"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

The Times is essentially a joint dynasty of the Sulzberger and Ochs families. The current publisher is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. In a chapter titled "Meet the Family," Hess dismisses the dynasty as consisting of incompetent, high society wastrels with a penchant for drugs and booze, whose commitment to progressive values was verbal at best. After Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to congress, voted against going to war in 1917, The Times editorialized that this was "final proof of feminine incapacity for straight thinking." When black soldiers returned from the war and demanded equal rights, the violence directed against them prompted The Times to wax nostalgic for the prewar days when most blacks "admitted the superiority of the white race and troubles between the two races were unheard of."

In 1963 Hess went to work at the Paris bureau of The New York Times, where on good days, he felt like he "had the best job in the world." Although his superiors assigned Hess to what amounted to puff pieces, like a carnival in the Pyrenees to attract wives for its unmarried men, there was always more than a bit of that John Reed in him that uncovered deeper social meanings. In this instance, Hess honed in on the true problem, which is that young women had fled to the lowlands to escape economic hardship. One white-haired mother of seven told him that "My faith, life must be better elsewhere."

Eventually Hess was drawn into covering the Vietnam War, but with the expected clashes with management over what and how to report. When he filed an article about the massacre of 300 villagers in Quang-nai Province in 1969, he was disconcerted to discover it was carried as a sidebar to another article and not placed on the front page where it belonged.

Subsequently, he learned why the foreign desk had decided to bury the article. They thought that "the absence of substantiation and the recent spate of similar allegations from many sources all pointed to extreme caution in handling a story with the emotional impact of this one." In Hess's view, this reflected a "crippling malady of the Times: its allergy toward sources that challenge the establishment's truths." Clearly, not much has changed since 1969, especially in light of Judith Miller's dispatches from Iraq.

at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The scepticism about arms and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamoured with military might.

The ensuing affair had, and continues to have, a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue.