Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh (born April 8, 1937, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American journalist whose reporting generally focused on the U.S. government and its involvement abroad. He was especially noted for his investigations into the My Lai Massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Hersh 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 and 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 villagers in the hamlet of My Lai by U.S. troops under his command. Hersh’s syndicated account helped end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1954–75) 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. 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 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.

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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 the U.S.-led war in Iraq (2003–11). Those articles—later collected in Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004)—culminated in Hersh’s earthshaking exposé of inmate abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which he traced beyond the U.S. 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.”

In May 2015 Hersh made headlines again with his allegations— published in an article in the London Review of Books that cited Pakistani and anonymous U.S. sources—that officials of the U.S. and Pakistani governments, including U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, had lied regarding details of the 2011 raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda, was killed. Among the allegations made by Hersh was that the Pakistani intelligence service had been holding bin Laden prisoner since 2006 and that Pakistani officials knew about the raid before it happened. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Obama administration denied the allegations.

In the course of his career, Hersh was the recipient of numerous honours. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize, he also garnered five George Polk Awards. The memoir Reporter was published in 2018.