Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  The most important part of my job, from the very beginning, was to file a news summary at 7:00 every morning and throughout the day for UPI’s radio and television subscribers in the state. There was no budget in our small office for a teletypist, so I was it. The only sources of information were our day-old wire stories and the morning edition of the local daily. It was reckless at first, because I had no idea what was news on the plains and what was not. I also had a hell of a time typing quickly enough to keep up with the constant demands of newscasters, who read far more than one hundred words a minute. I could not type half that speed with any accuracy, and I resolved the dilemma by typing a few phrases and then drumming my fingers on the pause key while figuring out what to steal next from the morning newspaper. It did not take more than a few mornings for me to realize that there was little gratification to be had in the job for which I had been hired—to rewrite stories from local newspapers and funnel them to clients.

  I did come, however, to appreciate the many virtues of small-town life. On many mornings the six or seven journalists who covered the statehouse were invited for coffee and donuts with Archie Gubbrud, the sweet-faced Republican governor who would be reelected to a second term in 1962. Gubbrud was a farmer before he went into politics and went back to his farm when his run was over. One of his major accomplishments was to set up a state budget office—more than seventy years after South Dakota had become a state. The governor, without pretension and guileless, was open to any question, including those about the weather and politics. The local hero was not someone who made it to the major leagues or the National Football League but a rodeo rider named Casey Tibbs, who, so I was told, had been featured on the cover of Life magazine. South Dakota was divided between rich farmland that extended east from Pierre to the borders of Iowa and Minnesota and west to the rugged badlands and ranch land bordering Wyoming that was cowboy heaven. It seemed at times as if I was living inside a 1950s Hollywood western with constant political and economic tugs-of-war between the farmers and the ranchers. Pierre and a sister city, Fort Pierre, were separated by the Missouri River, which also served as the dividing line between time zones. In practical terms, it meant that the bars across the river stayed open an hour longer. The young man from Chicago had a lot to learn.

  Social life also was…different. It was a good thing I had a serious girlfriend because the unmarried secretaries and office workers in the small statehouse were clannish and very protective of each other. In practice, that meant if a guy flirted with one or dated one, that was it. You were forever linked. I ended becoming best friends with a group of bachelor lawyers who worked for the attorney general’s office and, like me, did not tangle with the insanity of dating. Weekend nights often were spent with my lawyer buddies in Pierre’s sole bowling alley, and drinking. There were a few married couples who were welcoming and invited me to dinner every week. I became especially close to the family of Dan Perkes, a delightful man who was the bureau chief in Pierre for the Associated Press (AP), UPI’s bitter and far more prosperous and successful rival. It was fun socializing with the enemy.

  It was also fun getting to know the legislators and learning that the cowboys and ranchers who came from the badlands and wide open spaces in the west knew a hell of a lot more about socializing than did the farmers from the east. The good ole boys threw a series of come-one, come-all parties as the legislative season grew near, with sour mash and barbecued venison that never seemed to run out. This city boy heard many strange stories about how to hunt deer, with searchlights blazing away—sure to attract the animals—on the back of a pickup truck packed with shotgun-armed legislators out for the kill. One of the lawyers told me over drinks one night how he ended up working in the statehouse. He was a star high school football halfback who was recruited, all expenses paid, by the University of Nebraska, at the time a football powerhouse. In the fall of his sophomore year, he auditioned for the lead role in the university drama society’s production of Romeo and Juliet and got it. Swollen with pride, he told the head coach about his success and assured him the rehearsals for the play would have minimal impact on his availability for the team. The next morning, he learned that his scholarship had been canceled and he was no longer a duly registered student in the university. He ended up transferring to a state school in South Dakota and, after law school, came to Pierre to work for the attorney general. This was not a story I would have heard at the University of Chicago.

  I had rented a very strange one-room detached cottage—actually more like a shack—a few blocks from the statehouse that included a menacing heater fueled by propane gas. There was a real possibility—to me, anyway—of asphyxiation if the pilot light ever went out. I was constantly checking the goddamn thing that always had to be on, given the subzero weather that often hit central South Dakota. The car I had driven to Pierre was buried under snow by early November, and I did not dig it out until late March.

