Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh is widely acknowledged as the most influential and acclaimed investigative reporter of the past 35 years. His special focus is, and has always been, the abuse of power in the name of national security.

Hersh’s journalism and publishing prizes include the Pulitzer Prize (a record five), George Polk Awards, the Lennon-Ono Peace Prize, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting, such as Sigma Delta Chi, Worth Bingham, and Sidney Hillman. His groundbreaking reports include many that are landmark events in American journalism: the Abu Ghraib prison abuse in Iraq, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the C.I.A.’s bombing of Cambodia, Henry Kissinger’s wiretapping of his own staff, and the C.I.A.’s efforts against Chile’s assassinated President, Salvador Allende. 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 UPI and AP until late 1967, when he joined the Presidential campaign of Eugene J. McCarthy as speech writer and press secretary. 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.

Hersh has published seven books. His book prizes include the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times award for biography, and a second Sidney Hillman award for The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Hersh has also won two Investigative Reporters & Editors prizes, one for the Kissinger book (in 1983), and one for a study of American foreign policy and the Israeli nuclear bomb program, The Samson Option (in 1992).