I knew that dealing with the pros and cons of CBW would be a safe pitch to make to my new editor. I assured him that the AP would not be the first to raise the issue; someone else had already done the story in a highly respected magazine, and there was a ton of declassified congressional testimony raising questions about the intent of the program. I got the go-ahead and headed back to the Pentagon, but not to Correspondents Corridor. I went to the Pentagon library with a list of the known army CBW bases, as published by Langer, and tried to dig up copies of the weekly newspapers at those bases. I had written for such a paper at Fort Riley and knew that every retirement party for a colonel or general routinely made it into print, invariably with details of where the old-timer planned to retire. I got a list of names and addresses, made some calls, and took off, full of my customary enthusiasm.
I spent much of the next two months on the road, visiting retirees as well as the small towns that were the locales for the secret CBW laboratories and production facilities. Small towns have newspapers, too, and given that the bases themselves were totally off-limits, those offices were my first stop. I learned about unreported deaths of laboratory workers and delivery boys who had gone into the wrong lab at the wrong time. I also learned about animals infected with the most deadly of diseases that had escaped—in one case to the mountains of Maryland near Camp David, the much-used retreat for American presidents. I was led to a newly retired colonel who had spent his career—much of it filled with doubts about the morality of his work—in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. It did not take long to understand that America was not merely doing defensive research in case of a Russian attack, as constantly claimed—vaccines and all that; additionally, there was an intense drive to develop chemical and biological weapons that had the potential of causing mass destruction.
The scientists secretly involved, I would eventually learn, included some of America’s best and brightest—among them, Harvard’s Dr. James D. Watson, a Nobel Prize winner who was then serving on a secret Pentagon CBW advisory panel. Watson had earlier won fame for his role in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA.
I ended up writing a five-part series for the investigative unit, totaling more than fifteen thousand words that built on the research Elinor Langer had done, and added to it by finding those inside the CBW program who knew that the program had gone way beyond its constantly stated goal of ensuring a defense against a Soviet attack. I turned in the series to the editor of the investigative team with a note summarizing what I found and why the new information was important. And then I waited. A week went by with no word. A second week. I spent the time pretending to be engrossed in researching a new project, but inwardly I was seething. What was up with the son of a bitch? Finally, the editor called me over, reached into a drawer in his desk, pulled out the CBW series, and told me it was much too long. There was no evidence that he had read the material or made any attempt to edit it. I did not know whether he was acting on orders from on high or whether he was going to show the bosses in the bureau that he knew how to handle Hersh.
The bureau chief and others surely knew, as did a few of my pals in the bureau, that I had transgressed two months earlier, shortly after the Vietnamese had ended their weeklong celebration of the lunar New Year. The annual event, known as Tet, was more important, for a week, than the civil war, and a cease-fire was in effect. My walks with Izzy Stone were continuing and had been augmented by occasional dinners with our wives. Stone had talked often of my finding a way to help him get into the AP’s files on the Vietnam War, which included verbatim transcripts of the daily press briefings that took place in Saigon. I had gently asked and was told they were only for AP personnel. I mentioned to Izzy that I was scheduled to work an eight-hour shift on a Sunday night in mid-February, a chore that was rotated among all on the staff. It would be just me and a teletypist in the bureau, with little to do, barring a crisis, except to produce a national weather roundup. Izzy insisted that this was the perfect time for access. We made a date and I opened the office door to him minutes after I arrived. He spent at least six solid hours poring over the daily briefings, taking notes amid yelps of joy. Izzy was an odd-looking duck, short, with thick glasses, unruly hair, and a constantly upbeat manner; he would thank me every few hours and reassure me that he needed nothing—no food or water—and was having a terrific time. At some point I felt I had to explain to the mystified teletypist who he was and what he was doing. Izzy published a piece a week or so later in his weekly newsletter showing that the United States, which heatedly accused North Vietnam of violating the truce, had in fact taken advantage of Tet by vastly expanding the amount of supplies and weaponry it delivered day after day into Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport, with no mortar fire endangering incoming cargo flights. It was typical Izzy, doing what he had been doing for decades: reading and reading and reading before writing. I was thrilled, like a teenager, at being able to help him write it. By opening a door.