  It would have been lonely except for the fact that I had a chance to do all of the reading I should have done in college and law school. I spent many late nights reading novels and the collections of Carl Sandburg on Lincoln, Winston Churchill on World War II, and Arthur Schlesinger on Franklin Roosevelt. I would often chat about books with A. C. Miller, the quiet, elderly, and self-effacing South Dakota attorney general. One night someone knocked on my door—it literally had never happened before, nor did it later—and there was the white-haired attorney general, with an apology for disturbing me and an armful of history and legal tomes that he wanted to share. You bet I read them.

  Things would get more energetic once the legislative session began in January. Ever the enthusiast, I found time over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays at the end of 1962 to research and write a four-part series on the legislative history of the South Dakota budget. The crucial issue was whether the state needed to impose a sales tax in order to avoid a deficit. “The legislators have three choices in dealing with the money problem: Raise taxes, drastically slash the budget recommendation, or do nothing until 1964,” I wrote.

  There was not enough time, even with two of us, for me to competently report on the hearings on the sales tax to which I had been assigned and also write and teletype the obligatory news summaries during the day for UPI’s radio and TV clients. More often than not, I would stop by the hearings to pick up the prepared remarks of the various witnesses and legislators and file stories based on those to UPI’s subscribers. The witnesses who spoke off the cuff did not make it onto the wire. I often spent weekends—days when I was presumably not working—digging into issues of statewide importance that I had not been able to fully report contemporaneously. My goal was to get beyond the “he said, she said” message that invariably emerged during legislative testimony. Time was always the enemy, along with the space needed to tell more complicated stories, and the lack of interest in such by many of the UPI subscribers in South Dakota.

  I kept on plugging on weekends, and one of my stories did make a difference—to my career—although I’m not sure it was widely published in South Dakota. I got interested in Indian tribal history in South Dakota, essentially because of an anomaly, so I thought: South Dakota was the home to no fewer than nine American Indian tribes, including the Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux, with leaders who were of heroic stature—among them, Chief Crazy Horse, the Sioux warrior who led the attack against Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn in June 1876—and yet there were very few Indians at work in the capitol, and very little, if any, interest by the legislature in their plight. And what a plight it was at the end of 1962. The reservations were broken, with unemployment in some cases approaching 90 percent and high poverty, suicide, and illness rates. It seemed to me to be racism, only those being discriminated against—unlike in Chicago—were kept out of sight. So I did some interviewing, got someone to drive me to a reservation, and in general did what a reporter should do—but on my own time and my own dime. I have not kept a
file of the stories I wrote—it was impossible to imagine in early 1963 that I would eventually write a memoir—but vividly recall that at least one of my stories on the difficulties of the Oglala Sioux made it onto the pages of the Chicago Tribune, the largest paper, by far, in the region. It was my first big-league play.

  At the end of the legislative session, in March, I told the Chicago office of UPI that I wanted out: The response was an offer to transfer me to its bureau in Omaha, Nebraska. I’d had fun and learned a lot about myself and the wire service business, but it was time to get off the plains and get to a big city, any big city, and do the kind of reporting I knew I could do. In a letter that I mailed in midwinter to Bill Hunt, a Chicago friend (he miraculously saved it), I had complained about the cold—it had been below zero for two weeks—and about the oil heater in my house that was burning more and more raggedly. But I also wrote, “I’ve been here three months and it doesn’t bother me. I like the people and I have some very good friends and I’m me. It’s sort of a pleasure to be what you are and have people leave you alone. First of all, I’m a good newspaper man.” I predicted that there would be job offers in bigger cities and assured Bill, “I will be out of here within one or so months.”

  Dan Perkes of the AP made it easier to leave by promising to do what he could for me in Chicago, and so I resigned, said farewell to my friends, dug out my old car, and headed east.

  *Golf was a most unlikely sport for a ghetto kid from East Forty-Seventh Street to play, but my brother and I had found some discarded clubs, with ancient wooden shafts, while rummaging around in the basement of our low-end apartment complex. We could not have been more than seven or eight at the time, and one of my sisters, I think it was Marcia, took me to play a few times at a nearby public golf course—fifty cents or so for nine holes. I somehow figured out how to play the game and quickly got good enough to enjoy it.

