HENRY A. KISSINGER

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Personal and Confidential

July 12, 1983

Dear Abe:

I have been abroad for a month, enough time to gain some perspective on the Hersh book and the *Times* treatment of it. I see nothing to be gained at this point by reviving the issue publicly. Still, character assassination has been committed--egregiously--and the author has been abetted in this by the *Times*, albeit unintentionally. This raises a number of fundamental issues which I want to consider with you because there is no effective public forum available.

I have chosen to write you for two reasons: (1) because I know that the *Times* is, in principle, dedicated to the highest journalistic standards, and that the maintenance of these standards is of great personal importance to you; and (2) because the *Times* not only occupies a unique place at the pinnacle of American journalism, but also has a unique relationship to the Hersh book. Hersh's identification with the *Times* is what gives the book its imprimatur. He is constantly referred to as "the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for *The New York Times*;" in effect, he has invested the book with the authority of the *Times*; he has appropriated the *Times'* reputation for accuracy and turned that to his own purposes.

Mr. Abe Rosenthal
Executive Editor
The New York Times
229 W. 43rd Street
New York, New York 10036

SUITE 1100 • 55 EAST FIFTY-SECOND STREET • NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10055 • (212) 759-7919

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The Issues

By tradition in this country we take our chances
with the printed word. There are no prior
restraints on what is to be written--and precious
few penalities after publication under the law
of libel as it presently stands. This being
so, the responsibility of the press to correct
and balance is all the more grave. No public
official has a right to demand immunity from
criticism, even from a measure of unfair
criticism. But equally, systematic efforts
to destroy public reputations, when those efforts
are unopposed and even abetted by the media, are
bound to have a "chilling effect" on future
attempts to attract into public service people
who value their reputations. If honor can be
impugned through Hersh's obsessive pursuit of
my good name seven years after leaving office
and fifteen years after the events in question,
the penalty for serving one's country simply
becomes too great. The press has a responsi-
bility to expose malfeasance in office. But
unless this is coupled with an equal dedication
to countering the abuse of that power to "expose,"
the press becomes a nursery for nihilism.

Few serious editors would question these
propositions--in the abstract. The problem
arises when it comes time to apply them to
concrete cases. Cases, for example, like that
of the Hersh book.

This book presents almost a classic case of
rogue investigative journalism.

For a decade, the author has flagrantly ad-
vertised his bitter, vindictive animus toward
me. In 1975 David Halberstam wrote in the
Best and the Brightest:

Hersh had not gotten into Watergate
in the beginning because he had been
working on a series of stories about
General John Lavelle, who had been

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bombing North Vietnam in November 1971 and March 1972 without any apparent authorization. That was no small story, it was important in itself, a General seemingly disobeying orders, and Hersh suspected from the first that it might lead even higher and that it might, pleasure of pleasures, keeping his fingers crossed, lead to Henry Kissinger.

Harrison Salisbury reported in *Without Fear or Favor* that Hersh said about me in 1973: "I'd really love to get that son-of-a-bitch."

During this period Hersh was a *Times* employee, probably restrained by the ethical standards of the *Times*. But book publishing has a looser morality which has enabled him to give free rein to his vendetta. He started with his conclusions. His first Freedom of Information Act request *before* he had received any documents stated his purpose of demonstrating "that lying on a wholesale scale went on in the White House." Two years later he offered to exculpate Ambassador Korry whom he had vilified in 1973 provided Korry would assist in "getting" me.

In short from the outset it was widely understood in Washington--indeed advertised by Hersh--that he intended a hatchet job--which is why so few of those who were close to me agreed to be interviewed by him. I can only speculate on his motives, whether they were personal or institutional or both. The important point is that Hersh's trademark is the viciousness and ruthlessness with which he goes after his victims and the tendency to extend the assault to the institutions which they serve. Indeed the question arises whether he does not use the individuals as a surrogate for the institutions. In 1974-75 he quickly went from stories of CIA transgressions to disclosing

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intelligence operations against Soviet under-
water communications which served no useful
purpose but destroyed an irreplaceable
intelligence source. The thrust of his
Chilean critique is purely Marxist: that our
policy was to defend rapacious American
enterprise. That was not its thrust, as Helms
and Ambassadors Korry and Davis have sought
to show--though Hersh's methodology made it
impossible to respond in time and in major
journals. He claims Nixon and I wanted to
bomb Vietnam into submission from the
beginning. Hersh knows this to be untrue;
there was next to no bombing of North Vietnam
for three years until its offensive of 1972.
But it is a convenient handle--coupled with
grotesque claims of planned nuclear strikes--
to discredit any assertion of American power.

Hersh's vendetta against me would be capriciously
paranoid except as part of a larger agenda
serving his own political purposes. It makes
sense only if one understands Hersh as a
product of that period of American history when
a tiny minority on the radical left tore off
on a bloody rampage. Institutions--whether
organizations or individuals in positions of
authority and responsibility--were targets to
be demolished in an angry drive toward the new
utopia. No tactic was too low, for the extreme
radical left, no deceit too mean, if it
advanced that purpose. In that sense Hersh is
trying to discredit me in order to destroy a
foreign policy in which many Americans still
take some pride.

The methodology of systematic denigration is
blatantly self-evident: inference piled on
assumption, third-hand hearsay accepted as
fact, the self-serving accounts of disgruntled
adversaries elevated to gospel, the "impressions"
of people several removes from the scene or
privy to only part of a complex operation taken
as accurate--but all selectively, when to do so

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advances the rigidly predetermined and
relentlessly pursued thesis of the author.
And the bile is aimed not only at me but at
Congress, the press and the "system" which
are all said to have failed by not "exposing"
me--for what is not fully made clear.

This style of book-writing is not new. Nor
is the kind of journalism unknown. It has
even a place once it is clearly labeled.
But it is *not* tolerated--or at last, not
meant to be tolerated--in the *New York Times*.
How, then, does it come about that such a book
is both a) treated so seriously and with such
awe by the *Times*, and b) not subjected to
the sort of scrutiny as to both methods and
motives that equivalent charges would routinely
receive if they were made by a political
advocate, rather than an advocacy journalist?
If the book is important enough to be *treated*
seriously, isn't it also important enough to
be *examined* seriously? Especially when both
the intensity of the author's bias and the
flimsiness of his evidence leap out from every
page? And what special responsibility does
the *Times* have in the case of this particular
book, with the imputed authority of the *Times*
itself which the author brings to it, when the
book's journalistic standards fall so abysmally
below those of the *Times*?

