Seymour M. Hersh
Seymour M. Hersh is a prominent American investigative journalist known for his groundbreaking reporting on military misconduct and government secrecy. Born into a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family in Chicago, Hersh began his career in journalism after a brief stint in law school. His most notable achievement came in 1970 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre, where U.S. troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. Throughout his career, he has been recognized for his incisive critiques of U.S. foreign policy, particularly regarding the Vietnam War and subsequent military engagements.
Hersh's style is characterized by aggressive investigative methods and reliance on anonymous sources, which have drawn both acclaim and criticism. His works have often focused on controversial subjects, including the actions of public figures like Henry Kissinger and the Israeli government, leading to polarized opinions about his reporting. After September 11, 2001, Hersh gained renewed prominence for his critical analysis of the U.S. government's handling of the War on Terror, including revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. Recently, he has continued to provoke discussion with articles questioning U.S. involvement in international crises, including allegations regarding the Nord Stream pipelines and aid to Ukraine. With over eleven published books to his name and numerous awards for his work, Hersh remains a significant, albeit contentious, figure in contemporary journalism.
Seymour M. Hersh
- Born: April 8, 1937
- Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois
JOURNALIST AND WRITER
A famous investigative journalist, Hersh has exposed abuses by American forces in Vietnam and Iraq and uncovered American and Israeli government secrets. His biases and his reliance on anonymous sources have been widely criticized, however, especially when Hersh targeted such public persons as Henry Kissinger and John F. Kennedy.
AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Journalism
Early Life
Seymour Hersh was born a twin into a Yiddish-speaking immigrant household in Chicago. His father, Isadore Hersh, came from Lithuania, and his mother, Dorothy Margolis, came from Poland. Before Seymour Hersh and his fraternal twin Alan were born, the couple had twin daughters. Hersh’s father managed a dry-cleaning plant and shop in the tough southwest Chicago neighborhood of Austin, but the family soon moved to the more upscale Hyde Park district, where Hersh grew up.
Hersh’s family was not political. His two favorite subjects in high school were baseball and literature. With a rebellious spirit, he visited Chicago nightclubs where he watched stand-up comedians and satirists such as Lenny Bruce.
Hersh attended the University of Chicago and earned his bachelor’s degree in history in 1958. Around this time, Hersh later commented, he became an agnostic Jew and maintained only a vague Jewish identity. Interested in Jewish history, but not in religion, he valued Jewish American writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
Because his lack of interest translated into poor grades, Hersh was expelled from the University of Chicago Law School in 1959. He turned to journalism and worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago from 1959 to 1960. Drafted into the United States Army, he was an Army journalist in Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1960. He unsuccessfully tried his hand at a Chicago suburban paper in 1961 before joining the United Press International (UPI) news agency, which sent him to Pierre, South Dakota. In 1963, Hersh was hired by Associated Press (AP) and stationed in Chicago.
Hersh married his Jewish American college sweetheart, Elizabeth Sarah Klein, on May 31, 1964, and they had three children, Matthew, Melissa, and Joshua. Hersh stated that he left their involvement with their religious faith up to his children, and that only some had their bar (or bat) mitzvah. His wife eventually became a psychoanalyst.
Life’s Work
In 1964, while working for Associated Press in Washington, DC, Hersh became opposed to America’s military involvement in Vietnam. In 1967, he left the news agency. In 1968, Hersh wrote his first book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal, which laid out his suspicions of American secret weaponry. Hersh became press secretary for Senator Eugene McCarthy, an antiwar liberal Democrat, but Hersh left politics after McCarthy’s defeat in the US presidential primaries of 1968.
Working as a freelance journalist, Hersh got his big break when he was tipped off about an Army court-martial of the officer who ordered the 1968 murder of more than three hundred Vietnamese civilians at the village of Son My, called My Lai 4 by Americans. Visiting the officer, Hersh got him to talk and broke the news in a story that ran on the left-leaning Dispatch News Service in November 1969. Thirty-six leading newspapers picked up the story. It won Hersh the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Hersh wrote two books about the event and the trial, My Lai Four (1970) and Cover-Up (1972), which solidified his national fame.
