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SPEAKER: The Price of Power-- Kissinger in the Nixon White House is the title of a new book by Seymour Hersh. Hersh spoke at the Minnesota Press Club recently in Minneapolis as part of a national tour to promote his book. Hersh is a native of Chicago. He began his reporting career there, covering the police department. He worked for United Press International in South Dakota for one year, then for the Associated Press in Chicago and Washington, DC, and finally for the New York Times.

Hersh has won numerous prizes for his reporting, including the Pulitzer for his account of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Hersh also wrote the first accounts of the secret US war in Cambodia and Laos, and he was the first reporter to reveal the help given by former Central Intelligence Agency officials in arranging arms sales to Libya and other countries. Here is Seymour Hersh.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Let's see. I am a peddler this last few weeks, but that's all right. We all understand that flogging a book, I think we call it, which explains why there's such short notice. Let me just tell you, I guess, since most of the people here have a journalism background. Let me just tell you a little bit without getting into some of the foreign policy issues, some of the whole reason I did the book.

One of the things that-- and then maybe we just-- if anybody cares, anybody has specific questions. It's been an awful lot of stories about the double-dealing aspect of it. Nobody in my position should ever complain about the press. I've gotten more media attention on this thing than most books get in a lifetime, and yet there is you have to say.

The whole question of double dealing is in the first chapter of the book. It's a little bit like somebody like a food somebody-- a food critic judging a restaurant by the clam hors d'oeuvre. It's a big, long book, and I hope eventually the double dealing is serious enough. But there's other stuff that went down. Let me just tell you how it came about.

To begin with-- a lot of people ask me. I've been doing a lot of TV shows. They say, well, what was your motive? What was your-- why did you-- are you obsessed with this guy, Kissinger? I think, Bill Safire of the New York Times wrote a column about my obsession with Kissinger. And I ought to say that just professionally, quickly, that-- I don't think it matters much what's in my mind when I look into somebody or what my motives were. I think we in the press, we trust ourselves to be professional.

And I would certainly hate anybody to judge any story that I write by what I thought about it as I wrote it. I mean, I think there's a book, and you judge the book, whether it's objective or fair, or whether it meets the standards that it should meet of responsible journalism. And so one could say-- it's in politics just to say that, to snap at somebody and say, what's the difference what I think?

When I covered the Pentagon for the Associated Press in the middle '60s, I was sent from Washington Bureau of the AP to whence I retreated after working in South Dakota. One winter in South Dakota is enough for anybody. Yeah, careful. But I'll tell you, it's cold. I was working in the AP, and they sent me to Washington, where I was sent to cover the Pentagon.

We always have these incredible sort of-- I was very lucky. I had a couple of wonderful moments. And that is, I was writing about the Vietnam War and learning to hate it, and learning that it was awful. And I came to the personal conclusion based on OJT training, on-the-job training, that the war was corrupting the American military. It's corrupting the American people. You couldn't make colonel in the United States Army by '68 unless you were a professional liar.

And yet, that didn't stop me from covering Robert McNamara's news conferences and running out after the conference and putting a dime in the payphone and dictating 700 words to the AP on a bulletin and lead matter and doing it straight because I was a professional journalism. So I don't think that really is too relevant.

The other issue that makes it sort of interesting for me anyway is how I came to write the book was in a good, old traditional American way. I was working for the New York Times in New York covering-- I was done with the Washington-- covering corporations, organized crime, trying to get into some of that stuff, which-- take it from me. It's so much harder to write in the private sector than it is about the government.

You can write anything you want about the CIA, and nobody's going to-- you just can't-- some people get mad at you, but you damn well better be careful what you write about great, big American conglomerate because they are really going to come at you. You better be careful what you write about private lawyers and private practice, be they mob-connected or not. So the standards are much higher, and I found that much more challenging.

A publisher, Jim Silberman, who's the publisher of Random House, came up to me, and he asked in '77 if I would write this book. And I said no on grounds that-- who cared about Kissinger? He was out of office. And I didn't care about him once he was out of office. He wasn't sending my son or going to-- he no longer had the power to put a gun on my son's arms and send him off to commit murder in the name of democracy. As long as he did, I was very worried about him. But in '79, they simply offered me more money.

[LAUGHTER]

And so I did the book. I got a couple $100,000, and I don't know how that goes with the obsession issue. But anybody who's a reporter will understand. I followed that nickel down the sewer all the way.

[LAUGHTER]

And did I expect it would be rough and ugly? I think anybody who's ever been close to that Nixon-Kissinger regime, the smell was there. I guess the answer I've worked out is that when you stand on a diving board and you jump in the water, you know you're going to get wet. I didn't know how bad it was. I did know this. I covered foreign policy, Vietnam, for the New York Times. I was in Hanoi for the New York Times.

None of us at the time had any real insight into what was going on, as it turns out. But nonetheless, I also was the guy who was the point man for the times to catch up with Woodward and Bernstein in '73 after Wilbon and Bernstein beat the brains out of the New York Times and the rest of the press. Only, of course, the Times takes it very personally on Watergate.

And one of the things that always struck me about Watergate was this, that we all know about Nixon, and from Watergate. We all know that he did very badly. He was criminal. He was driven out of office. And the image of-- we'll all have the White House tapes-- the famous tape recordings in our mind, expletive, deleted. And who's going to be sandbagged here? And who are we going to lay this on?

And I don't give a damn about the lira, or whatever he said, and the image we all had. But there was this incredible dichotomy when it came to Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs was different. And the image, I guess, would be of-- Nixon would be meeting with Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman, and Dean about Watergate. And the four men-- Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean-- they were like furry animals-- craven, with blood on their hands, sitting around.

How can we sandbag? Who can we screw next? What can we do next? And limited hangout, all those wonderful phrase, modified hangout. And then the door would open. And this gaggle would be swept out. And in would prance Henry Kissinger. And the violin music would break out. And Nixon would become a foreign policy savant. And all of a sudden, the conversation would be on the level of a graduate seminar at Harvard from whence Kissinger came.

