Hersh, Seymour

▪ 2005

      In 2004 the world was as stunned by the torture of Iraqi inmates by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison as it had been by the massacre of the villagers of My Lai by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. Both horrifying stories were broken by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who for some 35 years had exposed misconduct at the loftiest reaches of the U.S. government and in the darkest corners of U.S. involvement abroad.

      Seymour Myron Hersh was born in Chicago on April 8, 1937. He was the son of Polish and Lithuanian immigrants whose deep belief in American democracy had long informed his idealistic muckraking. After graduating from the University of Chicago (1958) and dropping out of law school, he landed at the City News Bureau of Chicago. Following military service, Hersh cofounded a suburban newspaper, then worked for United Press International and the Associated Press before a brief stint in 1967 as press secretary for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. In 1969, acting on a tip, Hersh interviewed U.S. Army Lieut. William L. Calley, who recounted the killing in March 1968 of hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians by troops under his command. Hersh's syndicated account helped end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and provided the basis for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book My Lai 4 (1970).

      Joining the staff of the New York Times in 1972, Hersh did groundbreaking reporting on the Watergate Scandal, though most of the credit for that story went to Carl Bernstein and Hersh's longtime rival Bob Woodward (q.v. (Woodward, Bob )). Nonetheless, Hersh's investigation led him to write The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), a damning portrait of Henry Kissinger that won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among the subjects of Hersh's seven other books were the Soviet downing of a Korean Air Lines plane, Israel's acquisition of nuclear arms, and a much-criticized behind-the-scenes portrayal of Pres. John F. Kennedy.

      In 1993 Hersh became a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, for which he wrote a series of articles on the war on terrorism and U.S. involvement in Iraq. Those articles—later collected in Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004)—culminated in Hersh's earthshaking exposé of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, which he traced beyond the soldiers involved to policy formulated at the highest levels of the administration of Pres. George W. Bush. Hersh characterized Bush's prosecution of the war as the product of misguided neoconservative idealism. Having built his career on earning the trust of sources (usually unnamed) in the government, the military, and the intelligence community, Hersh described his mission as holding public officials “to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty.”

Jeff Wallenfeldt

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