Illustrations, Reporter

Courtesy of Cindy Zimmerman

My twin brother, Alan, left, and me at about the age of five. Our two sisters, Marcia and Phyllis, five years older, also were twins.

Courtesy of Paul Zimbrakos

The grungy desks at the City News Bureau of Chicago, circa 1960. I began my journalism career there as a copyboy, and the most hated of tasks was to make the top of one of the desks spotless for the day city editor.

Courtesy of Paul Zimbrakos

Celebrating the first edition of the Evergreen Park/Oak Lawn Dispatch in the early winter of 1962. Bob Billings, my partner, who also was my former hard-nosed editor at the City News Bureau, is on the left; Paul Zimbrakos, who worked with Bob and me at City News and volunteered to help put out the first edition, is in the middle; and I am on the right. The fledgling newspaper promised to cover both suburbs as never before, from high school sports to city hall debates.

Associated Press

David Halberstam of The New York Times, Malcolm Browne of the AP, and Neil Sheehan of UPI in South Vietnam in 1963—three magnificent, courageous, and oh-so-young reporters. Neil and David would become fast friends.

My first major freelance article, written in May 1967 for The New Republic, as I was ending my AP career.

Courtesy of Jefferson Siegel

Senator Eugene McCarthy, right, and his supporter Robert Lowell, the poet, during the 1968 Democratic Party primary race. The two men delighted in each other’s company, and I delighted in being a witness to their friendship. The resonance of McCarthy’s anti–Vietnam War campaign was a body blow to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

Courtesy of Marylouise Oates

Marylouise Oates, seen here at an antiwar planning session in late 1967, was my trusted deputy when I ran the press office of the McCarthy campaign. She went on to help organize the major anti–Vietnam War rallies of the next few years.

Ron Ridenhour, in Vietnam in 1970 as a journalist, viewing the aftermath of an American assault in the My Lai area. In late March of 1968, while in the army, Ridenhour had flown over My Lai and seen the destruction and was determined to learn what had happened there. Unlike his colleagues, he chose to do something about the massacre. It was his wave of official complaints that led me to the My Lai story. Ron selflessly stepped back and helped me pursue it. He was a caring man who died after a heart attack in 1998 at the age of fifty-two.

The first page of the original draft of my first article on Lieutenant William Calley, who ordered the killing of more than a hundred innocent Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in March 1968. In November of that year, David Obst, who ran the Dispatch News Service, wired the completed piece to newspaper editors, seeking publication. He somehow succeeded in convincing more than thirty-five editors to pay one hundred dollars for the right to publish the story.

Courtesy of David Obst

The always cheeky David Obst in 1992 with a man soon to be president.

The major play given my second story on My Lai by the London Times influenced many American newspapers to reconsider my stories, which they had initially rejected or downplayed.

The first page of an important chapter from my typed manuscript for my book My Lai 4, edited by Robert D. Loomis and published by Random House in June of 1970.

The wildly successful Harper’s magazine “extra” issue of May 1970 with its almost-book-length insert of My Lai 4.

AP Photo/Bob Daugherty

In the barren Dispatch offices in Washington, D.C., I had just learned, in May 1970, that I had won the Pulitzer Prize for international journalism.

Two months before officially joining The New York Times, I was sent by the paper to North Vietnam after a stopover in Paris. I was the second mainstream newspaper reporter permitted to report from Hanoi and elsewhere in the North in six years. I took this photo of schoolboys having fun with me in March 1972, outside the Reunification Hotel in Hanoi. They were excited to learn I was an American and made it a point to say “Good morning, sir” whenever we met.

At a news conference in 1971, the top men at The New York Times, left to right, executive editor A. M. “Abe” Rosenthal, publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., and general counsel James Goodale—all did their best to look somber after learning that the Supreme Court ruled that the Times could continue to publish the previously top secret Pentagon Papers. It was a decision, I heard more than once, that cleared the way for me and others at the Times to push hard on Watergate and issues of national security.

