Seymour Hersh, you know, the greatest journalist of, you know, his generation

Seymour Hersh, speaking at the University of Illinois conference, "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" on May 10, 2005.

Not just me. I mean, they can ignore me, but the networks, any time there's a good story, not a blip. And what does that mean? That means, you know, the body bags aren’t going to stop [Bush]. This is a guy who is convinced for whatever reason that even 1,000 or another -- you know, the body count goes on. It just goes on. Of course, nobody counts the Iraqis. I love the stories -- every time you talk about Vietnam, it's always -- the Vietnam war is summarized this way, “58,000 American killed and anywhere between 2 and 3 million Vietnamese.” There is a distinction between 2 and 3 million, but that’s okay. I used to joke all the time -- racism in America, you know, is so endemic and so hard to see, but I was always -- I used to joke that I was very proud of Bill Clinton because he was the first president in Kosovo, the former Yugoslavia, since World War II to actually bomb white people. It usually -- it wasn't worth the trouble. It's like going after Israel. Forget it. The racism is just -- anyway -- so, you’ve got a guy that thinks he's doing the right thing. I think he thinks in five years or ten years or 20 years he will be like Lincoln. I think, you know, I don't know. He will be judged as one of the great presidents. You know, you have to understand something about presidents. They -- war -- Jack Kennedy once -- is it David Donald Duncan? Yeah, the Lincoln scholar, he once said to Duncan, the Harvard historian, he once said to him that no President can be great without a war. This is early in the Vietnam War. This is in 1962. Obviously, he died a year later. But I think presidents like Bush understand about how important war is, you know, even a vague reading of history, and Bush is far from intellectual -- you know.

[Bush] is strange in one way. You know, Wolfowitz, who if nothing, if not smart, would understand this, but Bush is truly a Trotskyite, a believer in permanent revolution.

Painful reading isn't it?

It is important to bear in mind that when speaking, Hersh is not bound by the truth:

There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001.

Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.”