SY HERSH is calling! In the hearts and minds of legions of senior U.S. officials in the late 1960s and 1970s, thusly alerted by their secretaries, no words struck greater fear. Throughout official Washington they almost invariably prompted an attempt to evade and mislead the intrusive reporter, to destroy documents before he got his hands on them. The rare appearance of the nebbishy New York Times ace in a government building—wearing his Buddy Holly eyeglasses, a bland suit and rumpled raincoat, a cross between Woody Allen and Columbo—set hardened bureaucrats atremble.

For Hersh, one of four children of Jewish émigrés from Poland and Lithuania, humble proprietors of a dry-cleaning store in a black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, such moments brought sublime pleasure. And no newsman compiled a more enviable record of bombshell exclusive stories across five decades of lone-wolf sleuthing.

It was Hersh who—working as a freelancer—won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize by exposing the Army massacre at My Lai; Hersh who broke the stalled Watergate story wide open, in early 1973, by uncovering the White House payments of hush money to the burglars and their lawyers; Hersh who parted the veil, in December 1974, on two decades of illegal domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), prompting the establishment of congressional oversight committees to rein in the “rogue elephant”; Hersh who revealed the CIA’s $4 billion operation to raise a sunken Soviet submarine, using the corporate empire of Howard Hughes as cover; Hersh who located the dual-records system that enabled President Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to bomb Cambodia without informing Congress; Hersh who plumbed the Nixon-Kissinger-CIA effort to destabilize the Allende government in Chile; and Hersh who, following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, brought to light the horrors of Abu Ghraib.

Those are just the highlights. Still plying his craft at eighty-one—2015 saw him publishing 10,000 words in the London Review of Books to advance a contrarian theory of the killing of Osama bin Laden—Hersh has finally published a memoir explaining how a law school dropout managed to become America’s foremost investigative journalist.

His breezy and entertaining account brims with new information on his biggest scoops, including vignettes about the famous figures he encountered—from Martin Luther King and Yoko Ono to Donald Rumsfeld and Bashar al-Assad—and revealing glimpses inside the mind of this driven and divisive man. A profoundly consequential writer, he has long rebuffed other reporters’ efforts to probe his personality and methodology. Now the investigative journalist has opened his own life and career up to closer investigation—how reliable is his account?

IT IS true, as John LeCarre states in a promotional sticker slapped on hardcover editions of Reporter, that this memoir is essential reading for all aspiring and practicing journalists—but not always for reasons Hersh might find salutary.

By his own account Hersh is “a fast-talking, hotheaded operator,” neither “gracious” nor “polite,” “mouthy” and “morally superior” and given to “whining,” “self-pity” and “temper tantrums” (“my way of coping”), an intractable employee who is “not much of a team player” and “not very interested in rules,” a writer who “took everything to heart” and would “often go nuts” when editors challenged or tweaked his writing, who once heaved his typewriter through a glass wall in his Times office before stalking out, who provoked his boss there into telling him to “shut the f*** up and get the story already,” and who “did not hesitate to engage in some low-level extortion” when such tactics were all that stood between the celebrated scribe and his next triumph.

“I was not, to put it mildly, everyone’s cup of tea,” Hersh admits. His ethos is encapsulated in the ambivalence he entertains, briefly, during his assault on CIA’s legacy of domestic spying: “It was more than a little self-serving … But a scoop was a scoop.”

To be sure, Hersh denies that he was a journalistic terrorist who bullied his subjects, using “gangster tactics,” into talking to him—legendary are the tales of Hersh bellowing into the phone that the doomed soul on the other end of the line could have it his way and stay silent, and just see how it played out on the front page of the Times the next morning—and he provides defenses, here and there, of techniques with which he has become synonymous: the use of anonymous sources and reliance on former officials as sources.

