The Herald sat down with Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh before his speech Tuesday night.
Herald: Did Abu Ghraib redeem you as a journalist? Are people listening to you more now?
Hersh: I can't change people's perception, but I certainly got more attention. Who wouldn't? It's a hell of a story, and because of the irony of having done (coverage of the 1969 Vietnam War massacre) My Lai, it was an obvious sort of bookend. ...
... But if you look at the stuff I did in the New Yorker in the last 10 years, you'll see I was going after Bush pretty hard, Clinton too, on the bombing in Baghdad and the allegations that Saddam tried to kill Bush and troubles inside the U.N., UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) - you've probably read these stories.I think two months before 9/11, I wrote a long, complicated story about the corruption of Mobil Oil in Russia. That was before Enron. At that time no one could believe a company could be that bad, and then Enron came along and that validated it, but we were already in 9/11.
So I can understand people seeing (a liberal bias), but there've been eight million profiles done on me, and the price of profile writing is the same. I have trouble with the same things and the same old stories always show up. Let's see - I scream at people, I intimidate people, and I just say OK, I did it that way.
Herald: Most of your best-known work has been about the activities of Republican administrations. Do you think Republican administrations are more inclined to secrecy and provide better material for investigative journalism?
Hersh: It's not about that. I thought Clinton was a disaster. It's not about that.
Herald: How will Lebanon change the Bush agenda?
Hersh: Obviously, (Bush) sees a connection between what happened in Lebanon and his democracy, but I wonder. ... You know, today there's what, a half million people in Hezbollah. The Shi'ites march. How's he going to rationalize that? Does that mean if we have an election in Iraq tomorrow it's going to be a Shi'ite republic? (laughs) These guys are off the wall.
Getting back to your question about bias. It's really simple, honestly. I'll tell you what my bias is. It's that I'm really against this war. And then the next question is: How hard is it to be against this war in Iraq? Come on, how hard is it? Is anybody in his right mind - I haven't met many people who aren't against it, including people who are fighting in high levels.
Herald: Which of your stories did not receive the attention you feel they deserved?
Hersh: The McCaffrey story I loved. (On March 2, 1991, according to Hersh's May 2000 New Yorker story, Maj. Gen. Barry McCaffrey ordered his 24th infantry division to attack a retreating Iraqi Republican Guard division after a general cease-fire had been called in the Gulf War. McCaffrey claimed the Iraqis had attacked first.)
But I love all my children, I love them all. It was a great story, but it didn't get a lot of attention. A lot of army officers didn't like what he did. He attacked a retreating army. He's a very bright guy, by the way, and engaging, and very competent, but he did the wrong thing, and a lot of army officers knew it. ...
... It's funny that the story came up before 9/11 ... because a lot of people in 9/11, a lot of people knew me because of that story, a lot of officers I would call up knew about that story, so you never know. The McCaffrey story was an amazing story, longest (published) in the New Yorker since "Hiroshima" by John Hershey. 25,000 words, and it didn't get the bounce. And that bothered me because I wrote about killing 400 Iraqis.
Herald: Are there any stories or books you regret writing, either because of their content or the damage they did to your reputation?
Hersh: No. Everybody's written crappy stories. I regret none of the books, not even the Kennedy book ("The Dark Side of Camelot," 1997). There were stories I wrote in the New York Times that were bad. During Watergate there were things I wrote that were wrong. There's always stories you regret, always things you regret. But not since 9/11.
Herald: What direction will your reporting take now?
Hersh: There's other issues. We still don't know what happened in the (Iraqi) prisons, what happened with the people we captured there that disappeared. Those are the issues I'm interested in.
- Mary-Catherine Lader