Having started out with the announced purpose
of "getting me" Hersh has produced the predictable
sort of book: intellectually shoddy, factually
inaccurate, not history but histrionics--a
string of heavy-breathing anecdotes. The
reader is deluged with documents and quotations
whose context he has no means of checking. He
is overawed by the author's boast of having
conducted 1,000 interviews, the overwhelming
majority of whom are not identified--though to
a sophisticated reporter, the number alone
should inspire at least skepticism if not distrust.

C]

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Could there possibly be 1,000 reliable witnesses on my activities--especially as some really close associates were never even approached? And that same sophisticated reporter's skepticism-meter should surge even more at the names of those few who are identified, most of whom have a long history of policy disagreements or personal grudges, or who were losers in the internal contests that are part of any administration. Daniel Ellsberg, Morton Halperin, Tony Lake and Roger Morris, who has the distinction of being unable to get along with either the Nixon White House or Mondale's Senate staff appear on page after page as key "authorities". (Morris also distinguished himself for telling Hersh that I let Biafran children starve while writing me in 1970 that he was proud of serving the only man who had fought against starvation.) The pedigree of the sources should have raised a large warning flag. For as any reporter could have easily discovered, none of the named "sources" for administration procedures served on my staff for more than twelve months fourteen years ago. The majority left after a few months, not--as they now allege--over policy disputes, but demonstrably because they lost battles over turf. Halperin and Lake, moreover, have been pursuing me in the courts for years.

If Hersh were an honest reporter, he would have disclosed to the reader the bias of his sources. Since he chose not to, this responsibility falls on those other reporters who write about what Hersh says. A very few have done so; none have made the slightest effort to determine whether anyone outside the select circle of Hersh sources has ever heard me make the obscene racial and sexual remarks with which Hersh regularly credits me and which are frequently cited in book reviews. The fact that more blacks were appointed to higher positions in the State Department under my tenure than in any previous one has never been mentioned. And if Hersh's identified sources are so unreliable how about his unidentified ones? Indeed do we really know they exist?

cyl

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Unfortunately, the nature of modern government
serves Hersh's purposes. On each issue there
are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of documents,
often contradictory, representing every level
of authority and knowledgeability from the
highest to the lowest, and representing a wide
range of conflicting opinions, and also written
at different times and for different purposes,
and therefore reflecting different sets of
circumstances--circumstances which will often
not be apparent except in context. There are
always losers in policy disputes. It takes
no great investigative skill to find a self-
serving document or a sore-headed ex-employee.
Nor is it any particular trick, as Hersh
routinely does, to ignore the mountains of
contradictory evidence, when this contradictory
evidence would undermine his thesis.

The book is not only inaccurate in itself; it
is also a cynical effort to manipulate the
media in order to further its author's purpose
of character assassination. Hersh has tried to
put the media on the defensive by claiming that
one of his purposes is to expose my manipulations
of the press. He seeks to neutralize any
favorable opinions held by his media colleagues--
he savages the Kalbs and Joe Kraft--by calling
them sycophants. And he cynically mixes
attacks on me from the left with appeals to the
right. He couples the conventional--if grotesquely
distorted--Vietnam critique with an assault
on our SALT negotiations which is as grossly
misleading as it is difficult to rebut in terms
understandable to the non-expert. To illustrate
this point I am enclosing an unsolicited letter
from a former staff member whom I have not seen
in ten years.

Uncheckable "facts," out of context, gossip,
hearsay, and the suppression of the mass of
contrary evidence--all this brews a very potent
poison, which seeps out first as a news story,
then finds its way into reviews--along with

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summaries of my "views," as seen through Hersh's special prism--and finally into the writing of columnists eager to buttress their own established points of view. The result is a potpourri of nuclear alerts, assassination plots, sell-outs on Taiwan and SALT, absurd madman theories which belong to the field of paranoia, not a serious discourse on our foreign policy. When an author implies that there probably was no Syrian invasion of Jordan in 1970--in the face of mountains of contrary evidence--he should pose a serious credibility problem for himself. But I have the impression that journalists grant a standard of truthfulness to a colleague that they would never concede to a President or a Secretary of State.

And so it goes: the poison brewed by Hersh spreads through the *Times*, and is spread *by* the *Times* to the general public.

Sidney Shanberg alleges--apparently on the basis of Hersh--that I instructed subordinates to lie about refugee figures in Cambodia. (I have no idea what he is referring to, but the basic allegation simply cannot be true.) Tony Lewis rehashes several of Hersh's more vicious charges in ways which are even more defamatory than the original. It takes an extraordinary willingness to believe in my venality to repeat Hersh's charge that I placed guards around the most secret Pentagon communications center to exclude the Secretary of Defense; that I circumvented the chain of command to give orders to field commanders that I personally selected the targets--even the flight plans--for Cambodia bombing (on the basis of what intelligence and to what purpose?) This is nonsensical. Moorer and Laird both deny it. The *Times* should in fairness retract it.

Lewis goes on to parrot the Hersh assault on me from the right for "flaws" in the SALT agreements. What "improvements" in SALT do Hersh or Lewis fancy were possible? Were they worth the risk

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of failure inherent in procrastinating? One
could argue that an agreement that has lasted
over 11 years and been accepted even by the
Reagan administration could not be all bad.
No critique deserves to be called serious that
dodges this rather fundamental point. The
Hersh book is totally devoid of serious analysis
or insight into this or any other major policy
issues it raises.

I recognize full well the freedom columnists
enjoy to be opinionated, to be wrong, to be
outrageous. But I think there are questions of
responsibility that relate to the overall impact
of a publication's coverage of a particular
issue--in this case, of a particular set of very
personal and very vicious charges. If, in
columns and news stories and book reviews, those
charges are repeated, spread, taken seriously,
given credence--and if they are taken from a
book whose bias is so extreme and whose methods
are so transparent--isn't there some responsi-
bility to balance this? Isn't there some
obligation at least to inquire into the source
of the charges? What in the current system of
media ethics prevents serious critical
examination of the kind of blatantly one-sided
journalism practiced by Hersh?

True, on one occasion the *Times* did assign a
reporter to look into one of Hersh's more
sensational charges. But the result--a story by
Terry Smith, which appeared on June 13--was, to
put it mildly, hardly reassuring. The effect
was not to expose the falsity of the charges,
but to spread them more widely and at the same
time lend them an appearance of validity. This
was partly because of the theatrical way in which
Smith wrote the story, partly because the use of
both Richard Allen and Zbigniew Brzezinski--
Hersh's original sources--to verify their own
allegation gave an illusion of bipartisanship
and therefore credibility which it would not have
had if Smith had let the reader know the context.

