city. this is an hour and 45 minutes. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening. [applause] good evening. that is more like it. good evening. my name is paul holdengraber. i'm the director of public or grams here at the new york public library done is live from the new york public library. as all of you know my goal here at the library is to make this heavy institution levitate and make it dance. and so please do have seymour hersh back. he was here last with chris hedges two years ago in may 2016. after that visit, he discovered the abe rosenthal archives here

and it changed the course of his memoir. as always i'm grateful for the continued generosity of celeste backhoes ménage and adam birders. tonight is closing night and it has been quite the season which opened in closes tonight with seymour hersh. i would like to mark this occasion by thinking the new york public library team. in no particular order, but with gratitude i would like to thank fay rosenfeld breland grove and, kerry welch, chan ho dish, serena rocco, arden ambra said, alison paul, melissa novak, emily poland, david mackey, max clarke, richard schnur as well as the wonderful curators who have shown our special guest

things of great beauty and relevance before they inspire them further. i would also like to thank the guards at the library as one is our wonderful team from park blvd. tonight i would also like to thank all of the wonderful people, personnel and paul bogart. tonight we celebrate the just published memoir of sey hersh is simply called "reporter." sey will sign books after a conversation. it is not in my habit to really read blurbs, but this one is quite extraordinary. it is a blurb to speak on the book. this blurb is by john recarey and says this book is the central reading for every journalist an aspiring journalist world over. quite an endorsement.

now, i also would like to give you a sense of just how extraordinary this book is and how beautifully it is written, by reading to you the first paragraph in the first sentence of the second paragraph, which would you -- which you will see is very important. the first paragraph goes like this. i am a survivor from the golden age of journalism when reporters for daily newspapers did not have to compete with the 24 hour cable news cycle, when newspapers were flush with cash for from display or advertisements and want ads and when i was free to travel anywhere, anytime for any reason with company credit card. there is a sufficient time for reporting a breaking news story without having to constantly relay what was being blamed on the newspaper webpage. there were no televised panels

of experts and journalists from cable tv who began every answer to every question with the two deadliest words in the media world, i think. we are stuck with fake news, hyped up an incomplete information, delivered nonstop higher daily newspapers. our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media and our president. this is the next important first sentence. yes, it's a mess. [laughter] [applause] now, in closing, i wondered if you were applauding yes it's a mess, if you are applauding the fact that it is one or that sey wrote that. sey wrote on the second page of

his memoir, he says my career has been all about the importance of telling important and unwanted truths in making america a more knowledgeable plays. we have given our lives to the new york public library spring 2018 closing night. the hope for these 15 titles of unwarranted truths. now, many of you know that for the last seven or eight years i've been asked in my gas to give me a biography of themselves in seven words. seven words that might define them, a haiku of sorts. my favorite for the moment apart from my own, which i got for my mother, said that when it was 11 years old that we had two ears and one mouth, which said seven words do not yet define me. but i think my favorite one for

the moment is sey hersh's favorite words. would you like to hear them? it's fun rounding up the usual suspects. here is sey hersh. [applause] >> all right. i think it's weird to be asked to summarize anything in seven words, but that's okay. the newspapers always say 10 words and reduced them to seven, so you get used to it. [laughter] >> but i did like those seven words. they are my favorite for the moment. >> now, your critics have often

described you as paranoid and you've always been a big reader of fiction. so it perhaps makes sense for us to start with the line of thomas pynchon who wrote the following proverb for paranoids in gravity's rainbow. he said, if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. >> i read that book so many years ago. 20 years? a really long time ago. i remember that line. the idea is not bad. the whole purpose but sometimes -- let's put it this way. the most fallacious words i know are we have high confidence. the american government says we have high confidence that come

as you remember they said it again and again for 18 months to saddam hussein, this is in 2000 before the invasion of 2003. we have high confidence he has weapons of mass destruction. they also said i have to tell you again and again, they say we have high confidence the russians are responsible for hillary boosting. when i hear that i think there is another story they are. in a way, they are posing the wrong reality. but his idea is right. if they can get people -- it's a good idea. if the government can somehow deflect what could be some serious rational concern by making statements by which there is no basis, day when because it is very hard. we even have a case where we have a president is a born-again liar. he lies about everything.

it is more than lying. it is a topology because in the middle of a 20 minute sentence and later he will said he didn't pay it, which is the kind of like he makes. like a 3-year-old. maybe i am being cruel to 3-year-olds. but anyway, he does. he's in a world that doesn't exist on some things. and how do you parcel that? >> how do you? >> one thing when the president says i saw pictures of starving children or were murdered by the evil saddam hussein, or in this case, as this president does with bush and creating up to a point, we have this president. the press doesn't believe anything it says, except when it says things like hrl aside

murdered 800,000 people today and that is taken at face value. and that's when he saw pictures of dead people. it's a funny dichotomy. some things we don't believe a thing he says about, but sometimes when he says something about people we don't like the people unpopular, saddam hussein is a hated man in america right now. we always have to have people we hate. of course hitler and then you go through the list. bull market off e4 sometime. the mullahs in iran for some time. we always have people we have to hate. i don't understand why someone whose mayor of conversation is replete, but the "washington post" gives what they call pinocchio's. repeat misstatements in this fax. when somethings, foreign policy taken literally. does that mean he's wrong.

i just don't. i say if i don't believe what he says about anything and he did change -- he is running for reelection the fact that he did. he's definitely committed to running. he couldn't go another day without it. for the first time he was losing really seriously across the board. the newspapers, the recent newspapers in "the new york times" is great. they spend a great jail, but on the major friend it is still -- they are always like a fencing match with his tweets. they are living in his world. they are playing in his little bed pan or whatever it is.