In mid-April, my CBW series, shredded down to a single story of slightly more than one thousand words, without consultation with me, ran on the A wire just after midnight on a Sunday morning—the darkest of dark holes for wire service journalism. The lead of the series I had written noted that America was spending $230 million for an aggressive program on CBW research. The lead, as rewritten by someone in the AP, made the same point about U.S. spending but then added that the program was aimed at matching an equally aggressive Russian CBW program. I had no information to support that claim, nor had I made it.
At that point I asked to be reassigned to general assignment. The end was near, I knew, and I made it nearer. I met with Gilbert Harrison and Alex Campbell, the two senior editors of The New Republic magazine, whose stance against the Vietnam War had won a wide audience, and wrote a lengthy lead piece about CBW for the magazine, dramatically titled “Just a Drop Can Kill.” The article, published May 6, listed fifty-two universities and university research centers that were doing work on CBW under military contract. Much of the research was directly linked to the Vietnam War, I wrote, adding that such work also posed a domestic risk: There was a potential for calamity in case of accident to communities near CBW production centers. The article triggered campus protests and some renewed questions from Congress. I understood that I was violating a basic AP rule by publishing outside the news service without permission, and by so doing I put myself at risk of being fired. But it was then for me, and still is, all about the story, and to the credit of the AP’s leadership I heard not one word of complaint about my transgression.
The New Republic articles led to at least two serious offers for me to write a book on the CBW dilemma, and I chose a lesser offer from Bobbs-Merrill, primarily a textbook publisher, because the editor who approached me, Robert Ockene, was likable and knowledgeable. I also felt he had clout as executive editor at Bobbs-Merrill. My wife and I were expecting our first child, and the advance, a mere four thousand dollars, allowed me to cheerfully resign from the AP in June and begin crashing on the book. There was no attempt to keep me on the job from anyone in the Washington bureau. And no good-luck farewell party.
I wrote a second piece on CBW in July for The New Republic, reporting that I had been contacted since the first essay by dozens of campus newspaper editors who, when confronted by denials about dangerous research from college and university officials, wanted reassurance that my list was accurate. It was, and that led to more campus unrest. I also noted in that second essay that none of the major scientific societies had taken a stand for or against CBW. The debate over the morality of such work was spreading beyond the campus, but the debate was a nonissue for the nation’s mainstream media. I was not surprised at the inability of the press to comprehend that America was intent on developing a new strategic weapons system, for I had watched up close as the Pentagon press corps refused to face up to the implications of Harrison Salisbury’s reporting from Hanoi. It was much easier, I understood, to accept an offic
ial denial than to delve into a difficult and controversial issue.
I had a multitude of reasons to get the CBW book done quickly, and did so by early winter. Ockene did what good editors do: He emphasized outline and organization, and told me I had to have some idea about how the book would end before I began. The book was scheduled for publication in the spring; it was the first of many books I would write and the only one that was not published on a crash schedule. The last chapter quoted Matthew Meselson, a prizewinning biologist at Harvard, as warning in early 1967 that “we have here weapons that could be very cheap, that could be particularly suitable for attacking large populations, and which place a premium on the sudden, surprise attack….You could almost not ask for a better description of what the United States should not want to see happen to the art of war. And yet of all the countries in the world it is the United States which conspicuously pioneers in this area.” Our first child, a boy, was born that fall, and my wife told me that she wanted to name him Matthew. I thought it was perfect.