Nowhere, however, does Hersh grapple with the moral questions raised by his roughest methods, even as he provides damning detail on his employment of them. Assigned to cover Watergate by the Times in late 1972, by which point even Bob Woodward of the Washington Post had glumly concluded that “there was going to be no additional disclosure” in the case, Hersh found his path into the story in the person of Frank Sturgis, one of the burglars with CIA connections who was arrested on June 17, 1972 during the ill-fated break-in and wiretapping at Democratic National Committee headquarters. The only problem was that Hersh’s introduction to the soldier of fortune came through Andrew St. George, a writer who had reached agreement with Sturgis to collaborate on a book. The three met for drinks with the understanding that Hersh was going to write about the book deal. By the time St. George absented himself to visit the restroom, however, Hersh had picked up on Sturgis’s contempt for his collaborator and readily agreed when the Watergate burglar suggested they bolt for Hersh’s rental car.

It was a very brief moment of truth for me. Can I screw St. George to get what could be the story I need? Sturgis gave me the answer…He confirmed that he and others on the Watergate break-in team had been paid hush money since their arrest….I returned to Washington knowing that St. George would be mad as hell at me, and he had a right to be, but I had the beginning of what could be a hell of a story.

The ethos is on even starker display in Hersh’s recollection of the extraordinary spadework he performed, freelancing for the Dispatch News Service at the age of thirty-two, in what many still regard as his greatest journalistic accomplishment. His goal, in October 1969, was to find William Calley, the twenty-six-year-old Army lieutenant on whose orders, Hersh had learned, more than a hundred Vietnamese civilians had been slaughtered at the village of My Lai in March 1968. The Pentagon was quietly prosecuting Calley but the atrocity was unknown to the public.

Hersh let his fingers do the walking through old telephone books, used airport pay phones, placed pretext calls, staged dead drops, even pulled theatrical stunts, like when he would show up at some clerk’s office, dressed in the rumpled suit and clutching a briefcase, and start barking out orders for people or documents to be produced immediately, as if he were an attorney or some other authority figure. Hersh states it was his score of “a one-in-a-million bank shot,” in deft debrief of a colonel, that yielded Calley’s name. That in turn sent the roving reporter off in his ever-present rental car. Hersh’s memoir often conjures the wild, all-expenses-paid road-trip sensibility of Hunter S. Thompson, forcing us to recognize Sy Hersh, who enjoyed a good drink, as quintessentially Gonzo.

The trail led to Fort Benning in Georgia. Crisscrossing the city-sized base in stultifying heat, Hersh scoured the likeliest buildings in which to find Calley. The hours dragged on. Finally someone mentioned a young soldier named “Smitty,” freshly demoted from sergeant to private and said to possess, among his diminished duties, responsibility for Calley’s mail:

He has no idea where Calley is or where his mail ends up. I ask, resignedly, so there’s nothing on Calley in the battalion files? Well, says Smitty, we do have everyone’s 201 files. I knew that a 201 file is the military’s essential personnel folder that is kept for both enlisted men and officers. He adds, “I’d have to steal it to get it.” There’s a long pause. I say, “Well?” “I’ll try, mister.” …Smitty returns, suddenly much more animated, and slides into the seat next to mine. He opens his blouse and pulls out Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr.’s personnel file….[Smitty] is glad to have been a help – f*** the army. He leaves and I head for Calley’s new home.

To those unfamiliar with Hersh’s canon, this passage would seem to mark a signal moment, both because the conversation with Smitty produces Calley’s address, Hersh’s passport to journalistic immortality; and because it reveals a crime behind Hersh’s Pulitzer, made explicit when Smitty questions whether he should “steal” Army documents and Hersh prods the none-too-bright soldier, freshly demoted, into doing the deed (“Well?”).

And yet as damning as this passage is, it actually diminishes Hersh’s culpability, at least when contrasted with earlier accounts he has provided about his great breakthrough. The disparity suggests only a few possibilities, none uplifting: that Hersh forgot his earlier versions of events; that, for Reporter, he deliberately recast them—or, more aptly, revived them, with some conscious agenda, literary or otherwise, in mind; or, most troubling, that when the subject is himself, he feels unbound by any obligation to factual accuracy, consistency or any of the other hallmarks of journalism or history.

“YOU MADE your reputation on My Lai. How did you get that story?” Joe Eszterhas asked Hersh during their lengthy interview, spread across two issues of Rolling Stone in April 1975. “It’s a long story,” Hersh replied. “I’ve never told anyone the story. Maybe I should have written it.”

