How investigative master Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre

By Richard Read

After six days crossing the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian railway, I stumbled from the chill of a winter evening into the warmth of The New York Times Moscow bureau. The fragrance of home cooking filled the upstairs office in a rundown building near the Kremlin and Red Square.

Bill Keller – a star foreign correspondent who would go on to become the newspaper’s executive editor – sat at a broad desk that evening in 1988 as his colleagues’ young children careened around the cluttered office from an adjoining apartment. He kindly loaned me a desktop computer to file a freelance story that I had reported for The Times.

As I typed, I overheard Keller chuckling about a reporting tactic that he had used that day. “I pulled a real ‘Sy Hersh,’” he told an editor on the phone. I didn’t catch the particulars, but I certainly knew the name Seymour Hersh.

The legendary reporter is best known for breaking the story of My Lai, a massacre by U.S. soldiers that triggered global outrage and stoked opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. The story was such major news that I remember being horrified as a 12-year-old kid who was just starting to follow national events.

The quick summary of what Hersh uncovered:

On March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., a 24-year-old Army platoon leader, had led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai (pronounced mee LYE), a hamlet in South Vietnam. The Americans, angry that numerous members of their company were being killed or maimed in the heavily mined area, suspected that anyone found in the village, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies. Calley told his men to enter the village firing. Soldiers bayoneted old men, shot women and children in the back of the head, raped and killed women and girls, and ordered villagers into an irrigation ditch to be machine-gunned.

For exposing the massacre, Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Calley, who maintained during a trial that he had only followed orders, was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison. He served just three years of house arrest and barracks confinement after his conviction was overturned.

Enduring craft lessons

I knew most of that story when I made my way into The Times Moscow bureau all those winters ago. But what I overheard there, from Keller’s phone conversation, illustrated how tricks of the trade pass from one journalist to the next. Techniques filter through generations, linking denizens of the hot-type and pay-phone era to reporters who take laptops and cell phones for granted.

Two of my journalistic heroes — Keller, who would win the 1989 Pulitzer for international reporting for stories from and on Soviet Russia, and Hersh, who would expose abuses by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Graib prison in 2004 during the Iraq war — employed tactics that remain relevant today.

Hersh started as a copyboy and reporter in Chicago, served in the Army and began covering the Pentagon in 1965 for the Associated Press and other news organizations as he honed his investigative skills. After his Vietnam scoop, he reported on the Watergate scandal in the 1970s for The New York Times.

Hersh has a penchant for dramatic detail. A review in The Guardian of his 2018 memoir, “Reporter,” said that detail swamped the narrative “like creeper clambering over an ancient Mayan ruin, and for the reader, hacking through it is completely exhausting.” (Here’s a 2019 Nieman Storyboard of tips gleaned from Hersh’s memoir.)

At 87, Hersh continues wearing out shoe leather as an independent journalist published on Substack. Last year he probed the sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream Pipeline, contesting a version of events reported by The New York Times.

Over the years Hersh’s reporting has sparked lawsuits and controversy. His methods, at times, have drawn criticism from some of today’s journalists who find them ethically problematic. But the same Guardian reviewer who found his memoir writing wordy had praise for his relentless reporting: “Here is journalistic tenacity of a kind that, social media being what it is, is close to nonexistent today.”

Tips, tenacity and resourcefulness

This past August, after The Washington Post reported that Calley had died, Hersh wrote a piece titled “Tracking down Lieutenant Calley. How I learned the story of the My Lai massacre.”

