The Reporter’s Reporter, The Chef’s Chef, and America’s Favorite Neighbor
This week —an in-depth interview with the reporter’s reporter, Seymour Hersh—listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Mary McGrath: It feels like a bit of a nostalgia tour — Studs Terkel last week and Sy Hersh this week: two old white dudes from Chicago whose art and craft seem to be so obviously missing now. Chris’ conversation with Sy (they’re old friends from the Washington bureau of the New York Times in the 70's), is a rambling but always entertaining and compelling BS session. I plowed through Sy’s book, and I’m in awe of his career and the way he works. I hope it’s not just for journo nerds of a certain vintage, but a model of a certain kind of reporter anyone can appreciate. As Chris said: “He’s ever on the move, leaning into the wind — gossiping, bluffing, wheedling his way through the bazaar of information: dropping names, grabbing documents, phone numbers and anything else he can into a big ball of notes and leads.” This is how he broke the My Lai story, and then Abu Ghraib, CIA assassinations and domestic wire tapping, and so many more. And you gotta take him straight when he says the issue today — still — is government secrecy.
There’s lots of great nuggets in the hour: a play-by-play on how Hersh got the My Lai story; his take on covering Trump, and the story of a late boozy night with Woodward, Bernstein and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone about a scheme to pay for an expose about the Kennedy assassination.
Listen: The Music of My Lai
Zach Goldammer: I spent a lot of my time this week exploring the various musical experiments which were loosely inspired by Seymour Hersh’s reports on My Lai. Joshua Brummer’s Vietnam War Song Project is incredible resource in general, and his collection of My Lai songs is particularly fascinating. I personally became fascinated by this strange Freddie Hubbard record, Sing Me a Song of Songmy, which we ended up using as the soundtrack for our program this week.
Most of the other recordings in the My Lai collection are relatively obscure country and western tunes which were written in defense of Lt. Calley—reflecting the popular opinion of the time. While we tend to remember the anti-imperialist hippie anthems from this period, songs like Lucky Clark’s “My Lai” tell a different story
If we can’t stand by our fighting men, what is our
Country coming to? Now the service took some boys
And turned them into men…now war is hell, where if
You want to live the enemy must die, like the commie
Infested village, the town they call My Lai where one
Day a young lieutenant and company of fine young men
Were giving orders that would bring dishonor and prison
In the end, now these were good Americans and never
Thought to wonder why, they were sent to fight the
Enemy in a village called My Lai, if they had not done
What they were told, they would have faced court-martial…
Dishonor if you don’t listen, dishonor if you do
There is no way to win, either way to loose”
Brummer, who put together the Vietnam War Songs Project while pursuing his history PhD from University College London, wrote to us on twitter about how songs sympathizing with Calley gradually faded out of fashion in the post-war period.
Songs like Ivan Lee’s 1972 song “Cry of My Lai”—a traditional country song which ultimately condemns Calley—makes for an interesting contrast with the rest of the wartime collection
There in a ditch in My Lai, a small baby cried
Any man that would do this is bound to be
Possessed by the devil himself in disguise
They may set him free, but he’ll still hear that small baby cry
Hey lieutenant, you’re not god, don’t you know
You’re just a lieutenant, and the devil possesses your soul
Did the frightened child remind you of a smiling boy
Who plays war at home and the gun is only a toy
Did anyone pray to god that day, was he old enough to ask why
Hey lieutenant, can you still hear the small babies cry…
Has god grown weak and the devil grown strong in a man…
Hey lieutenant, will death set you free from My Lai
Maybe the most interesting recording in the collection is the 1970 album Massacre at My Lai, which set the words of one of Hersh’s contemporary— the great newspaper columnist Pete Hamill—to music. Hamill’s My Lai columns were read aloud by the African American DJ William “Rosko” Mercer and accompanied by the legendary Blue Note bassist Ron Carter and jazz flute-player James Spaulding. The great jazz critic Nat Hentoff also wrote liner notes for the project, but it’s ultimately Hamill’s original words which stand out still:
All of us must sleep tonight in the knowledge
That we share in mass murder, can we look
Deep into the photographs by Ronald L. Haeberle
And deny what they tell us? That girl…she is
About 10 and terrified, hiding behind a shrunken
Woman, in a moment she is about to be liberated
Forever by the guns of Americans, we don’t
Know her name…we will never know
RIP: Anthony Bourdain
Early in his career Anthony Bourdain came to Boston and appeared on “The Connection.” Thanks for remembering this, Michel Paradis!
