories I had in the Times obviously was a factor in their coming to me. I asked my host at one point during the dinner—there were a few other old hands from the Agency there—about the CIA’s highly secret plans to use a salvage ship owned by Howard Hughes to recover a Soviet submarine, with three nuclear warheads aboard, from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. I used the then current code word for the operation and the table froze. My host responded that he hoped I would not write the story until the mission was completed.
Washington certainly worked in strange ways, but the dinner table confirmation enabled me to go back to those former agents, who shared a lot of disturbing information with me, with renewed confidence in their status as insiders; an inevitable fear for any reporter who is critical of his government’s policies is being fed a false story that would be professionally catastrophic. I resolved early that I would never publish information from someone on the inside without verifying it elsewhere, even if a second source insisted I had to pretend that he did not exist. Abe Rosenthal made a point, after I was hired and began writing inside stories for the Times, to speak privately to me and ask for the names of all of the sources involved, including those not cited in any way by me. I had no hesitancy in telling all to him. In some cases, the unnamed source was a senior official in the White House or even in the CIA. One source led to another, and I learned of three major issues that were creating controversy inside the Agency, led by Richard Helms, the urbane old-timer who meshed brilliantly with the Washington establishment. One involved the recovery of the downed Soviet submarine, an operation whose budget was estimated at $750 million at a time the federal government was cutting back milk subsidies for public school lunches; the second dealt with the CIA’s frantic efforts to undermine the government of Salvador Allende of Chile, a socialist who was unafraid to speak out against American foreign policy; and the third was total dynamite—the existence of Operation Chaos, a secret project authorized in 1967 to collect intelligence inside the United States on anti–Vietnam War protesters and other suspected dissidents. Such activity was in direct violation of the CIA’s charter, which explicitly forbade the Agency to operate inside the United States.
The stories would take time, lots of it. I understood that going that deep into the Agency was a hell of a lot more complicated than writing about the unfair cashiering of a general. I had relied on Bob Phelps to keep Frankel aware of what I was doing, but the CIA was a formidable target, and I wrote a long memorandum to Frankel about the three stories, explaining what I knew, what I needed to know, and something about my sources. I did not remember that Frankel had published a series of articles in early 1972 about the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, obviously with a great deal of help from Kissinger, one of which told how Nixon had successfully resisted pressure from the CIA to be more aggressive in opposition to Allende. Even if I had recalled the stories, I would have sent the memo; Frankel was far too bright and competent not to realize that stories evolve.
A month went by with no answer. I kept busy in the interim. I had gotten to know and respect Mrs. Cora Weiss, a leading New York City activist against the war who, through her contacts with the North Vietnamese, had become a funnel for mail to and from the American prisoners of war in Hanoi. She filled a natural void, since the U.S. government refused to acknowledge the North and thus was unable to handle mail for the prisoners. In September, Cora flew to Hanoi to accept in her care three American prisoners who had been released by the North. She was accompanied by Mrs. Minnie Lee Gartley, whose son, navy lieutenant Mark L. Gartley, was one of those released. The flight from Hanoi stopped in Moscow, and from there the five of them flew on a commercial flight to New York, via Copenhagen. I was invited by Cora to join the group in Copenhagen. The Times allowed me to do so, and I was able to spend useful time with the former prisoners and also witness a very tense standoff at John F. Kennedy Airport after the regular passengers had departed. The three men were to go directly to a nearby military hospital for evaluation, and a team of Pentagon officials, on edge because the prisoners had been freed by Cora Weiss, and not by the U.S. government, boarded the plane to begin the process. Mrs. Gartley stunned all by insisting on taking her son home for a few days before he was to report to the hospital. A senior Pentagon official angrily told her that the lieutenant, prisoner or not, was still a navy officer and was obligated to go where he was ordered. At that, Mrs. Gartley burst into tears, and said, “I haven’t cried since the day you called me and said my son was shot down.” As I watched and took notes, another senior Pentagon official whispered to me, speaking of the Pentagon’s insistence that Gartley could not go home with his mother, “I told them not to do it.” I of course began my story for the next morning’s Times with Mrs. Gartley’s tears.
A few days later, I wrote a far more significant dispatch, based on information I learned in talking to the pilots en route from Copenhagen, about the high standard of discipline that was being maintained among the prisoners in Hanoi, including an internally adopted code of conduct. I coordinated closely with the Pentagon in preparing the article, as any journalist would—hundreds of Americans were still in captivity—and many of the ingenious ways the prisoners found for communicating with one another remained a secret.
My first six months at the Times had been exciting and I was proud of the work I did, but I understood I was still on the fringes of even more significant stories. An air force general bombing unauthorized targets and a mother crying for her prisoner son made great reading, but there was, so I was learning, another level of Nixon and Kissinger wrongdoing in foreign policy. Woodward and Bernstein were continuing to make headlines in their relentless hunt for the Watergate truth, but I still wanted no part of a story those two owned. I knew nothing of the war between Washington and New York over Watergate coverage, but I was convinced that the three stories I had proffered to Frankel would be as important, if not more, than the continuing Watergate saga. There was a secret world in Washington, and I wanted to write about it.
