4A • September 7, 2018 | Cannon Beach Gazette | cannonbeachgazette.com
Views from the Rock
For Seymour Hersh, a long
career is the best revenge
L
ongtime friend Abbott “Kit” Combes, a former
editor at the New York Times Magazine,
bequeathed me his collection of journalism,
memoirs, biographies and autobiographies: Harrison
Salisbury, James Reston, Katharine Graham, among
many. Political journalist Jack W. Germond penned
perhaps the most colorful title, “Fat Man in a Window
Seat,” an on-the-road recounting of politics in
backcountry.
Whether a big newspaper superstar or a small-town
journalist, reporting is reporting, with the same toolkit
at the Wash-
ington Post or
the Cannon
CANNON SHOTS
Beach Ga-
R.J.
MARX
zette. Only the
megaphone is
different —
and even that
is changing with the widening reach of regional papers
online.
I thought of Combes — who died in 2012 — after
reading Seymour M. Hersh’s “Reporter,” a new book
from Knopf.
Hersh had what the great early 20th-century editor
William Allen White called “the vitriolic pen,” not to
be wielded lightly.
Publishers loved and hated Hersh’s high-stakes,
high-profile exposés that demanded rigorous
fact-checking and occasionally legal counsel. Readers
found his revelations tantalizing but unsettling.
But he managed his decades-long career as a great
voice for independent, effective journalism defying
party labels and equally respected on both sides of
the aisle. He was the first U.S. journalist inside Hanoi
during the Vietnam war.
Hersh blew the lid off Nixon’s secret bombing of
Cambodia and shocked readers with revelations of CIA
assassination attempts throughout the world.
He detailed a massive, illegal domestic intelligence
operation against the antiwar movement, leading to the
formation of the Church Committee in 1976 to examine
abuses by intelligence agencies.
Hersh traced the CIA’s supply of Saddam Hus-
sein’s chemical weapons 1980s war against Iran and
debunked official versions of Iraq’s chemical weapons
arsenal in 2002.
‘Smitten’
As a teenager in Chicago’s south suburbs, Hersh was
about to enter his father’s dry cleaning business when
a community college professor recognized Hersh’s
writing talents and paved the way to Hersh’s entry to
the University of Chicago.
“I could always write — say exactly what I wanted
to say in one take — and that ability got me through
college with better grades than I deserved,” Hersh
recalls in “Reporter.”
That skill would serve him well in the world of
journalism.
Working for Chicago’s City News Service, tutored
by cynical editors and reporters wise to “the Chicago
way,” a beat where the cops were on the take and the
mob ran the city.
According to Hersh, the City News reporters, with
rare exception, ignored the corruption and in return
were given access to crime scenes and allowed to park
anywhere they wished as long as they displayed a press
card on the dashboard.
The young reporter “was smitten” with his profes-
sion.
Hersh learned journalistic rules that would be rules
that we should all live by: “If your mother says she
loves you, check it out. The guys on the streets who did
not get their facts straight or were consistently being
out-reported did not last long.”
The best way to tell a story, no matter how signifi-
cant or complicated, “was to get the hell out of the way
and write it,” said the man who broke details of Lt. Wil-
EVE MARX
Lucy back from a walk on the beach. Plus sand.
Sweeping up sand
L
‘I LEARNED EARLY IN
MY CAREER THAT
THE WAY TO GET
SOMEONE TO
OPEN UP WAS TO
KNOW WHAT I
WAS TALKING
ABOUT AND ASK
QUESTIONS THAT
SHOWED IT.’
Seymour Hersh
liam Calley Jr.’s shooting of 109 Vietnamese civilians
in 1969. Twenty-six American soldiers were charged
with criminal offenses in the aftermath, but only Calley
Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted.
The piece “made a lot of people irrational,” Hersh
reflects. The story was to be among his first to shine a
light on the government’s costly military secret opera-
tions, a path from Vietnam to Cambodia, Panama and
the Middle East.
His early experience as a reporter in Chicago “kept
me from falling into a funk when my work was being
savaged, as it occasionally was,” he writes. “I would
survive any criticism of a story I knew to be true.”