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Let me first deal with the Hersh charge that Smith set out to investigate.

My Role in the '68 Campaign

The come-on, the bait of Hersh's book is that I maneuvered with both camps in the '68 campaign to be appointed security adviser. Hersh alleges that I offered Humphrey through Brzezinski Rockefeller's "shit files" on Nixon; the quotes are presumably to suggest my actual language. I allegedly offered Nixon "secret" information from the Paris peace negotiations to which I was a consultant working out of offices in the State Department; Nixon in turn is said to have used this to seek to block the negotiating process by dealing with Thieu behind Johnson's back. The issue is important because beyond credibility it involves my honor.

Let me sum up some facts which I believe all subsequent scrutiny has confirmed:

a. In the summer of 1968 I was an independent not affiliated with either campaign.

b. Humphrey and I had been on warm terms for many years prior to 1968--a friendship which deepened until his death. I did not need Brzezinski as a conduit to him. As it happened I never saw him or had any contact with him during the campaign as all his friends verify. Nor would duplicity have been the way to gain his respect.

c. Nothing that could conceivably be called a "shit file" on Nixon was maintained by the Rockefeller organization nor was such a word ever used. The Rockefeller files on Nioxn were innocuous compilations of Nixon's public pro-nouncements of 1967 and 1968.

d. Brzezinski, by his own account, initiated a call to me in early August shortly after the

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Republican convention which nominated Nixon, to solicit my opinion on an arms control paper being prepared for Humphrey. In the event he never sent me the paper and I never commented on it.

e. Brzezinski claims that in the course of that conversation I offered some unspecified files from the Rockefeller campaign.

f. Humphrey's close associates Max Kampelman and David Ginsburg have affirmed that they never heard of the alleged offer, and both find it inconceivable that it would have been acted on without their knowledge. I know that Humphrey's Chief of Staff, Bill Connell, his close friend Dwayne Andreas, and his biographer, Dr. Edgar Berman would say the same.

g. Brzezinski says that he waited four weeks before asking for the files and was then rebuffed by a secretary who told him I was now "working for Nixon."

h. Every other witness cited in subsequent reports as having heard of the purported incident acknowledges that he heard of it *only from Brzezinski*; none claims any independent knowledge.

i. It is undisputed that after early August there was no further contact between the Humphrey camp and me on *any* subject.

Brzezinski's account is inherently unlikely. For starters, why did he wait fifteen years to disclose these startling facts? Why did he not use them when I was in office--when they would have been deeply embarrassing--or at the latest in 1976 when he was an adviser in Carter's fight to unseat the Ford Administration? I suggest that there were two inconvenient obstacles: Humphrey and Rockefeller were still alive; they would have blown this tale to smithereens.

Other questions obtrude themselves: Why did Brzezinski wait four weeks to ask for the files?

Cy>

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That a secretary would have dismissed Brzezinski in the cursory manner he describes is not credible; that Brzezinski would have accepted so cursory a dismissal is even less credible.

And why did the Humphrey high command never hear of the bombshell of an offer of Rockefeller's files on Nixon?

But even should one believe Brzezinski's unlikely version, with what are we left? Disagreement about a single phone call--initiated by Brzezinski. After that, according to Brzezinski he was told by a secretary that I was working for Nixon-- a strange way to promote myself.

Hersh goes on to repeat a fanciful tale by a then-Humphrey speech writer Van Dyke who is now active in the Democratic Policy Committee and thus hardly untainted by partisanship. This gentleman claims to have seen a letter I wrote to Humphrey late in the campaign expressing my distaste for Nixon and my regard for Humphrey and offering my services to a Humphrey administration. Does it seem likely that within four weeks of notifying the Humphrey camp that I was "working for" Nixon--to use Brzezinski's phrase--I would announce a reversal? Why would I wish to reiterate my regard for Humphrey of which he was well aware? Is it credible that a speech writer would have the authority to throw a letter addressed to Humphrey in the outbasket--showing it to no one else? Even if public figures have lost the presumption of morality they must be given some credit for a minimum of intelligence and prudence. No such letter has been found; no other witness claims to have seen it. Yet the speech writer claims perfect recall of a letter he threw away fifteen years ago.

Let me now turn to the more serious charge that I abused my trust as a member of the Johnson team working toward an agreement in Paris with the North Vietnamese, by funneling reports from the Paris negotiations to the Nixon camp which then

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enabled Nixon to torpedo the agreement that brought about a bombing halt. This charge is of a piece with Hersh's other misrepresentations. First, years before the Hersh book came out my involvement in the Nixon campaign was set forth in my *White House Years* and by Nixon in *RN* without attracting any particular attention. Hersh introduces no new facts; he only rearranges them into his typically reckless innuendo. Second, I was not a consultant in the Paris delegation; I did not have offices in the State Department as Hersh alleges nor any other place in Washington; I spent all of the period after my return from Europe on September 24 at Harvard except for an occasional trip to New York to consult with Rockefeller. Most emphatically I did not have access to the negotiating tactics or instructions of our delegation--as Hersh could easily have determined from Bill Bundy who was the Washington backstop, or Cy Vance who was deputy at the Paris end. Such general sense of the dynamics of the 1968 peace effort in Paris as I had derived mostly from a negotiation initiated by me the previous year when I encouraged--on my own--a French acquaintance who had once sheltered Ho Chi Minh and was willing to travel to Hanoi at his own expense to explore the mind of the North Vietnamese leader. Finally, during the campaign I had an article in print which would appear shortly afterwards supporting the Paris talks. All these facts--available to Hersh--would keep a responsible journalist from alleging that I would work to frustrate the Paris negotiations.

It must also be of some interest that Mitchell has denied the quotes ascribed to him by Hersh with such epithets as "grossly exaggerated," "gross falsification" and a "goddamn lie" (see the *National Review* of June 24, 1983).

Let me go into some detail on my relationship to the Nixon campaign. I have never made any secret of the fact that until I made his acquaintance late in 1968 I had a similar low opinion of Nixon, as most of my academic colleagues. In August 1968 both Rockefeller and I were deeply disappointed by the outcome

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of the Republican convention and chagrined by
the conduct of some of the Nixon forces there.
Therefore in the immediate aftermath of the
Convention I turned down an Allen request
that I join a Nixon advisory panel or be listed
as a Nixon adviser. As the weeks went by
Rockefeller and I reconsidered our position.
He decided--and I agreed--that he would not
repeat his dog-in-the-manger attitude of 1964;
instead he would work hard for the Republican
ticket. The conviction that the Democrats were
too divided to provide national leadership
played a role. If an ulterior motive was
involved it was to further a role for Rockefeller
in a Nixon administration; my ambition, if any,
--as I wrote in my memoirs--was to enter the
Administration in his entourage. Rockefeller
approached Nixon; I contacted my friend Bill
Buckley. Buckley arranged a meeting between me
and Mitchell. That meeting took place around
September 11 in New York. (I left for Europe
on September 12 and the Nixon files show a
Mitchell memo for that day relating his meeting
with me.)