>> you actually meant to say that? >> i said it. i didn't want to say it. i tried to stop myself. so look, this isn't about anything. as you said in the beginning about the people saying i think. i stopped watching cable television. we really got to a country now where when i worked at "the new york times," i call it the healthy and days in the 70s. we wrote something that meant it was a rational judgment and you could take it to the bank. now you have a whole half of america they don't believe anything anybody says negative about bush, "the new york times," msnbc or cnn. and they want to listen to fox for the paper and they tune out everything else. there's no middle ground anymore in the media. unfortunately the times has

joined and that doesn't mean -- for me it means don't worry about what he says. let's write about yemen. let's write about two months ago taking the kids away and why did it take a sunday broadcast of children crying for the press to get into it. it was there. also, why worry about pruitt, the sky is entitled to whatever he's entitled to. start thinking about the things he did. last week in orlando the investigator reporter and editors conference. a young group of journalists a large group, not 1800 because they think they see young people a sort of a renaissance. this group, i hear we just call.

the annual conference is up to three times as many in a downtime for the market when people are going into this business knowing they will not get the kind of money they did. i mentioned my credit cards. "the new york times." my first week at "the new york times," business class, the korean hotel to start covering the peace process. the french talks in the 1972 peace talks with the north vietnamese. they are not like that anymore. kids going into it because they care. i talked to people when i go to these conferences and i talked to reporters in oklahoma and in the city and they tell me things like they have a manufacturing of baby carriage and he can cut costs on the manufacturers. baby carriages, little toddlers fall out of them for years.

a six-month, eight-month baby won't be able to push and fall down out of it now. they've cut back to safety. did manage their lobby, conservatives and reduce the requirements. when they are a pull mechanism. they made it much easier for a child to inadvertently flop out. it is being mitigated. that's the kind of stuff does go after a week on that. indices playing in his bed pan, his sturdy little pan, he was up eight points in the poll. in some of the stuff, i mean, it is bad. he is president and it's bad, but he goes to korea. it's bad. he doesn't know a thing about nuclear arms. i mean, ronald reagan didn't

know -- nuclear arms and he didn't know how bombs were delivered. he didn't know anything. in this case, i'm just trying to think how secret this crap is. there is a very intensive paper done about the third generation of north korea in a semi-psycho analysts and others the word for the government. many done in private practice. the goal psychologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst to look at information that you can't see and i can't see, intercepts, conversations he's had, private stuff we collect. in america, my god, the ratings and russians are listing everything. we are listeners. we are really good. we just don't want to talk about it. but we know who does what. these guys are given the transcripts and they produce a report, an extensive report.

it's all about this guy is incredible real desire to have money, to not be an impoverished nation. he wants to be a leader. he wants to be a tourist leader. he wants to do it, so they tell it to the president. the way it comes out in his conversation, for which it was mark, you said you've got beautiful beaches. i can see condos being groomed. he's the atlantic city guy, casinos and all about. indies mocked for it. but the idea he can't articulate, but he did get enough to know that i can offer this guy money and that's what is going on. it's a little more complicated than the press makes it. he's a bumbler and it's going to be that way forever. my attitude towards it, talking about politics than they should

answer instead of i'm telling you what i think, which is what i would answer on their shows. how the hell do i know? >> i've known people all my life to do things in places that would surprise a lot of people. my editors at "the new york times", somebody to talk to them that would show what enough for debate inside job and he would call me. there's ways to do it. what i wants to know if he wants to run. he said in the state of the union, nobody paid any attention to it. he said were going to have a marshall plan. go back and read the last paragraph. maybe i stopped listing early, but it was in the end. it is hard to listen. it is hard to listen.

this is something else. he said we are going to have a private company to contribute for it. he's been raising money around the world for reconstruction kitty. it's over a billion now. three, 4 billion. he's going to announce at some point after the congressional elections. he's not going to lose the senate and is not going to get impeached. [inaudible] >> no, i don't think so. collusion. collusion implies that you have an ability to take this step, knowing it's going to happen and it's going to impact step d. the idea of significant collusion. so how are you going to prove he

was colluding with the russians? he's not capable of that. he's mens rea. they are not going to get enough. that i know. they found enough there. >> so, let me ask you a question. >> i'll just answer it for 20 minutes again, so go ahead. [laughter] >> i'm trying to change that a little bit if i can. >> you just open it up, man. >> you speak about yourself in your memoir as an aggressive learner and you say you signed up as a teenager. you signed up to the book of the mens rea. what kind of books to defend you? >> i was about 13. my parents were dare i say it, immigrants who had gone to realt figure them out.

eastern european, lithuanian, polish, they didn't communicate. we were a different generation very quickly. my mother communicated by cooking. my father communicated by saying nothing. [laughter] and so, he liked walter whitman, so i knew he could read and write, but he never talked about it. when i was 13, i saw these ads for the book of the month club which was huge back then. it was 99 cents a month and i only signed up for the nonfiction. four of the 12 months i would get something by edgar hoover and the perils of communism for john gunther, somebody might remember him. in the chinese civilization and so it's like what. they didn't teach you much in

school. i could read and write and stuff like that. did you detect it was fishy, that something was wrong? >> how in the hell do i remember? you ask yourself that question -- i don't remember often. >> i jump ahead 10 years, 15 years, i'm a reporter in chicago for "the associated press." the legislature in south dakota. but anyway it was great. i was a southside chicago kid. i'm in a town of 10,000. what? i'd figure it out. that helped. but my first reaction to the vietnam war was i was

passionate. i began to read "the new york times" very early every day and i began to read by working for the ap. they were great to me. they let me just run. i worked in an african-american -- a black neighborhood and i was very sensitive to racial issues. i got to know martin luther king. i was assigned to cover him. i was madly in love. the ap is powerful. he'd have a rally. he would go like this. yes, sir. and so i would go see him and he would do the ap every paper in the world. he understood a rally in the rocks thrown and he was marching in this incredible range of southwest chicago in panic about

blacks marrying their daughters in taking their jobs. it was horrible stuff, but he would never waver. not afraid to say i was always scared. i would go and he would see me and say i'm so mad at president johnson for not doing this and that in this story the next day king west johnston. he would do that with me a lot. but getting back to the earlier stuff. i started reading about the vietnam war because i saw it coming. i just don't know why. my first impression, i read david halpert, sheehan, both of them became friends. neil sheehan was with upi in morey safer at cbs was the first cut report they were torching villages, for which he got in big trouble. they later became very good novelist for the "washington post" informs no.