This is a letter to me from marine lieutenant colonel Edison Miller written in May 1973, after his release from captivity as a POW in North Vietnam. He thanked me for my “frank reporting” on the war. Miller spent more than five years in captivity after being shot down, most of it in the infamous Hanoi Hilton jail.

The strong, silent Major Bo, detailed, clearly against his will, from the army of North Vietnam as my fellow traveler and watcher during my visit to Hanoi for the Times. We ended up as friends, though communication was difficult because he spoke Vietnamese and French and I spoke neither. But his dark eyes did a lot of talking.

This May 11, 1972, interview, datelined Paris, was my first major piece as a full-time Times employee. It was published ten days after I formally joined the paper.

Courtesy of Judy Gelb

My three closest and most adored friends from my Times days: Anthony Lewis as he appeared in the mid-1960s; Gloria Emerson in 1970; and Leslie Gelb when we first met at the Times bureau in Washington in early January 1973.

Courtesy of the Estate of Gene Spatz

My favorite portrait of Henry Kissinger.

A memo to Kissinger from two of his aides meant to spur efforts to officially challenge my reporting on events in Chile. I had written, accurately, that Kissinger, obviously at the behest of President Richard Nixon, was pressuring the CIA to be more aggressive in its activities against the socialist Salvador Allende, who had won the Chilean presidency in 1970.

My December 22, 1974, CIA domestic spying story.

The cover of the program from Bob Kiley’s memorial service in New York City, 2016. He had been a special assistant to Richard Helms, the CIA director, and he had become increasingly troubled by American lying about the Vietnam War and the CIA’s most secret domestic spying program on dissident students. Thinking of his two grown sons who knew little of their father’s CIA years, I decided to talk at the memorial service about how important Kiley’s guidance was to me.

Richard Cheney’s handwritten memo of May 28, 1975, suggesting that the FBI get a search warrant “to go after Hersh papers in his apt.” I had written that U.S. submarines had been in Soviet waters, and obviously it hadn’t gone over well in some circles. Cheney was then an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, President Ford’s chief of staff.

One of many supportive letters David Halberstam wrote to me, with his warning about New York Times editors!

Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz

This photo of me, my wife, Elizabeth, and our two oldest children, Matthew and Melissa, was taken by a young Annie Leibovitz, on assignment for Rolling Stone, after being told by me that my family was off-limits. She shot it early in the morning through a window of our home in 1976, and I had no choice but to reward her cheekiness by letting the magazine publish it.

Two of many letters of praise for my reporting on Watergate from Times colleagues: one from Anthony Lewis sent to Clifton Daniel, then the Times Washington bureau chief, and one to me from Dave Jones, national editor.

Washington, D.C., police photos of four of the key players in the White House, clockwise from top left: Bob Haldeman, John Mitchell, John Ehrlichman, and Charles W. Colson, in 1974 at the time of their arrest for involvement in the Watergate affair.

The front-page Times story on the Glomar Explorer. The vessel was the key element of a $750 million covert CIA program to recover the remains of a sunken Russian submarine that, it was hoped, would contain Soviet codebooks as well as nuclear torpedoes. It was a classic CIA boondoggle.

Associated Press

Sharing a sometimes argumentative panel with William Colby, then the CIA director, at the Associated Press’s managing editors’ annual convention in 1975. I had respect for Colby as someone who understood that the CIA would not survive, given its misdeeds, unless he and other senior agency officials talked honestly and openly, up to a point, about its wrongdoing.

This is one of hundreds of pages I obtained from Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was chief of naval operations in 1972, that described, from the inside, the insane level of bureaucratic turmoil in the National Security Council at a critical moment in the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam. Kissinger and his deputy in the White House, army general Alexander Haig, were constantly betraying each other’s confidences to President Nixon. After retiring, the admiral had the purloined data transcribed. The markings are mine.

Courtesy of Jeffrey Gerth

My wonderful Times colleague and friend Jeff Gerth, whose ability to absorb and recall the most demanding of corporate documents was unparalleled. I had been led to him by aides of Robert F. Kennedy, who told me in 1976 that Gerth was the go-to guy if I was interested in reporting on organized crime, which I was.