  · FOUR ·

  Chicago and the AP

  I arrived back in Chicago in early April 1963, days before my twenty-sixth birthday, with no job, no money, no place to live, and a car in constant need of repair. I crashed once again in my sister’s basement, slept in for a few days, ate well, and played with my nephews until it was time to go job hunting. I innocently thought my UPI clips, as published in the Chicago Tribune, would be meaningful, but got nowhere at the four Chicago newspapers. I made a call to the Chicago bureau of the Associated Press, and an interview was arranged with Al Orton, the bureau chief. There was paperwork to do and references to be checked, but he hired me. Just like that. I was ecstatic and profusely thanked Dan Perkes. I was convinced it was a letter or call from him that put me over the top. Maybe not. A colleague later told me that at some point shortly before my interview a longtime staff member decided, with no warning, to quit.

  Orton had little to do with the workings of the newsroom. His job was to keep the AP’s newspaper, radio, and television clients happy and to find more markets for the news service. The newsroom belonged to Carroll Arimond, the city editor who let his sharp pencil and his quiet demeanor speak for him. He’d been in the Chicago bureau since 1937 and would stay on the job there until his retirement in 1974. He’d seen it all, including political scandals and horrific crimes. A punk like me would have to prove he belonged.

  My first week was horrendous. I was assigned to what was a new-guy, Tuesday-to-Saturday day shift and spent it, as others had before me, sitting to the left of Arimond—allegedly to get a feel for the rhythm of the bureau. The AP offices, ironically, were in the same downtown office building as the City News Bureau, but with far greater space. There was a separate wing in the office for the photo editor and staff photographers, along with a darkroom. The bureau was a central collection point for what seemed to me to be a confounding maze of desks, reporters, and editors with regional wire stories spewing out of constantly humming Teletype printers. I was figuring all of this out as I sat, mutely, watching Arimond make assignments and edit story after story before they were sent off on the wire. After two or so days, I was given a chance to do what I was hired to do—write a story. Arimond tossed me a four- or five-paragraph dispatch about a fatal automobile accident, as relayed by a regional newspaper in southern Illinois, and asked me to rewrite it for transmission on the Illinois wire. “Make it tighter,” he said. I did my best, buttressing it with a quote from a local traffic cop, and watched, with growing anxiety, as Arimond scratched away at the piece. His edited version began with the name of the victim and then cut to “died in a car crash today near Springfield.” That was it. He chopped all but one or two words in each paragraph and linked them into a ten-word sentence. I did nothing else for Arimond that week.

  Yet I still had some excitement. It was baseball season, and the New York Yankees were playing a day game against the Chicago White Sox, my team, in Comiskey Park on the South Side. The sports department needed someone to call in a running score on the game, inning by inning. I, as the low man on the office totem pole, was it. So I went off to the ballpark early on Friday afternoon, my fourth day at work, with Harry Hall, who had been covering sports and news for the AP for thirty-five years. What fun that turned out to be. Hall, as I learned later, had taken one of the iconic photos of the war years—depicting Sewell Avery, the prominent chairman of the board of Montgomery Ward, being carried, by government fiat, out of his Chicago headquarters in 1944 by two army soldiers. The acerbic Avery had defied a Washington demand that he settle a strike that stopped the flow of war-related goods.

  As we drove to the ballpark, Hall learned I had spent much of my childhood playing baseball and going to games at Comiskey. So he defied the apparent office dicta about being anything but civil to a rookie and told me about one of his early experiences covering the Yankees in Chicago. It was a year or two after Babe Ruth, in his prime, had broken all records for hitting home runs. As usual, the Babe was playing catch in front of the first base dugout before a game. Somehow a kid had gotten past the ushers and was parked near the dugout, constantly begging the Babe to sign his scorecard. The kid was about twelve years old, as Harry told it, with a leather cap and the smudged look of the street. The kid’s mantra, said over and over again, as he waved the scorecard, was “Sign my card, Babe…Sign my card.” He was indefatigable. Finally, after half an hour or so of the bleating, the Babe, totally irritated, told the kid to scram and added, “I don’t sign scorecards, kid. I only sign balls.” With that, the kid flung the scorecard away and, using both hands, emphatically cupped his groin and said, “Oh, yeah. Well, sign mine.” As Harry told it, the Babe fell to the ground in laughter and, once the game began, glanced before each at bat toward the dugout where the kid had parked himself, and could not stop smiling. The mighty Babe, Harry added, went 0 for 4 that day.