and my thought then was pretty much the conventional thought. communism is coming. i didn't know the history of vietnam and china. i didn't know they hated each other. dan ellsberg was the first to the first atomic guy. he couldn't get the pentagon to understand there was no way -- we are fighting the north vietnamese and thought the chinese would come. the stupidity has never been a big thing, anything other than a major serious issue for us in our wars. going back to the korean war which they thought there russians were responsible for. no evidence of that at all. i go without a stop communism, that they were fighting the war wrong. they were fighting at the right way. it took me a while to realize, a year or two before i realize this is mass murder. i got assigned to washington from chicago and began to cover the pentagon. and what you do as a reporter, what i did, i can't believe this

is so original. we had access as a reporter in the pentagon to officers. mostly officers. they are good people. they are great people. what you want are the guys that when they take the oath of office, it is enough to the constitution. it's not to the general, not to the admiral, not to the president. you find those guys and i told them about my skepticism. this is in 65 and 66, died early. they began to talk about mass murder. and i was reading the other thing when i go to journalism school's to talk, you know, they say what is the trick? i see the trick is to read it for you write. so read the church groups that they were putting out about the war. >> i will stop you there for a moment. >> you can stop me there anytime. >> i want to stop you for a moment because someone i

discovered through you very later in life now, matter to me greatly and i want to show you a little moment with him. look at video number one, please. .. men can't live without institutions so it's important to a good society to have institutions. you have to have them, it's

also important have independent voices with the freedom to express themselves who can check the abuses of institutions. >> what about the man you dealt with over the years. today behave differently or they might behave as individuals so they are influenced by the institution. >> take a man like that mcnamara who is a very able man, it's a tremendous. [inaudible] no matter how active, vigilant, vigorous they are there's very severe limits to what they can do. they could've told alexander to get out of the way.

>> but you have had people power. >> yes, sure and you have have people without power. you can't run a society without bureaucracy and you have to have mechanisms for dependence of judgment and expression and check for abuses and criticize the shortcomings. that's what the press is supposed to be, free society. the press itself becomes institutionalized. >> to the have an adversary relationship with institutions and government. if they stop being an adversary, they stop doing their job. that doesn't mean it has to be perpetually hostile, but basically skeptical.

>> you look younger than i remember. it's just an amazing story. >> i didn't know much about him until i got married and my mother-in-law had been a subscriber and she's the one who got me into it. i got a signed by the associated press, i was a reporter there in washington and i was good, and i got assigned to washington to the sour of some of the editors in new york, i was assigned to the pentagon. i thought mcnamara, it didn't take me long to think he was a psychotic liar. i got involved in a story about procurement and

airplanes and he was lying about it. he was losing more than he wanted to admit so i knew there was trouble. within a month of being at the pentagon i was going after him about not telling the truth and it led me too those guys in the pentagon. those officers with four stars who were very worried about the lying in the war and i began to write some stuff. i just wrote stories for those writing stories for neutral organization with a little bit of edge. >> but you do know. >> what happened one day. we probably got the better at 3:00 o'clock, and my first encounter. against all the sunday papers by six so he called me and the

conversation went like this, around 645 in the morning, i thought maybe it was the desk in new york, anyway, he said have you seen page 19? i said hell no and we agreed to meet. i began to take talks and walks with him. he would come and get me, even on weekends when i was not at the pentagon or whatever, and we would just take walks for our sometimes and he was a teacher. >> it was to the point of read before you write. >> it's what he did. i write about, he was forbidden to read all the files produce the most, he

didn't like communism. he didn't like the way communism treated his people and he didn't like any totalitarianism. he didn't like us and the ap was getting every night, they would get in washington bureau, every day in saigon there is a briefing. this went on for years and it was a long briefing of everything that happened, all the rage and he wanted access to it. and so, there was a time i was working a sunday double shift and i'm jewish, maybe it was one of the holidays, something like christmas. [laughter] and i told him i was working a double shift. he said can i come, we let me and i said of course, what you want to do. he said i want to go through those files. he was there reading for me and there's only me and a teletype us.

we had a thing where there is a big library and he's in the library with his volumes and he's just there, and he's, the only thing i wrote, i said the only thing i would hear were little snorts of happiness, little grandson i'd say sometime around 1:00 o'clock you want to get you something, he said no, i'm fine, he was just in heaven and he took those files in a later wrote a four-page spread from those files that he read, it was called the tech stand down. he took those files and wrote this magnificent series of how we were misusing in ways we always accuse the other side but we were doing at four times were spread everywhere thinking wow. and, it was just, one time my

wife and i, once we invited him for dinner, just the four of us and his wife was married , my wife's father had practiced law with an eye remember my wife worked all day making chinese food in about a half hour before they came we realized it was horrible. i ran out to a chinese restaurant, good one and i beat him by two minutes and we put it in the pot. you have to know, you could get a sense of him, he had a sense of humor, incredible. he was funny and he was proud of himself. he became very successful. he ended up moving next to william, chairman of the organization committee, and they became great friends. he was not a bomb thrower. they were like as tight as you want to make it. they were buddies. he wasn't afraid to consort

and so he saw something in me that was. [inaudible] and he help me get published. i stayed friends with him all his life. >> i would like you to respond to a quotation by george orwell about morality and language. >> i know that one. i think you do. and this is in light of your reporting, he writes this in the politics of the english language, in our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. things like the continuance of british rule in india, the russian perjure's and deportation and the dropping of bombs on japan can indeed

be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people the face and which do not square the aims of the political parties. the political language has to consists largely of euphemisms, question begging and sheer cloudy agnes. defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out in the countryside, the house set on fire with bullets. this is called pacification. millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and send charging along the road with no more than i can carry. this is called transfer of population where rectification frontiers, people in prison for years without trial or shot in the back or sent to die of scurvy.

