Seymour Hersh, bad senators, and more

Seymour Hersh, bad senators, and more
From the May 2, 2005 issue: Hersh says that it's okay to communicate another reality when you're speaking.
By The Scrapbook
Weekly Standard
05/02/2005, Volume 010, Issue 31

Seymour Hersh's Other Reality

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh is paid up to $15,000 per public lecture, according to Chris Suellentrop's blockbuster profile in the April 18 issue of New York magazine. But based on what Suellentrop reports, the audiences Hersh addresses may want to ask for a refund.

Because, it turns out, while on stage spinning yarns, Hersh makes things up. As the New York headline put it, "Sy Hersh Says It's Okay to Lie (Just Not in Print)." When he's speaking, Hersh tells Suellentrop, "Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people." Which shouldn't matter, he goes on, since "I'm just talking now, I'm not writing." Put another way: "I can't fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say."

And what fudge! Suellentrop gives us a taste of the stuff Hersh "reveals" to his audience:

Videotape of young boys being raped at Abu Ghraib. Evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be a "composite figure" and a propaganda creation of either Iraq's Baathist insurgency or the U.S. government. The active involvement of Karl Rove and the president in "prisoner-interrogation issues." The mysterious disappearance of $1 billion, in cash, in Iraq. A threat by the administration to a TV network to cut off access to briefings in retaliation for asking Laura Bush "a very tough question about abortion."

And so forth.

Safely lodged behind the lectern, Hersh never offers any proof of his accusations. He feels he doesn't have to. "I'm just communicating another reality that I know," he says, "that for a lot of reasons having to do with, basically, someone else's ass, I'm not writing about it."

"Another reality," such as the wanton slaughter of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops, which Hersh imagines vividly for Suellentrop:

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.

Or maybe you're an aging lefty icon who got famous reporting the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. And so maybe you're still milking your notoriety for everything it's worth. And maybe you're always imagining another scoop like My Lai, because you're afraid that on some level you've become just another old gasbag on the lecture circuit. Or maybe not; we're just talking out loud to ourself here.

Hersh, by the way, doesn't provide any evidence that the scene described above actually happened. But--as we say--this doesn't stop him. At Berkeley in October 2004, for example, he told his audience that a young soldier had called him to say that a platoon of American troops had butchered "30 or so" members of the Iraqi National Guard. Hush up, Hersh told the soldier. "You're going to get a bullet in the back." Since this massacre hasn't showed up in Hersh's print journalism, we can only assume the story fails the rigorous New Yorker fact-checking process.

"I get paid to do speeches," Hersh concludes. "And I'm not there to be on straight. I'm there to tell, you know, give somebody, exchange views with people."

Come to think of it, Hersh's audiences are probably getting exactly what they paid for.

Anger Management

Last week on this page we took note of the low farce that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats made out of the hearings into Bush appointee John Bolton's fitness to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Joe Biden, for instance, claimed to believe that it is "just not acceptable" when a government official confronts a subordinate "and reams him a new one." Barbara Boxer wondered if Bolton needed "anger management."

Well, we certainly did, after listening to Boxer and Biden. The abuse of subordinates, after all, is a tradition on Capitol Hill every bit as venerable as calling opponents you despise "honorable gentlemen." So we invited Hill staffers to rat out members who liked to "kick down," as one of Bolton's accusers put it.

Among our informers (if we can call them that without disrespect) was the celebrated Washington lawyer Victoria Toensing, who recalled, not without some nostalgia, her days as chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1980s, when it was chaired by Barry Goldwater. Second in seniority to Goldwater was the legendary New York Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had an earlier career as ambassador to the United Nations. Indeed, as Toensing points out, because of his tough-talking, no-nonsense approach, "he was the U.N. ambassador that everyone wants to use as their model. Right? The prototype." Moynihan, you could say, kicked up, down, and sideways at the U.N., to his everlasting credit. As he famously said, when that body voted to equate Zionism with racism, the United States "does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act."

And as an Intelligence Committee boss, Toensing recalls, "he would call us in about something, and it would always be in the afternoon, after lunch . . . and he would just rant and rage at us about something that usually we had nothing to do with whatsoever, and then dismiss us."

Yes, as we said, it's a Washington tradition. And we want to hear more. So keep those cards and letters coming to scrapbook@weeklystandard.com. As noted last week, we intend to conduct this little investigation into anger management Capitol Hill style, according to the same high evidentiary standards adhered to by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority staff--i.e., feel free to email any dirt you've ever heard, even second hand.

She Fought the Good Fight

Diane Knippers was to the liberal hierarchy of America's mainline Protestant churches what Václav Havel was to the Communist bosses of Czechoslovakia--not only a thorn in their side, but the leader of a growing moral and spiritual opposition.

As head of the Institute on Religion and Democracy for 12 years, she took on the often lonely job of restoring the mainline denominations to a traditional, Bible-based faith. Rather than battle on behalf of classical Christianity, millions simply fled the mainline to join the Catholic Church or the Southern Baptists or a nondenominational church where the faith was not diluted or trendy.

Knippers stayed and fought. She was soft-spoken and encouraging, and she turned IRD into a visible and influential force. The deeply politicized leaders of the Episcopal and Methodist and Presbyterian churches feared her, and they should have. She was relentless in exposing their apostasies and instrumental in organizing a populist revolution in the pews against them.

"She always kept her eye on the ball," says Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Havel's legacy is a free Czech Republic. Knippers's legacy will be a vibrant Protestantism free from the grip of churchmen who thought Christianity was just another name for their left-wing crusades. Diane Knippers died last week at 53.