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Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly,
women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years.
"Brad Pitt loved this place," says Hersh with a wolfish grin. "It totally fits the cliche of the grungy reporter's den!"
When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated - the idea of moving all his stuff was too much.
After My Lai, Hersh was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about their scoop, they describe him - the competition. He was unlike any reporter they'd ever seen: "Hersh, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy, showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed, pinstriped shirt that might have been at its best in his college freshman year and rumpled, bleached khakis."
Forty years on, little has changed. Today he is in trainers, chinos and a baggy navy sweatshirt and - thanks to a tennis injury - he is walking like an old man: chest forward, knees bandy, slight limp in one leg. In conversation, away from the restraining hand of his bosses at the New Yorker, the magazine that is now his home, his thoughts pour forth, unmediated. "Yeah, I shoot my mouth off," he says, with faux remorse. "There's a huge difference between writing and thinking."
A Democrat who truly despises the Bush regime, Hersh is reluctant to make predictions about the election on the grounds that he might "jinx it". The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun.
It's amazing Hersh has anything left to say about Bush, Cheney and their antics. Then again, with him, this pushing of a story on and on is standard practice.
Though it was Woodward and Bernstein who uncovered the significance of the burglary at the Watergate building, Hersh followed up their scoop by becoming one of Nixon's harshest critics and by breaking stories about how the government had supported Pinochet's 1973 coup in Chile, secretly bombed Cambodia and used the CIA to spy on its domestic enemies. His 1983 book about Nixon, The Price of Power, is definitive.
So far as the War on Terror goes, Hersh has already delivered his alternative history - Chain of Command, a book based on the series of stories he wrote for the New Yorker in the aftermath of 9/11 and following Bush's invasion of Iraq. Among other things, Hersh told us of the bungled efforts to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; of the dubious business dealings of the superhawk Richard Perle - a report that led to Perle's resignation as chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board (Hersh alleged that Perle improperly mixed his business affairs with his influence over US foreign policy when he met Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in 2003. Perle described Hersh as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist" and threatened to sue before falling oddly silent); and of how Saddam Hussein's famous efforts to buy uranium in Africa, as quoted by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, were a fiction.
Most electrifying of all, however, was his triple salvo on the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It was Hersh who first revealed the extent of this torture, for which he traced the ultimate responsibility to the upper reaches of the administration.
Bush reportedly told Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that Hersh was "a liar"; after the third of his reports on Abu Ghraib, a Pentagon spokesman announced that Hersh merely "threw a lot of crap against the wall and he expects someone to peel off what's real.". This year, Hersh turned his attention to Iran: to Bush's desire to bomb it and to America's covert operations there. But while Hersh believes the President would dearly love to go after Iran, the danger of that happening has now passed.
So he will soon write about Syria instead, which he has recently visited.
Four decades separate My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Wasn't it appalling for him to be investigating US army abuses of civilians all over again? Didn't he think that lessons might have been learnt? Yes, and no. Hersh says it made him feel "hopeless", but on the other hand, war is always horrible.
In 1970, after his My Lai story, he addressed an anti-war rally and, on the spur of the moment, asked a veteran to come up and tell the crowd what some soldiers would do on their way home after a day spent moving their wounded boys. The traumatised vet described how they would buzz farmers with their helicopter blades, sometimes decapitating them; they would then clean up the helicopter before they landed back at base.
:How do you write about that?" he says. "How do you tell the American people that?" Still, it was better to attempt to tell people than to stay feebly silent.
What really gets Hersh going - he seems genuinely bewildered by it - is the complicit meekness of the American press since 9/11. He disdains its failure to question the "evidence" surrounding Hussein's so-called weapons of mass destruction.
"When I see the New York Times now, it's so shocking to me. I joined the Times in 1972, and I came with the mark of Cain on me because I was clearly against the war. But my editor, Abe Rosenthal, he hired me because he liked stories. He used to come to the Washington bureau and almost literally pat me on the head and say: 'How is my little Commie today? What do you have for me?' Somehow, now, reporters aren't able to get stories in. It was stunning to me how many good, rational people supported going into war in Iraq. And it was stunning to me how many people thought you could go to war against an idea."
Seymour Hersh was born in Chicago, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Lithuania and Poland (he has a twin brother, a physicist, and two sisters, also twins). The family was not rich; his father, who died when Hersh was 17, ran a dry-cleaning business.
He went to law school but hated it, dropped out and wound up as a copy boy, then a reporter for the local City News Bureau. He joined Associated Press in Washington and rose through its ranks until he quit for a stint working for the Democrat senator Eugene McCarthy. Pretty soon, though, he was back in journalism.
His wife of 40 years, Elizabeth, is a psychoanalyst. They have three grown-up children.
Hersh was a freelance writer for a new syndication agency when he got wind of My Lai. A military lawyer told him that a soldier at the Fort Benning army base in Georgia was facing a court martial for murdering at least 109 Vietnamese civilians. Hersh headed to Benning and went on a door-to-door search until he found Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr. He asked the former railway pointsman if they could talk, which they did, for three hours.
Calley told Hersh he had only been following orders, but described what had happened (it turned out soldiers of the 11th Brigade had killed 500 or more civilians).
Thirty-six newspapers ran the story under Hersh's byline. Some, among them the New York Times, did not carry the story in spite of the fact that Calley's own lawyer had confirmed it. The scoop caused not only horror but disbelief. Hersh, though, was not to be put off.
"By the third story, I found this amazing fellow, Paul Meadlo, from a small town in Indiana, a farm kid, who had actually shot many of the Vietnamese kids - he'd shot maybe 100 people. He just kept on shooting and shooting, and then the next day he had his leg blown off, and he told Calley, as they medevac-ed him: 'God has punished me and now he will punish you.' " Hersh wrote this up, CBS put Meadlo on the TV news, and finally the story could no longer be ignored. The next year, 1970, he was awarded the Pulitzer.
A low point came in the 90s, when he embarked on a book about Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot.
Hersh was shown documents that alleged the former President was being blackmailed by Marilyn Monroe, and though he discovered that they were fake in time to remove all mention of them from his book, the damage to his reputation had been done - and the critics let rip anyway, for his excitable portrayal of JFK as a sex addict and bigamist. As a Jew, his mailbag since 9/11 has also included letters from readers who denounce him as a self-hater.
Hersh is in his 70s, he can't keep going forever. Or can he?
"I have information; I have people who trust me. What else am I going to do? I love golf and tennis and if I was good enough, I'd be professional. Why shouldn't I be energetic? Our whole country is at stake. We have never had a situation like this. These men have completely ruined America."
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