this is called elimination of unreliable elements. such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures. >> what years that. >> we called pacification. the vietnam war, what can i say except it still goes on. what do we call, he just called this atrocity that was going on at the border, that it's their fault. these people are coming to rob us and it's all a language, but he's not good at it. jack kennedy was good at it. lyndon johnson wasn't that

good at it. but kennedy was good at it. kennedy was great at it. he made the first punch into the war and to this day, i don't know the people all say i wrote a book about kennedy that does a lot with the war but fortunately i will learned a lot about the secret service. compromises made and policies described as pacification. it's exactly what orwell was talking about. >> we went back wit about three years ago. >> it and want to go back ever, but it's where i made my first fame and my wife and my

kids, the dog, cat, the gerbil, the mice, all the animals in the backyard wanted me too go back. after some years i did. i wrote a piece for the new yorker about it. why don't say about doing the story, what he's talking about, if you read the great investigation done by shaw, if you read the church groups published in the 60s about what was going on in vietnam, if you just read some of the stuff that was being published, particularly in europe about the war, you knew there was something really wrong and i was also learning about being in the pentagon as

a reporter was lying about bombing. we didn't have satellites back then and i knew they were lying about it and they had gone to vietnam and he was accused of being a traitor and i also read. [inaudible] the great russell tribunal which was debunked in america, i remember reading this, i read it in 66 or 67. no one in america paid much attention but they had a section on vietnam. three boys testified, one from cleveland. it was march of 65, there's

lying that the orange man doesn't is lying that johnson did. by march he had boys there. when the marines went there in the summer, he still lied about it. that's quite a lie to the american people. anyway they said we were going in a village and i thought they'd find the enemy there and they find nobody there and then there frustrated because they can't find the enemy and yet at night, he would take a shot and killed somebody in there be a sniper there and they fall into a pit with bamboo sticks and stuff like that never losing people but they didn't have contact and so the captain of this one persons unit set okay, they went on a mission, they began this process if they did find any real enemy, everybody could just have a mad minute and the guy shouting rockets out of the tank and the guys with rifles and machine gun they just shoot up anybody in

the village. they were full of people. i knew it was so. it's just, it's tough. that's what mimi believe in the story because i had done, i got a tip on a nowhere and the thing i don't tell on the story, i am writing about myself but there's some things that are just too hard to do. i spent months fact checking doing what you need to do. it was a great place to be we alters they worked hard on it. but what i didn't talk about was when i first got a tip from a lawyer, his father had been head of cbs news a decade

earlier and he was working for the first public policy nonprofit law firm doing social stuff in washington. he said he called me in 69 and said i've heard that some g.i. has gone crazy and there's a big massacre their hiding and 75 people were killed. my nose is running so i'm just going to wipe it. [laughter] i can pretend it's not. i sat next to a kid one day with a cold and he cap his nose and his shirt and then i remembered that's what mothers tell kids to do so i can get mad at him but i didn't like it. john's my editor. he's been cleaning after me

for two years, not literally, what else are you going to do, just cannot put that back on you so we hear every word that you say. is this the kind of crowd that will come up to me, i've spoken to groups of a lot more than this and gotten done and everybody came up to me and said none of us could hear anything. if you can hear something. >> no, you can hear. >> and did a talk early today about the journalists who started screaming right away, we can hear, we can hear, but anyway. >> they can hear your. >> i start off doing the story, and i'm thinking okay, it's going to be a good story about killing a lot of people, and then i discover, and i'm learning as i do it, that it's not about some pretend combat stuff, they go into a village of civilians, they had been stupidly told by cia guy, the employee was an idiot like all the guys, they were hiring

people left and right, working part-time would join the cia and be in charge of intelligence, it was just comical. they told this group of kids who had done nothing, they were just farm kids in this unit in particular had a higher percentage of african-americans and hispanics the most units and the white kids were rule kids, not educated -- role role kids. by 67, to many bright white kids with college degrees were getting in the army and seeing what was going on and not liking it. he realized we've got to get these out. i worked for senator mccarthy who is running for president. he was so vocal that i didn't know i was going to do it but i was offered a job as press secretary. letting that me and will.

democratic party was up in arms and can get anybody to challenge johnson for the nomination that. he gave us beach and he said two things that knocked me out and he never was anything but difficult. i do write about him but he said this is an immoral war. he had been in a monastery and he went to mass every day and i could never talk about it. he spent nine months in silence in a monastery in minnesota. that's where he was born, and he said this is immoral and i'm just debating whether i'm going to do this but i was a freelance writer and offered this job and i couldn't do it in the press. ap fired me, did me and, i was writing about the war more

critically and one day there was a. >> mini mcnamara had gone not about something i wrote next thing i know their assigned about health and human services that i took the hit. you understand that guys like me, as i later learned, my job essentially was to walk into editor's office with a dead rat full of rice. i said this many times now because i do believe it and dump it on their desk and say okay, this is a story that's going to take a lot of time, it may not work and it's going to get people who want to see you and hate you and all that, and after a little while it gets counterproductive. in any case mccarthy said two things. he said it's an immoral war and he also said he's changing, he's talking about johnson and lowering the standards. he said he's changing the color of the corpses from white to more hispanic, yellow and black.

he's changing the color. man, i was knocked out. i had never heard such talk. you never hear anyone talk about morality anymore. i didn't go to work for him. anyway, what happened, they were told they were gonna meet the enemy, a medical unit that does exist, the 48 north vietnamese battalion, they fought in the central high lands but they weren't in this part of vietnam along the coast. instead they found women and children heating a price for the morning breakfast and they began to slaughter them. he said i just knew something happened that i find the kid to do that and i eventually find the people who did the killing. what they were doing that i

couldn't bear, they were throwing infants up and catching them on bayonets and raping like crazy, everything from five to 50, just going nuts. some of that stuff, i've been in the army. i thought this is it. we didn't really know what happened in world war ii. is a wonderful academic at yale, he published a book about censorship and here i am , when i was a kid my sisters used to take my brother and me at the end of world war ii to the south side of chicago where they see them war movies and the one i remember today, it begins with having a fight in the pacific. they are fighting those who flew the zeros, our boys flew

the p50 ones. my wife will tell me tomorrow what it is. in the movies i saw, flynn. [inaudible] at the last minute he saves his life by shooting a lot of bullets, and our boys, the movie we thought saw, we flew with canopy open. there guys had the can be closed, buck teeth, they wore these little hat in chicago in

the winter my mother used to make us the soft helmets that you tied under the chin. we hated those things. they wore those kinds of helmets and the bullets would fly in and the plane would go down and i remember, you could hear it, it looked as good and just before he hit the water, he was shot, this is literally what i remember, a trickle of blood came out of the corner of his mouth and he hit the water and diane would all go nuts. that was my definition of world war ii. we flew around, thumbs up, it turns out we don't fight wars any better than anybody else does. i knew this was not to be easy as i got into it. in one case, there was a boy who had done most of the

