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."