Hersh was hired by The New York Times, where he worked in Washington, DC, and New York from 1972 to 1979. His newspaper reporting was investigative and confrontational. He investigated illegal domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency and American involvement in the 1973 coup in Chile. A planned 1974 story of the United States retrieving a sunken Soviet submarine had to be postponed until 1975 for national security reasons. After turning to exposing corporate malfeasance in the United States, Hersh used aggressive investigative methods that critics charged amounted to blackmailing sources, and he was forced to leave the paper.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Hersh’s zeal as an investigative reporter led him to cast his subjects in the darkest light possible. This alienated Hersh from American mainstream journalism. His spiteful biography The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983) left critics wondering why Hersh harshly criticized everything Henry Kissinger did as US national security adviser and secretary of state. Hersh complained bitterly that some fellow Jewish Americans called him a “kapo,” a Nazi term for Jews who helped them, for writing The Samson Option (1991). This book tried to expose Israel’s semisecret atomic program. Hersh’s low point was The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), trying to destroy the legacy of US President John F. Kennedy. Critics proved that some of Hersh’s anonymous sources had provided him with forged negative material.
Hersh’s reputation as an investigative journalist was restored in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Publishing his incisive reports in The New Yorker since that time, Hersh became a widely read source of material critical of the American government, particularly its wars on terrorism and in Iraq. Hersh exposed torture and prisoner abuse at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, summarized in his book Chain of Command (2004). By 2010, Hersh was less antagonistic toward the government of US president Barack Obama than to that of his two predecessors.
However, beginning with the Obama administration's 2011 Navy SEAL operation in Pakistan that ended in the assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Hersh became increasingly more critical of the administration. After writing articles for the London Review of Books in which he expressed skepticism over the event as well as intelligence pertaining to the civil war in Syria and subsequently the credibility of Obama and his administration, Hersh published The Killing of Osama bin Laden in 2016. In this book, he further argues that there were too many lies and secrets surrounding the operation to kill Bin Laden, and he generally questions Obama's policies concerning the civil war in Syria.
Known for initiating controversy, in 2023, Hersh accused the United States and Norway of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines in an article on Substack. The pipelines run from Russia to Germany, transporting natural gas to Western Europe. During the same year, Hersh published another article on Substack in which he claimed that members of Ukraine's government had embezzled at least $400 million of US aid sent to Ukraine.
Significance
Hersh’s exposure of the My Lai massacre proved criminal misconduct by the United States Army in Vietnam. Hersh’s revelation significantly helped to turn troubled American public opinion against continuing military engagement in Vietnam. With this story, Hersh became one of the top American investigative reporters.
However, Hersh’s unrelenting, continuous harsh criticism of the United States and of the Israeli government and some of its public figures made him unpopular with many audiences who believed he was far too one-sided. Critics included Jewish Americans who felt Hersh underestimated the malicious resolve of Israel’s enemies, which required effective Jewish countermeasures.
Hersh’s work to uncover failures, shortcomings, missteps, and misjudgments in the US war on terror and in its relationship with Iraq and Iran earned him a new appreciative audience after 2001. By 2024, he had written eleven books. He was recognized with a Pulitzer Prize, five Polk Awards, the 2004 George Orwell Award, and numerous international honors.
Bibliography
Applegate, Edd. Journalistic Advocates and Muckrakers. McFarland, 1997.
Aucoin, James L. The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism. U of Missouri P, 2007.
Downie, Leonard, Jr. The New Muckrakers. New Republic, 1976.
Hersh, Seymour. "'I am Not Backing Off Anything I Said.'" Interview by Isaac Chotiner. Slate, 13 May 2015, www.slate.com/articles/news‗and‗politics/foreigners/2015/05/seymour‗hersh‗interview‗on‗his‗bin‗laden‗story‗the‗new‗yorker‗journalism.html. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.
Hersh, Seymour. "Zeleksky's 'Bad Moment'," Substack, 21 Sept. 2023, seymourhersh.substack.com/p/zelenskys-bad-moment. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.
Isaac, Rael Jean. “Investigating Seymour Hersh.” The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders, edited by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, Transaction, 2006.
Jensen, Carl. “Seymour Hersh.” Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the Twentieth Century, by Carl Jensen, Seven Stories Press, 2000.
Zevin, Alexander and Seymour Hersh. "How to Blow Up a Pipeline." New Left Review, 15 Feb. 2023, newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.