To believe in that is basically, as I said before, is to believe in the tooth fairy. It just wasn't that way. I knew that much. I knew that there was no way. There's no way Richard Nixon could behave so dismally in domestic affairs and not have the same pattern in Foreign Affairs. Nixon, by the way, is a great figure, I think, the most compelling figure of our time, really, politically the most interesting. I mean, he has emerged.

Most of you remember the David Frost interviews. I mean, he's emerged as one of the best actors we've ever had in America. He's an incredible actor. I mean, Nixon affecting surprise, amazement. And then this, and it happened. I mean, god, the guy. He puts Hollywood to shame. And he's a marvelous actor. He's one of the great. He really missed his calling. Could have been another Barrymore. He's totally recreated events, whatever the realism school. Anyway.

So the idea I had was that it wasn't pretty. The real story wouldn't be pretty, but I didn't even have an outline when I signed the contract for this book. I did what? I got to tell you how I've made it as a journalist. And I've been out 20 years or so. And the way you make it is, it seems to me, is as you work your tail off, as you just go work. And it isn't. I love the notion.

There's a cliche about me, is that I get people on the phone, and I badger them in to give me information. All of you who have ever worked on the phone with anybody know that the first time you're offensive with people, they hang up, or they become annoyed, and they break off the conversation. You can't do it that way. It doesn't work. I don't mind the image because at this point for these weeks, I guess it sells books, so OK. It's a big mercenary operation.

But the fact is that I started a book in March of '79. I set a goal. I was going to do 15 interviews a week. And that's an incredible goal. I didn't make it, but I averaged about 12 for the next 11 months. I had over 600 interviews at the end of January when I sat down and did an outline. By that time, I had 600 people. I talked with some once, some twice, some three times. And I had a feel. And boy, is it bad? It was bad.

The big breakthrough, the first breakthrough, the double-dealing break, came when Richard V. Allen, who was then Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. Again, let me give you another bit of gratuitous advice perhaps. I'm a good, old bleeding heart liberal on most issues. But you know something? It turns out in Washington, just as I assume in Minneapolis, in any place, those labels for a newspaperman are very dangerous for this reason. It isn't whether somebody is a liberal or a conservative or a Democrat or a Republican, or a right winger or a left wing that's important. It's whether or not they have personal integrity.

And I'm telling you that the personal integrity you find, particularly among some people in the military, which are, for the newspaper people, the biggest untapped source-- people keep on saying, oh, generals won't talk to you. They will. And they have honest beliefs. And I think the way into this mess-- we're in Central America now-- is to start doing more reporting with inside the military about what's going on, because it isn't a CIA game out there. It's a military game. CIA is an adjunct role.

The military has a tremendously active covert presence in Central America, which is a new part. What I'm saying to you is something very serious. I'm saying that in the last couple of years, the Reagan administration has gotten into covert military intelligence operations as opposed to covert CIA operations. They're using the pen anyway. It's there. The stories can be gotten. That's another story.

So I simply went. And the people that I quote in my book-- and more than 200 or so people I mentioned by name. And more than half the people I interviewed were willing to be. Some people just played such a peripheral role. To mention the name would confuse things, but it's by name. When I talk about Kissinger double dealing, I quote Richard V. Allen by name. I quote John Mitchell by-- Mitchell is fascinating, by the way.

After about a year, he finally agreed to see me. And we all have an instinct, I'm sure, about Mitchell. One part of the instinct would be-- he's been a caricature. He's become a caricature for everybody in Watergate. He's certainly brighter than people realize, and he certainly was on top of Foreign Affairs a lot more. He was watching Henry Kissinger for Richard Nixon. Very interesting.

With guys like Mitchell, with guys like Chuck Colson, with guys like John Ehrlichman, I was exceedingly careful. I triangulize as much as I could. I would find out from them. Mitchell would acknowledge. He's telling me stuff that I might not believe, and he would tell me who else knows about it. He would tell me who else he told the same story to. In some cases, people like Ken Rush, the former ambassador to Germany, who was the chief executive officer, I think, of what Carnegie-- one of the big steel companies.

Rush is an admirable man. Rush would confirm that Mitchell had indeed said some things to him that he told me. All of which builds up a sense of credibility for certain aspects. Mitchell still will. He will still follow Richard Nixon out of the window any day. He still is terribly loyal, which is a great mystery to me. I don't understand why they're all so loyal. Anyway, I went, and I found all these people.

And Mitchell's quoted by name. Allen is quoted by name in that chapter on double dealing. And people in the Humphrey camp-- if people don't know, I'll just tell you what it is in essence. The book begins with Henry Kissinger having had his man, Nelson Rockefeller, lose the nomination in '68. Kissinger begins a very, very, I think, highly duplicitous, obviously, but almost deadly game. He first approaches Humphrey, and he goes after Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was then Humphrey's foreign policy advisor.

And he says to him, look, I have-- we're on live radio. I can't say it, right? I have a blank HIT File on-- Nelson Rockefeller kept a dirty little file on Nixon. Do you want it? And the deal was, sure, they wanted it. Humphrey's camp wanted it. That's part of the game. The deal was this. He would turn it over on two conditions-- one, that no public mention be made of his role, and two, that Hubert Humphrey be personally told of what he was doing for him.

That's lousy. It stinks, but that's the way the game is played. I can't tell you, when I work for Gene McCarthy in the '68 campaign, that we were always wonderful and fair and generous to Robert Kennedy when we came to analyzing something he said. I can live with that. I don't like it, but I live with it. That's the price. Our political system works that way. The other side of what he did is far more serious.