shooting. i was writing stuff, i couldn't get anybody to buy it and i eventually wrote for an antiwar group. they cover the war and a new vietnamese. i learned as a kid, there was a farm kid, not overwhelmingly but just the kid, didn't know much, not bright, but callie had told them to shoot in the ditch are they lined up kids, most of the shooting was just, there were three companies and two companies just killed whoever they could. kelly was an organizer, let's put them all in the ditch but there's a famous picture of the ditch. i went back to look at the ditch. it's not easy to do, believe me. anyway, a couple of boys shot a couple rounds, you press a button and it keeps on going and he shot after clip and the

next day his leg was blown off and was pretty famous in the unit because they were just marching around on patrol, they had lied about everything that had happened, it was just another day in the war, there is no such thing as murder, there was a violation of rule. they violated the rules. anyway, that's my explanation of vietnam and all the torture and killing that went on. anyway, the next day he's medevac out and what i remember is somebody give me a company roster for thanksgiving. they were still in the barracks in hawaii. they didn't get there until january year later and a lot of the boys were home by then. they did one year of combat and one year out. their home, i'm doing it from america but i remember i was in. [inaudible] i don't remember, i called every telephone exchange but i knew he was from indiana. finally there was one in a place and i call up and i get this old southern voice, the

deep south, the kkk was there in the 1920s right next to the illinois border and i had no idea where it was and i fly from salt lake to chicago when i fly to minneapolis and i get a car and there's no gps, i go to the town and i called up the night before and seven coming and i said i just assumed it was the only one i could find. [inaudible] he said here, can i come talk and he said i don't know he'll talk to you and he said i don't know and so i fly there and i finally get to this farm, it's an old rundown farm. this chicken coop's with the wires on. i just don't know what paul doing. her husband had died earlier

and i park in front and i've got this ready suit like this ready shirt, all sweaty, i showered early today, and i don't change shirts twice a day. so anyway, i know people who do. so i pull up, and she comes out and she's 50 but she looks 70 and i said hi, i'm the guy who called and she said yes and i said as paul around and she said well he's in there and then this old woman who's not read a newspaper, doesn't know much, she said, about her son, about the war, she said i sent them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer. i don't know what to think so i go see the kid.

>> t remember what you thought? >> the first thing i felt was i was going to go say hello and say to him, take up your boot and show me your leg, i want to see the stump. he had lost his leg. : : : i later got a letter. he was taken from the field with a blown off leg. we went to emergency hospitals and was eventually found to japan where he spent five months

relearning things. he wasn't quick in rehabilitation. the fellow whose bump with next to him for three months, another guy that was shot wrote me a letter in the early 70s. i've kept them. but the private letters so i didn't put it in the book. he said i slept next to paul below for a 2.5, three months and he was comatose. he never said a word. not one word. and then at the end i got letters when there was a book published. random house did a book and i got letters from doctors, young doctors working in japan. this is later in 70 and 71 when the war was going on and nobody wanted to do with the officers wanted. you had a major black movement. nobody wanted to be the last guy shot in a sub for a war that

nobody cared about >> i want to talk to you about cia spying. let's jump to december 22nd, 1974. >> what happened? what is due in three light? -- two and three light? >> cia operation reported other dissidents in the nixon years.

and also, how you got so much space, exact stories. >> for a lot of reasons i had a contract for a lot of reasons doing with people career in. >> i couldn't do the book because a typical thing, there is some talk about the constitution as a nuisance. and he was paying for it but billions of dollars. they know who and where and how it worked. the people that noticed he's

alive. and i couldn't do that and i was very kind to my publishers and my editor and they all said my handkerchief man. new title for him. they say do a memoir. the first thing i realized -- >> you didn't want to do. >> i'm not done. i'll do another more in 10 years in volume two. i don't think so. don't worry about it. i kept on saying it turns out you can be alive and be legendary, but it makes you nervous for a legendary reporter. i'm not dead. anyways, in doing the book, there's a couple things about it. >> it also might mean people don't need to be paying attention.

>> that the definition i don't like. 1918, oed, you're one of those guys. that is interesting. anyway, words are interesting. he doesn't understand what words mean. this guy takes it to another level. he doesn't understand words. they don't mean anything. anyway, doesn't matter. we will survive this. that's what i'm saying. the republic will stand. if we have to get rid of them, we'll do it. so far the turnaround today means i'll run again and the democrats better think of some policies if they're going to do what hillary did and run against this guy is a bad guy, there's going to be trouble. >> so you called ebro stash

>> it's actually a great story about "the new york times." i learned about this stuff about spying. i learned something about it two years earlier. i didn't tell anybody. it turns out the cia did a history. as a chapter on me, read a lot in the book, in which it turned out the cia was asking questions from 1972 on. and learned about it when i first joined the cia and when i first joined the times i was doing vietnam stuff. for two years i was asking questions about it and they were worried to death about me, but i didn't know that. it was a declassified study of 500, 400 pages written by cia analysts about the history with all these intercepts and phone conversations i had for two years. so here's the story, i am using anonymous sources, but rosenthal

used to ask me who the sources are. same with david remnick. he would stop at a certain point because i named one of them in the book. the one i named the family was fine with it. he was a special assistant to richard helme, head of the cia for four years and he was deeply involved in domestic spying before that. you don't get sources like that. when you get something, there is nothing better than a guy inside who decides they can't live with us anymore. that is what you need. you don't need a guy inside -- >> how do you know? how many sometimes? >> they come to me. people know that i'll take care of them. i haven't hurt anybody. i haven't heard anybody yet. that's why i don't do certain things i could do, should do when it's troublesome to me. and the golden boy. i'm running around doing all of this stuff.

december the 20th, the head of the cia and i finally went down and they went through a list. at this point, he didn't know how much i knew. he knew i'd been working stuff, and that there was something called the family jewels in the next day after i saw them on the 20th that he asked the number two guy in the justice department. he said did hersh of her talk about stuff? he said yes, something called the jewels. the next day he learned about the jewels. he said we did some wiretaps that he minimized the numbers. and for the cia after 9/11, well, the cia's job is to lie. that's their job. that's what they do for a living. that's what they do. they do some wonderful things, to things, too, but basically

they are there to lie about what they do. they hurt people, do things, make mistakes. this culture of the cia, the sword of fresh population thing we screwed that up, but okay we will kill someone else. so the editor of the times who had hired me, i was looking for "the new yorker" from 70 to 72. i couldn't do the job at a newspaper after working for mccarthy. politics were left because i was against the war. i made a judgment about the war purely on the basis that the war was bad for america. he can do my personal politics. we would all be in in disastrous top role. i knew how bad it was. i knew earlier. i called december the 20th, 2019, 1974 until 11:00 that morning i stopped 123.

