Once upon a time in America

The Golden age of journalism was at the end of 2001. The editor-in-chief of the New Yorker called his famous Reporter and asked him not "almost in a whisper" to fly this time, three thousand miles, but to question his informant on the phone. Lacked the money to throw in the money, and soon the freedom, the fury on the Gentiles-in-chief of the typewriter out of the window.

at most, the gravedigger leads a more boring life as a Journalist. Googling, making phone calls, write, submit, wait, start again – for a biography there's nothing. Murder and manslaughter commit other, and who is interested in first-hand office experienced intrigue, or a coffee-driven After-Work initiation on the copier?

Bad

Seymour Hersh attracted to is an exception. He might not have changed the world, but their consciousness more than any other Journalist. Over the decades, he was the most important Reporter in the effect is comparable only with Upton Sinclair, who reported from the meat factories of Chicago, or, even earlier, with Émile Zola, unveiled in 1898, the Dreyfus affair. "I was like, the Best, the First," says the now 81-year-old Hersh faithfully, and how it got there, he says in his memoirs, with the simple title of "Reporter".

It has become a real Bildungsroman, the America lifting as Saul bellow's "adventures of Augie March": "I grew up on the Chicago Southside, where I knew no one from the newspaper industry and for Baseball enthusiasts." Hersh leads the fast cleaning of his father in a black neighbourhood and learns quickly, what is the meaning of racism. He brings never made it to an elite University and so carelessly that his temporary boss at the "New York Times" one day shirts from Brooks Brothers brings to the table: "you better get dressed." Hersh can't make it to this day.

He had expected a child killer and met a "frightened young man, small, thin and pale".

This aristocratic newspaper, civic cowardice did not want to have his most famous story, a revelation that actually had influence on the big policy. The Army had to make a sub-officer because of the killing of civilians in court, but it should remain a secret, that Lieutenant William Calley on March 16. March 1968, with his squad, the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, and (depending on the census) 350 to 500 people massacred had invaded. After painstaking and detailed, detailed search, Hersh tracked down these Calley. He had expected a child killer and met a "frightened young man, small, thin, and so pale that you could see the veins in his neck and his shoulders with a bluish Shine through". From Drinking Calley needs to vomit, he spits blood. Calley feels as a victim; the year before it was right, women and children to slaughter.

The report on the My Lai massacre can only appear because Hersh distributes them through an Agency. Calley goes on trial, gets life in prison, but pardoned by President Richard Nixon immediately to house arrest and later pardoned. The mood in the country turns definitively against the war.

later the head of Department Abe Rosenthal at the Times, applies to Hersh, not only because of his war opposition as a "Communist", with whom he argues constantly, but Rosenthal also wants the stories of him that can only deliver it Hersh reveals how Nixon and his foreign Minister, Henry Kissinger worked on the overthrow of Chilean President Allende how the CIA was to monitor Thousands of alleged enemies of the state, such as Fidel Castro killed.

Chat with John Lennon

at the same time Hersh was so other-worldly, or went so much in his work that he was able to chat at the beginning of the Seventies, at a Party unaware with an unknown young Englishman, of the difficulties with the immigration authority. It was John Lennon, one of those who were observed and followed.

With remarkable courage of the Chicago-hardened Reporter entered the interrelationships of the film industry, banks, trade unions and Mafia and experienced a lawyer is in a better suit threatened a similar fate as the dead of My Lai.

but the complaisance of the gentlemen, the Kissinger, the evaluation of its policy directly to the title page dictate revolted him. His bosses when President Gerald Ford for lunch invite, speaks openly about executions in the government order, what do you want to keep. Hersh would like to apply as a "prude" because he believes that "editors should not be the ruling President's friends."

"The best job in the world"

Long he was never in a newsroom, for he was too much of a single fighter who discovered his stories alone, alone-researched and solely wanted to write. His working life, he was famous for his countless informants. Not only once he is like to Turn in, even from the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad wrapping, as he propagated his Version of the poison gas attack. Once, he wanted to quote the former German foreign Minister Joschka Fischer as a "senior European diplomats" who had referred to the Deputy US Secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as "Trotskyists". The former antiquary of the Frankfurt Karl-Marx-buchhandlung it had to him, he would be immediately blown, and finally he was "the only Diplomat in Europe to know what a Trotskyist is".

To Hershs recent revelations of a report on the background to the discovery of Osama bin Laden and before that, about the atrocities, which helped American soldiers with Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. "It was a good feeling to write a article, my government would rather have not seen," he announces once proud of. "I had the best job in the world." But his own history, know that Seymour Hersh is like a fairy tale from ancient times.

Seymour M. Hersh: the Reporter, The investigator of the American Nation, Ecowin, 432 pages,approx. 38 Swiss francs. (editor-in-Tamedia)

Created: 21.01.2019, 17:46 PM