And one of the reasons Kissinger may have been so frantic, I think, in his denial on television, Nightline. He said, it was a slimy line. He got very emotional. The other part of what he did is a lot rougher. And I'll tell you what else he did. He approached Nixon on the secret peace talks. And what you have to know about Henry Kissinger that I describe as much as detail as I can, not necessarily right away but eventually in the book, he had begun working on the peace process for Lyndon Johnson in '65. He'd become an expert on Vietnam. He'd gone to Vietnam three times in '65 and '66, working at the highest levels, Robert McNamara, working with Henry Cabot Lodge, ambassador.

In '67, through his amazing contacts, Kissinger ran this foreign policy seminar at Harvard for years, a summer seminar through which most foreign leaders came to, to which most came, and knew many people. Among the people he knew were two Frenchmen that had been very friendly with Ho Chi Minh at the end of World War II. He began a series of very, very complex and sophisticated negotiations in '67 through these Frenchmen with Ho Chi Minh. It didn't work out.

But the negotiations, which later became known in the Pentagon Papers as x, y, and z, were very well done by Kissinger. And he got everybody's respect. Averell Harriman was the chief delegate for the peace process in Paris. Cyrus Vance was also there. Paul Warnke. All these names should be familiar to you. Kissinger won their respect because he was discreet. He worked well. He was one on one with Lyndon Johnson often. He spent many hours on the phone with Lyndon Johnson, describing it.

In '68, it was Henry Kissinger, no less, who is smart. That's what makes it all so tragic, this incredible ambition and willingness to be a high-priced courtesan, this willingness, this inability to stand up. I don't know from one. Psychologically, it comes. I don't care. I mean, I care, but it isn't that important, at least to the story. It's probably important to getting a great understanding of the man, which I don't pretend you will from my book. There's no big, intellectual, or psychological insight because I don't think one is easily obtained.

Anyway, in '68, he approached McNamara with an idea of how to get something going on the peace process. The issue in the process, if you remember, was Johnson was willing to end the bombing of North Vietnam, but he wanted reciprocity. The North Vietnamese said, you earned it. And then we'll tell you what we'll do. Johnson said, you tell us what you do before you enter. These kind of things, this is what foreign policy is all about, right?

Here's a bunch of people drawing lines in the dirt. But nonetheless, it was very important. Kissinger came up with a compromise solution that everybody liked, that they tried to put into effect. This was in the mid-summer of '68. After the convention of '68 when Rockefeller lost, Nixon was the man running against Humphrey after he approached Humphrey and had cut a deal, which enamored Humphrey. Humphrey was telling people that he was thinking of making Kissinger the National Security advisor over Brzezinski.

In the middle of September, 1968, Kissinger paid his own way to Paris, where the peace talks were going on. Obviously, he'd gotten a clue something was cooking. And he got there just as there was a major breakthrough. And here you have a situation. And everybody told them, of course they would. Why wouldn't they tell Henry Kissinger. He wasn't officially a consultant at the time, but he had been, and he had everybody's respect.

And they told him because maybe he can give him some advice. He then goes to a payphone from Paris, and he calls Richard Allen. And this is described in excruciating detail, I guess. It was excruciating for me, basically. He tells Allen, look, there's something going on here. I want to help you guys. Are you interested in Allen? As Allen said, are we interested? We were ecstatic. This is Mister Foreign Policy and Nuclear Weapons, the name of his book. He said, I was ecstatic. Nixon was told by Allen.

Eventually, Kissinger set up a separate relationship with John Mitchell, talked directly with him. Mitchell confirms this and describes Kissinger's information as being basic to the campaign. We don't know everything, he told them. One of the things we know he told them, is he told Nixon to lay off Vietnam, that you're going to get hurt if you make Vietnam a campaign issue. Nixon did not. He took the advice. He laid off Vietnam. He did not make it a campaign issue.

We don't even know. We do know that Nixon had a series of intermediaries then going back and forth to South Vietnam, urging the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, not to go along with the peace process. Sabotaging it, I think, is a fair word. I can't tell you. And the book doesn't try to suggest that Nixon wouldn't have thought of this without Kissinger. I don't know. I don't know what the nexus is. I don't know whether or not you're going to fix a direct line of responsibility between Kissinger's intervention and the subsequent inability of the peace talks to work.

And, by the way, his narrow election and the narrow defeat of Hubert Humphrey, I just don't know. I do know that it's more than double dealing for a man who's on the inside of a peace process to come, involve himself, intervene in the process. Here is Lyndon Johnson. He's been prosecuting this war for five years. He's built it up to a half a million people. He's been taking our children and sending them to war for five years.

And for two months out of five, he's looking for peace. And in those two months, Kissinger, for his own ambition, comes in to submerge a peace agreement, or at least an attempt to spread the information about the peace agreement. I don't know what you can call it, but it isn't double dealing. It's a hell of a lot more serious than that. And that is my instinct. That's why I got so angry about it because it is more serious. It is more complicated.

And the ultimate responsibility may be-- I can't even begin to hint where it goes. I don't know. I'm an empiricist. I believe in facts. I believe in what people tell me. I don't even speculate about it in the book, but it is fair to speculate, as many in the press have done, is that the book raises profound questions about just what he did. Nixon loved it, by the way.

One of the things that comes across in my mind is Nixon's bright, a lot brighter than you think-- really a smart man. And Richard Nixon understood a kindred soul from the moment Kissinger began the double deal. He understood what Kissinger was doing, that's he's a man, a guy who was willing to take incredible chances. That's one reason Kissinger and Nixon eventually had so much trouble. How could they ever be any real trust between them?

[LAUGHTER]

Nixon understood Kissinger. Gene McCarthy once said about during the '68 campaign, we had a fellow working for us who was very loyal to Bobby Kennedy, Richard Goodwin. I shared offices or suites in a motel with Goodwin, and I used to often pick up the phone. When the campaign got going and we began to go well in New Hampshire and Wisconsin, I'd pick up Goodwin's private phone when it rang, and it'd be Bobby.

And it was clear. I remember once being a good little dutiful toddler. I ran into Gene, and I send him this guy. He's on the phone to Bobby all the time. And McCarthy, I swear, said this absolute wonderful fey humor. He said, well, aside. He said, it's good having a traitor around. It keeps you on your toes, don't you think?