This exchange followed by nearly five years Hersh’s publication, in the July 11, 1970 issue of Saturday Review, of an article entitled “How I Broke the Mylai 4 Story.” Whether Hersh in 1975 had forgotten about the Saturday Review essay, or was deliberately misleading Eszterhas—one of the first journalists to follow up on Hersh’s initial My Lai reporting—is difficult to know at this point.

“How I Broke the Mylai 4 Story” marked the first installment in Hersh’s Legend of Hersh. In this earliest iteration, the account is largely the same as it would be nearly fifty years later in Reporter—but for one important detail. In the 1970 version the hapless ex-sergeant who steals Army documents to provide Calley’s address to Hersh has a different name:

Calley had been around, the ex-sergeant said, but no one knew where he was now. The only way Jerry could find out anything would be to steal Calley’s personnel file. There was a long pause.

“Well?” I said.

“I’ll try, Mister.”

In less than five minutes he returned with a short information sheet the battalion commander kept on each officer. The sheet included a local address in Columbus for Calley…I raced off.

Orally recounting the story to Eszterhas in 1975, Hersh changes the ex-sergeant’s name to Smitty and provides—for the only time—a clue about the ethno-geographic background of his most important source.

Smitty is a tall, gangly, and nervous hillbilly kid. “Come and sit in the car,” I tell him. He gets in the car and I slam the door hard. I tell him I’m a reporter from Washington. I tell him I’ve been hunting this goddamned Calley all day and I tell him I know Calley’s mail is in there. “So where is he?” I ask Smitty. Smitty seems relieved that I’m just a reporter. “Mister,” he says, “I’d like to help you. All I can tell you is that we used to get his mail. We used to forward his mail somewhere but I don’t even see it anymore.”

We’re sitting there and Smitty says, “I don’t even know how he gets his mail anymore.” And then he adds: “The only thing that I know is that we’ve got his personnel file in there. I’d have to steal it out of there.” There is a long pause. “Come on,” I tell him, “just do it. I promise I’ll just look at it for a minute.” Smitty says: “I don’t know.” I whisper: “Come on.” He says: “Well, wait here.” He goes in past the old sergeant and comes out a couple minutes later. We get back inside the car. He reaches inside his shirt and pulls out a file marked “Calley, William L., Jr.”

The differences between this account and the Saturday Review essay are marked. Here Hersh is far more active in prodding Jerry/Smitty to violate the law: not just once with a vague “Well?” but twice, leading the charge with “Come on, just do it.” And when the uncosmopolitan Smitty bravely resists Hersh’s entreaties, the ace reporter—having already tried to convince his mark on the basis that their transgression would be time-limited (“I’ll just look at it for a minute”)—resorts to whispering theatrically, like the Devil, into Smitty’s ear.

Nearly fifteen years would pass before Hersh would return to the story, once again in writing. Now he felt compelled to share his misgivings over how he treated a key source in his exposure of My Lai—only it wasn’t Smitty. For this the Pulitzer winner chose as his venue an obscure nostalgia magazine, now defunct. Its cover divided between Al Capone and Tracy and Hepburn, the October/November 1989 issue of Memories (“The Magazine of Then and Now”) devoted ten pages to Sy Hersh and My Lai. Illustrating his firsthand account was a photograph of the massacre, a reprinted headline, and a sidebar, by Delphine Taylor, presenting where-are-they-now? updates on key players.

In “MY LAI: Breaking the Story,” Hersh writes: “I must admit that today I’m troubled about not having been straight with the colonel.” This was the officer who had given him Calley’s name. “I had no such qualms then,” Hersh adds. “All I felt was the jolt—that euphoric rush—a reporter gets when a great story is suddenly his.” What Hersh feels badly about, twenty years after the fact, is his having made no mention to the colonel that he planned to write about the information the officer had just volunteered. Then Smitty appears in the 1989 account:

I tell him to get in the car. I tell him who I am and that I know he handles Calley’s mail. He says he doesn’t handle it anymore….I slump in despair.

Smitty wants to help.

