Hersh's friend Murray Waas, a Washington investigative reporter, says that the kind of work Woodward and other Washington reporters now do is all too common: "There's only a handful of reporters like Hersh who are still doing investigative reporting. There's a new crop of journalists who are what I call scandal reporters, or scandal beat reporters. They only pretend to do investigative reporting. The scandal reporters do their work by receiving leaks from partisans, congressional committees, independent counsels, public interest groups and from political operatives or 'oppo' folks. They get a leak from Ken Starr's office or Sidney Blumenthal and call that investigative journalism. It's kind of like yogurt -- predigested for you. The work they pass off as their own is done by someone else. The problem with this pretend investigative reporting is that the reporters are oftentimes serving someone's political, ideological or personal agenda."

Hersh is not one to suffer fools gladly. His temper is legendary, and he's been accused of bullying sources. Though he denies this -- "If you piss off your sources, you're not gonna get anything out of them," he says -- it's clear that he is capable of working himself into a state of high dudgeon. One of Hersh's sources told Time magazine that when he wouldn't say what Hersh wanted to hear, Hersh yelled "Bullshit! Bullshit!" at him. There's no question that he's volatile. But Waas, for one, questions whether at least some of Hersh's reputation in that regard is more folklore than reality. "It's more shtick," Waas says. "He knows he has this reputation so he makes fun of himself."

Waas recalls a series of phone messages he received from Hersh the day Hersh broke a major story in the New Yorker: "'It's 8:30 in the morning. Why aren't you home like every other normal person in the world having your milk and Cheerios?'" Then another message: "'So what the hell are you doing that you aren't home to read my story? What do you have going on in your life that's more important than this? What do you even have going on in your life at all?' It's shtick," Waas says. "It's self-deprecation. And it's funny as hell."

One can imagine that at the genteel New York Times Hersh was something of a bull in the china shop, and indeed in 1979 he resigned. All the better to work on his next book, "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," which hit the shelves with a 700-page whomp in 1983. The book is a feast for Kissinger haters, revealing the Machiavellian official to be capable of practically any nefarious deed in order to stay cozied up with Nixon and dominate U.S. foreign policy. Hersh opens the book with a humdinger -- that during the 1968 race between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, Kissinger was double dealing, giving information he had collected from President Johnson on secret Vietnam peace talks in Paris to Nixon. At the same time, to curry favor with Humphrey, Kissinger offered him Nelson Rockefeller's files on Nixon.

After Nixon was elected he hired Kissinger, and the two became locked in a pathological embrace of mutual distrust, plotting end runs on various cabinet members in order to create a kind of White House monarchy. Along the way there were betrayals, wiretaps and perverse orders to bomb countries with which we were not at war. Thousands died needlessly, and thousands of others came to know Kissinger as a war criminal.

"The Price of Power" was a bestseller, and added a National Book Critics Circle award to Hersh's belt, but it remains a bit of a slog and got some justified criticism for its indiscriminate shoveling-on of factoids. Not to mention that Kissinger may have had the last laugh. The book "didn't make any difference in the press's perception of him," Hersh said. "I can barely get through a week of 'Nightline' without seeing him on some panel." On the other hand, "When the rest of us can't sleep we count sheep, and this guy has to count burned and maimed Cambodian and Vietnamese babies until the end of his life." Not something you can picture Woodward saying, eh?

Kissinger wasn't a player in Hersh's next book -- "The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It" (1986) -- but his Cold War ethos is all over it. In the early morning of Sept. 1, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean Airliner that, en route from Anchorage to Seoul, strayed far into Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers, including 25 Americans, died in what became one of the worst flare-ups in the history of the Cold War. The Russians claimed KAL OO7 was really on a spy mission, and the Reagan administration countered that the Soviets destroyed the plane even though they knew full well it was a civilian craft. Because the plane's black box cockpit recorder was never recovered, the truth can't be completely known, but Hersh -- in a virtuoso exercise in penetrating the notoriously hush-hush U.S. intelligence community -- showed that the incident was nothing more than a trivial accident compounded by a horrible one. The plane strayed off course, and the Soviets ineptly assumed, without verifying, that it was spying and shot it down. Then when they quickly realized their mistake, they never fessed up, and the Reagan administration -- which well knew of the Soviet error -- also clammed up. Both sides wanted to score Cold War points, and Kissinger no doubt would have approved.

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