[LAUGHTER]

I don't know if Nixon was that sanguine about it.

[LAUGHTER]

But I think the bottom line was he really had some reason to suspect Kissinger's loyalty, and yet he rewarded it with the top job. The conundrums are fascinating. And eventually, as you all know, I want to do some questions. Eventually, as you know, the book describes how they grabbed the power immediately, I mean, this incredible grab for power.

And the real enemies of Nixon and Kissinger, of course, were not the Russians and Chinese after all. Nixon was a man determined to win the war in Vietnam. And he knew if he prosecuted the war, he could not win re-election at home. He would end up belly up like Lyndon Johnson and bailing out. So he had to be a peacemaker. The genius of Nixon, if you will, and Kissinger. They let the Russians and the Chinese reelect them.

Then he got summits in '72 in Peking and in Moscow. He paid dearly. We all paid dearly. I say in this book clearly-- to give you some idea-- some of the stories that haven't gotten to yet. I say clearly that the reason the wheat deal was made with the Soviet Union was because of SALT. I make the link. I make it absolutely, categorically with name sources that they went to the unions in '71. They said we have to get SALT. It was Colson and Nixon-- brought on all the union leaders and said, we're going to sign a SALT agreement with the Russians next year. We need the summit. Part of the deal is you have to agree to stop to load Russian ships.

And they paid off the unions to do so. And the way they told the union people-- and I'm talking about direct quotes from people like Teddy Gleason, Paul Hall, who's now dead-- but certainly, I got access to some of his recollections-- Jay Lovestone-- all talked to me, all recalled the same series of meetings in which they were told clearly that the SALT agreement hinges on our willingness to sell grain at 6% and let the Russians come and buy. And we all know what happened in '72.

And what I do very clearly is I link that sale of grain to the White House, which I think is one hell of a story, but I figure eventually people will get into it and find it, and not necessarily even believe in me. You have to go and talk to Gleason, talk to Hall. The New York Times, too, to my everlasting gratitude, did, on this double dealing issue, send its reporters out and talk to everybody. I interviewed Brzezinski and Allen, Ted Van Dyk of Humphrey's campaign, and they all confirmed the story, which is important for me. If I am right-- let me go on a second-- if I'm right about all this stuff.

What does it say about the press? If I'm right that the policy in Vietnam was to win, if I'm right that when I say the real enemies were not the Russians and the Chinese but the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, Bill Rogers and Mel Laird were the real enemies of Nixon and Kissinger. If I'm right, what does it say? If I'm right that we could have had a settlement in 1971, in the Middle East.

But Kissinger would be damned if he'd let Bill Rogers get the first foreign policy accomplishment. He just would not let that happen. And he derailed it. I don't think meaning to permanently derail it, but he derailed it in '71. They couldn't get it back on track until after a brutal war, the '73 war. I begin my section on the Middle East by saying spite played a major role in the Middle East, and I stand on it.

I think Kissinger's enduring diplomacy is what the press corps. I think we all have to look-- all of us in the media have to look into ourselves, me included. I wrote some of the Pollyanna stories, too. He really had an incredible con. Oh, I don't know what to say about-- I don't deal specifically with my press. I'm very rough in some of the Times columnists. I guess, James Reston-- very rough-- because I think some of the columns were not necessarily doing a service.

I think people were writing what they knew Kissinger wanted them to write. And I think, at the same time, they knew the truth was a little different. I don't know. We're vulnerable to that. But even if the press had been terrific, one thing comes true. One thing is exceedingly clear to me, that if the President of the United States decides to lie to the American people or to the press, he can get away with it. There's nothing we can do, for all this talk about the power of the press and the omnipotence of the press.

The fact is, there's nothing we and the press can do if the president decides to lie. And if Mr. Reagan decides he wants to expand the war and not tell us, he could probably get away with it. I'm sorry to say that. I don't think it's a fault of the press. I think it's one of the limits of our system and I think what I really come down to being is a moralist. Maybe it's my Midwestern background. Maybe not.

I come down saying that we can't-- we the people have been better than our leaders, and we have been better for much too long. We've been better than our leaders for more than 20 years. We've had leadership that didn't match our people, our great mass. We've had leadership that didn't match us in integrity, in morality, in willingness to take chances and for peace.

We have a country right now that I think if some president got up and talked peace in terms of disarmament, I think he'd find an overwhelming response. As long as we certainly didn't leave ourselves denuded, nobody's suggesting that. I think we have a country that if some leader got up and talked seriously about Central America and where we're going and the notion that the Russians may be undermining everything, I think he'd find an amazing response among the people who are very, very skeptical of what we're getting into in Central America, particularly after the Vietnam experience.

And I just think the people of the country are better than the leaders. And I get tired of these television shows and radio shows and interviews. People say to me, well, but so what if he lied? Presidents always lie. And national security, that's part of government. Well, I think maybe it's time to restore lying to where it belongs. It's something nobody wants to do, and it's something that is bad for all of us and is immoral and wrong.

And I know I'm not living in Plato's Republic. I understand that. But I also understand that in four years of policy-making all over the world-- in Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam and Bangladesh, where millions were killed. In Chile, Nixon and Kissinger conducted a Foreign Affairs. And I can find absolutely not one shred of evidence. And there isn't one that they ever said to themselves, what's the human cost of this action? How many people's lives are we going to dislocate? How many American boys are we going to dislocate?

The hero of my book, ironically, is Mel Laird, because it was Mel Laird who was taking a beating in the public for supporting the war but in private was doing everything he could to stop the war. And there's something to be said, I guess, for that for him. And I do, I think. I think he's a very admirable man for his willingness to fight the fight on the inside and take all that trouble.