As it turned out, Mitchell was exclusively
interested in the likelihood of a bombing halt
before the election. He wanted to avoid a
surprise; he could not have cared less about
tactics. The previous year's experience which
had convinced me that the real gap between the
parties was relatively small and that a bombing
halt was likely before the election--if only to
commit both candidates (but especially Nixon) to
it. I urged Mitchell that Nixon not oppose the
effort and say nothing about it in his campaign
statements. According to the internal memoranda
of the Nixon campaign, another conversation along
the same lines took place on September 26. None
of these memoranda contains any "secret" infor-
mation, only my predictions that I thought a
bombing halt likely. Not even the people who
supposedly have such photographic memories for
dates and for the content of conversations
fifteen years ago have managed to come up with

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a single concrete "secret" I passed on. What I offered the Nixon team was my personal judgment, based on experience and some knowledge of the forces and people involved, that a bombing halt agreement before the election was likely, and my advice that Nixon say nothing in advance that would come back to haunt him if such an agreement were in fact reached. That judgment turned out to be correct. My source for the memos is the *Village Voice* of June 21 presumably courtesy of Hersh--a journal that has given me only the most modest support.

These excerpts also make clear that Allen did not even know about my meetings with Mitchell.

The total substance of my relationship with the Nixon campaign over Vietnam is thus two meetings with Mitchell--according to the Nixon records--in which I predicted a bombing halt and urged that the candidate do nothing. Nixon, whether because of that advice or his own sound instinct, did nothing.

Recognizing this skimpy fare, Hersh through Allen, has invented a number of other phone conversations and a fiction. The first is a phone call by me to Allen offering my services to Nixon "on or about" September 10, using as a bait my contacts in the Johnson administration. My own recall for phone calls I may or may not have made fifteen years ago is far from perfect and I wonder about those who claim that theirs is so much better. But the context makes such a conversation nearly inconceivable. Why should I offer my services to Allen when only a few weeks earlier I had refused his offer to join an advisory panel? Moreover, by September 10 Buckley had already arranged a meeting with Mitchell who had told me--as Hersh confirms--to deal only with him. Why would I call Allen who, after all was considerably subordinate to Mitchell?

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Hersh alleges that I called Allen four or five
times during the campaign from Europe using
pay phones and occasionally speaking German to
mask my identity. This sounds all very exciting;
it implies that I was feeding hot tips to Nixon
from Paris. It is, however, humbug. I was in
Europe from September 17-24. I spent about 40
hours in Paris, the rest in St. Anthony's College
at Oxford at an ISS meeting. It makes little
sense that I would feel such an urgency to talk
to Allen when Mitchell had just told me to
deal only with him. Paris and Oxford pay phones
sound romantic but I doubt that I would know
how to use them for transatlantic calls. And
what could have been the subject? The Paris
talks had not yet started; was I reporting on
the ISS meeting?

This leaves the Allen allegation that I gave him
a twelve hour warning of an imminent bombing
halt. I have no recollection of it and I am
sure that in the light of Mitchell's injunction
I would have initiated no such call. It is
possible that Allen called me to solicit my
views about what by then was on the frontpage
of every newspaper--though I do not remember it;
if so, my answer would surely have been less
melodramatic than he presents it. It could
have been no more than to repeat my original
prediction and what every reporter was writing.

In Allen's case especially elementary decency--
let alone professionalism--would have required
any fair retelling of his story to point out
his biases. His bitter animus toward me is
hardly a secret to Washington's reporters; it
dates back to when I was given the job he
coveted after which he departed disgruntled
from his subordinate position. Nor has Allen's
veracity gone unchallenged in the interlude.

Finally, the Hersh fiction that my contacts with
Mitchell enabled Nixon to encourage Thieu to
resist the bombing halt. To begin with Thieu

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was not involved in the October negotiations at all. They were concluded without reference to him. Thieu began to resist only after the public announcement of the bombing halt of November 1, a few days before the election. Thus, whatever message Nixon sent to Thieu-- if there was one--was based on public, not secret, information. I was not consulted or aware of it--indeed any effort to obstruct the negotiations would have been contrary to my advice. And the bombing halt was completed during the transition period with Nixon (and my) cooperation.

Hersh, in short, has no evidence, only insinuation, and even he acknowledges Mrs. Chennault's insistence that Theiu did not need Nixon to tell him to resist negotiations. Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of Vietnam negotiations would recognize that Thieu's action was entirely consistent with his position throughout in defense of what he perceived his country's interests. The causal connection between my contacts with Mitchell and Thieu's post-announcement foot-dragging is flimsy to the point of invisibility. My actions are much more compatible--indeed only compatible--with trying to keep the negotiations out of partisan controversy than with Hersh's slimy innuendos. (The national interest and Nixon's desire not to be caught wrongfooted by public statements on ongoing diplomacy happened to be identical.)

We are then left with a single phone conversation initiated by Brzezinski and an arms-length relation with the Nixon campaign of a pattern not at all unusual among academics moving in and out of government. Is that enough to impugn a public servant's honor fifteen years after the alleged event?

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The Smith Story of June 13

How does Smith treat these facts? The obvious
conclusion would have been that--at worst--he
was confronting conflicting recollections of
events of fifteen years ago that had no practical
consequence. Simple fairness should have obliged
him to emphasize the incontrovertible fact
that there was no "shit file"--much less a quote
to that effect and that I gave no help whatever
to the Humphrey campaign.

Instead, he begins with an irrelevancy that
restates the original charge as a news story in
the form of a dialogue between Allen and Brzezinski
in a Washington hotel. He neglects to mention--
what should surely be of interest to an unwary
reader--that Allen and Brzezinski are Hersh's
principal sources in the first place and holders
of long-standing grudges against me.

The exchange in which my original accusers restate
their falsehoods and distortions would be more
amusing if it were less malicious. Allen gravely
recounts to Brzezinski his nasty and exaggerated
version of my relation to the Nixon campaign. This
had already been described at some length in
Nixon's memoirs and mine. But it is all a
surprise to Brzezinski. He is "indignant." "Henry
was working for our side," he exclaims. But what
made him think so? By Brzezinski's own account,
(1) he called me in early August; (2) nothing
happened; (3) a few weeks later he called again
and this time a secretary told him that I was
"working for" Nixon. Brzezinski obviously has
great difficulty keeping his stories straight.