· SEVEN ·
A Presidential Campaign
With the book done, I returned once again to the overwhelming foreign policy issue of the time—Vietnam. The war had become a virtual bloodbath for both sides by late 1967, and the growing antiwar movement was desperate to find a way to block the reelection in 1968 of Lyndon Johnson. One fantasy had it that Senator Robert Kennedy of New York would break with his party and run on an antiwar platform against the President in Democratic primaries across America. There was no sign, however, that Kennedy was prepared to take the political risk of doing so. Thus the “Dump Johnson” movement, led by Allard Lowenstein, who also had been in the forefront of the civil rights movement, was in desperate search of a candidate in late 1967, and he was not having much luck.
My wife and I, in need of more space, had rented a small house in northwest Washington that had two immediate attractions: It was a few dozen yards from the entrance to the official residence of the Indian ambassador, and Mary McGrory lived across the street. India was a close ally of Russia’s in the ongoing Cold War and also maintained embassies in Hanoi and Beijing, and its senior diplomats were, by necessity, well informed on America’s progress, or lack thereof, in the Vietnam War.* Mary, then a must-read columnist for the Washington Evening Star, had emerged as a fearless and moral voice against the Vietnam War. She liked the reporting I had done from the Pentagon while at the Associated Press, and, equally as important, she was a good neighbor. She brought dinner many times to us after the birth of our son, and got a martini or two from me in return. One evening she told me that Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, a Democrat from Minnesota who had been raising questions about the war, was going to jump into the race against Johnson. Mary had been close to President Kennedy and was disappointed because Bobby wouldn’t run. Gene was brilliant, but prickly, she said, and would need help with the press and with speeches. Did I want the job?
I didn’t know the senator and knew less than nothing about running a press operation for a presidential candidate. Mary urged me to meet McCarthy and said she would vouch for me and set things up. I had a brief chat with McCarthy the next day at his office in the Senate. It was clear he knew little, if anything, about me, but after some laconic back-and-forth he said I would do and ended the interview. The only word for him was “diffident,” and the only word for me at that point was “nonplussed.” McCarthy’s cavalier attitude toward me made it clear that he wasn’t very interested in a competent, or even halfway-competent, press operation. I had worked closely on CBW issues with the staffs of two liberal Democratic senators from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson and William Proxmire, and knew that the senators took their relationship with the media very seriously. I reported back to Mary McGrory, who told me not to fret and urged me to arrange a meeting with Blair Clark, the former head of CBS News who was going to be—this was all hush-hush—the campaign manager. I had no idea how to reach Clark, a New Yorker listed in the social register, but I did know his son Timothy, who was a reporter in Washington. We had played golf together, and I told him I was interested in being the press secretary. He called his father, who called me. We arranged a meeting at a Washington hotel, to which I brought a satchelful of clips. Blair, like McCarthy, wasn’t very interested in my writing, but he, too, pronounced me hired—“if we can get an okay.” The okay had to come from Abigail McCarthy, the senator’s wife, who, so I would learn, was doing everything possible to micromanage the campaign through Blair and, of course, through her husband. Mrs. McCarthy was very Catholic, very bright—a Phi Beta Kappa who did graduate work at the University of Minnesota and the University of Chicago—a stay-at-home mom, and totally invested in her husband’s career. It was a lethal combination.
McGrory understood that McCarthy’s campaign would be crazed and threw me to the wolves in the hope that I could do some good. I could care less what the senator’s wife thought, and I felt there were two valid reasons to take the job: No other Democrat seemed interested in challenging the seemingly assured nomination of Lyndon Johnson, and anything in public life was better than being yet another freelance journalist. So I signed up as the campaign’s press secretary at the princely sum of one thousand dollars a month. I then learned that most of McCarthy’s Senate aides, including Jerome Eller, his longtime chief of staff, the secretaries, and other minions in his office, wanted nothing to do with the campaign staff. I met with Blair in late November 1967, the day McCarthy announced his candidacy in New Hampshire. There was a stunning lack of interest in the announcement because McGrory, after a chat with McCarthy, had revealed in her column the day before that he was going to run. I probably should have made a run for the hills then, but was told, since I had accepted the job, that my first task was to fly to New York with the now-presidential candidate, who was scheduled to make a speech before an antiwar group.
