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Hersh proved much more adept at making contacts than attending press conferences, and soon he had a raft of sources, many of whom were unaccustomed to being courted by reporters. This first paid off when he learned that the Army was busy secreting away nerve gas overseas. AP, however, was less than enamored with the story Hersh wrote, cutting it by 80 percent and rewriting it. So Hersh quit, and at columnist Mary McGrory's behest, went to work for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, convinced that the senator was the country's best bet to end the Vietnam War. But Hersh couldn't stand the game-playing in politics and soon returned to journalism.

Hersh wasn't a peacenik by birth. One might assume that Hersh, coming of age as he did in a Jewish household in the '40s, was a red-diaper baby, but he says his family was apolitical. His anti-war convictions came strictly through "O.J.T. -- on the job training. I was covering the Pentagon for AP and I'd go to lunch with officers. And what they said was that you had to be a professional liar. It was all about body counts. That's how they measure success in the military. So they would lie about it. It turned me against the war."

Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one.

After his stint with McCarthy he authored several pieces on chemical and biological weapons for the New York Times and the New Republic. This led to his first book: "Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal," a 354-page tome that exposes exactly what its title suggests, as well as cataloging all the military and academic research helping to bolster the country's arsenal. And in his chapter on the military's use of chemical defoliants in Vietnam, Hersh showed why his book was relevant. Certain Hersh traits emerged in "Chemical and Biological Warfare" that would characterize most of his later book writing. On the plus side, he passionately imbued his exhaustively researched, documented, footnoted and indexed work with a sense of mission. On the minus, his writing was a little dense, surviving on the quality of its information alone. More troubling, he tended to give short shrift to points of view opposed to his own, thus inviting accusations of bias.

In 1972 Hersh rode his My Lai rep into the employ of the New York Times, where he engaged in a glorious 7-year run of abundant scoops. He was the Gray Lady's golden boy, grabbing the nation's exalted leaders and institutions and revealing them to be twisted and corrupt. The CIA still hasn't recovered from the thrashings Hersh administered. First he brought to light the CIA's surveillance of domestic organizations it deemed subversive -- a blatant violation of the agency's charter to gather foreign intelligence only. Then he revealed the CIA's covert role in overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile. The agency came across as a bunch of Keystone Kops when Hersh exposed its hijacking of the Glomar Explorer drilling ship in a failed attempt to raise a derelict Soviet submarine.

And where the CIA dallied, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security advisor and later secretary of state, could generally be found making his special mischief. Kissinger was deeply involved in the CIA's role in Chile, and so became a big target for Hersh. Hersh blew the lid off the Kissinger-directed secret bombing of Cambodia; he revealed Kissinger's authorization of wiretaps on his own staff and on several other White House aides; and he reported that documents in Kissinger's office had been stolen by Pentagon operatives. Hersh had other plans for Kissinger as well, but first the Times decided to play catch-up with the Washington Post on Watergate, and Hersh was given the beat. He caught up, too, scooping Woodward and Bernstein on the coverup part of the story and staying competitive with them in other areas as well.

But thanks to "All the President's Men," book and movie, Watergate will always be remembered as the Washington Post's story. To this day Hersh views Woodward with envy. Woodward's books generally are bestsellers, no matter how tawdry, and he's smooth and slick, the consummate Washington insider. Hersh is more like the anti-insider, all rough and blustery, given to the proletarian dress of the traditional reporter. But where Woodward now only has his celebrity and money, Hersh has his integrity.

Next page | Nixon and Kissinger: A pathological embrace of mutual distrust