“The only thing I know,” he says, nodding toward the headquarters building, “is that we’ve got his personnel file in there.” But he can’t give it to me. “I’d have to steal it….” I say nothing for a moment. I’m hoping he’s thinking about those stripes he lost.

“Come on,” I say.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on!”

“Well, wait here.”

Smitty disappears inside. A few minutes later, he gets back in the car, reaches under his uniform blouse and produces Calley’s file.

Putting aside Hersh’s curious use of ellipses—what else did Smitty say?—this account makes no mention of seductive whispering but rather suggests that in his second thrust, after Smitty’s hesitation, Hersh resorted to brow-beating (“Come on!”).

Hersh was not done. The next version—the last to appear before publication of his memoir—was occasioned by his first trip to My Lai. There, joined by his wife and children, Hersh met with survivors and toured the museum memorializing the massacre. The ensuing New Yorker article, entitled “Scene of the Crime” and published in March 2015, ranks among Hersh’s most emotional pieces—but the breakthrough moment is reduced to a single sentence, in which Hersh notes only that “someone in the Army had allowed me to read and take notes on a classified charge sheet.”

And now comes Reporter, with its modified limited hang-out route, wherein Hersh, reverting to his 1970 account, only nudges Jerry/Smitty to steal, and then only once, gently (“Well?”). After experimenting in The New Yorker with complete erasure of his incitement to crime, Hersh’s intention now appears to be to use his memoir, with its built-in audience, to bury his more revealing accounts from 1975 and 1989, to cement the less-incriminating version as the “official” one, to be relied upon by all future biographers.

At all points it is hard to know exactly what Hersh is thinking. As with his description of the “very brief moment of truth” he experienced in his pursuit of Watergate, Hersh’s treatment of Jerry/Smitty in Reporter is matter-of-fact, presented without any serious or sustained contemplation of moral implications. Nor is there any mention of the pangs of guilt Hersh felt, in 1989, over his treatment of the colonel.

ANY REPORTER who has broken a big story, an investigative exclusive recognized by his peers, has probably trod ethical terrain similar to Hersh’s, marked by dilemmas in which moral obligation and journalistic excellence come squarely into conflict. Notable in Hersh’s case, above all, are the stakes—no less a figure than Henry Kissinger complained, in a recorded 1974 call, that “Sy Hersh is out to get me”—and the crystalline clarity with which these conflicts confronted Hersh in real time. Sometimes the enterprising reporter will not learn relevant factors, such as a source’s motivation, until long after publication.

But what of the reporter’s motivation? Since Hersh is so uncharacteristically taciturn on the subject, we are left to guess what fueled the moments of transgression he now divulges. In this context, it is central to remember that Hersh was always more than a reporter; he was, and remains, a crusader. It was never enough for Sy Hersh simply to add to the record of our times, without care for where the chips fell; he wanted to have an impact, often a specific one. He seems to have regarded it as a disappointment if one of his big stories failed to result in someone’s indictment, in the commencement of official inquiries or in some grand policy shift.

Among Hersh’s earliest splashes was his series of exposés, for the Associated Press and The New Republic, on the Pentagon’s secret arsenal of chemical and biological weapons (CBW). The attention the stories generated was widely credited with propelling the Nixon administration to shift U.S. policy and ban such weapons. “I was proud of my CBW journalism, and my role in changing American policy,” Hersh notes in Reporter. Left unaddressed once again is another of the ethical dilemmas that confronted Hersh, in which he elevated policy preference over journalistic obligation. At one point in Reporter, Hersh recalls that a congressman, using CBW information “supplied by me,” became “more effective among his House colleagues” on the issue; three pages later, Hersh notes, without elaboration, that he subsequently wrote a long article for the Times focused on the congressman “and his activism,” detailing how this politician “broke through on the CBW issue.” That 1969 article did not disclose Hersh’s backstage work with the congressman; nor, five decades on, does the author appear to realize the ethical problem posed by this set of circumstances. Sy Hersh, the great connector of dots, never reckons that funneling information to a politician with the explicit aim of making him more effective on a selected policy issue, then writing about that politician, publicly lauding his effectiveness on said issue—without anywhere divulging the role played by the ostensibly neutral reporter in the politician’s ascent—might violate a journalistic norm or two.