McCarthy delivered his talk off the top, with no text, and it was riveting. He was challenging the post–World War II assumptions about the inherent power of the President to interfere militarily where he thought fit, and raised an issue that remains relevant today by insisting that the office belonged not to the man who holds it but “to the people of the nation.” We had a senior senator who was a ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee attacking a president from the same party over his unilateral decision to prosecute a murderous war. McCarthy went on to depict the war as immoral, something I never thought I’d hear a politician say. The guy knew his history and had guts, brains, and integrity. He also spoke quietly, with total self-assurance and implicit respect for the intelligence of his audience. He did not hector. My ambivalence evaporated. I had made the right choice.
It was going to be one hell of a job. My appointment had been reported in a brief two-paragraph story in the Times. Soon afterward a reporter named Jack Cole, who worked for the leading newspaper in Minneapolis, called me on the day of McCarthy’s speech and asked me to arrange an interview with him. I was now a real press secretary. I found Jerry Eller, who also had made the trip to New York, and told him of the request. I’ll never forget his answer: “Well, I’ll tell you what you do. Wait until you get two hundred requests and then throw them over the wall to me. We’ll handle them.” I felt it was a make-or-break moment for me in the job, so I shoved my way to McCarthy, who was surrounded by a cluster of adoring fans, grabbed him by the shoulder, told him about the request, and asked when the best time was to schedule the interview. We worked it out. I was at war with Eller, the senator’s staff, and his wife after that, but it was a war of necessity. McCarthy might have been Eller’s man in the Senate office, but he was mine, in a very limited sense, when we were on the road campaigning.
A few days later the senator and I flew to California, a focal point for antiwar fervor. On the flight out I gave him copies of a few recent books critical of the war, with various chapters and pages highlighted. I also gave him some data about local issues that I thought he could use in a speech he was scheduled
to give at UCLA. The idea of writing a speech in advance for distribution to the wire services and local press had not penetrated the campaign, but it was a goal. I saw that McCarthy, like many senators, was a quick study. He raced through the packet of materials I gave him, which included critical essays about the war and a long memo on the constitutional issues raised by the pending trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock, everyone’s favorite pediatrician, and four others who were accused of conspiring to counsel young men to avoid the draft. We talked about the memo, which had been prepared by Michael Tigar, a brilliant Washington lawyer. I worried that perhaps McCarthy had gone through the materials too quickly. After his talk, though, before an enthusiastic crowd that filled more than half of the UCLA basketball stadium, he answered a question dealing with the Spock trial with a brilliant attack on the indictment, based on the Tigar analysis, and a defense of antiwar protests. His support for Spock made the national news that evening.
The contrast between the brilliance of the man and the chaos created by his Senate office was numbing. McCarthy rarely came to the downtown campaign office, and often I would go nuts because his Senate staff would not put me through to him when I called. I would then have to grab a taxi and race to the Senate to get an audience. But he was mine, so I thought, when we were on campaign trips. In those early days, I often was the only aide who accompanied him, and I was a busy bee, constantly giving him materials to read and keeping him up to date on the war and other issues. My diligence and hustle surely bemused him at first, but he soon came to expect a packet of materials from me before every important campaign stop. My travels were made possible by serendipity, in the name of a bright, fast-talking twenty-three-year-old blond ex-UPI reporter named Marylouise Oates, who had been hired by Allard Lowenstein to be Abigail’s press secretary. Oates spent a few days on the job before announcing to me that she was quitting after hearing Mrs. McCarthy express concern about all the “Hebrews” working for her husband. I thought that anyone who could figure out the downside of the candidate’s wife that quickly was worth keeping around, and I hired her as my deputy. I also sensed that the senator could not care less about my religious background.
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