Substacks

A REPORTER’S LAWYER Seymour Hersh

Published

7 months ago

December 25, 2023

Michael Nussbaum in 1986. / Photo by Gloria Weissberg.

With the world in such disarray, there is a lot of reason now, during the holiday season, to think of family and good friends, here and gone. This is a remembrance I wrote for the New Yorker in 2011 when someone important to me and my family passed, way too young.

My lawyer died last week. His name was Michael Nussbaum, of Washington, D.C. He was seventy-six years old and Stage 4 lung cancer got him after a brave two-year struggle. He was survived by his wife, Gloria Weissberg, and her two daughters. His obituary in the Washington Post told of his high-profile client list, about whom he rarely spoke, and his equally high-profile corporate clients, such as Lloyds of London.

What’s harder to put into words is the relationship of a trusted lawyer and an investigative reporter. Michael was born in Berlin and came to America as a three-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, just before the Second World War. His sense of time and place remained impeccable. He spent his career resolving disputes and, if that were impossible, making them go away. I spent my career creating disputes and doing all I could to keep them alive. Michael’s favorite word was vanilla, by which he meant: Let’s not rush to judgment about who did what to whom, and whether it was an outrage; slow down. That wasn’t the same as doing nothing: an injustice, if real, had to be rectified, but carefully.

Lots of words, but what do they mean in practice? In 1969, I was a freelance writer, one of many in Washington, and our status then was as tenuous as it is now. I had done my reporting apprenticeship with United Press International, covering the state legislature in Pierre, South Dakota, and then moved to the Associated Press. An assignment at the Pentagon in 1965 turned me into a dead-serious opponent of the Vietnam War. I had come to know many veterans of that war, who were serving at all levels of the military chain of command, and had gotten the message: this war cannot be won, and is destroying two societies—theirs and ours. I began to run into criticism from the senior managers at the AP over my belief that the officials speaking for the government were lying about Vietnam. I left the AP in 1967 and joined the Presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. I wrote speeches and served as press secretary; I admired the Senator’s integrity, and his willingness to call the war immoral, but also learned to hate politics, with its constant compromise and catfights. I moved back to the newspaper world that spring, only to find that I was essentially unemployable at places like the Washington Post and the Times: my work for McCarthy, I was told, showed that I was not objective. It was back to freelancing.

Michael, whom I had initially befriended in 1958, when we were classmates at the University of Chicago law school (I bailed out; he was the class whiz), had been defending conscientious objectors and others opposed to the war in Vietnam. He became an expert on how to legally avoid the draft, and even wrote a popular handbook on the subject. At the same time, he had become a sought-after expert in complex commercial litigation and was enjoying the profit, and the fun, of success in Washington.

In early October of 1969, I picked up the first hint of what would become known as the My Lai massacre. I managed to work my way deep into the story, and, driving around a military base, found and interviewed Army Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., whose name would become synonymous with the murders. The day before, I had interviewed Calley’s attorney, a retired Army judge named George Latimer, who practiced law in Salt Lake City. I had also seen an Army charge sheet accusing Calley of the premeditated murder of “109 Oriental human beings” in South Vietnam. (The actual number of victims turned out to be more than five hundred.) None of that mattered to the various editors to whom I brought the story—including an editor of Life magazine who, I later learned, had been told about My Lai months earlier by an American G.I. No one wanted to be the first to publish.

It was more than a little distressing; it was frightening. I had empirical evidence of a major American crime in Vietnam, plus an interview with the guy accused of leading it, and the mainstream media apparently wanted nothing to do with it. I had been persuaded by David Obst, a young neighbor and pick-up basketball friend who ran a small anti-war news agency, known as the Dispatch News Service, that the only way to get the story out, intact, was through his syndicate, offering it to editors as a wire story for a hundred dollars. It was a huge risk. Few people needed a lawyer more than I did at that moment, and so off to Michael I went.

He was then living in a small house in Georgetown and, luckily for me, answered my stricken telephone call one night in early November. I’m not sure how late it was; I arrived just as Michael was shooing a woman out of the door. He listened carefully, as he always did, to my rushed and undoubtedly inchoate account. Yes, he said, on behalf of his law firm, he would be my lawyer and give the story a careful reading for libel, and yes, I could tell editors that he had done so, and he and his firm would stand behind me.

Michael was not new to the world of the First Amendment—his clients included, even then, Ralph Nader and a number of Washington Post journalists. And he did what good libel lawyers do—quizzed me about sources and urged a series of changes and additions that added to the integrity of the story. Michael’s tiny house suddenly became an oasis for me; there was no talk of fees or worries about the professional consequences for him or his firm. But something else emerged during our long meeting that night. I’m not sure how it came up, but it was obvious to Michael that Calley’s interview with me could be legally disastrous for him, in that it would likely contradict what he had told the Army. Michael’s advice was to go back to George Latimer, Calley’s lawyer, and tell him everything Calley had told me.

So I did. Latimer was distraught, and said—how right Michael was—that Calley’s comments to me conflicted with his prior sworn testimony in the military proceedings. (Calley had denied all, and concocted a story of a huge firefight with the North Vietnamese.) If I published the interview this way, Latimer told me, I possibly would be denying Calley his constitutional right to a fair trial. He offered a deal: if I would in some manner avoid saying outright that Calley’s comments were made directly to me—be ambiguous enough to leave open the possibility that I had heard them second hand—he would go over my story, line for line, and correct any factual mistakes he could. I did not have to check with Michael to accept the offer.

And so George Latimer and I spent a deal of time on the telephone. He corrected dates, phrasing, the spelling of the names of others involved, etc. He was exceedingly precise, to the point, as I learned years later from an academic’s Freedom of Information request, that military analysts had concluded after publication of the first of what would become five freelance articles on My Lai, that I clearly had access to the most secret of Army files.

Latimer had one more inducement. He told me I could tell editors and reporters to telephone him, and he would confirm that he had reviewed the article and that, to the extent of his knowledge, what it said about his client, Calley, was accurate. He lived up to his commitment, although he and Calley never talked to me again. That first fifteen-hundred-word story, which Obst sent by telex collect to fifty or so newspaper editors, triggered a new debate about the Vietnam war that would dominate front pages, and also reaffirmed a young reporter’s faith in his chosen profession.

Michael and I kept on talking for the next four decades. There would be libel cases, actual and threatened, and courtroom dramas in America and England. Michael and his colleagues handled them all, and either won them outright or settled them favorably. Michael’s rule was to say little or nothing in public about such victories—the real interest of the press, he told me repeatedly, would come when and if I lost. My line of work generated a lot of attacks that I would insist, to Michael, had to be answered. (Reporters are much more thin-skinned than those we report about.) Michael’s response was always the same: vanilla. But he would listen, like a good therapist, I guess, and nothing would happen.

We Americans like to make fun of lawyers and everyone has a lawyer joke or two, it seems. I don’t.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

11 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

22 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641