the kicker

Better late than never

A quote from Seymour Hersh, portending interesting stories on the Bush administration, even after inauguration day: “You cannot believe how many people have told me to...
October 22, 2008

A quote from Seymour Hersh, portending interesting stories on the Bush administration, even after inauguration day:

“You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January … ‘You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.’ So that is what I’ll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.”

That is, if New Yorker editor David Remnick deigns to run them:

“He says no to a lot of stuff – stuff I think the editor would die for! Admittedly, it is not the Seymour Hersh weekly. But sometimes he’ll say: ‘We are not going to publish this kind of stuff ‘cos it’s frigging crazy.'”

Both quotes–and a glance of what a Hersh draft looks like after facing Remnick’s pen–are in a breezy Observer profile from this past Sunday.

(And if you get on a Hersh kick, Scott Sherman’s more comprehensive CJR profile from 2003, before Hersh landed some of his greatest Bush era scoops, is still worth a look.)

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Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.