Smith, however, has a sense for drama. He describes
the two men as startled, shaking their heads in
disbelief; asking each other--could it be true?
Smith gravely reports all this as it if were
neither absurd nor nasty.

Having thus established my duplicity Smith mentions
my denial--which in the context looks preposterous.

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(At the risk of appearing paranoid I have had the thought that even the pictures accompanying the story tend to support his innuendo.) And he weakened my denial even further by citing four Humphrey aides who confirm Brzezinski's story, neglecting to mention the crucial fact that *not one* of them had any personal knowledge. They merely restate what they purport to have heard from Brzezinski--whose story may have resulted from misunderstanding, wishful thinking, self-promotion or malice.

Smith gives cursory treatment to the two men in Humphrey's top command who considered it "inconceivable" that anything like this could have happened without their knowledge. He fails to check with at least three others far closer to Humphrey than were those he uses to indict me on the basis of double hearsay. But he does have space to conclude with another quote from Allen repeating the charge with which the story opened.

My purpose here is not to accuse Terry Smith of bias; I do not know him well enough to make a judgment and I have not detected any in previous stories. My point is rather more serious. Journalism may be defenseless against the witches brew of biased sources, quotations out of context and vile innuendo which is Hersh's specialty. Indeed if Hersh can provoke a newspaper into reinterviewing his named sources he has won half his battle. I do not doubt that most of Hersh's named sources will confirm his version. The issue is their bias, their credibility, their knowledgeability; the lack of representation of other, usually far more knowledgeable sources, the failure to examine the relevant documents. This requires years of effort and training.

Not For Publication

20

## Conclusion

The time and space needed to rebut even one inherently improbable allegation shows the near hopelessness of attempting to combat the modern McCarthyism. And it should raise some questions about the responsibilities of the media. The fashionable style of "investigative reporting" with its seemingly "objective" but in fact highly selective collection of facts about trivial or irrelevant incidents long after the event has results which are Kafkaesque. Those claiming total recall of far off events are most likely to be the least trustworthy. They do not reflect but distort the essence of reality. If the media permit irresponsible and reckless journalists to conduct genuine policy disputes as versions of Watergate they will wind up discrediting the major contribution they have made when true malfeasances were involved. By covering up their own transgressions--or being reluctant to challenge their colleagues--they run the risk of creating their own Watergate.

The *Times* has no responsibility for the Hersh book; Hersh wrote it and is alone responsible for it. Yet the *Times*, I think, has certain obligations to the public, no less than to Hersh as an author and its former employee. In sequence the *Times* (a) first published a news report, quite favorable, about the Hersh book; (b) analyzed it further in Terrence Smith's story, to my certain detriment; (c) followed Smith's news story with an ecstatic review in its daily paper; (d) followed the review with a column by Sidney Shanberg, a persistent personal critic and; (e) followed Shanberg, with a column by Tony Lewis, who has seen the evil in me and the good in Hersh, mitigated very rarely. A Sunday frontpage review of the Hersh book by Stanley Hoffman was the *Times* sixth contribution to history and sixth assault on my reputation, mitigated only by a Safire column accusing Hersh of a late hit but restating some of his own grievances. Anyone familiar with Hoffman's two

Not For Publication

21

massive reviews of my memoirs in the New York
Review could have had no doubt when assigning
the book to him that he would repeat his
familiar criticisms which while intellectually
and morally far superior to Hersh, in this
context could only legitimize him.

As the *Times* and other newspapers have treated
Hersh's methods as beyond challenge, his assaults
on me have become increasingly virulent. For
example, he is reported in the *Los Angeles Times*
of June 29 as follows:

> In my bad days, in my mad days at
> Henry, when they used to ask me about
> Kissinger, Hersh said he would say,
> 'I don't know how he can go to sleep.
> When the rest of us go to sleep, we
> count sheep. He has to count little
> maimed, burned babies. Indians,
> Laotians, Cambodian and Vietnamese
> running down the street with napalm all
> over their bodies.

> I seek no remedy. Indeed at this point I cannot
> think of one in which the cure would not be
> worse than the disease--that indeed is precisely
> the issue. The last thing I desire is a
> regurgitation of Hersh's charges.

> I do want to return to my original point. Hersh
> is not just attacking me personally. He has set
> out systematically to attack a whole series of
> institutions vital to our national security,
> and now this attack on me personally becomes a
> vehicle for discrediting the nation's foreign
> policy. Though injured, as anyone who values
> his reputation and his honor would be, I will
> survive. But Hersh is engaged in an enterprise
> as vicious as it is malicious, and one, furthermore,
> which strikes at very central aspects of the
> public interest--not to mention that the practical
> canons of journalism have enabled him to enlist
> the *Times* as an unwitting handmaiden in that effort.

[Y]

Draft

July 8

Not for Publication

Dear Abe:

I have been abroad for a month, enough time to gain
some perspective on the Hersh book and the Times' treatment
of it. There is nothing to be gained by reviving the issue
publicly. Still character assassination has been committed
unopposed--if not abetted--by our leading newspaper. This
raises a number of fundamental issues that I want to consider
with you because there is no effective public forum available.

The Issue

The tradition in this country is that we take our
chances with the printed word. There are no prior restraints
on what is to be written--and precious few penalties after
publication under the law of libel. This being so, the
responsibility of the press to correct and balance is all
the more grave and onerous. No public servant has a right
to demand immunity from criticism. But equally, systematic

3

against me. In 1975 David Halberstam wrote in the "Best
and the Brightest":

Hersh had not gotten into Watergate in the
beginning because he had been working on a series
of stories about General John Lavelle, who had been
bombing North Vietnam in November 1971 and March 1972
without any apparent authorization. That was no small
story, it was important in itself, a General seemingly
disobeying orders, and Hersh suspected from the
first that it might lead even higher and that it might,
pleasure of pleasures, keeping his fingers crossed,
lead to Henry Kissinger. He was very suspicious of
Kissinger. Hersh thought he was the prime liar of
Washington and the prime manipulator of his colleagues,
and nothing would have pleased him more than taking the
Lavelle stories right to Kissinger's door.

Harrison Salisbury reported in *Without Fear or Favor* that
Hersh said in 1973: "I'd really love to get that son-
of-a-bitch."

During this period Hersh was a *Times* employee, probably
restrained by the ethical standards of the Times.