SPEAKER: Former New York Times reporter, Seymour Hersh, he spoke recently at the Minnesota Press Club in Minneapolis about his new book, The Price of Power-- Kissinger and the Nixon White House. Following his remarks, Hersh was asked, how is the Reagan administration different from the Nixon administration?

SEYMOUR HERSH: If there was so much we didn't know what happened despite the fact that it was the most incredibly studied period, particularly the Watergate side of it-- the Nixon-Kissenger era was incredibly studied. If I'm right and there's so much, though, you have to say what's going on today, I wish I could give you an answer. I can assure you that you don't know the whole story about the Central American involvement, or the intentions of the men in the White House. I can assure you that. But that's all right.

I think it's different in this sense. I think Reagan honestly believes in his policy. I think he's terribly misguided. I mean, he perhaps may even end up being criminally misguided. I think he believes in his policy. I think Nixon even believed in Vietnam. So it's not a question where you have the amorality, immorality of Kissinger, who I don't know what he believed in. It's not clear. He had to know better.

But that doesn't help you much to get off the hard spot. It's deadly wrong. Obviously, I would guess there's more going on. All I can tell you is that you have to make your own analogy or juxtaposition for what I'm saying about what happened just 10 years ago. And I don't know if we have to wait 10 more years to find out the whole story. I just don't know. But if you're nervous about what's going on there, welcome. It makes me very nervous. Yes, sir.

SPEAKER: Another listener in the Minnesota Press Club audience wanted to know if Hersh had said that military men have more integrity than bleeding-heart liberals.

SEYMOUR HERSH: What I said was, I didn't make a comparison. What I said is that you have to find-- the critical issue is not whether somebody is a bleeding-heart liberal or a conservative or a lefty or righty. It's whether or not they have personal integrity. And what I found in the military was an incredibly high degree of personal integrity. You're talking to a man, although he's a bleeding-heart liberal who's made a living basically from getting information out of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, clearly. I mean, I clearly get stories out of those two spots and the people I number as my friends, who I respect.

There are some people who were members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom I consider my friends. I mean, we don't sup together, but we certainly have frank conversations. And they tell me they're honest. They're honest. And I find that very refreshing. I'm not comparing. I'm sure the bleeding-heart liberals like me have a lot of integrity, too, but we don't have any corner on the market, believe me.

And I'll tell you something. I get madder at a Frank Church than I do at any good conservative with integrity. I think of Frank Church when he had the Senate Intelligence Committee and confuse that with running for president, does a disservice, much more of a disservice than people realize. And I do think there's a double standard among the press.

I think people who are conservative tend to be judged more harshly than people who are liberal. But I think everybody understands that. I mean, that's just a reality that most of the press is liberal, therefore. And look, they make a mistake not dealing more with conservatives. You can get a lot out of conservatives. Yes, sir.

SPEAKER: Shortly before Hersh spoke in Minneapolis, a former prime minister of India, Morarji Desai, announced that he was suing Hersh for what he had written in his book. The reporter charged that Desai, while he was prime minister of India, was also a paid informant for the Central Intelligence Agency. With one suit already filed, a listener wanted to know how long before Henry Kissinger would follow suit.

SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't know. Follow suit is a wonderful pun. I thank you that. I don't know. Desai isn't put up to it. He's old. And it's very painful, by the way. I can't comment about the suit. I haven't seen it. It's very painful to name somebody as a CIA operative. And in many other places in the book, I did not. I have footnotes saying I'm not using the right names for these people.

I got inside the Chile operation. For example, I had access to an internal array of documents. If any of you have been in the government or in the intelligence business, Ribat, R-I-B-A-T, which are internal CIA documents for the head of the CIA only, with no code names. And so I got to know an awful lot about the CIA, who their operatives were, who the double agents. And I don't use that.

In Desai's case, the reason you mention a leader like that is this. And I guess it's time for me to start talking about what the issue there is, because the press is, again, you get a facile-- this lawsuit is interesting. But why would somebody like me who's done so well in the CIA, why would I suddenly want to incur the wrath of all my sources by dropping a name? They don't like you to do that. A lot of my friends said, don't drop the name. You're going to hurt a lot of people.

And why would you? Because in '71, the override early '71 before successes-- don't forget, it's early '71. They've just had a bad congressional election. The Russians won't have a summit with Nixon. It's a rough time. They haven't done SALT. They haven't done China. They're way down in the polls. Muskie is looking strong. He's running ahead. In '71, the big hope was China. They were talking to China, the Zhou Enlai and Mao through Ayub Khan, the president of Pakistan. He was a conduit for some letters. This is in Kissinger's memoirs, among other places.

Ayub Khan was a typical foreign leader we support, basically more interested in pulling fingernails than in providing real Democratic reform. But nonetheless, we support him. Lord knows why we have to go find everything. At one point, we had so many fingernail pullers. It's hard to keep track. We had two. We had Park in South Korea. We really do an awful job with-- Pinochet-- a lot of fingernail pullers. Anyway, amazing phenomena of our American policy.

We're comfortable with the fingernail pullers. He was a very comfortable fingernail puller. Well, the other guys, once in a while, won't do what we tell them. There's something about democracy. And India has always been very troublesome because they don't quite do what we say. And Mrs. Gandhi was friendly to the Russians, and people always were suspicious of them. Never liked them anyway because she wasn't wholly in our camp.

Ayub Khan was in our camp, and he was also a conduit for secret messages between the United States, Henry Kissinger, and the Chinese. Kissinger describes in his memoirs, for example. He didn't give me an interview, but I have my interview. It's a 1,500-page book-- how they would use paper with no water markings on it. All this secrecy is ridiculous, really, if you about it, but nonetheless, so nobody could track it back.

And Ayub Khan's doing it. He's going to deliver Nixon to Peking in February of '72. And that was the highest price you could get. I mean, they would pay anything for that. There's elections in Pakistan. He's got problems with the Awami League, which is a dissident group in East Pakistan, where the Bangladesh movement. The elections are held, and the dissidents win. They win a majority in Congress.

