Seymour Hersh

The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

April 25, 2005 at 7:30pm · Mountainlair Ballroom

Seymour Hersh is widely acknowledged as the most influential and acclaimed investigative reporter of the past 35 years. Hersh's journalism and publishing prizes include the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, four George Polk Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes (Sigma Delta Chi, Worth Bingham, Sidney Hillman, etc.) for investigative reporting. His ground-breaking reports include a variety of landmark events in American journalism.

Hersh found his first big story as a 32-year-old freelance writer: his uncovering of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam was bought by 36 newspapers including the "Washington Post," "San Francisco Chronicle," "Boston Globe" and "London Times" and by television’s “60 Minutes.”

Throughout his career, Hersh has written seven books including his first, "Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal," "The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It," “The Samson Option: Isreal’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy” and “Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome, the War Between Americas Ailing Veterans and Their Government.”

His most recent is "The Dark Side of Camelot" about the Kennedy presidency. His book prizes include the National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times book prize for biography and a Sidney Hillman award for “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House.” Hersh has also won two Investigative Reporters & Editors prizes, for the Kissinger book, in 1983, and in 1992 for a study of American foreign policy and the Israeli nuclear bomb program, “The Samson Option.”

Hersh’s current contributions to the "New Yorker" often cover controversial military and security matters, some of which are the intelligence used to justify an invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Most recently, Hersh’s articles in the “New Yorker” have probed the underside of the Iraq war and the intelligence and military quagmire caused by the conflict.

Hersh began his newspaper career as a police reporter for the "City News Bureau" of Chicago. He served in the army and worked for a suburban newspaper and then for wire services United Press International and the Associated Press until late 1967, when he joined the presidential campaign of Eugene J. McCarthy as speech writer and press secretary. Mr. Hersh joined the “New York Times” in 1972, working in Washington and New York. He left the paper in 1979 and has been a freelance writer since, with two six-month returns on special assignment to the “Times’” Washington bureau.