That episode followed Hersh’s lone foray into professional politics: his brief stint, in 1968, as press secretary to the insurgent Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. History records that McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary catalyzed Lyndon Johnson’s retirement and Robert F. Kennedy’s late plunge into the race. Hersh’s unflinching portrait of McCarthy, poet and boor, includes the eyebrow-raising detail that it was Hersh who rounded up the marijuana when McCarthy and Jerry Brown got high for the first time. Ultimately McCarthy’s contempt—for staff, donors and process—sent Hersh back to journalism for good. “I had helped to get rid of a president,” Hersh records with glass-half-empty melancholy, “but not a war.”

“IF YOUR mother says she loves you, check it out.” This maxim of journalism Hersh attributes to one of his earliest editors, Arnold Dornfeld of City News in Chicago, and Hersh cites it repeatedly as the quintessential task facing every journalist. Yet this iron rule also falls casualty in Hersh’s hands—twice, in fact, and both in the author’s recounting of his award-winning exposure of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The first instance concerns the motivations that drove some of the U.S. military personnel who participated in the torture and humiliation of Islamic prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Hersh relates that it was not always pure barbarism at work but sometimes a calculated effort to conscript the prisoners into becoming double agents for the United States: blackmailing them with compromising photos to persuade them to penetrate Al Qaeda. In this, the Americans were said to have derived inspiration from a foreign ally. “While researching the Abu Ghraib story, I was told, but could not confirm,” Hersh writes, “that sexual extortion had been tried by the Israelis in an effort to get Palestinian prisoners to agree to join Hamas and similar radical groups and to spy on them.”

If Hersh could not confirm this allegation about Israel, and still hasn’t, why does he include it in his memoirs? Is it Hersh’s contention that because he is now an octogenarian, or tackling the new genre of autobiography, that the maxim of “check it out” no longer applies? Or does he believe he can publish unverified allegations when the subject is a nation-state, or Israel, specifically? If so, he should say so. A page later, in a footnote—often the location of Hersh’s finest thumbnail sketches—we are told the sad fate of Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, author of the internal report that catalogued the Abu Ghraib abuses.

“[Taguba] and I have talked many times since about war crimes and torture,” Hersh writes. “We still share lunch every few months” (a disclosure likely to wean some Sy Hersh fans from the desire to lunch with their hero). “His honesty is breathtaking,” Hersh adds in his account of how Taguba, for his candor, was forced to retire from the Army without further promotion. Hersh then relates an exchange Taguba claims to have had with Gen. John Abizaid, then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq:

Abizaid rolled up the glass separating the two of them from [their] driver and warned Taguba that he was going too far and too deep in his inquiry. “You and your report will be investigated.” “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time I thought I was in the Mafia,” Taguba said.

End of footnote. Did Hersh check it out? Here again he is silent, failing to tell us whether he ever even reached out to General Abizaid for his side of the story; Taguba’s “breathtaking” honesty seems to have been all Hersh required to go to print.

Contacted for this article, General Abizaid told me, in a telephone call and subsequent e-mail correspondence, that “to the best of my recollection” he has never met or spoken to Hersh, and that he never threatened General Taguba. “I warned him that some in D.C. would not take kindly to his report which was a statement of the obvious. I have lots of respect for Tony,” Abizaid added, and “no threat was made to him nor did I ever disparage him or his report to the Army which chose not to select him for promotion.”

Whom should we believe—Taguba or Abizaid? Hard to say, but the reader deserves both accounts, not just one. Which is to say: The allegation that the top military officer running the Iraq War secretly threatened one of his subordinate generals, with a menace that conjured the Mafia and the unmistakable aim of suppressing alleged war crimes, is undoubtedly a matter of greater consequence, a claim worthier of verification, than the contention that Mrs. Hersh loved her son.

