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Hersh's response: Soldier on. And hope that once in a while you'll hit a motherlode that catches the public's imagination. Because one thing is certain: The journalistic glamour of Watergate sleuths Woodward and Bernstein's "All the President's Men" has long faded. The starry-eyed kids who once flooded journalism schools to learn how to root out corruption have been replaced by a crop of college grads who have concluded government is inhabited by Martians, so why bother? Better to go for the money. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty much out of the business, anyway, Bernstein writing biographies and Woodward authoring gossipy bestsellers, replete with made-up quotes, about government figures. Elsewhere, ownership of the media is being concentrated into fewer hands, which have been busy blurring the line between news and entertainment and squelching the venues for real journalism in favor of those for gossip and personality.

We live in a cynical time. Lucky for us, Hersh is too invested to turn away. "I think there are great stories to be written about this pretend government and this corporate world we now live in," he told the Progressive magazine a decade ago. Those are the stories he writes. For a recent instance, he wrote in the New Yorker that the government pretended to have evidence that the plant the United States bombed in Sudan in retaliation for supposed terrorist activity was something other than a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. It wasn't, and we knew it, but we killed people anyway.

Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one.

It's been an up-and-down career for Hersh, but he was lucky to have a huge up early on -- his exposé of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam. To refresh: In March of 1968, a division of American troops called Charley Company, led by Lieut. William L. Calley Jr., entered the village of Son My (called My Lai 4 on the soldiers' maps) and spent a few hours killing every man, woman and child -- all unarmed civilians -- in the vicinity, about 500 all told. Women were raped; babies were used as target practice. Hersh brought it all out in the open, and helped end the war as a result, because Americans realized that this incomprehensible conflict far away was making their boys act like Nazis.

Hersh, in 1969 a 32-year-old freelance writer in Washington, got onto the story after he received a tip that an officer was about to be court-martialed for the murder of civilians in Vietnam. From his sources in the Pentagon Hersh got a hint of what had happened, then he tracked down Calley, who was stockaded in Georgia. Calley spilled all and Hersh realized he had a career-maker on his hands. He wrote the story, but the magazines to whom he tried to peddle it turned him down. They didn't want to know about it. But luckily a friend who ran a small newspaper syndicate offered to run the piece. Thirty-six newspapers, including the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe and the London Times bought the exposé. Then TV picked it up, including "60 Minutes," and Hersh was in the saddle.

Others had written about random atrocities in Vietnam before Hersh -- most notably Jonathan Schell in the New Yorker -- but most reportage on the war focused on policy. Hersh was the first to demonstrate that military brass was ordering soldiers to kill noncombatants, and once he did, Vietnam War reporting was never the same. Hersh went on to track down other members of Charley Company and reported their stories for the syndicate, all of which he collected and amplified for his 1970 book "My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath." He received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, the prestigious George Polk Award and a host of other trophies. He was a big deal, and when he wrote a follow-up piece about the Army's prosecution of Calley, the New Yorker snapped it up. In 1972 he turned it into "Cover-Up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai," the lousy sales of which gave him a quick object lesson in the topsy-turvy world of book writing. Hersh blamed the bad showing on Vietnam fatigue. "Nobody wanted to hear about Vietnam in 1972," he told the Progressive. Apparently, in a mere two years the public's mood had gone from outrage to ennui. "We were losing the war," Hersh said. "Until Oliver Stone's movie 'Platoon' came out, I think Vietnam was a dead issue in America."

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