5

pseudo-academic apparatus has no other function than to
marshal whatever argument comes to hand, regardless of
the nature of the source, ignoring the mountainous contrary
evidence. The reader is deluged with documents and quotations
whose context he has no means of checking; he is overawed
by 1000 alleged interviews, the overwhelming majority of
whom are not identified. The number alone should inspire
distrust, not confidence. Can there possibly be 1000 reliable
witnesses on my activities--especially as some really close
associates were never approached? Most of the few "witnesses"
who are named have a long history of known grudges or are
losers in policy disputes. These facts Hersh does not
disclose. A reviewer seeking to be fair would have to
spend months checking the sources, something clearly be ond
his capacity.

The nature of modern government serves Hersh's purposes.
On each issue there are hundreds, sometimes thousands,

6

of documents. There are always losers in policy disputes.

It is no great trick to find a self-serving document and
~~if anyone is manipulation, his误. For~~
a soreheaded ex-employee. ~~but~~ it is unimaginable to the
uninitiated that a book by a Pulitzer Prize reporter could

contain a lie or distortion ~~on practically every page~~ as this one is.

Moreover Hersh has tried to put the media on the defensive by claiming that one of his purposes is to expose my manipulations of the press; no reviewer wants to appear as being taken in. And he has cynically mixed attacks from the left with appeals to the right. The conventional--if grotesquely distorted--Vietnam critique is coupled with an assault on SALT negotiations as misleading as it is difficult to rebut for the non-expert. To illustrate this point I am enclosing an unsolicited letter from a former staff member whom I have not seen in ten years.

and

Uncheckable "facts", out of context, coupled with

the suppression of ~~all~~ *the men of* contrary evidence brew a poison that seeps out first as a news story, then as a summary

7

by reviewers of my views, finally through columnists eager
to prove their own well-established prejudices. None of
this has imposed any skepticism on those who have written
about the book in the *Times*. Sidney Shanberg alleges--
presumably on the basis of Hersh--that I instructed subordinates
to lie about refugee figures in Cambodia. (I have no idea
to what he is referring but the basic allegation cannot
be true.) Tony Lewis repeats charges which are on the
face of it absurd. How would an Assistant to the President
go abut placing guards on a Pentagon command center to
keep out the Secretary of Defense (and why?); how would
he circumvent the chain of command to give orders to field
commanders; on the basis of what intelligence would he
select the targets--even the flight plans--for Cambodia
bombing? It is absurd; Moorer and Laird both deny it;
the *Times* should in fairness retract it.

9

# My Role in the '68 Campaign

The come-on, the bait of Hersh's book is that I maneuvered with both camps to be appointed security adviser. Hersh alleges that I offered Humphrey through Brzezinski Rockefeller's "dirty shit files" on Nixon; the quotes are presumably to suggest my actual language. I allegedly offered Nixon "secret" information from the Paris peace negotiations to which I was a consultant; Nixon in turn is said to have used this to seek to block the negotiating process by dealing with Thieu behind Johnson's back. The issue is important because beyond credibility it involves my honor.

I can understand the reporter's quest for "facts."

But there are some intangibles that are surely significant.

It is true that in later years Humphrey occasionally stated that I would have been his security adviser had he won in 1968. If so, that was not due to non-existent services in his campaign but to a friendship already several years

eyJ

10

old in 1968 and destined to grow in warmth until his death.

In 1968 I did not need Brzezinski as a conduit to Humphrey
nor was duplicity the way to gain Humphrey's respect.

However let me confine myself to the "facts" contained
in Smith's story freed from the dramatic gloss with which
Smith embellishes them:

a. No "dirty shit" file on Nixon was maintained by the Rockefeller organization. There was only a collection of clippings of Nixon's published foreign policy pronouncements of 1967 and 1968 which the record will show were rather skimpy.

b. Brzezinski, by his own account, initiated a call to me in early August shortly after the Republican convention which nominated Nixon, to solicit my opinion on an arms control paper being prepared for Humphrey. In the event he never sent me the paper and I never commented on it.

11

c. During the conversation Brzezinski claims I offered some unspecified files from the Rockefeller campaign.

d. Smith does note that Humphrey's close associates Max Kampelman and David Ginsburg, never heard of the alleged offer, and that both find it inconceivable that it would have been made without their knowledge. To the same effect he could also have cited Humphrey's Chief of Staff, Bill COnnell, his close friend Dwayne Andreas, and his biographer, Dr. Edgar Berman, whose names I gave to Smith but whom he chose not to contact.

e. Brzezinski says that he waited four weeks before asking for the files--in itself unlikely--and was then rebuffed by a secretary who told him I was now "aligned" for Nixon." That a secretary would have dismissed Brzezinski in so cursory a manner is not credible; that Brzezinski would have accepted so cursory a dismissal is even less credible.

12

f. Every other witness cited by Smith acknowledges having heard of the purported incident from Brzezinski; none claims any independent knowledge.

g. It is undisputed that after early August there was no further contact between the Humphrey camp and me on any subject.

Brzezinski's account is inherently unlikely. For starters why did he wait fifteen years to disclose these startling facts? Why did he not use them when I was in office or at the latest in 1976 when he aspired with Carter to replace the Ford Administration. I suggest that there were two inconvenient obstacles: Humphrey and Rockefeller were still alive; they would have blown this tale to smithereens.

And why did the Humphrey high command never hear of the bombshell of an offer of Rockefeller's files on Nixon? Because it was never made so that Brzezinski kept his self-promotion to the lower levels of the Humphrey campaign.

13

But even should one believe Brzezinski's unlikely version, with what are we left? Disagreement about a single phone call--initiated by Brzezinski--which would be due to any number of factors including self-advancement. After that, according to Brzezinski he was told by a secretary that I was aligned with Nixon--a strange way to promote myself.

Because these "facts" could not possibly support the charge that I would demean myself to curry favor with Humphrey, a bald-faced lie has been concocted to the effect that I wrote a letter to Humphrey late in the campaign expressing my abiding distaste for Nixon, my high regard for Humphrey and offering my services to a Humphrey administration.

Brzezinski's own statements undermine that invention. Can anyone believe that within four weeks of notifying the Humphrey campaign that I was "aligned" with Nixon--to use Brzezinski's phrase--I would announce a reversal? Why would I wish to reiterate my regard for Humphrey of which

14

Let me now turn to the allegation of passing secret
information to the Nixon campaign. I had covered the subject
already in _White House Years_ and Nixon in _RN_ wihtout attracting
any particular attention.

