Slamming Sy

Sy Hersh has a somewhat mixed legacy. It is fair to say that he created what we today call 'investigative reporting,' when he broke the story of My Lai in 1969. It would also be fair, at least in my estimation, to say that he has in later years allowed himself to get carried away as evidenced by some of his Abu Ghraib reporting and more especially in his Kennedy-bashing tome, The Dark Side of Camelot . See here for an example of what I'm talking about.

While I'm given to slamming Uncle Sy, such criticisms could be classified as casual--not in-depth and elaborate. I leave that to the professionals. And according to Chris Suellentrop, Uncle Sy has a really big mouth.

What Chris examines is the difference between Seymour Hersh the writer and Sy the speaker. Seems that Sy says alot of things that Seymour could never get away with writing:

There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001.

Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.”

Are you kidding me? "I can't stretch the truth when I write because I might get sued, but I can say whatever I want when I speak. " Never mind the credentials as a so-called leading investigative journalist. Flat out irresponsible.

Am I jumping to conclusions when I write that statement? Possibly, but I find it hard to believe that there are stronger motives for getting things right in print than the spectre of a libel suit. The difference between the written and spoken standard here is huge, and like I said, irresponsible.

Still, what’s emerged from Hersh’s numerous speaking engagements—dozens of speeches last year, he says, which have drawn as much as $15,000 per university lecture—is a vast, tantalizing trove of what might be termed Hersh apocrypha: unpublished tales of official screwups, ideological intrigue, cover-ups, and government lies that have an influential—and growing—public life of their own.

Irresponsible behavior, complete with examples:

It doesn’t take much prompting for Hersh to supply an example of the sort of story he keeps out of The New Yorker’s pages but will discuss freely elsewhere. He tells me a long tale of the ghastly killing of some Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers. He frames his account as a hypothetical set piece: “You’re a soldier on a patrol . . . and you see people running, and you open fire, okay? . . . Maybe they were bad guys, but then they run into a soccer game.” He gradually modulates the story to its climax: “You’re a bunch of young kids. And so maybe you pull the bodies together and you drop RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and you take some photographs about it because you’re afraid you’re gonna be investigated. And maybe somebody there tells me about what happened.”

Moving back into straight, declarative talk, Hersh lays out how this no-longer-quite-so-hypothetical scenario shaped his on-the-job news judgments. Investigating the tip, he discovered that, even though the photographs he obtained of the incident could suggest a terrible lapse of responsibility in the field, there was nothing here to qualify it as a Hersh story. “It was stupid, it was wrong, it was terrible, but it wasn’t murder. Do I write that? No. I don’t write that. Because then six, eight, ten American kids who did nothing but panic, and did what anybody would, would get in trouble. Do I have some photographs that are interesting? Yes. Do I publish those? No.”

But does he talk about it? Sure. Did this event happen? Who knows? Hersh never subjects these sorts of stories to any kind of public truth test, but he bandies them in his lectures, as part of the ongoing effort to bring his speaking audiences closer to that other reality of the Iraq War.

The most egregious example of Uncle-Sy-out-of-control, in my opinion is this one. Suellentrop delivers a direct quote from Uncle Sy about his behavior in information gathering for the My Lai story:

When Hersh was pursuing the My Lai story, he tracked down the lawyer of William Calley Jr., the man later convicted of participating in the 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians. Hersh intentionally inflated the number of deaths for which Calley was charged, in order to get the attorney to tell him the correct number, 109. A few years ago, Hersh told a crowd at Duke, “a word for what I did—an actual word, it has three letters—it’s called ‘lie.’”

Inexcusable. The man's defining moment as a professional journalist and it's built around a lie? When I read this for the first time, it stopped me in my tracks. How can you take what he says seriously in light of such an admission? Suellentrop stops short of where I land:

Few would argue that Hersh’s impropriety should diminish the astonishing coup and public service of bringing the My Lai story to light.

But I would be one of them. Slamming Uncle Sy does not diminish the facts of what he found in this or any specific case. However, his irresponsible behavior in terms of his approach and his loose-tounged oral arguments is inexcusable as far as I'm concerned for a journalist with his credentials.

If Sy wants to speak truth to power, by all means go right ahead. But make sure it's truth and not a lie.