there's no cell phones to collect them shorter. i set up to tell you about a story i've been working on. but he's talking about this big story about spying on americans. he said what? i said yes. go right. i said okay. i went to the office. about 11:00 i spent two or three hours calling everybody and i called that people high up in the cia whose names have never been known. here's the thing to know about the cia in those years. there were phonebooks then. usually the last name is in the phone book because you want to get calls from the garden club or wherever they live. i could find a lot of people the phonebook or it it wasn't magic. i talked to a bunch of people. i even tried ed muskie because he wanted to run for president. sandy berger was a good guy.

i said i know he's running for president. i have a story that can help. he told me about it. this is friday, the same guy friday the 20th, two days before the story ran. cindy calls back a couple hours later and says you don't let it take a chance on this. of course that's why he was running for the presidency. when john kerry was running in 2004 i had the same issue within. i had done on the grave and i was at a dinner. i like john. and i remember the issue was whether he should go out against the war and he decided instead to run on his record as an officer. do not go after the war. of course that went on the election, too. anyway, the point going back to

it. i went back to the opposite and calling people. i called six or seven major people in the cia that day. i said i know what you've been doing and they all, they all said initially what, a very complicated man who i talked to quite a bit about this. singleton said you were helping spying on americans. i could never get through that the person they were looking at was stoking carmichael who was killed. i always wondered. but i got through a lot of stuff. it was a big story. nobody said to me you're not using my name of course. i knew the game. i named seven sources. so i rate this story. and i'm writing and i go home for dinner. i go back and about 2:00 or

3:00 in the morning, if you ask me about it i'm just going to spin it off short. i am called by an editor at the times, a guy named ed jenkins who ran the sunday paper. that particular sunday paper. he was making money like you couldn't believe. they were great. they would make more than 1.5%, 2% profit. that's the way it was then. it's much different now. and so the guy making of the sunday paper, the first 600,000 copies, there was some early to get to the west coast to be available on monday. it's a powerful national paper. and he said well, aides said you are writing a story, but he thought he was going to be about

2500 words. i said what? he said can we hold it a day or two? i said what? it's like he was a good guy, but he didn't have space for it. i of course went nuts. anyway, i tracked down abe rosenthal which is a complicated story in itself. i don't socialize with editors. it's just a good rule. it links in my life. and so, i didn't know much about it. i met his wife. her name was ann. i said we day. this is going to knock the cia into hell. they've been tracking journalists, keeping travel on americans, worried about

anti-communist and disloyal americans. there was a story about fbi who said congratulations for doing the job, but they couldn't do anything in america. are you kidding me? big thousands of hundreds of people. this is the end. he said i can't help you. i don't know what to do. so he calls up ann who i've met once. the call rings a long time. 2:30 in the morning. she answers the phone. he ran 10 times a minute rain 10 more times. i said i had to go find -- i was alone in the bureau. nothing more fun than being alone in a major newspaper office like "the new york times." it's like you on the world. they're still life in here are conditioning, but even though -- they don't say anything except

myself. so i call up and said i've got to talk to any of. she says what you mean? i've got talk to abe. she said don't you know he's left me for that nasty some word about that other lady. he left me three months ago. i said what? she was mad. she hung up. >> it was 2:30 in the morning, too. [laughter] i thought to myself i'm in a soap opera. but then i thought, this story has got to go. this story is more important. so i call her back and she answers. but they tell you what this story is about. i told her a little bit. it's a story you'd be very proud of. i need to know the name of the person he shacking up with.

[laughter] she gave it to me because she wanted that story in the paper. an editor's wife. the institution at the time is an institution we do have a feeling for it. and then i had a problem because the person was one of those people because of what she did for a living wasn't in the phonebook. [laughter] published in books than i had to call my agent who had somebody in his office who did handle those people and had phone numbers and took a lot of people to get woken up. i've got a number. it's now about 3:15. right now i'm going nuts. i did know how long it was going to go. but i have been working on this

story for two years. i was worried about getting enough to make a go and i needed enough in colby said there weren't 142 american reporters wiretapped. more like 40 or 50. as he later wrote in a memoir, he thought he would copy down. he didn't know how much i knew. more than that said i'm not in the business of telling everything i know to the cia director. >> obviously, no. >> again here because memoirs are interesting. turns out it's nice writing about yourself. turns out everything you thought happened didn't happen that way. >> you talk about that in the memoir. >> find that you were wrong about things and it's really more complicated. you can really do a lot. remember i came here a couple years ago and what's his name,

tom london took me -- his second wife was not at the time and didn't give this paperback. he gave it back to you guys and their staff on me. it's so interesting. anyway, free coffee. i got the enlisted number in a dead dialect. nobody answered. i dialed it again. and so he told me, she answered the phone and i said look lady, i don't care what's going on. i beg your pardon, just get a. he gets on the phone. and as i said a couple times, he hired me for "the new yorker." william shawn was the famous

editor. i got along with him, but he said you can do more for america then you can for me. i have a lot of reporters and you can be in their interest do it. will i be fined? this wonderful man said you'll be fine. i always stay friendly with him. anyway, so he gets on the phone. first thing he said was okay. he said where are you? i'm in the view room. what's your phone number? >> how do i know. >> look at the a phone. he was really angry.

he said hennepin don't do anything. he says okay, he said before i say, i just want to know, you will pay for this. pretty sad -- let's put it this way, i never told the story after he was dead except to a few of my friends. he said your cockamamie story, "the new york times" is going to have 1.6 billion extra pages added to it. not the publisher, the editor. another page, the back is going to be a house that in your 7000 words. that's all we can have. they're going to be on that page. you have to understand something. she knew. you saw the banner headline. it doesn't do that. those days "the new york times" when they took on the cia.

they have the exact opposite view of the cia. they buried the story. first thing i did was run through the files. it would be sure to run despite to run this by helme the head of the cia. you've got to be kidding. this is in the 60s before i was there. i saw that. in other words, they pay, they paid obeisance to the leadership. it feels -- i don't know how i can say this in simple words. it's an american paper. and i always thought it should be a world paper. do we do this to america? that some of the instinctive is getting. people talk about the problem i had change in culture. i said that was the issue.