Again some intangibles may be in order. I have alwasy
avowed that until he appointed me security adviser I shared
the academic community's prejudice against Nixon. IN August
1968 both Rockefeller and I were deeply disappointed by
the outcome of the Republican convention and chagrined
by the conduct of some of the Nixon forces there. Nevertheless

15

during August Rockefeller decided--and I agreed--that he
would not repeat his dog-in-the-manger attitude of 1964, instead
he would not
work instead for the Republican ticket. He approached
Nixon to offer our cooperation; I contacted my friend Bill
Buckley. Buckley arranged a meeting between me and Mitchell
which took place around September 11. (I left for Europe
on September 12 and the Nixon files show a Mitchell memo
of that day.)

As it turned out Mitchell was exclusively interested
in the likelihood of a bombing halt before the election.
I was somewhat of an expert on the subject having visited
Vietnam three times and more relevantly having conducted
a secret negotiation for a bombing halt on behalf of the
Johnson administration a year earlier. (That negotiation
was not an assignment given to me by the Administration.
I originated it by digging up a French acquaintance who
had once sheltered Ho Chi Minh and was willing to travel

17

according to the Nixon records--in which I predicted a bombing halt and urged that hte candidate do nothing. Nixon did nothing. None of the people with photographic memories for dates and content of conversations fifteen years ago have managed to come up with a single "secret" I passed on.

Recognizing this skimpy fare Hersh through Allen has invented two other incidents and a fiction. The first is a phone call by me to Allen offering my services to Nixon "on or about" September 10, advertising my contacts in the Johnson administration. Unlike my detractors I do not have perfect recall of what calls I may or may not have made 15 years ago. But the context makes such a conversation nearly inconceivable. By September 10 Buckley had already arranged my meeting with Mitchell. Why would I call Allen? The second was an alleged call to ALlen on October 26 giving him 12 hours of warning of an imminent bombing halt. That too is highly improbable. First, Mitchell

18

had specifically instructed me to deal only with him. Second, by October 26 the imminence of a bombing halt was on the front page of every newspaper. Third, the bombing halt was not announced for *five more days*. (I cannot exclude at this remove that Allen called me and I gave him my judgment but if so--and I have no recollection of it--it was *supposedly*) less melodramatic than he presents it and even less explicit than I had been with Mitchell.)

Finally Hersh uses the fiction that my sparse contacts with Mitchell enabled Nixon to urge Thieu to resist the bombing halt. According to the public record, whatever message Nixon sent to Thieu--if there was one--occurred *after* the bombing halt had been *publicly* announced on November 1. It was based on public, not secret, information.¹ I was not consulted or aware of it--indeed any effort to obstruct the negotiations would have been contrary to my advice.

18-A

Hersh, in short, has no evidence, only insinuation,
and even he acknowledges Mrs. Chennault's insistence
that Thieu did not need Nixon to tell him to resist
negotiations. Thieu acted, when he did, *after* the election and
*after* public announcement of the bombing halt. The causal
connection between my *unproven*) contacts and Thieu's
*post-election* foot-dragging is flimsy to the point of
invisibility.

19

We are then left with a single phone conversation initiated by Brzezinski and an arms-length relation with the Nixon campaign of a pattern not at all unusual mong academics moving in and out of government. Is that enough to impugn a man's honor fifteen years after the alleged event?

## The Smith Story of June 13

How does Smith treat these facts? The obvious conclusion would have been that--at best--he was confronting conflicting recollections of peripheral events of fifteen years ago that had no practical consequence. Simple fairness should have obliged him to emphasize the incontrovertible fact that there was no ~~

22

Brzezinski--whose story may have been promoted by misunderstanding, self-promotion or malice. No one of a contradictory view is given the dignity of a quote.

S Smith ignores the fact that his own evidence proves the "dirty" shit" file to be false and goes on to speculate about its nature. IT was "apparently" a "compendium of Nixon pronouncements on foreign policy that the Rockefeller staff had assembled for use against Mr. Nixon in the Republican primaries that year." Bunk. Rockefeller entered no primaries that year and so declared publicly in early March. He announced his candidacy in mid-June when the primaries were over. His six-week campaign, limited and improvised, consisted of a series of full-page newspaper and advertisements outlining his program and implying that Nixon was an unknown quantity. These contained no attacks on Nixon at least in the foreign affairs field--as your morgue will show.

The Nixon clip file was used to make sure we were plowing new ground. And Nixon as the frontrunner was careful to

[y]

23

say very little that was controversial. All this can easily
be checked.

Smith gives cursory treatment to the statement of two men
in Humphrey's top command that anything like this could
have happened without their knowledge. He fails or refuses
to check with at least three others far closer to Humphrey
than the people Smith uses to indict me on the basis of
hearsay. But he does have space to conclude with another
quote from Allen repeating the charge with which the story
opened.

## Conclusion

The famous style of
A Kafkaesque atmosphere results from current investigative
reporting with its seemingly "objective" collection of

24

facts abut trivial or irrelevant incidents long after the
event. Those with seemingly total recall of far off events
are most likely to be most biased. They do not reflect
but distort the essence of reality. If the media turn
all policy disagreements into versions of Watergate they
will wind up discrediting the major contribution they have
made when true malfeasances were involved. By covering
up their own transgressions--or being reluctant to expose-
their colleagues--they run the risk of creating their own
Watergate.

The _Times_ has no responsibility for the Hersh book;
Hersh wrote it and is alone responsible for it. Yet the
 Times, I think, has certain obligations to the public,
no less than to Hersh as an author and its former employee.
In sequence the _Times_ (a) first published a news report,
quite favorable, about the Hersh book; (b) analyzed it
further in Terrence Smith's story, to my certain detriment;
(c) followed Smith's news story with an ecstatic review;

26

In my bad days, in my mad days at Henry,
when they used to ask me about Kissinger,
Hersaid said he would say, 'I don't know how
he can go to sleep. When the rest of us go to
sleep, we count sheep. He has to count little
maimed, burned babies. Indians, Laotians, Cambodian
and Vietnamese running down the street with
napalm all over their bodies.

I seek no remedy, indeed at this point I cannot think
of one--that indeed is precisely the issue. And obviously
I would not write at all did I not believe in your
personal fairness and decency.

With high personal regard

[y]

23

up discrediting the major contribution they have made when
true malfeasances were involved. By covering up their
own transgressions--or being reluctant to expose their
colleagues--they run the risk of creating their own
Watergate.

With high personal regard,

11

2

Otherwise, the media will nurture nihilism, destroying everything that could rally our country or sustain our people's faith.