Well, being a good fingernail puller, Ayub Khan did the appropriate thing. He disbanded the Congress and began a genocide against his enemies, 1,000 miles to the East Pakistan, across India. From beginning in late March and through the mid-summer of '71, anywhere from a half a million to three million people were slaughtered by, basically, the Punjabi troops of West Pakistan. My Lai pales, I mean.

For example, the National Security Agency, our Communications Intelligence Agency, had a secret transmitter in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. And out of this transmitter was coming just horrible stuff back channel, very highly classified codes, to the State Department and to the National Security, to the military intelligence people. One such document described about an eyewitness account of how the Pakistani troops surrounded a Catholic girls school, set fire to it at night, and as the girls came out, mowed them down and machete them. I mean, you cannot believe the stuff that was coming in.

Nixon and Kissinger refused to the Ayub Khan. And in fact, as I write, made it clear to the Ayub Khan that they would not intervene in any way with whatever he did to ensure his democracy. I'm not saying they were responsible for what he did, but it's clear to me if they had gone hard and heavy in stopping him, he would have not have gone as far. That's a fair surmise.

I don't say that, though. I only stick with what I can prove. I don't think he can read the chapter any other way. I quote one of his closest aides-- Ayub Khan's closest aides-- saying that he thought he'd gotten the go-ahead signal. Anyway, even the Soviets condemned it immediately. We did nothing, and it was terrible for our country that we did nothing. And it was awesome. This is the famous tilt towards Pakistan. It was a brutal tilt, and they were protecting a secret policy, the China opening.

And one way they did it is-- I write in the book that Desai was an informer. This problem with Desai, he'd been deputy prime minister. He'd been fired by Mrs. Gandhi. He was hostile to Mrs. Gandhi, very hostile to the Soviets, very pro-American. No moral judgment on that. At the time he began working for the CIA, we were the white hats. The Russians were the black hats. Unfortunately, it's all gray these days.

By and large, it's a lot grayer than it was, even though nobody here would change places for anybody in Russia. Now, that isn't the point. The point is that we're not as innocent as we once thought we were. And Desai's information was coming in, and he was alleging that Mrs. Gandhi was ready to attack West Pakistan, which would be a justification for not coming down hard on the Ayub Khan.

Well, the problem with his information is he's very biased source. Nonetheless, Kissinger insisted on his information being given directly. It's called raw. He wanted the raw reports, which he then would run to the president on, and then also to the press, not leaking the name, but leaking the information, saying we have a cabinet-level source. And he tells us that Mrs. Gandhi is ready to invade.

He used this man's intelligence, which, if he had handled right, would have come over to him with the CIA, maybe not even been reported by the CIA. It certainly would have said caution. This man's biases are very clear, and it makes his credibility at, what? 30% 50%? There's no reason to act on the basis that information and this information. He chose not to do so. He chose to use the raw information because it fit into the prejudices and gave him a justification for not interceding in genocide.

I can't tell you what an outrage that is. I can only suggest. You have to read it, I guess. I am the peddler again. I can't tell you what an outrage it is. It was an outrage to people in the CIA. It was an outrage to people in the State Department who knew about it. It's an outrage today that this country turned its back because the president wanted to have a summit.

I think it's one of the most devastating things I wrote in the whole book. And that's why I had to mention his name. And that's the real issue behind, is the whole-- I don't know what the issue behind the lawsuit is. I presume he honestly believes he wasn't working for the CIA. But anyway. Yes, sir.

SPEAKER: A listener in the Press Club audience wanted to know Hersh's impressions of President Reagan, and questioned him on his statement that the press is inherently a liberal institution.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me say, also, having said that. I think by and large, the instinct of the press is liberal, and people were suspicious about our liberal leanings have some basis for it. We're a liberal institution. We're also perfectly willing to eat up our young. I mean, McGovern certainly got treated as roughly in '72 with the Eagleton thing as any time Nixon was. I think Reagan is a master at public relations. I think he's really--

SPEAKER: No, he's not brains necessarily.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Let's put it this way. He's our first acting president of the United States.

[LAUGHTER]

And he does a great job. He does a great job. He knows how to handle people. He brings him in. Let me tell you something. I had to see Gerry Ford about-- I'm doing some-- I work for The Atlantic Magazine. I'm doing some story about, actually, the Nixon's pardon. I had to see Gerry Ford. I can't tell you. I mean, Gerry Ford, to me, is a perfectly nice guy who's become-- if I talk about myself peddling, he's willing to sell the president. He'll sign autographs of the pardon for $5.

[LAUGHTER]

He's in more shaky business deals than anybody else. He's perfectly willing to lend his name to any real estate deal if he can get 1/4 lot. I mean, it's unbelievable. He's in business deals with Mrs. Sadat. He's doing all kinds of stuff. He's really unbelievable the way he's peddling himself. Nonetheless, knowing that and not having any great illusions about his presidency, although I think he certainly was a decent man, much more-- not crazy, not wacky like Nixon, not nearly as interesting, though, either.

I went to see him, and you can't help but be-- the trappings of the president are very much. He's in Palm Springs. He's on this fantastic golf course. He's got a big office, a big house, two pools, 60 cars in the driveway full of Secret Service men, a staff, everything. It's clear he can reach his finger. I mean, that's a lot of power. And this country does respond to power. We're power groupies.

And we've had presidents now. Let's say, since Kennedy, I think Ike's the last president, I think, that really had some problems in lying and had some problems with power. I really was the man who really worried about nuclear weapons. Ever since then, we've had presidents that had two basic rights, and in this sense, Nixon was very much in pattern.

The presidents from Kennedy on had two basic beliefs. One, they were divine kings, so to Saint James. They had a divine right to do wage war, do this. And the second right is that they could, of course, lie to anybody about it, lie to Congress, lie to the press. They could take it upon themselves to do it. That seems to be the tradition of all of our presidents in the last 20-some odd years. It's sad. It's sad that we stand for it. We've become a nerd.