Hersh’s account shows how a dogged reporter can turn the vaguest of tips into a blockbuster story that can change the course of history. Here are some lessons that emerge from his article about finding Calley:

• Cultivate sources and a reputation. Hersh was a broke freelancer in 1969 when he received a phone call from a young Washington lawyer he didn’t know. A government official whose name the attorney did not reveal had suggested the call to Hersh. Evidently the official had faith in the freelancer’s ability to root out, as Hersh wrote, “a terrible massacre in Vietnam that was being covered up by the Pentagon.”
• Study the culture and language of your sources. Hersh knew from his G.I. days that “making fun is part of Army culture.” After a fruitless search of court records and news reports, Hersh encountered a man limping along a Pentagon corridor whom he’d known as a colonel during his AP days, and who had become a general after being wounded in Vietnam. Hersh joshed the guy, saying he’d heard he had shot himself in the knee to get a promotion to general. The general responded in kind, saying he had heard that Hersh had been fired. Hersh then told the general that he’d heard there had been a massacre in Vietnam. “What he did next was a magic moment for a journalist,” Hersh wrote. “He wheeled around and in obvious disgust slammed his hand on his bad knee and said something like: ‘That asshole Calley didn’t kill anyone higher than this. There’s nothing there, Sy.’” Hersh now had a name: Calley.
• Be persistent. Be resourceful. Hersh phoned an Army flack who went on a tangent, speculating that Calley had shot up a bar in Saigon. Next Hersh had coffee with a Congressional staffer who told him there was a mess that was being handled, but no reason to worry. “You bet,” Hersh thought.
• Know records and how to read them, even if it means reading upside down. After Hersh finally found the name of Calley’s Utah-based attorney, he borrowed money to fly to Salt Lake City and see him in his office. The attorney laid the Army charge sheet citing Calley on his desk and began to read from it. Hersh could see the first few paragraphs at the top of the page. “I started to copy them, word for word, very slowly, while pretending to take notes,” Hersh wrote. “It wasn’t the highest form of journalism, but neither was mass murder the highest form of military behavior.”
• Hold your liquor. Ok, you probably won’t find this technique in journalism textbooks. But Hersh, Keller and I never attended J-school and, at least when I was a foreign correspondent, sources in the alcohol-drenched regions I covered often insisted that Western visitors match them shot for shot. On Substack, Hersh describes imbibing an escalating amount of cheap bourbon while chatting up soldiers at Fort Benning, where he searched for Calley. Worried that competitors would find him first, Hersh drove more than 100 miles in a day around the sprawling Army base in Georgia. Finally, Hersh located Calley, who invited him to his apartment. “More bourbon was poured,” Hersh wrote, “and he started talking.” In the wee hours the exhausted reporter switched to wine, taking notes all the while.
• Be an acute and detached observer. Hersh continued observing when Calley went to the bathroom. “There was a large mirror on his side of the door that showed he was vomiting dark red arterial blood — the product of a significant ulcer or two, so I guessed,” Hersh wrote. “He was masking a hell of a lot of anxiety, and perhaps terror. But I didn’t allow myself sympathy for his plight. He had a choice to make at My Lai, and he chose to kill innocents and to order his subordinates to do the same.”

Then and now

Would uncovering the story of the My Lai massacre be easier today? Or more difficult?

Hersh lacked databases, smartphones and the vast resources of the Internet. Yet in his early reporting days, access to the heart of stories often was easier.

“There were no issues back then with getting onto the base in my rental car,” he wrote of entering Fort Benning.

Roles also blurred more casually then. Hersh bluffed his way around without always identifying himself as a reporter. He had heard of an Army clerk named Smitty who reportedly handled Calley’s mail. At the apartment building where Smitty lived, he barked at a sergeant: “Sergeant, get Smitty’s ass out here now!” He hoped that by wearing a “ratty suit and tie,” he would be mistaken for a lawyer.

After landing the story, Hersh had trouble finding a news organization to publish it. Life and Look, major magazines of the day, rejected it. Most news organizations at the time stuck to government sources when reporting on the war.

Ultimately a small antiwar news service, the Dispatch News Service, picked up the story and sold it to newspapers nationwide. Hersh interviewed dozens of soldiers over the next few months, writing more stories.

Some critics argued that it was unpatriotic to expose atrocities committed by U.S. servicemen fighting in horrifying, harrowing conditions. But Hersh’s stories not only uncovered war crimes, they changed coverage of Vietnam, as news organizations began reporting on other U.S atrocities.

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Richard Read, Nieman ‘97, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, reported for The Oregonian for many years. He retired in 2021 after a stint as Los Angeles Times national reporter and Seattle bureau chief.