SUCH ARE the corners one might cut if a journalist’s ambitions are directed at specific policy goals rather than the establishment, for its own sake, of a more accurate record. Hersh might tell us, as he does in Reporter, “It was then for me, and still is, all about the story,” but compilation of the story is repeatedly relegated to secondary ranking on Hersh’s hierarchy of needs. He wants changes on the ground, not just history recorded. “It would be wonderful to say that my reporting on Abu Ghraib changed the course of the war and ended torture, but of course nothing like that happened,” Hersh laments, “just as the My Lai story had not ended the Vietnam War or its brutality.”

One of the biggest surprises is Hersh’s scathing portrait of the timidity of the New York Times in the 1970s, when the author was on a historic roll of front-page exclusives. “There was a strange Times pathology when it came to stories that touched the presidency,” Hersh writes. For too many at the paper of record, Henry Kissinger and Dick Helms, then the director of CIA, were not mere sources but friends, or something else altogether: figures of power for whom top executives and editors harbored a reverence that impinged on journalistic independence.

Max Frankel, the Washington bureau chief whose unenviable duty it was to manage Hersh in this frenzied period, once responded to one of his ace’s explosive story proposals by telling him to be sure to “run it by Henry and Dick.” “Run it by Henry and Dick? They were the architects of the idiocy and criminality I was desperate to write about,” Hersh recalls. “I could not imagine how a senior editor, one as bright and supportive as Frankel had been, could not grasp the implications of what I was proposing.”

Frankel, executive editor A.M. (“Abe”) Rosenthal, columnist-cum-legend James (“Scotty”) Reston—all get their comeuppance here, with Hersh recounting instances when the Times’ leadership, fearful of entrenched power in Washington and elite boardrooms, yanked the reins on his investigative thrusts. In the late ‘70s, toward the end of his run with the Times, Hersh served a brief tenure in the paper’s New York bureau, choosing to focus his energies on ferreting out corporate malfeasance. But he found his editors more hesitant than when he had been taking on Kissinger and Helms, Nixon and his stone-faced attorney general, John N. Mitchell (whom Hersh tells us, in one of his savory footnotes, he found it “hard to dislike”). “The courage the Times had shown in confronting the wrath of a president and an attorney general in the crisis over the Pentagon Papers in 1971,” Hersh complains, “was nowhere to be seen when confronted by a gaggle of corporate con men who were struggling for their existence in the face of a major SEC investigation … After that experience, I was ready to leave New York.”

The pipe-smoking Reston, who died in 1995, fares particularly poorly in Hersh’s telling. Lauded in his Times obituary (written by R.W. Apple) as “perhaps the most influential journalist of his generation,” Reston comes off as barnacled and effete, altogether too chummy with the powerful he purported to cover. Reston argued against publication of the My Lai story, claiming it would damage American morale and security. He objected, “more than a little irritated,” when Hersh, in a first for the Times, wrote a story citing secret grand jury evidence. When Reston heard that his friend, Kissinger, was the target of Hersh’s next exclusive, Reston, in slippers, approached Hersh’s desk and sought to kill the story by asking: “Do you understand that if you do this story, Henry will resign?” Still another of Hersh’s delectable footnotes implicitly ascribes anti-Semitism to Reston, as when the latter, dropping by the Times offices late at night, tuxedo-clad, ribbed the hard-working reporter: “Hersh, aren’t you going to get that exclusive interview with Jesus for the second edition?”

If there is a venerated figure of American journalism who escapes Hersh’s score-settling scorn, it is his contemporary and Pulitzer-winning peer, Bob Woodward. Hersh recounts how the two, after pleasant tennis outings, fashioned an unusual information-sharing agreement in 1973–74, during their mutual pursuit of Watergate. The rival aces decided “it would be much more efficient if we would no longer chase the same story…but do separate stories and push our editors to run the gist of each other’s work.” “I’ve liked and respected Bob ever since,” Hersh writes.

That’s not true—or at least it hasn’t always been true. In a May 1992 telephone call with Len Colodny, coauthor of the 1991 bestseller Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, a starkly revisionist account that challenged Woodward’s Watergate-era reportage, Hersh was caught on tape disparaging his fellow reporter. “I’ll tell you right now I had a conversation with
Woodward about you,” Hersh tells Colodny, according to a transcript I obtained. “Sy,” Colodny interrupts, “I’m gonna tell you this one last time: Bob Woodward is a[n] incredible liar.” “I know,” Hersh responds. “It hurts me to believe that he’s in my f***ing profession.”

