Amy Davidson: A Beer with the General

[Amy Davidson is a senior editor at The New Yorker.]

It’s always good to read the footnotes, especially when they’re written by Seymour Hersh. This week, President Obama asked the Senate to restore the rank of General John Lavelle, who had been demoted and forced to resign in 1972 for supposedly ordering the unauthorized bombing of targets in North Vietnam—bombings that violated the rules of engagement at the time. (A sergeant had written to his senator about being told to falsify reports about the raids, setting an investigation in motion.) But documents located by Aloysius and Patrick Casey, who published an article on their findings in 2007 in Air Force magazine, show that Lavelle did have authorization—from President Richard Nixon. Hersh was on this story thirty-five years ago; as Jeff Schogol, a reporter for Stars and Stripes, noted in a story this week, back in 1972, “Seymour Hersh, then a reporter for the New York Times, reported that Lavelle had been given implicit permission to carry out the raids.” One of Hersh’s sources for that assertion was Lavelle himself, as Hersh detailed in this passage in an engrossing, six-hundred-word footnote in “The Price of Power,” his book on Kissinger (the full footnote, which is well worth reading, is after the jump*):

[T]he reasons for Lavelle’s abrupt disappearance were kept secret. On April 7, reporters at the Pentagon were handed a cryptic memorandum noting [General John] Vogt’s appointment and adding that Lavelle was retiring “for personal and health reasons.” Fear of scandal diminished over the next few weeks, as Lavelle chose to retire quietly and the press and Congress were absorbed by Hanoi’s offensive and the pending Moscow summit. In early May, someone inside the government began to talk to Representative Otis G. Pike, a New York Democrat who was a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. In early June, Pike privately urged me to follow up on the Lavelle story. I found the general on a golf course in a Washington suburb. He told of being relieved for the unauthorized bombing and claimed that higher authorities were aware of his bombing and did nothing to stop it.

A couple of things jump out there. First of all: “on a golf course”? I asked Hersh about his experience reporting the story....