After the Kissinger book, Hersh went on, in 1986, to get the story wrong in The Target is Destroyed, on the Soviet downing of Korean civil airliner KAL 007. Typically, the U.S. comes out worse than the Soviets. While the latter made an honest mistake, confusing the Boeing 747 with the RC-135, a U.S. reconnaisance aircraft, the "real story," says Hersh, is the "politically corrupt" use of intelligence by the U.S. which had rushed to judgment because of "strong hostility to communism that led them to misread the intelligence and then, much more ominously, to look the other way when better information [that the Soviet pilot misidentified the plane] became available." In 1991, with the end of the iron hand of Soviet communism, the Soviet fighter pilot who brought down KAL 007 would tell his story to Izvestiya. He indignantly rejected the suggested he had mistaken the plane for an RC-135, describing how he had been ordered to lie after the incident. While Hersh could not have been expected to obtain the true story in the Soviet Union of 1984, if he had not worn anti-American blinkers he would have been less confident of his simplistic thesis that bad American anti-Communism led to the U.S. "lying" about the incident, misrepresenting an innocent, if tragic, Soviet mistake.

In subsequent years, Hersh has continued his penchant for believing outright frauds. Working on a book about John and Robert Kennedy, he initially fell for a stash of phony documents peddled by one Lawrence X. Cusack (convicted in 1999 for defrauding more than 100 investors in a scheme to sell the documents, which he claimed to have found in the papers of his late father, a prominent lawyer). One was a purported contract in which President Kennedy agreed to pay Marilyn Monroe money to keep silent about their affair; another supposedly linked Kennedy directly to mobster Sam Giancana. What is most interesting is the bizarre way Hersh "validated" the documents. Called as a prosecution witness, Hersh tried to explain a letter he sent to Cusack claiming he had not only independently confirmed that Cusack's father had known Kennedy through an interview with Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln, but had also "independently confirmed some of the most interesting materials" in the papers. Hersh had to admit that he had misspoken, including what he said about Evelyn Lincoln. "When I wrote this letter," he testified, "I selectively recollected the good and didn't remember the bad." Cusack's lawyer had a field day: "If there were a Pulitzer Prize for backtracking and eating one's words, I think he could add it to his trophy chest."

Hersh is an ideological yellow journalist. With his tenacity, lack of scruples, narrow vision, and white hats versus black hats view of the world, he might, in an earlier era, have been a successful police reporterparticularly in the earlier journalistic world described by Ben Hecht, where letting the facts interfere with a sensational story was a mark against you (indeed, Hersh started out as a police reporter in Chicago). But Hersh is unable to handle complicated material, unable to understand or analyze policy issues. He never seems to have heard of standards of evidence. Unable to sift out the wildest, most absurd allegations, he tosses them into the pot, as long as they contribute to his being able to say "the target is destroyed."

Hersh cannot even get the Samson story right. Explaining why he chose the title The Samson Option, Hersh writes that "Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured after a bloody fight." What the Bible records, of course, is that Samson became helpless after Delilah deceived him into telling her that the secret of his strength lay in his long hair, and she summoned one of the Philistines to cut it off as he slept in her arms. Every school child knows that -- but not Seymour Hersh.

There is no more serious indictment of the shoddy standards of American journalism than the flood of awards its standard bearers have bestowed on Seymour Hersh.

Of greater concern than Hersh himself is his reputation among journalists. Hersh has won twenty major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. There is no more serious indictment of the shoddy standards of American journalism than the flood of awards its standard bearers have bestowed on Seymour Hersh.

What explains the high standing among his peers of a journalist whose work should be anathema to any publication with standards higher than those of a supermarket tabloid? The journalistic world that celebrates him still largely identifies with the juvenile politics of the Movement that Hersh unabashedly purveys in his books and articles. During Gulf War II, embedded in the armed forces, U.S. journalists showed signs of growing up. Another welcome sign would be the long overdue banishing of the tawdry journalism of Seymour Hersh from reputable journals and publishing houses.  

Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost.

May 2003               - 7 -               Outpost