  Okay, I told myself, maybe it wasn’t so, but there was no way I could hear a tale like this in Pierre. Working for the AP in Chicago was going to be a kick. So, that Friday night I partied, hard, with some of my old university pals. I woke up in someone’s apartment on the South Side an hour after I was scheduled to spend Saturday sitting next to Arimond. I was a hungover mess, with a filthy shirt and a serious stink. Fresh clothes were in my sister’s basement thirty miles away. I took a taxi to work and slunk into my chair next to Arimond. My reek was impossible to ignore, but he did. For the next few hours he said nothing to me. I said nothing in return and tried to avoid eye contact. I waited until he left for lunch, which he always did before noon, before dashing for coffee. At the least, I hoped he had figured out that the little eager beaver panting next to him all week was not all work and no play, but someone who showed up for work no matter what. He and I would have issues over the next two years. He was a Jesuit-educated Catholic who endorsed the church’s strictures on abortion and other controversial issues, but he kept his religious views out of the newsroom. I respected his integrity and the fact that he never interfered with my reporting, even when the stories annoyed him. I later learned he vouched for me wit
h enthusiasm when the AP was considering my promotion to Washington.

  My first assignment in Chicago was as a night editor on the radio and television news desk. I was more than well trained for the job, which had the luxury of a teletypist. The job involved some creativity. I was to file a running news summary for the AP clients of the local news stories of the day, and also be alert for bulletins and other special events that called for immediate reporting. I was not merely parroting what the local newspapers were reporting, as I had done in Pierre; I was to edit and summarize, in essence, the news for the scores of radio and television newsmen in Chicago who, in many cases, would simply recite word for word on air what the AP was providing. It did not take long before I started playing with language and trying to make stories less programmed and formulaic. I have no idea whether my efforts were successful or even noticed, but I worked hard at making the stories lively, and it was not long before I was pulled off the job and made a general assignment reporter.

  My new job started at five in the afternoon and lasted until one in the morning. The AP had the right to make any use it wished of news articles in the four Chicago dailies, and to my surprise much of the work that was done essentially consisted of rewriting pieces, with credit to the paper involved, for the AP wires. I assumed that the senior editors in New York who controlled the AP’s national and international output would be eager to publish fresh interviews and new data on major stories, and I did all I could to give them what they wanted. And why not take a routine story in one of the papers from time to time and puff it up with whimsy or a pun? Thus, when Sinbad, the lowland gorilla who was the main attraction at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, escaped from his cage and romped around the zoo before being felled by a narcotic, I led my rewritten story with “Sinbad the gorilla nursed a hangover today, just like anyone else not used to being on the town.” I did the same with a report on crime in Chicago; my lead read, “Crime—of all things—is falling off in rough, tough Chicago.” A new skyscraper under construction was to be covered with a new form of steel that would oxidize and turn pretty in Chicago’s dampness and high air pollution. My lead said, “Chicago’s finally found a use for smog. It’s going to make the city’s new $87 million downtown civic center beautiful.” A 1920s ballroom in Chicago closed, and I convinced the night editor to let me flee the desk and take a look. My hokey lead said, “Thousands of Chicagoans, who learned to dance at the Aragon Ballroom, paid dreamy homage to yesteryear Sunday night by waltzing to Wayne King’s soft melodies for the last time.” The stories all got widespread play in the next day’s afternoon newspapers. After a few instances of such silliness, a senior editor in New York began reminding Chicago to add my byline to the stories. The editor eventually made it known he wanted me to get out of the office and find offbeat and feature pieces for the overnight report. I was free to report whatever I wished, within limits. I thought I owned the city.