Seymour M Hersh Popular Books

Seymour M Hersh Biography & Facts

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2013, Hersh's reporting alleged that Syrian rebel forces, rather than the government, had attacked civilians with sarin gas at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War, and in 2015, he presented an alternative account of the U.S. special forces raid in Pakistan which killed Osama bin Laden, both times attracting controversy and criticism. In 2023, Hersh alleged that the U.S. and Norway had sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, again stirring controversy. He is known for his use of anonymous sources, for which his later stories in particular have been criticized. Early life and education Hersh was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 8, 1937, to Isador and Dorothy Hersh (née Margolis), Yiddish-speaking Jews who had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s from Lithuania and Poland, respectively. Isador's original surname was Hershowitz, which he had changed upon becoming a citizen in 1930. As a teenager, Seymour helped run the family's dry cleaning shop on the South Side. Hersh graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1954, then attended the University of Illinois Chicago and later the University of Chicago, where he graduated with a history degree in 1958. He worked as a Xerox salesman before being admitted to the University of Chicago Law School in 1959, but was expelled during his first year due to poor grades. Newspaper career After briefly working at a Walgreens drug store, Hersh began his career in 1959 with a seven-month stint at the City News Bureau of Chicago, first as a copyboy and later as a crime reporter. In 1960, he enlisted as an Army reservist, and spent three months in basic training at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. After returning to Chicago, in 1961 Hersh launched the Evergreen Dispatch, a short-lived weekly newspaper for the suburb of Evergreen Park. He moved to Pierre, South Dakota, in 1962 to work as a correspondent for United Press International (UPI), reporting on the state legislature and writing a series of articles on the Oglala Sioux. In 1963, Hersh moved back to Chicago to work for the Associated Press (AP), and in 1965 he was transferred to its Washington, D.C., bureau to report on the Pentagon. While in Washington, he befriended famed investigative journalist I. F. Stone, whose muckraking newsletter I. F. Stone's Weekly served as an inspiration. Hersh began to develop his investigative methods, often walking out of regimented press briefings at the Pentagon to interview high-ranking officers in their lunch halls. In 1966, Hersh reported on the intensifying U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, writing series of articles on draft reform, the shortage of qualified pilots, and on the U.S. bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam, revealed by New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury. In 1967, Hersh became part of the AP's first special investigative unit. After his editors diminished a piece he wrote on the U.S.'s secretive chemical and biological weapons programs, he quit and became a freelancer. Hersh wrote six articles in national magazines in 1967 (two for The New Republic, two for Ramparts, and two for The New York Times Magazine) in which he detailed the government's growing stockpiles of the weapons and its co-operation with universities and corporations, as well as the secret adoption of a first-use policy. The research formed the basis for his first book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal (1968), and the topic was highlighted that year by the Dugway sheep incident, in which an aerial test of VX nerve agent at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah inadvertently killed more than 6,000 sheep owned by local ranchers. The event and Hersh's reporting led to public hearings and international pressure, contributing to the Nixon administration's decision to end the U.S. biological weapons program in 1969. In the first three months of 1968, Hersh served as the press secretary for anti–Vietnam War candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy in his campaign in the 1968 Democratic Party presidential primaries. After resigning before the Wisconsin primary, he returned to journalism as a freelance reporter on Vietnam. My Lai massacre In 1969, Hersh's freelance reporting exposed the My Lai massacre, the murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians (almost all women, children, and elderly men) by U.S. soldiers in a village on March 16, 1968. On October 22, 1969, Hersh received a tip from Geoffrey Cowan, a columnist for The Village Voice with a military source, about a soldier being held at Fort Benning in Georgia for a court-martial for allegedly killing 75 civilians in South Vietnam. After speaking with a Pentagon contact and Fort Benning's public relations office, Hersh found an AP story from September 7 that identified the soldier as Lieutenant William Calley. He next found Calley's lawyer, George W. Latimer, who met with him in Salt Lake City, Utah, and showed him a document which revealed Calley was charged with killing 109 people. Hersh traveled to Fort Benning on November 11, where he quickly gained the confidence of Calley's roommates and eventually Calley himself, whom he interviewed that night. Hersh's first article on the massacre, a cautious and conservative piece which was approved with Latimer, was initially rejected by Life and Look magazines. Hersh next approached the anti-war Dispatch News Service run by his friend David Obst, which sold the story to 35 national papers. On November 13, the story appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Seattle Times, and Newsday, among others. Initial reaction was muted, with the press focusing on a massive anti-war demonstration in Washington on November 15. Follow-up articles by other reporters revealed that the Army's investigation had been prompted by a letter on March 29 from Ronald Ridenhour, a Vietnam veteran who had interviewed soldiers who knew of the killings. After traveling to California and visiting Ridenhour, who gave him their personal information, Hersh traveled across the country to interview the soldiers. This revealed t.... Discover the Seymour M Hersh popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Seymour M Hersh books.