NOT LONG after the September 11 attacks, while working on my own revisionist history of Watergate, I reached out to Hersh to get his advice and perhaps some cherished anecdotes from the era. The man I encountered telephonically on that occasion—and in a subsequent run-in, years later, on an elevator at a party thrown by The New Yorker—was very much the character recalled by all students of Hersh, fans and detractors alike, and his biographer, Robert Miraldi, a professor at the State University of New York. With Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist (2013), Hersh did not cooperate; indeed, he even vetoed his sister’s agreement to speak with Miraldi:

He had long been intensely private and media shy, except when promoting a book or exposé…Writers have been chasing him for four decades. His home and work phone numbers are publicly listed, and he answers his own phone, abruptly, with “Hersh.” He will answer a few questions and then dismiss the caller with, “You’ve got enough. G’bye.”…Marianne Szegedy-Maszak tried to write about him in 1991 for Esquire, but he kept saying to her, “But imnotgonnatell you a thing.”

In my case the conversation was extended a bit because I was able to tell Hersh, truthfully, that I was calling him from the White House, which I was then covering for Fox News. “Who do they got doing the briefings over there nowadays?” he wanted to know. I thought it an odd request; in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the press briefings by senior Bush-Cheney administration officials were routinely televised, in full. “Ari Fleischer is the press secretary,” I said haltingly. This triggered Hersh’s famous impatience. C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon, he said—maybe ten c’mons in a space of two seconds, a classic display of the cantankerous big-city kibitzing I had grown up with in New York.

“You mean the background briefings?” Yeah yeah yeah, he said. Now I volunteered the name of a prominent female official who frequently briefed reporters on background. This prompted, from Hersh, a vulgar intimation unsuited for publication in the intellectual journal you hold in your hands. When I brought us back to John Mitchell, Hersh begged off. “Watergate was a long time ago, kid, and there’s a war going on now. That’s what I’m working on. Call me in a few months and maybe we can get together.” Click.

As Miraldi notes, the subjects of Sy Hersh’s nonfiction form a large contingent of enemies, people still furious at him decades after publication, “still convinced they were wronged.” Foremost among them is Kissinger, who turned ninety-five shortly before Reporter appeared in print. The former secretary of state occupies his own chapter in these pages, perhaps predictably, as he always occupied a special place in Hersh’s imagination and canon. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983) is a deeply reported and thoroughly tendentious portrait. Hersh’s contempt for what he deems “the essential evil of the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy” is matched only by his conviction that former Vice President Dick Cheney—the subject of a forthcoming magnum opus on which Hersh has been working for over a decade—was a “menace to civilization.”

Few readers will have the institutional knowledge, the archival reach, to adjudicate all the controversies Hersh has eagerly stoked; publication of his memoir will prove invaluable to his next biographer. Yet even those dubious about Hersh’s animadversions can welcome the arrival of this book. Hersh transports us back to another time, when shoe-leather reporting and documentary evidence mattered more than encrypted passwords and unique clicks, when editors and publishers still subsidized investigative reporting for months at a time, and reporters could pursue complex stories, as Hersh writes, “without having to constantly relay what was being learned on the newspaper’s web page.” Hersh notes that investigative sleuthing became harder after 9/11, but without identifying exactly why: the conquest of technology, which has made virtually all phone calls traceable.

In today’s crowded journalistic environment, no one reporter stands out the way Hersh once did. It is difficult to imagine the deputy attorney general of the United States and the CIA director indulging in a discussion about a working journalist in the Obama-to-Trump era that would resemble the exchange that occurred between Larry Silberman and William Colby on December 21, 1974, on the eve of the Times’ publication of Hersh’s expose on domestic spying. “The sob has sources that are absolutely beyond comparison,” Silberman marvels, in a transcript declassified decades later and published in Reporter. “He knows more about this place,” Colby said of the CIA, “than I do.”

James Rosen is a former chief Washington correspondent for Fox News and the author of three books, including The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (2008) and Cheney One on One (2015).