they decided they would go after president and without going and checking my story but the head of the cia, i had to go with what i had. so what happened here, this is a day later, saturday. 4:30, 5:00, the first edition that's going to ship abroad. i went home and slept a couple hours. i came back and it wasn't. this was december 21. this is "the new york times" taking on the cia on the basis of a kid named hersh. rosenthal used to come behind me when i was going hot and heavy. i helped them on watergate. perhaps being more famous than he was. bill murray later, and he said how's my little today. the next sense would be when you

have for me. this had been going on for years. every day there's a page in this paper. i was asked by a tv guy who interviewed me, my cable news guy. just a week ago, two weeks in washington, one of the shows that they do for everybody says i think. he had no idea what the book was. he asked me about trump and then says let's talk about your book, which is a strange question because he didn't have a note from his producer. i almost said i think 36 pages of pictures and a lot of words. but i didn't do it. well, the story about my life. this is what you have. [inaudible] anyway, the point is they ran the story.

i didn't talk to the lawyers. i named seven people. who are they? five hours, 10 hours after i finished writing it. so no matter what i think i might get mad at the times in my house for years it gets delivered to me in the morning. the subscribers have a credit card. that's the real money. the online stuff is nothing. one of the cuts, the core subscribers. it's been that way since 63. why did they do this, why didn't they do that? the church hearings come in the first investigation, the first time congress has been into committees at the house and senate intelligence committees. we didn't have it before but the

craziness between the democrats and republicans. there's no oversight anymore. just disappeared, which is not good for any of us. it was copyedited, but you know, that's all. they don't have that much trust in you. you can't walk away from this. as i say, it was the most amazing time because we had a president that was more relieved than anything. discuss anything. discussable interest in foreign stuff which is crazy. guess he saw them there, you believe them. he lost any capability between 72 in the moment they came in. we set the agenda.

more than the white house. never a time like that again. >> you said a little earlier it's a pleasure in some way to write about yourself. the book that you're currently writing of the book that is currently -- >> in my head? >> about dick cheney. >> it is about dick cheney today. there's something called the watson is good at brown university. people like a wonderful former ambassador. what is image number two? i'm curious to >> what about image number 10? are we going to get out of there?

>> yes. okay, 7600 right now. cheney developed the notion that you could operate and he didn't have to fund it. he found ways to fund it. he was very creative. by 2004 or five there was a system set up we are in 76 countries right now, most of them in africa. worker is killed in mali, i've got a bridge i want to sell you. special operations people out of control but by a general. they are very christian. a disciple of rudolph shiner. basically the notion, but one of them was the notion that we are here to fight the infidels and

what happened in 9/11 with the killing, we in the christians in special forces are going to fight the masses who want to destroy us and cheney bought into that motion that you could fight something called a war on terror. you can fight a war against an idea instead of -- the reason there's people hate us. the idea is just beyond. i ran into problems because they are so much stuff we don't know about in this administration is completely incapable of getting control. there is a general named mattis who has ideas about doing it, but it's complicated. >> so many other things i'd like to ask you. >> yet, but it's midnight. >> a couple of surprises.

>> anybody with babysitting problems. >> of a good look at image number five. >> i was kidding about post-warren. >> is it going to work? tell me i don't remember. >> it is interesting. >> who is that guy? >> will tell you. it's george saunders. >> i gave a talk to him. so long ago. i asked him to send me a question for you. i said george saunders could write his way out of an experimental lab, which is the highest compliment i can give anybody.

>> i interviewed them here. he's one of the most extraordinary people i've ever spoken to. >> i didn't recognize. i was a long time ago. >> exactly. he said he could find out i believe he's one of the great minds and spirits of our time. he's speaking about you. i have fond memories of meeting him at the 175th anniversary party back in 2000 keep the inspiration at that event. my simple easy to answer question, how has our democracy changed in the years since you first started writing about us. and as a quick follow-up [laughter] what does the meaning of life size? >> he's having fun with that. how in the hell do i know.

i knew him from his short stories and i was at "the new yorker" then. i mean come if you can appreciate george stanton is, which is headed to her son great writing. further collections, amazing stuff. he takes things to another level in the imagination. i'm just going to say what i said earlier. we will get through this. we will get through this. we will get through this. i wish -- i don't see the white knight on the horizon. we saw obama by 2005. we saw him. we could see him coming. you know, we could see that there was hope they from 2008

when kerry lost the election he shouldn't have lost. we could see somebody coming. i don't see it. i have political panels. the talk about the guy, sherrod brown may be. see you tell me what is going to happen. is it going to be maybe some woman is going to come out? a lot of women are running for congress. the major media don't do enough. my youngest son works for biases and they have a show in which they've been tracking some of these young women, complete outlanders and they are doing great. it seems there's somebody running in virginia. the wife of a journalist friend of mine. she's an american. anyway, there's a lot of -- there's something different in

the air and i think the democratic party is going to have to be broken up, work and have to have new leadership in its didn't have to be -- you know, hillary did a disservice by taking control of the party and making sure he didn't get a chance. we all know that happened with debbie wasserman schultz. is that her name? making sure the five debates they had were on a sunday night or monday night football night or a strange place at a strange time. we all know that now. and make sure that hillary won the election. which i don't and that's an overstatement and all. i fault obama for letting her do it. she also led the party drive. she took a lot of money that should have been put into the local elections and put it in the campaign. >> in closing, you have said --

seymour hersh what does that mean? net worth? >> in closing. >> does that mean shut up? >> i want you to answer something else. >> i can't answer george's question. >> that is fine. that's fine. maybe i'll have a chance to answer -- >> please don't tell him i didn't recognize him. >> you may see this. he might be watching right now. i will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work. >> i did something. i'm fascinated by libya, what libya, would have been in libya with all the oil. i couldn't get it in american press. i honestly think that part of me

thinks i was writing staff that it would've been easy to do. but it was hard to believe that the democrats in 2012 could be secretly working to support the extreme groups against bashar al-assad. the country was going to be taken over a people -- literally kill people who didn't agree with him. even the sunnis didn't accept the radical practices. and that was going to lead to an immediate war with iran. and same with israel. israel frog is yapping got along very well. >> so you think you would be proven right, that which you mean? >> what you mean? i think i was right. be proven right by whom? >> in closing now --

