We had rented a small condo in a new housing development in Washington’s integrated southwest, and, ironically, our immediate neighbors included Thurgood Marshall, another Supreme Court justice, who, on behalf of the NAACP, argued and won Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that found racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. Other neighbors included a prominent British journalist and the Pentagon correspondent for Time, who would often host what I later learned were off-the-record dinner parties for senior members of the Johnson administration.
Meanwhile, I decided to jump-start my boring job by doing what I did in Chicago—find a story that no one else had and write it while also doing the required rewrites. In early August, six weeks or so after getting to Washington, I tracked down Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, at the time the high point of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The ever-shrewd King told me, and untold numbers of terrified politicians in the South and the North, that he planned within a month to register 900,000 Negroes to vote. He had just finished a tour of Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Washington, he said. “It was my first real hard look at the North. I have seen hundreds of thousands of faces, all expressing a great sense of hope in spite of terrible living conditions…and I do not yet see the kind of vigorous programs alive in northern communities that are needed to grapple with the enormity of the problems.” My story flew off the A wire, and King’s remarks were all over America. No one said boo in my office. A few weeks later, once again on my own, I interviewed Bayard Rustin, a visionary of the civil rights movement in America who was deeply involved in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, when hundreds of thousands of whites and blacks gathered to see King give his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin told me he was going to take the civil rights fight to Congress. The task of integrating schools and getting more jobs for Negroes, he said, “will require votes, planning, and billions of dollars from Congress….Most of the big problems must be solved by moral and financial aid from Congress.” That story, too, made headlines.
I slogged away that summer and fall on the rewrite desk but made it a point to try to reach the key players who were quoted in the various stories I had to rewrite, whether they dealt with a legislative issue, a dispute on military spending, or anything else. My goal was to punch up the story by adding to the inherent controversy, if there was any, or by more fully delineating the issues involved. The high point of my efforts came in late December 1965, after the announcement of a thirty-hour cease-fire in the Vietnam War. Congress was out of session for the Christmas holiday, and many senior administration officials had also left town. There was time to kill on the rewrite desk, so I went on a mini telephone rampage. I cheekily called Vice President Hubert Humphrey at his home in Minnesota and got him—he may have had a hot toddy too many—to talk about extending the cease-fire until Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, which was to begin on February 1, six weeks away. I got calls for peace, with varying caveats, in telephone interviews with John McCormack of Massachusetts, the Speaker of the House; Gerald Ford, the House Republican leader; and Leverett Saltonstall, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was fun to do, made some news, and spread a little more Christmas cheer. The war continued.
My hard work won me a promotion, and in early 1966 I was freed from the overnight desk and put on general assignment. I made a few out-of-town trips to cover conferences at which a major Washington politician, almost invariably Bobby or Teddy Kennedy, was to speak; I also reported for a day or two for one of the AP’s client newspapers that wanted special coverage of a congressional debate about an issue of vital local interest. In all, I covered, when needed, politics, Congress, civil rights—I cared deeply about the difficulties and dangers facing those involved in the civil rights movement—and the inequities and other shortcomings of the draft. In the summer, barely a year after I had come to Washington, I was told that Fred Hoffman, the bureau’s longtime Pentagon correspondent, was going off on a six-month assignment and I was to start working there immediately, under his tutelage, and then take over the beat. At last, I was going to be writing about the rapidly expanding American commitment in Vietnam. I felt strongly even then that the war was the wrong way to confront Soviet-style communism, but I knew I would be able to separate my personal views from my professional responsibility as a reporter.
Most of the correspondents covering the Pentagon had been on the job for a decade or more and saw themselves as military experts. The key, then and now, was access, and the beat reporters had plenty of it. There were cozy and friendly off-the-record meetings with Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who had been secretary of defense since Jack Kennedy took office, and his deputy, Cyrus Vance, a Yale College and Law School graduate who came from a prominent family. There were also what seemed to be almost daily briefings for the press corps by senior generals and officials on all subjects, from Vietnam to social issues; the American military was praised by social scientists for its progressive role in integration and education. Fred Hoffman, as the senior wire service reporter, had earned the right to ask the last question at news conferences and the like; it was he who decided, often on a cue from a press officer, when to end such sessions. As Fred’s replacement, I inherited that responsibility.
I was stunned—even astonished—by the Pentagon pressroom, which had the earmarks of a high-end social club. It seemed stunningly sedate. The correspondents were clustered in an overcrowded ghetto down the hall from the office of McNamara’s press secretary, Arthur Sylvester. The hall was known as the “Correspondents Corridor” and featured photographs of past and present war reporters. Most of the guys smoked pipes, or wanted to, I thought. Len Downie would later tell it like it was in depicting the atmosphere in the pressroom when I arrived there in mid-1965. “Most major stories written by Pentagon correspondents on national issues reflected only the official point of view,” Downie wrote in The New Muckrakers, a study of investigative reporting that was published a year after the Vietnam War ended. “With a few notable exceptions, Pentagon reporters, especially at the time Hersh was assigned there, have seldom tried to balance that view with more critical appraisals from dissenters within the civilian or Pentagon ranks or from expert outside observers.”
