How investigative master Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre

By Richard ReadAfter six days crossing the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian railway, I stumbled from the chill of a winter evening into the warmth of The New York Times Moscow bureau. The fragrance of home cooking filled the upstairs office in a rundown building near the Kremlin and Red Square.Bill Keller – a star foreign correspondent who would go on to become the newspaper’s executive editor – sat at a broad desk that evening in 1988 as his colleagues’ young children careened around the cluttered office from an adjoining apartment. He kindly loaned me a desktop computer to file a freelance story that I had reported for The Times.As I typed, I overheard Keller chuckling about a reporting tactic that he had used that day. “I pulled a real ‘Sy Hersh,’” he told an editor on the phone. I didn’t catch the particulars, but I certainly knew the name Seymour Hersh.The legendary reporter is best known for breaking the story of My Lai, a massacre by U.S. soldiers that triggered global outrage...