What I'm really saying in this book is, we've let it happen to ourselves. And I think the Freeze movement is very interesting because it's a people movement. It's people saying, uh, whether-- it's people saying, it's just like the old joke about war being too important for the generals. That nuclear strategy and nuclear bombs are just too imminent, too close.

And we just can't depend on these crazy politicians here in Europe and elsewhere in the world to do anything about it. We have to do it ourselves. And I think if more people begin to work that way-- I'm very optimistic about this country. This is a very wonderful country, as you know. Well, That's it. It's not going to last until we start making higher standards on our leaders. Yes, sir.

SPEAKER: Another listener asked reporter Seymour Hersh about his recent appearance on ABC television's Nightline program, where interviewed Ted Koppel had invited Hersh, along with two former Kissinger aides, to answer questions about Hersh's new book.

SEYMOUR HERSH: You mean, Nightline? The gang bang, I call it.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, actually, it worked to my advantage. As you can see, I'm not exactly slow of tongue, but it was so unbelievable that these guys went after me. I just shut up, which worked to my advantage, because eventually, I emerged as a figure of sympathy, which is pretty amazing for me.

[LAUGHTER]

And there were a lot of Colin Russell. Baker had one, and Sidney Sheinberg and Coleman McCarthy of the Washington-- a lot of columns have been written about and really hurting, I think. Yes I'll tell you what the truth is about that as far as I know it. First of all, you should know that Kissinger is a consultant to ABC television, and he's a very close personal friend of Ted Koppel's.

I happen to Ted Koppel, and thought he would-- I went on the show willingly. I'm a peddler. And I thought for sure that Ted would rise above it. The only time I really got angry was when this fellow, Winston Lord, who was one of Kissinger's acolytes. He was president of the Council of Foreign Relations. When Winston Lord denounced me as unscrupulous and everybody knows it, I think it was up to Koppel then to say, well, wait a second, why is he here?

He has to explain why I'm there if I'm such a bad guy. Why would they give me all this time on network television? Clearly, because I'm a serious person, and it's a serious book. He did not say that. But there was not much like, what can you do when-- what can I say? Can I start saying, hey, I won prizes. I'm a good boy? There's nothing to do. And Eagleburger went on, and he's the one who said that-- they all acknowledged they hadn't read the book.

And Eagleburger had a wonderful line. He said he read something in the Atlantic article, where I quote, one, Roger Morris as saying that when Eagleburger was in a hospital, he had a breakdown working for Kissinger. Sick. Morris visited him, and there were tears in his eyes. And Eagleburger said, and I swear, it was like this.

Larry Eagleburger was the highest-ranking Foreign Service officer in the State Department under secretary of State for Political Affairs. He runs all the intelligence operations, clear through him. Eagleburger on television says, now I may have been-- I was in the hospital on Roger Moore's. Well, he may have been in that room, may have seen me, but there were not any tears in my eyes.

[LAUGHTER]

Eagleburger has since told others that he was forced into it by Henry. Henry called him up and insisted he go on. And really, I mean, Henry can't do anything more. He can't threaten him. He can just cajole him and whine and snivel. And apparently, he did do that. I wouldn't like to have Henry Kissinger's phone bill the last month. He's been working overtime.

[LAUGHTER]

And I think that's probably what happened. I think Win Lord also was programmed to go on. They did me a favor. I could have counterattacked, but there was nowhere to go. It was just one of those awful situations. It was very poor show for Ted Koppel. And I have every reason to suspect being a professional journalist of, I think, who ends a wonderful show. I think he must regret it. I hope he does.

SPEAKER: Seymour Hersh is a former speechwriter and press representative for Gene McCarthy. When McCarthy sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, Hersh was asked about McCarthy.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Look, let me tell you something. I don't give speeches at corporations because I never know when I'm going to have to write about a corporation, even though I turn down sometimes, hmm, so much money that I really need. And I don't come out of these books making money. I might, but I'm certainly not. Now I'm in debt. I don't because I don't feel that if I take money from somebody, I can talk about it.

And so I won't go to an insurance company annual banquet or something. And I took money from Gene McCarthy. I worked for him. And so I don't want to speak ill of him. I just think it ill behooves me to do it. I remember him as somebody who did a wonderful thing in late '67 or early '68 for reasons that were muddled. He led the crusade, what we call the Children's Crusade. He led the country out of the way, and he made Lyndon Johnson go belly up. And I guess the nicest thing I can say about him is I was on Erickson's show. What's his first name, ma'am?

AUDIENCE: Roger.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Roger Erickson. And he asked me that question, and I did say. I said, I think he's running because he wants to keep his speech fee up. But nothing can take away what he did earlier. And your ambivalences are duly noted. And would he have helped out if he'd supported Humphrey in '68, we would not have had Nixon? I don't know. But anyway, you can understand where I'm coming from. I did work for him privately.

AUDIENCE: I certainly understand that just-- of course, he comes from a state that produced Harold Stassen. And Stassen--

[LAUGHTER]

Honestly.

SEYMOUR HERSH: He should stop! For sure, he should stop. But who's going to tell him?

AUDIENCE: Well, I guess I was hoping someone like you.

[LAUGHTER]

SEYMOUR HERSH: He called me and asked me if I was ready to go again, and we all had a good joke about it. I think he's seriously thinking of running, and I think it's a terrible mistake. He did a wonderful thing, an absolute wonderful accomplishment. And there's no question about it. He's got an amazingly interesting mind. He's bright.

AUDIENCE: I know he wrote a hell of a good book of poetry just over a year ago.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, no. It's called "Potomac fever." It's one of the great-- I don't know what the-- well. Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry. She hasn't had a chance. Yes.

SPEAKER: A listener in the Minnesota Press Club audience asked Hersh, what can be done to counter lies told by the president of the United States?

SEYMOUR HERSH: In '74, I was doing-- this is not a direct answer, but I think it's reasonably clear.

