Straight talk from America’s best reporter

The Newport Beach Public Library Foundation offered a smash opening number last weekend for its 2006 Distinguished Speakers Lecture Series.

Seymour Hersh, in my view, is the best print reporter in the U.S. today -- and certainly the most credibly outspoken. He offered plenty of evidence of both those assessments in his three appearances here -- two before the paying public on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, one before a packed house of students on Saturday morning.

Ever since we invaded Iraq, Hersh’s reporting in the New Yorker magazine has been years ahead of the mainstream press. More than two years ago, for example, he described in detail how our intelligence was twisted to justify the invasion. He left no doubt that this took place with the full awareness and encouragement of the top levels of the Bush administration. Subsequent articles -- particularly about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison -- have been equally prescient. Congressional hearings, news-release reporting and a half-dozen insider books, plodding along behind Hersh, have consistently vindicated his work. And it was from this place he talked to us last weekend.

His style is quick, impatient, frequently funny and presumes a certain level of knowledge and grasp of nuance in his audience. He doesn’t stop and wait for us to catch up, especially with such throwaway lines as, “If we go into Iran, we’ll be paying $8 a barrel for oil,” or, “The Iraqi election was a lot like those they have in Chicago.” And he didn’t change the rules for the kids. He never patronized or talked down to his school audience.

After he explained his professional background, he told the assembled students that rather than lecture at them, he would open the floor immediately for questions so he would be dealing with their major interests. When he got blank looks, he said: “C’mon speak up. What’re you here for? Extra credit?” When more silence followed and his introducer tried to offer a question to fill the gap, Hersh waved him off, saying, “Don’t make it easy for them. Make ‘em work.”

It took a half-hour, but he got there by asking himself a question about ethics in journalism, then describing at some length how he had discovered and broken the My Lai story that won him a Pulitzer during the Vietnam War. At a key point in his research, he was faced with an ethical question that he put before the students. And they finally got involved and kept things lively the rest of the way.

This process was typical of Hersh’s blue-collar style. He’s the print-media Edward R. Murrow -- with a lot of rough edges that are in short supply today. He is not a pundit or a personality or a talking head or an amateur psychologist or one of those guys you see in the pack at Washington news conferences or part of a news team. He’s a reporter, pure and simple, a loner with an impressive set of sources who trust him. “The people I talk to all have two questions up front,” he said. “First, will I quote them accurately, and, second, am I good at doing my job? When both answers are ‘yes,’ insiders will -- and do -- talk to me.”

What they tell him, and what he makes of it, is what we got unsparingly last weekend -- and what I constructed here from my notes. He was decidedly more reportorial than judgmental and played no political favorites. (He called John Kerry “unlikable” and said, “Bush didn’t win the 2004 election; Kerry lost it.”) Perhaps the most remarkable tribute to his performance was the total lack -- in the sessions I attended -- of hostile questions in this very Republican community.

About the president, for example, he said: “Bush is a true revolutionary, without any ability to change courses -- a rebel with a lost cause. He sees himself as a missionary bringing democracy to the world, and he’ll keep it up regardless of how many body bags they bring back.... Even though what’s going on in Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11, Bush is convinced he is doing the absolutely right thing, and that’s what worries me -- especially since he only wants democracy the way he wants it and elections when he wants them.”

About the current situation in Iraq, Hersh said: “I like people who tell the truth, and there’s a lot more integrity in the military than there is in the White House. But we have to report what the president says.... He isn’t calling it a civil war in Iraq, even though that clearly is what is happening. Shiites are killing Sunnis, and vice versa.... The two groups who won the most seats in the Iraqi election have strong ties to Iran -- our next enemy -- and there’s nothing left for the Sunnis.

“Meanwhile, we see ourselves as fighting for their freedom, and they see us as occupiers. We see them as insurgents. They see themselves as patriots and us as insurgents.... We have two billion Islamists who hate us, and we’re going to have to go through a lot of generations to get past them. That’s going to be harder because we don’t talk to people we don’t like. Bush hasn’t talked to the Syrians or Iran or the insurgents -- even though Syria represents secular Arabs and was the best source of intelligence we had after 9/11, and the others just want their piece of the pie.

“We’re retreating right now. Our ground troops are doing less and less, and we are using air support more and more as we train Iraqis to take over. But we’re facing a huge crisis, and I’m worried about our leadership because it isn’t rational.”

Finally a lady in the audience, weary of all the bad news, asked him if he had any good news to offer us.

“What Bush and Cheney have done is a real horror story,” he said, “but we’ll survive them. In my travels around the country, it’s very clear that people are increasingly disturbed over Iraq, and we’re going to see substantive changes in the years ahead.”

That’s about as upbeat as he got. Then he retired to an outdoor patio to schmooze with a long line of people seeking an autograph for their copy of Hersh’s newly published book, “Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib and Beyond.”

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column runs Thursdays.

20060216gzs0vnke(LA)