The cover image on Seymour Hersh’s memoir, Reporter, could hardly be improved. Taken in 1974 in the newsroom of The New York Times, it shows Hersh with his left elbow propped on a typewriter with blank paper in the roller, sleeves rolled up and patterned tie loose around an unironed collar. He is leaning confidentially in to the receiver of what must be a rotary dial phone, listening intently, gazing into the middle distance. It could be a still from All the President’s Men or The Parallax View, although Hersh is in black and white, as befits a giant of print, bane of governments and scourge of spies from Watergate to Abu Ghraib.