AUDIENCE: Kind of what we do about it.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Look, if I knew how to handle that one, I would immediately incorporate myself in the public relations business and sell myself for $1 a bottle. I mean, I don't how you do it. I don't know how you convince somebody to listen to you. But I'll tell you a story. I think I know where the newspapers are coming from. I was doing this story on domestic spying, how the CIA was spying on American citizens in violation and knowingly in violation.

One of these guys who worked in the CIA finally told me a little bit about it. And I talked to him a lot over the years. And I said, why don't you tell me this earlier? And he shrugged. I said, tell me. Why didn't you? He said, well, let me tell you. I'll tell you a story, he said. It's an apocryphal story. It's about Nikita Khrushchev. This is an agent. This is a CIA man telling me this story-- Khrushchev in '56.

There was the famous speech when Khrushchev made Stalin a non-person-- took Stalin out and denounced Stalin. He finally publicly denounced Stalin's crimes. And Khrushchev was making this great speech. It's a famous speech. The intelligence agencies went crazy to get copies of it. It was a secret speech at the time but was quickly leaked to the West.

And as a CIA man tells you the story, this is his answer. He said that Khrushchev was giving this speech at the lectern, and all of a sudden, one of the delegates-- there's 3,000 committee party members. One of the delegates stands up and he says, hey, comrade Khrushchev, he said. Where were you when the trains were going every night to Murmansk with our wives and children?

Hey, Khrushchev, where were you? Where to be Jewish meant that you were executed and hung. Hey, Khrushchev, where were you when the secret police were coming and taking everybody out of their beds at night? Where were you, Khrushchev? Khrushchev, at the lectern, went-- who said that? Who said that? Long silence. (WHISPERING) That's where I was.

[LAUGHTER]

I think it's as simple as that. It's very hard to take them on, my friend. Your White House correspondent gets in trouble. You don't get exclusive interviews. Maybe the president won't come to your cocktail party after the gridiron dinner. The publisher can have lunch with him anymore. Don't ask me how.

AUDIENCE: So little.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, but I still don't want to go to dinner with the president.

[LAUGHTER]

Yes, sir.

SPEAKER: Another listener wanted to know when Hersh would mellow out.

SEYMOUR HERSH: I feel a little bit like a riverboat gambler. I mean, I gave up a lot when I left the Times. I gave up that international air travel card, the free phones, the nice office, the expense account. Oh, brother. I mean, who are you going to take for lunch today, fellas? And I took a gamble on this book. Why? Because I thought if I went to the New York Times and said I want write this story, they would have said, oh, well, it's not a story. We don't quite know how to do it.

I have immense respect for the New York Times, as Harrison does, too. That doesn't mean I don't see its worths, which are acute. And there's a lot of toadies in that place. The top editor is wonderful, and beneath him are a bunch of toadies, which is probably the way it is in the world. But you don't have to work there if you don't want to. Anyway, I don't know. There's no answer. Let's do one more question. It's time to get out of here.

SPEAKER: Finally, a listener wanted to know what's the line between playing the sometimes dirty game of politics and personal ethics.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me give you a serious answer to that question, which is that if I've been working for Gene McCarthy and somebody walked into me, somebody reputable, and said, I have a dirty file on Bobby Kennedy, and it's 1968, I would have accepted it. And I think that's true. Just like I think in 1968, March '68, if I'd been in My Lai and Lieutenant Calley, I was 17-year-old and a farm boy out of Goshen, Indiana, like Paul Meadlo, I would have shot when Calley said shoot. And maybe my mother would have said like his mother said. I gave him a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.

So there's no question that anybody who inspects-- there's no question that one of the things you learn as you grow older and you grow wiser is what it's all about and what the rules are and what the rules should be. I assure you, if I were in politics now, that wouldn't happen because I would say no, that isn't the way to win. But then I was 29 years old, and I didn't know enough. For sure, I would have accepted it.

I'd like to think that when people get older and wiser, that they learn that this is not the thing to do. I know it now. I didn't know it then. I think there's nothing wrong with people coming to learn what's right and what's wrong as they go through life. And that's all that happened. I don't know what Gene McCarthy would have said. He might have been very upset if we'd done it, but we would have done it first and asked him later.

But I do think there's a difference between that, not in terms of personal integrity. I don't think that's a-- I'm not particularly proud of that. I'm not particularly proud of the fact that when I was a kid reporter for the City News Bureau in 1961, police reporter. Two cops came back after allegedly shooting an escaped prisoner. And I was an eager beaver, and I wanted to be the first to interview them.

So I ran down to the garage. I told the story at the IRE convention here. And the cops came in, and there were two big, beefy Irish cops. And they were talking about the nigger they let go and plugged in the back. I was scared to death. I didn't know what to do about it. I mean, one thing about Chicago, you know where you stand in Chicago. I mean, if you go up against the cops, you're in trouble.

And everybody advised me to forget it. I went, and I got the corner report, which showed the bullet holes in the back, although they publicly announced it as an escaped prisoner. And because he was Black, it was a non-story. I mean, Washington, Chicago. The racist situation in Chicago was really acute. And it's better now, but it was acute then. And I learned a lot just covering politics. I ended up doing nothing about it. But if it happened today, I would do something about it.

So nobody here is professing any-- don't think for one second I am saying. And I make it a point to talk about my own crappy reporting on Henry Kissinger in the book. I went for Henry Kissinger's lies as much as any other reporter. And I'm not trying to sit in judgment of anybody, but the least we can do is learn from the mistakes. And that's all, I guess, we're saying. We had a terrible mistake, we in the press with Henry Kissinger. We may be having one with Reagan. I think this is my book ultimately is about. Anyway, goodbye.

AUDIENCE: I guess you ought to tell him it's on sale.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Former New York Times reporter, Seymour Hersh. He spoke recently in Minneapolis at the Minnesota Press Club. His new book is The Price of Power-- Kissinger in the Nixon White House.