Thursday, November 6, 2008

The man who knows too much

And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai, he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about their scoop, they describe him - the competition. He was unlike any reporter they'd ever seen: 'Hersh, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy, showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed pinstriped shirt that might have been at its best in his college freshman year and rumpled, bleached khakis.' Forty years on, little has changed. Today he is in trainers, chinos and a baggy navy sweatshirt and - thanks to a tennis injury - he is walking like an old guy: chest forward, knees bandy, slight limp in one leg. There is something cherishably chaotic about him. A fuzzy halo of frantic inquiry follows him wherever he goes, like the cloud of dust that hovers above Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown strip. In conversation, away from the restraining hand of his bosses at the New Yorker, the magazine that is now his home, his thoughts pour forth, unmediated and - unless you concentrate very hard - seemingly unconnected. 'Yeah, I shoot my mouth off,' he says, with faux remorse. 'There's a huge difference between writing and thinking.' Not that he has much time for those who put cosy pontification over the graft of reporting: 'I think... My colleagues! I watch 'em on TV, and every sentence begins with the words: "I think." They could write a book called I Think.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/19/seymour-hersh-new-yorker-reporter

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