‘Doing his thing’
Hersh repeatedly turned down offers to take an
editorial desk job or to settle in at one place for too
long. But he was to maintain the respect of his peers and
the grudging admiration of government officials and
journalistic peers.
Again and again, it was Hersh’s stories — and his
publishers’ willingness to run them — that deserve
praise in a world too eager to break for the next com-
mercial or to kowtow to whoever holds office.
Hersh’s advice to reporters is fundamental, and
serves well newsrooms large and small:
“I learned early in my career that the way to get
someone to open up was to know what I was talking
about and ask questions that showed it.”
Note to Kit Combes: I’m adding this to the book-
shelf.
ately, I’ve been doing a lot of sweeping. Mostly I’ve been
sweeping sand. As summer winds to its inevitable end,
I’ve been trying to spend as s much time as possible on
the beach; walking it; planting my bare feet in the sand; staring
into the mysteries of the water.
When you live in a beach resort town, you either avoid the
beach all summer (bummer), or learn to tune out or accept the
hordes of summer people who converge on your sacred spaces
pretty much nonstop
June through August.
One of the blessings
VIEW FROM
when the crowds finally
THE PORCH
thin out is having the
beach to your self again, EVE MARX
or at least you, and a
handful of dog owners.
There’s been sand in my moccasins and sand in my trouser
cuffs nearly every day now as I arrange and rearrange my sched-
ule to accommodate more beach walking. It seems no matter
how diligent I am about getting sand off my person before enter-
ing the house, I fail and fail again in this endeavor. Sand blows
across the wooden floors. It collects in the bathroom corners. I
find it on the counter tops and in between the chair cushions. One
night I awoke in the early dawn hours to discover a fine scrim of
sand strewn across the bottom sheet, delivered no doubt off the
feet of Lucy, our miniature pinscher, who is a bed burrower.
Sand, I find, is best removed from the house by broom
sweeping. Sand is not really good for the vacuum cleaner,
particularly if have a nice one. We’ve had the same Miele
machine for quite a few years. I find twice as effective than the
central vac that came with our house when we bought it. Beach
sand, no matter how clean, is a bit stinky; once it gets inside
your vacuum cleaner hose, it causes a low tide kind of reeking.
I took the Miele in to Astoria Vacuums on Marine Drive in
Astoria for a cleaning and tune up, which resulted in a few days
of me having no choice but to sweep the sand up.
There’s something mesmerizing about the act of sweeping.
Unless you’ve taken up farming in Nehalem, sweeping might be
the closest thing many of us will ever experience to manual labor.
On the other hand, If you work in a shop or a restaurant in Cannon
Beach in the summer, it must seem there is no end to the sweeping.
Many people have other people to do the sweeping; the
days of people cleaning their own houses seems a relic of the
past. And yet I remember the lazy mornings of my own child-
hood summers at the shore, my assigned chore to sweep down
the stairs. Day after day I recall small mountains of sand piling
up, blowing in the wind.
If you’re looking for an accessible mystical experience, try
sweeping sand. There is something magical about every grain.
And now, my daily sweeping done, I will reward myself
with a slice of crystallized ginger, which, come to think of it, is
sort of like eating candy lightly dusted with sand.
LETTERS
Vote yes on ballot
measure 105
In my third-of-a-century in law
enforcement — which includes al-
most 14 years as sheriff of Clatsop
County — the most important thing
I’ve learned is this: Respect for the
law, among citizens and noncitizens
alike, is indispensable to a free so-
ciety.
That’s why I urge Oregonians, in
November, to vote “yes” on Measure
105 and repeal the state’s, illegal im-
migrant sanctuary statute.
The statute undermines respect
for law in significant ways. It tells
illegal immigrants that Oregon con-
siders immigration-law violations so
inconsequential as to be unworthy of
police and sheriffs’ attention. In do-
ing so, it legitimizes those violations
and encourages more. As well, the
statute invite the contempt of U.S.
citizens and legal residents, whom
Oregon expects to, abide by all laws.