I finally got my answer from Frankel late in the fall. In a one-paragraph memo to “sh” from “mf,” I was told that my story ideas were interesting and should be written in a single dispatch that described the lengths the national security establishment had gone to to protect American interests and monitor Soviet gains in technology. Be sure to run it by “Henry [Kissinger] and Dick [Helms],” Frankel wrote. I was crushed, and then horrified, and then realized that if I could not find a way to get what I knew into the newspaper, I would have to resign. Run it by Henry and Dick? They were the architects of the idiocy and criminality I was desperate to write about. I could not imagine how a senior editor, one as bright and supportive as Frankel had been, could not grasp the implications of what I was proposing. (I would be even more confounded by Max’s indifference when I learned later of the pressure he was under because of the bureau’s failings on the Watergate story. My stories offered the guy a chance to show New York, at a difficult time, what his bureau could do.)
I do not remember whom in New York I bitched to, but I was bitching aplenty. It may well have been something I said to Bob Phelps that made its way north. In any case, in the midst of my doldrums, I got a call from Clifton Daniel, a senior Times editor who was primarily known to me as the husband of Harry Truman’s talented daughter, Margaret. I recall the gist of the one-way conversation well: “Sy, this is Clifton Daniel. I know you’re unhappy but don’t go anywhere. I’m coming down—this is private—to run the bureau in a few weeks, and I promise that you will be able to write any story you have.” A few days later it was announced that Max was moving to New York to become Sunday editor of the newspaper, a job that got him out of Washington and put him in the running to eventually become the executive editor, the top job that every editor on the newspaper, for reasons I could never fathom, dreamed about. How could anyone want to edit when there was so much fun to be had reporting? I stayed put.
Clifton was a North Carolinian who was always gracious and polite. It would be hard to locate anyone on the newspaper, or perhaps on the planet, who could be more of a contrast than I was. He always dressed well and oozed charm and very pointed humor. At an end-of-year reception for the staff and families, I introduced Clifton to my wife and he said, with a big smile, “Oh my, Mrs. Hersh. You have my heartfelt condolences.” A few days later he walked into the newsroom and dumped half a dozen boxes full of Brooks Brothers shirts and sweaters on my desk and said only, “Dress better.” As different as we were, we had two things in common—a love of stories that pained Nixon and Kissinger, architects of a mutually despised war, and two young children of the same age, all of whom adored McDonald’s. The two of us eventually set up a standing date to take our children there on Saturday mornings, and occasionally to a very bad kiddie movie. I would be dressed as I usually was, in a T-shirt and chinos, and Clifton was always in a suit. The odd couple.
Just before the end of 1972, with Nixon reelected by a landslide—his opponent, the liberal Democrat George McGovern, won only 37.5 percent of the vote—and the Democrats in total disarray, Clifton gave me the bad news: Abe Rosenthal wanted me to drop my obsession with Vietnam—an obsession I thought Abe shared—and focus on Watergate. Nixon may have won, I was told, but Abe was convinced the story was far from over. There would be investigations not yet envisioned, and he did not want Ben Bradlee to continue humiliating the Washington bureau as many in New York were suggesting. I protested but Abe insisted he was doing me a favor by giving me a chance to show the newspaper world that my skills went beyond trashing the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about the White House or the Watergate story, other than what had been published.
Over the Christmas holiday Abe had made another radical move, hiring Leslie Gelb to begin work in January 1973 as a reporter in the Washington bureau. I knew Gelb as someone who had worked as director of policy planning and arms control for the Pentagon and also served as director of the top secret Pentagon Papers project that was authorized by Robert McNamara. Earlier, while working on a doctorate at Harvard, Gelb was a teaching assistant for Henry Kissinger. I had interviewed him while he was at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, about the Paris peace talks, about which he was knowledgeable and helpful. It all sounded pretty bad to me, especially because he had never worked for a newspaper and had worked on the war.
Gelb was assigned a desk a few feet from me, and he turned out to be the most fun-loving guy I had met on the newspaper. He was brilliant, no fan of the war, and innately suspicious of Kissinger—although respectful of Henry’s intelligence and cunning—and understood the soul of bureaucracy in a way no one who spent his life as a reporter could. If I learned of a new highly secret document, Les would get it within a few weeks. He was a marvel. We became fast friends and active pranksters. I not only had a bureau chief who would have my back, but I had a new best friend.
All I had to do was figure out Watergate, six months after Bob and Carl had done so. That story, by the end of 1972, seemed to be at a dead end. In fact, it had just begun.
*In a critical study of American global power published in September 2017, McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, recalled an important role—not remembered by me—I had played in initially getting his book published. Cord Meyer, the deputy director for covert operations, had gone, very early, to McCoy’s publisher, Harper & Row, in New York, and asked that they not publish it. Harper & Row refused, but did agree, to McCoy’s horror, to allow the CIA to review the manuscript prior to publication. At that point, McCoy, as he wrote, went to me: “Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day that the CIA courier arrived…to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm and his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship soon appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead….The book was published unaltered.”