[laughter] >> at the same sources i had when i wrote all those other stories. one of the problems in america is a good review of the books which a lot of american reporters think it's one of those they give you in the subway before you go in, follow that. they had no idea that they would hired new york fact checkers, tons of money to fact check the stories incredibly well, not pay me as well as "the new yorker," but that's the way it goes. america got too hard. if i had to think about it, it probably had to do at the democrat in some unconscious way that you didn't want to believe the democrat would be really working to support the crazies and there was a story called the red line. another one was about bin laden. if you want to believe -- i don't want to go there.

i could write more about it because i know much more about it. >> you sometimes feel the burden of secrecy on you? >> no, i never feel the burden of secrecy. i feel the obligation of people to talk to me. you know what i did in that story when i did it for the review? the computers broke on the story. the most amazing -- i mean, the editor just threw it away. americans knew all over the world, why did they accept it. one of the things you don't do is you don't name a station chief. even if he has been outed as this guy was. the station chief in pakistan, the story was simply someone walked in and told us five minutes before it happened that he was a prisoner of the pakistani intelligence service. that is all. i was a story. cia has a special team. they do interrogations to

anybody who is a suspect. he was the pakistani high-ranking officer in there was a reward. it was 25 million bucks for information. he got $20 of it and moved to another country. i knew about that i knew that started a process that led to the killing of bin laden. he was a prisoner and we are very angry at the pakistanis. the pakistanis didn't tell us because they captured him inside an area between pakistan and india. they held them because saudi arabia did not want him to be put on trial. they paid a lot of money under the table for years to keep them quiet. the station chief is a very, very competent guy and i didn't know what to do. i wanted to telegraph that i knew more, then i'm writing.

so i name them. i said a special team. for these kind of the factors that come in, there is a special unit. we are not just talking about a lie to her. there is a unit to see whether someone is telling the truth or not. i'm not talking about paranormal. very clever deduction stuff and they are very competent. he was handled by a special unit. his name is george bank. and so here's what i thought. i said okay, they are going to go nuts about this, the white house. what obama did was he made something that was a rogue mission into i did it. why? because the political people said this is reelection. he's a black guy running for reelection. it was important for him to be reelected. i thought so, too. i offered it at "the new yorker" and there is hesitancy there. i went in after the election and

i did it because i'm stubborn. i'm not going to let a story set. there's no reason not to publish what you know. so i thought banks was known inside by a lot of people have been a very high quality person, somebody who is going to rise high. i thought if the agency wants to screw me to the wall, he's in the fourth graph of my story. getting to go on cnn cable and say that story is just crazy. no one came into me. well he didn't do it. some of the reporters would figure out well, i have to tell you they are. there is a big tell. i can tell you right now there's a big tell everyone is missing trump after the election that no one figured out yet. i need the station chief and he doesn't come on to say and deny the story. that's what you would do.

when the story first broke and there was a big fight in the white house about it because he had made commitment to the pakistanis not to talk about it for a week or 10 days and have been found in pakistan or afghanistan. nobody was supposed to know she was living there. he was living there in secret. no one was supposed to know we wanted it. take the body with you. you're going to kill him. the trial. take the body with you. we offered an incredible amount of money, which we did to some generals to keep their mouth shut. there was a process for doing it already been some other book some other time. the government figured out a way to do it. it involved oil. so i actually thought in my naïveté. what i didn't understand at the white house, they sort of double

cross. so you can understand his running for president and they have the photograph going like this. for a lot of people it was wait a second, you cannot take a photograph of it? you don't photograph the situation room meetings. come on. it was all political. if you remember the first story, bin laden hiding behind two women with a k. 20, who is a murderer. that's their job. it was just what they call, they have a phrase. they have an ugly phrase for some kind of a -- when a mission is just a straight up murder. they do it. that's their job when they came in and do they hate. one of the tiles was they describe in one of the books the

steel door. they blew it. i don't know anything, but a learned steel doors if you blow it with a dynamite charge and you don't know the exact specifications of it, thanks to this deal, you're going to kill yourself because it's going to bounce back, even down the hallway at 30 feet you're going to really get in trouble. i talked to a lot of bomb guys. you had to know exactly -- who told them that? only the isi walk them in. and so, what happens is for the first day, the first three of four days they said no, and then they said he was watching porn. they walked in and he was watching porn. everyone wanted to get in briefings about the greater jury

over bin laden. the war on terror was going to end. one of the seals bought a dog in illegally. they were in the compound doing the killing. one exploded and crashed. it was a big explosion and the neighbors perhaps would be curious. i will tell you if you went and read about two or three weeks after the raid, they went and talked to the neighbors who all said the same thing. we were told that morning there'd be a lot of action. don't talk to anybody. let me just say this. one of the stories was the u.s. news. the seals brought a dog out there and the dog was put outside if anybody got curious about what was going on with the explosion. i remember saying, a dog that barks in urdu. wow, we can beat this story.

[laughter] that he was two years later it in the newspaper world were they all see another mass lawyer, brenden -- later the cia for who doesn't buy as much just because he hasn't been in office as long. anyway, they had all these briefings that were going on in everybody's getting great stories and it's a wonderful story and here comes somebody two years later that may be slightly different history. some guy wrote a letter to the london times saying he's a bad guy and obama killed him. what else, who cares. obama did kill him. anyway, my colleagues even at the new york times with a somewhat different story came out, it was as if two years later there's no comma. you can't have a different

version. i remember thinking to myself, don't they have mothers? it is like -- it doesn't matter. it's just the way it is. >> let me ask you this question and then a true ending. a question that comes for a dell or morris. >> my buddy. >> he said saint helena said, what then is generally speaking the truth of history, a fable agreed upon. this quote is of course the knuckle. but is it true? is it merely an agreement between people were particularly history is concerned? >> i took a course and studied for four years. we read plato and socrates

pineda chorus called organization of principles and it was sort of a one-year course taught by a brilliant professor in which he looked at all of it. oral morris does live in plato's republic. i worked with him on a documentary in he's an interesting man. he's just amazing. and he has followed those lines. you had a wonderful strange book recently published about studying philosophy. the answer is how in