Certainly, immigration-law viola-
tions are federal offenses. But they
are precursors to other crimes illegal
immigrants routinely commit in their
efforts to conceal their illegal pres-
Publisher
Kari Borgen
Editor
R.J. Marx
Circulation
Manager
Jeremy Feldman
Production
Manager
John D. Bruijn
ence — crimes, like identity theft,
that harm everyday Oregonians at
the local level.
Such crimes are well with in local
police and sheriffs’ purview. But Or-
egon’s “hands off” sanctuary statute
works to keep law enforcement from
pursuing many of the people who
commit them for the very reason
that they are here illegally, and inno-
cent Oregonians pay the price.
Most often the common inter-
section with illegal immigration and
alleged criminals and alleged crimi-
nals is your County Jail.
This is an additional strain on the
system which should not be happen-
ing in the first place. To have the
ability to work with our federal part-
ners would alleviate the inconsisten-
cy and stop the erosion and ineffec-
tiveness of these sanctuary laws.
Mollie Tibbetts’ recent murder
has refocused attention on the vio-
lence and heartbreak illegal-immi-
grant criminals can visit on Amer-
icans and their families. Tibbetts’
killer “was here because our gov-
ernment neglected its responsibility
to keep him out,” writes Agnes Gib-
boney (whose son, Ronald Da Silva,
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Brenna Visser
Contributing
writers
Rebecca Herren
Katherine Lacaze
Eve Marx
Nancy McCarthy
also was murdered by an illegal im-
migrant). Oregon’s sanctuary statute
not only compounds that neglect, but
issues a de facto invitation to illegal
immigrants to settle in our state.
Another pro-sanctuary argument
is that the statute’s repeal would
make illegal immigrants afraid to
report crimes. Oregon Sen. Michael
Dembrow, for instance, has argued
the statute is needed so if illegal im-
migrants “have to call the police …
they don’t have to worry about state
law enforcement turning them in” to
U.S. authorities for deportation.
More nonsense. Can any sanctu-
ary supporter cite a single instance of
an illegal immigrant being deported
for reporting a crime? To the very
best of my knowledge the answer is
no and always has been. When people
step forward to volunteer information
about criminal activity, law enforce-
ment officers are not going to look a
gift horse in the mouth by inquiring
into their immigration status. Cer-
tainly no prosecutor I’ve ever known
would want to deport witnesses who
could help them obtain convictions.
More, when they provide infor-
mation that helps prosecute crimi-
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nals, illegal immigrants can qualify
for federally-issued nonimmigrant
visas (the “S,” “T,” “U” and “VAWA”
visas) or deferred action or parole.
Illegal immigrants, without dis-
closing their identities, can easily
report crimes via law-enforcement
agencies’ anonymous telephone and
online “tip lines.”
Last and most nonsensical and
insulting of all to the men and wom-
en who have sworn to preserve the
peace — is the assertion that sanctu-
ary repeal would unleash a wave of
profiling against Hispanics.
First, all across the State, law-en-
forcement officers undergo formal
rigorous training which includes
antiprofiling training. More impor-
tantly however is this: People who
choose to devote their lives to law
enforcement are people of uncom-
mon integrity. From their first day on
the job, when they raise their right
hands and take the oath, they commit
themselves to treat everyone equally
under the law. This commitment is at
the core of their professional being
and informs all their professional ac-
tions. I can honestly say that I have
never witnessed an instance of racial
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profiling from any of my deputies.
They serve and protect all who need
assistance regardless of race, origin
or creed. Whatever the outcome of
Ballot Measure 105, they, and law
enforcement officers everywhere
throughout Oregon ,will continue to
do their jobs with integrity and don’t
believe for a minute they won’t.
In November, please join me in
voting “yes” on Ballot Measure 105
to repeal the illegal-immigrant sanc-
tuary law.
Tom Bergin
Clatsop County Sheriff
Idea to address
parking problem
We have only owned a home here
for a little over two years so don’t know
all the ideas presented to help alleviate
the parking problem. Would ask why
not use the old school area, paved and
grass? Seems ideal for various groups
such as scouts, churches, Elks and oth-
er fundraising groups to alternate times
to collect fees and direct traffic. We
certainly haven’t seen any other uses?
Marvin Parnell
Portland
THE NATIONAL AWARD-WINNING