Here’s Chris’ remembrance:
Anthony Bourdain introduced us almost 20 years ago to Systeme D, the crisis procedures in the best kitchens that get the chef out of a jam. I was eager to interview him not least because all three of my daughters were circling around the food biz — one to be a celebrated chef herself. What the veteran Bourdain made clear was that the great restaurant kitchens depend not so much on Escoffier schooling as on the wily immigrant dishwasher who can disappear into the night on orders and come back in an hour with a pound of foie gras when only a miracle will do.
It’s a comfort of sorts today to recall the introduction I cobbled together on the radio in June, 2000:
“As Anthony Bourdain writes, restaurant kitchens are filled with hard-working psychopaths, misfits and other crazies, the kind of people you’d want to have at your side in a war.
To people who love the business of cooking it feels like a warm bath. To an outsider watching meal preparation at Les Halles restaurant on Park Avenue South in New York where Anthony Bourdain is the chef, it could look like triage. The scene is a quick-moving mass of pans, slippery hands holding sharp knives, hot plates and slips of paper; six burners going at once, dishwashers up to their ears in serving plates and utensils. The discourse is not the stuff of family radio, but it may have something to do with feeding a hungry public. Connection listeners, who knows this world of talented throat-cutters and fire-starters, hooligans? Did you ever work in the restaurant business and come to miss the night life, the swearing, the immigrant culture so much that you’re ready again to quit your desk job?”
God rest dear Anthony Bourdain. He’s wonderful listening still.
Listen here for The Connection show with Bourdain. It is a little eerie as some have pointed out.
Listen: Two Years With Franz
MM: Our friend, the radio magician Jay Allison has done it again. This is an amazing, gorgeous work of radio art.
Intro from Jay Allison: What if you have a story that’s really complicated, and you have 546 tapes to listen to, and you get obsessed and don’t know where to stop? All of those things were true for “Two Years with Franz.” The “Two Years” refers to two years of tapes recorded by the Pulitzer-winning poet Franz Wright before his death, and then, the two years Bianca Giaever spent listening to them. Over the past few months, this timeline ended here in Woods Hole with Bianca and me huddled in a studio figuring out what to do. This is a story of art and love, of madness and beauty, of youth and age and death. We hope you listen and that you feel it was worth the time and effort.
Chris also interviewed Franz in 2009.
Listen: Charm City
The Daily continues to break new podcast ground. The five part series about the lif.e and death of a Baltimore teenager who was fatally shot by a police officer a year after the killing of Freddie Gray is a must listen.
Watch: Won’t You Be My Neighbor
ZG: It’s by no means a perfect film, but the new Mr. Rogers doc is definitely worth a watch. Fred Rogers tried to do for children’s programming what Studs Terkel’s did for talk radio—bring the “feeling tone” back into mass media and eliminate all forms of condescension. Unlike soft socialist Studs, Rogers was a mild mannered conservative. At times, it feels like the film tiptoes around the Rogers’ personal politics in order to make it palatable for a liberal audience. The movies also fails to really go deep into the mechanics of the magic—how did Mr. Rogers manage to sustain that character and that world for so many years? Still, the movie does manage to strike the feeling tone again and again and again. Even if you weren’t a fan of the show growing up (I’m not sure that I was), try to watch the film now and see if you don’t shed at least a couple tears.
Etc
MM: Before we forget, we were serious about forest bathing. It’s scientifically proven to improve your health. And in case you’ve been wondering who Konstantin Kilimnik is (latest target of Robert Mueller), here’s a profile by Franklin Foer of the fascinating guy who became the mini Manafort. We’re still our program with David Graeber bullsh*t jobs next week. If you’ve ever had a bs gig like the ones Graeber describes, you can leave us a voicemail at (617) 651–2421. And if you know anyone looking for the least BS job in the world, we’re hiring. Email us if this job floats your boat.
Til next week, neighbors
