Seymour Hersh is the outstanding investigative reporter of his generation. From the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture center , he made a career of exposing things that the U.S. military and intelligence agencies didn’t want the American people to know.
His new memoir makes me feel I wasted my 40 years working on newspapers. I never really got below the surface of things. The world was a very different place than I thought it was.
He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reporting of the My Lai massacre. All he had to go on was a tip that a soldier at Fort Benning had been court-martialed for massacring Vietnamese civilians. He systematically scanned microfilm records of the New York Times and found a short item inside the newspaper about a Lt. William Calley being court-martialed for the death of an unspecified number of Vietnamese civilians.
Later he was told the last name of Calley’s lawyer—Latimer. With that to go on, he was able to locate George Latimer, a returned judge on the Military Court of Appeals now practicing law in Salt Lake City. Latimer confirmed that he was defending Calley, but refused to help Hersh locate him. He finally did by driving into Fort Benning and finding Calley for himself.
What Calley told Hersh was far worse than he suspected at the time, and far worse than I remember it. The massacre was not something that happened in the heat of battle. It was a systematic killing for more than 700 people, including women (after being raped) and babies.
In a follow-up, Hersh learned there was a soldier named Paul Meadlo in Calley’s unit who’d lost a foot to a land mine. He told Calley that God had punished him for what he did, and would punish Calley, too. All Hersh knew was the Meadlo lived somewhere in Indiana. He called telephone information operators in Indiana until he found his man.
His first book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal, was published in 1968, He reported that, among other things, there were some 3,300 accidents at Fort Detrick, Maryland, involving biological warfare research, resulting in the infection of more than 500 men and three known deaths, two from anthrax.
Fort Detrick’s experiments resulted in the deaths in experiments each year of 700,000 laboratory animals, ranging from guinea pigs to monkeys.
The Seventh Day Adventist Church supplied 1,400 conscientious objectors to Fort Detrick to do alternative service in the form of being exposed to airborne tularemia and other infectious diseases. Hersh said that at least some of them had no idea what they had volunteered for or been exposed to.
I mention this because at the time, I was a reporter for the Hagerstown (Md.) Daily Mail, and Fort Detrick was within our circulation area. I had no idea that any of this was going on, and I probably wouldn’t have believed it if I had been told.
Hersh uncovered the facts by first obtaining a Science magazine article that listed all of the U.S. military’s chemical-biological warfare centers in the United States, then obtaining the in-house newspapers for these centers. The newspapers listed retirement parties for officers leaving the service, and Hersh sought them out to interview. Enough of them were bothered by what they had seen to provide the information for Hersh’s articles and book.