I was also as tame as I could be until Hoffman took his leave. By then, the Johnson administration’s commitment of troops and dollars was constantly expanding, amid evidence that the war was not going as well as expected. The number of Americans drafted in 1966 reached a staggering total of more than 382,000, and more than 385,000 Americans were on duty in Vietnam by the end of the year. Dissent was growing on college campuses across the nation. I would learn, after doing the My Lai stories in late 1969, that the wanton murdering of civilians began very early, literally within days of the first marine landing on the beaches at Da Nang in March 1965, but nothing of that sort had been published.
My first break with tradition came early, when Sylvester’s office trotted out a senior marine general who had returned to his staff job in Washington after a short visit to Vietnam. The general was going on and on about the imminent success of the war but made no effort to back up his opinion with a fact. After fifteen or so minutes, it seemed clear to me that the only story that would emerge would be about yet another general claiming victory in the war. Thus, when the officer finished his presentation and asked for questions, I stood up and, invoking my right as the senior AP correspondent, thanked him for his time and walked out. My gesture made it clear that I felt there was nothing to be gained by asking questions, to which he would have familiar answers. There was a moment or so of hesitation, and my colleagues followed me. There was hell to pay, of course, from Sylvester’s office, and muttering about getting me off the Pentagon beat, but I insisted to one of Sylvester’s aides that the briefing had been a waste of time and most of my colleagues knew it, but were too polite to say so.
There was a far more important story hiding, as many stories always do, in the open. It revolved around navy pilot retention in the Vietnam War. America was spending as much as half a million dollars to train each navy pilot in the art of landing on and taking off from aircraft carriers, and as the loss rate in the war grew steadily, pilots were putting in for retirement as soon as possible. The targets were increasingly being seen as asymmetrical, in the sense that their destruction was not of much value to the war effort. One key primitive bridge in Thanh Hoa province of North Vietnam was targeted hundreds of times by navy jets, beginning in mid-1965, with significant losses, before finally being put out of commission in 1972.
I picked up on the official double-talking about the aircraft loss rate shortly after getting to the Pentagon when McNamara announced a $700 million investment in more fighter planes, most of them for the navy. I quoted him as explaining that the navy still had a lower loss rate than expected, but more missions were flying and thus more planes were being shot down. I checked out the McNamara analysis with a staff member of the House Armed Services Committee whom I had met while on the general assignment beat. His informed assessment, based on classified data, he said, was much more direct: “We’re going to lose more Navy planes than we thought.” I reported that.
My continuing interest in the navy losses and McNamara’s dissembling on the subject eventually led me to Clarence “Mark” Hill, a navy captain who was at work on a long-term project for McNamara dealing with the shortage of pilots. Hill’s deputy at the time was a brilliant junior navy officer named John M. Poindexter, who held a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology. (Poindexter’s career would crash two decades later when, as an admiral, he was indicted during the Iran-contra scandals in the Reagan administration.) Hill understood, as I did, that many navy pilots, convinced that their targets in Vietnam were not worth the risk involved, were eager to get out of the service as quickly as possible. It was a story that no one at the top wanted to hear, or have told. But Hill’s office had provided testimony and backup statistical data to a committee or two in Congress, and he pointed me to the right committee and the right set of hearings.
The subsequent series of articles in 1966 for the AP on the navy’s problems with pilot retention marked me to some at the Pentagon, and to some of my newspaper colleagues, as an antiwar activist. In fact, I also learned a lot about military integrity and honor from Mark Hill, who was as conservative as any officer I knew when it came to social issues. Hill fervently objected to the notion that there was something racist in the navy’s tradition of recruiting Filipino sailors to serve as mess stewards for navy officers aboard ship, and he wasn’t sure African Americans would make good pilots. But he also valued integrity and truth, and as such he taught me a great deal about the war.
In the fall of 1966 there had been yet another vicious battle in South Vietnam involving a North Vietnamese ambush of an army company—some one hundred soldiers strong—on patrol. More U.S. troops were ordered in, with even greater casualties, before attack planes and helicopters could drive off the enemy. The newspaper accounts of the battle were grim. I, as the senior guy for the AP, was invited for a midday chat with McNamara and Vance, along with five or six other correspondents from the major media. The two key American officials in charge of the war provided a more positive account: Far more enemies than Americans had been killed, they claimed, and the general in charge of the operation had been given a battlefield promotion from a one-star to a two-star general. McNamara explained that, of course, neither he nor Vance should be cited by name or title in our dispatches, which would suggest the two of them were trying to whitewash a bad day. Thus ensued a brief discussion between some of my colleagues and the men running the war about how best to attribute the information. The reporters seemed glad to help out. It was my first background session with McNamara and I kept my mouth shut. I also followed the formula for attribution that had been agreed to—something like “senior officials said.”
