By David Rubien
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January 18, 2000 | I nvestigative reporter Seymour Hersh must feel like he's howling into the darkness sometimes. His eighth and latest book, "Against All Enemies," which gruesomely details the extent of Gulf War Syndrome and the government's attempts to pretend it doesn't exist, has been selling indifferently and has been ignored by a surprising number of reviewers. His 1972 "Cover-Up," a report on the Army's cowardly investigation of the My Lai massacre -- the bloodbath Hersh had previously exposed in his blockbuster "My Lai 4" -- also sold poorly. When he revealed in 1991's "The Samson Option" that Israel was secretly stockpiling nuclear weapons, the response was yawns. What's the hardest-working muckraker in the journalism business to do?
Hersh's response: Soldier on. And hope that once in a while you'll hit a motherlode that catches the public's imagination. Because one thing is certain: The journalistic glamour of Watergate sleuths Woodward and Bernstein's "All the President's Men" has long faded. The starry-eyed kids who once flooded journalism schools to learn how to root out corruption have been replaced by a crop of college grads who have concluded government is inhabited by Martians, so why bother? Better to go for the money. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty much out of the business, anyway, Bernstein writing biographies and Woodward authoring gossipy bestsellers, replete with made-up quotes, about government figures. Elsewhere, ownership of the media is being concentrated into fewer hands, which have been busy blurring the line between news and entertainment and squelching the venues for real journalism in favor of those for gossip and personality.
We live in a cynical time. Lucky for us, Hersh is too invested to turn away. "I think there are great stories to be written about this pretend government and this corporate world we now live in," he told the Progressive magazine a decade ago. Those are the stories he writes. For a recent instance, he wrote in the New Yorker that the government pretended to have evidence that the plant the United States bombed in Sudan in retaliation for supposed terrorist activity was something other than a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. It wasn't, and we knew it, but we killed people anyway.
It's been an up-and-down career for Hersh, but he was lucky to have a huge up early on -- his expos of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam. To refresh: In March of 1968, a division of American troops called Charley Company, led by Lieut. William L. Calley Jr., entered the village of Son My (called My Lai 4 on the soldiers' maps) and spent a few hours killing every man, woman and child -- all unarmed civilians -- in the vicinity, about 500 all told. Women were raped; babies were used as target practice. Hersh brought it all out in the open, and helped end the war as a result, because Americans realized that this incomprehensible conflict far away was making their boys act like Nazis.
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