The Hersh book is almost a case history of [vague] investigative journalism. Here is a reporter who for a decade has flagrantly advertised his aminus against me. In 1975 David Halberstam wrote in the "Best and the Brightest":

9

There is more than a remote possibility that in this
whole episode Brzezinski was promoting himself. However
let me confine myself to the "facts" contained in Smith's
story freed from the dramatic gloss with which Smith
embellishes them!

b. Brzezinski, by his own account, initiated a call to
me shortly after the Republican convention which nominated
Nixon, to solicit my opinion on an arms control paper being
prepared for Humphrey. In the event he never sent me the

10

d. Smith notes that Humphrey's close associates Kampelman and Ginsburg never heard of the alleged offer, and that both find it inconceivable that it would have been made without their knowledge. To the same effect he could also have cited Humphrey's Chief of Staff, Bill Connell, Dwayne Andreas, and his friend and biographer, Dr. Edgar Berman, whose names I gave to Smith but whom he chose not to contact.

e. Brzezinski says that he waited four weeks before asking for the files--in itself unlikely--and was then rebuffed by a secretary who told him I was now "aligned with Nixon." That a secretary would have dismissed Brzezinski in so cursory a manner is not credible; that Brzezinski would have accepted so cursory a dismissal is even less credible.

And why did the Humphrey high command never hear
of the bombshell of an offer of Rockefeller's files
on Nixon? Because it was never made so that Brzezinski
kept his self-promotion to the lower levels of the
Humphrey campaign. But even should one believe Brzezinski's
unlikely version with what

At any rate, it is undisputed that there was no other
contact between me and the Humphrey camp on any

subject: According to Brzezinski he was told
by a secretary that I was aligned with Nixon--a strange
way to promote myself.

Because these "facts" could not possibly support
the charge that I would stoop to anything to curry
favor with Humphrey, a bold-faced lie has been concoted
to the effect that I wrote a letter to Humphrey late
in the campaign expressing my abiding distaste for
Nixon, my high regard for Humphrey and offering my
services to a Humphrey administration. Brzezinski's
own statements undermine that invention.

19

finally informed him that I was "aligning" with Nixon."

So where was I working for his side?

Smith, however, has a sense for drama. The two men
are described as startled; they shake their heads in disbelief--
could it be true they ask each other? Smith gravely reports
all this as if it were neither absurd nor nasty.

Having established my duplicity Smith then mentions
my denial which in the context looks preposterous. (At
the risk of appearing paranoid even the pictures
accompanying the story tend to support *this* innuendo.)
And he weakens my denial even further by citing four Humphrey
aides who confirm Brzezinski's story, neglecting to mention
the crucial fact that not *one* of them had any personal
knowledge. They merely restate what they purport to have
*where story may have been prompted by* heard from Brzezinski--*whether misunderstanding, self-
promotion or malice. No one of a contradictory view is
given the dignity of a quote.

20

Smith ignores the fact that his own evidence proves the "dirty shit" file to be false and goes on to speculate about its nature. It was "apparently" a "compendium of Nixon pronouncements on foreign policy that the Rockefeller staff had assembled for use against Mr. Nixon in the Republican primaries that year." Bunk. Rockefeller entered no primaries that year and so declared publicly in early March. He announced his candidacy in mid-June when the primaries were over. His six-week campaign, limited and improvised, consisted of a series of full-page newspaper and advertisements outlining his program and implying that Nixon was an unknown quantity. These contained no attacks on Nixon at least in the foreign affairs field--as your morgue will show.

The Nixon clip file was used to make sure we were plowing new ground. And Nixon as the frontrunner was careful to say very little that was controversial. All this can easily be checked.

22

not use it when I was in office or at the latest in
1976 when he aspired with Carter to replace the Ford
Administration. I suggest that there were two inconvenient
obstacles: Humphrey and Rockefeller were still alive;
they would have blown this tale to smithereens.

The time and space needed to rebut even one inherently
improbable allegation shows the near hopelessness of the
task for combatting the modern McCarthyism. And it should
raise some questions about the responsibilities of the
media. A Kafkaesque atmosphere results from current investigative
reporting with its seemingly "objective" collection of
facts about trivial or irrelevant incidents long after
the event. The people with seemingly total recall of events
as long as fifteen years ago are most likely to have
been distorted
the axes to grind. They do not reflect but distort
the essence of reality. If the media turn all policy
disagreements into versions of Watergate they will wind

DRAFT

July 5

Dear Abe:

I have been abroad for a month and had enough time to gain some perspective on the Hersh book and the Times' treatment of it. Certainly there is nothing to be gained by reviving the issue publicly. But the kind of mudslinging Hersh represents does seem to me to involve a number of fundamental issues that because there is no public forum available I want to take the liberty of raising with you.

The media are the only institutions in our country essentially free of checks and balances. Their power can be devastatingly precisely because they are believed to be objective. No public servant has a right to demand immunity from criticism. The fear of a vigilant press is in fact a powerful discipline. But to be a benign and enduring force, dedication to the exposure of malfeasance must be coupled with an equal dedication to prevent the abuse of that power.

2

The Hersh book is almost a case history of ROGUE investigative journalism. Here is a reporter who for a decade has flagrantly advertised his aminus against me. In 1975 David Halberstam wrote in the "Best and the Brightest":

[Y]

3

Harrison Salisbury reported in *Without Fear or Favor* that Hersh said in 1973: "I'd really love to get that son-of-a-bitch."

In both these cases Hersh failed to pursue the subject, restrained probably by the ethical standards of the Times. But once he turned to the looser morality of book publishing free rein was given to his vendetta. He started his so-called investigation with his conclusions. At the very beginning he wrote to a potential witness: "I'm not going to try and tell you I'm writing a friendly book about Kissinger: I think he is basically incapable of telling the truth."

His first Freedom of Information request stated that his purpose was to prevent a repetition of my role in government. Two years later he sought Ambassador Korry's cooperation by promising to publish material given to him by Korry in 1973 in return for dirt on me. And I could multiply examples.

The result is a book which is at the same time intellectually disgraceful and a cynical manipulation of the media to achieve its purpose of character assassination.

4

It contains an impressive appearing investigative and pseudo-academic apparatus. The reader is deluged with documents and quotations whose context he has no means of checking; he is overawed by 1000 alleged interviews the overwhelming majority of whom are not identified; the number should inspire distrust rather than confidence for can there possibly be 1000 reliable witnesses on my activities-- especially as some really close associates were never approached. The few "witnesses" who are named have in their majority a long history of demonstrable grudges or losers in policy disputes to which no reference whatever is made. Even a reviewer seeking to be fair would have to spend months checking the sources, something clearly beyond his capacity.

The nature of modern government serves Hersh's purposes. On each issue there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of documents. There are always losers in policy disputes. It is no great trick to find a self-serving document and a