My article was published in time to make the final edition of the afternoon Washington Star, then the main competitor to the more prosperous and highly regarded Washington Post. Late in the day Captain Hill showed up in the doorway of the Pentagon pressroom, caught my eye, and signaled for me to join him in the hallway. As we began walking around the endless corridors, Hill wanted to know where on earth I had gotten the information that was published. I did not hesitate before naming McNamara and Vance. Hill was stunned. He was at that time assigned to Systems Analysis, a special unit set up by McNamara that called for military requirements and issues to be reduced to their component parts and analyzed piecemeal for better understanding. There were senior officers in the military who saw the office as a convenient vehicle for McNamara to avoid relying on military advice. I would learn later that Hill had already been promoted to admiral (it was known as being “frocked” in the navy) and was awaiting the right job, at admiral’s rank, to become available. With that in mind, what he did next took extraordinary courage and involved an extraordinary trust in me. After swearing me to secrecy, Hill put his promotion at risk by revealing that the involved general had been cashiered—summarily fired—for his refusal to understand the ambush as the crisis it was, leading to a feckless decision to order a second company into the ambush in the vain hope of mitigating the slaughter. The second unit had also been mauled, with high casualties. Hill then told me that the cover-up of the debacle included an on-the-spot promotion for the general, who was then immediately reassigned out of Vietnam. It was a farce.
I remember being angry, of course, but also more than a bit frightened: I had no idea of the extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect their losing hand. I was dealing with a dilemma that reporters who care and work hard constantly face: America needed to know the truth about the Vietnam War, but I had made a commitment to an officer of integrity. Of course I kept my mouth shut because my professional, and moral, obligation was to protect Hill. I should note that Hill, who retired as a three-star admiral in 1973, passed away in 2011; otherwise I would have had to ask for his approval before revealing his role in my education as a reporter—an approval that I believe he surely would have given. Hill got the assignment he was waiting for a few months after our hallway chat, as commander of the USS America, an aircraft carrier. He and I would stay in touch for the next four decades.
Even if Mark had given me permission at the time to write what he told me, without quoting him by name of course, it would have been very difficult to do so. I had made a number of visits to his office, and Sylvester had ordered all senior military officers and civilian officials in the Pentagon to immediately report every visit by a reporter. In practice, this meant that if I went to a general on a Tuesday and got some relevant information and wrote about it the next day, Sylvester’s office would know—whether the general was cited in my dispatch by name or not—that the general had most likely been the source. In order to protect that general, or Mark Hill, if he would have authorized me to use the information he had, I would have had to spend days visiting generals and admirals for spurious reasons in an effort to mask the source. The McNamara/Sylvester edict was a huge element in discouraging serious investigative reporting and essentially forced the reporters to rely more and more on officially arranged interviews and the various news conferences that seemed always to be at hand. Sylvester made it easy for the Pentagon press corps to do the minimum. There was an obvious way to beat the system, of course—contacting senior officers and officials at home. In the year I reported from the Pentagon, that seemed to be done rarely.
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IN THESE LAST FEW MONTHS of 1966, I made an important new friend, I. F. Stone. Our first encounter was very typical—for him. My wife and I had been out late on a Saturday night, and the telephone rang early the next morning, before six o’clock. My fear was that it was an AP editor in New York asking me to check out a military story published somewhe
re in the world. That happened far too often. Instead, the caller introduced himself as Izzy Stone and asked if I had seen the fascinating story on page whatever it was in either The Philadelphia Inquirer or The Baltimore Sun. Izzy, I soon learned, got up early on Sunday morning and drove to a downtown newsstand that sold national and international newspapers. This call was his way of telling me that he had seen something in my reporting that suggested I might be a kindred soul, in terms of being more than a little bit skeptical of the reporting on the Vietnam War. Izzy was fond of long walks, and we soon began taking them together. We talked incessantly about how to do better reporting, and I was in the hands of a master; it was to the shame of the mainstream media—and my pipe smoker colleagues in the Pentagon pressroom—that his biweekly reports and analyses, as publisher of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, were viewed as little more than a nuisance.
The most telling crisis of my young career took place at the end of the year. On December 12, 1966, Harrison Salisbury of the Times arrived in Hanoi; he was the first mainstream American journalist to be granted a visa since the marines had invaded the South. Two days later he wrote about seeing evidence of massive American bombing in Hanoi, with obvious civilian casualties. The Pentagon’s response was immediate and fierce: categorical denials of any American bombing inside the city limits of Hanoi, along with a suggestion, widely repeated in the press, that Salisbury and the Times were serving as propaganda agents for the enemy. I was going to the briefings with “American officials”—usually one or two of the men at the top—and reporting their anonymous denials, which eventually included the hard-to-fathom notion that any damage to civilian structures in Hanoi had been caused by errant anti-aircraft missiles that had been fired at American bombers by the North Vietnamese.
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