Seymour Hersh
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.
Seymour Hersh
Sy Hersh
Journalist, writer
3
George Polk Award (1969, 1973, 1974, 1981, 2004)
Pulitzer Prize (1970)
National Book Critics Circle Award (1983)
National Magazine Award (2004, 2005)
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[edit]
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.[1][2] 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.[3]
Investigative books: 1980s and 1990s[edit]
Hersh's 1983 book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, which involved four years of exhaustive work and more than 1,000 interviews, was a best-seller and won him the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.[1] The 698-page book contained 41 chapters, including 13 devoted to Kissinger's role in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia;[34] other topics included his role in the Chilean coup, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, domestic wiretapping, and the White House Plumbers, as well as Hersh's criticism of his former Times colleagues, such as Max Frankel and James Reston, for their proximity to him.[1] One much-discussed allegation was that Kissinger, originally an advisor to Nelson Rockefeller in the 1968 Republican Party presidential primaries before his defeat to Nixon, had offered Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey damaging material on Nixon before going to the Nixon campaign with secret information he had gathered from the Vietnam War's Paris peace negotiations. The book also alleges that Kissinger alerted Nixon to President Johnson's October 31, 1968, bombing halt 12 hours in advance, securing his position in the administration. The book is noted for its density of information and prosecutorial tone,[34] and it has been credited with preventing Kissinger from returning to a government position during the Reagan administration.[35]
While writing the book, Hersh revisited his previous reporting on Edward M. Korry, the U.S. ambassador to Chile from 1967 to 1971. In 1974, Hersh had reported in the Times that Korry had known of the CIA's efforts to foment a coup. Korry, who had reacted to the claim with furious denial, demanded a front-page retraction in exchange for documents Hersh wanted for his book. The retraction, which Time called the "longest correction ever published", appeared on February 9, 1981. Peter Kornbluh, Chile expert at the National Security Archive, later judged based on declassified documents that Korry was unaware of CIA involvement.[1] Also in the book was the claim that former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai had been paid $20,000 per year by the CIA during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Desai filed a $50 million libel lawsuit against Hersh; when it went to trial in 1989, Desai, then 93, was too ill to attend, but Kissinger appeared and testified that Desai had not worked in any capacity for the CIA. A Chicago jury ruled in favor of Hersh, finding it had not been proved that Hersh had intended to write falsehoods or that he had shown reckless disregard for the truth, either of which must be proven in a libel suit.[36]
In August 1983, a 17,500-word article by Hersh in The Atlantic magazine alleged that former President Gerald Ford, whom he interviewed in the story, had struck a secret deal prior to Nixon's resignation, brokered by Nixon's chief of staff General Alexander Haig, which gave him the presidency in exchange for his subsequent pardon of Nixon.[37] Hersh worked on and narrated the 1985 PBS Frontline documentary "Buying the Bomb", which reported on a Pakistani businessman who had attempted to smuggle krytron devices which could be used as nuclear bomb triggers out of the U.S.[37] On June 12, 1986, an article by Hersh in the Times revealed that U.S.-backed dictator of Panama Manuel Noriega was a key figure in weapons and narcotics trafficking. The article was the first in a "political landslide" of allegations against Noriega; in 1989, the U.S. invaded Panama and captured him, taking him to the U.S. to stand trial.[38]
Hersh spent much of the decade writing two critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful books.[1] In his 1986 title The Target Is Destroyed, Hersh examined the 1983 shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union. He reported that the U.S. Air Force knew almost immediately that the Soviets believed that they had shot down a military plane, and that the U.S. misrepresented the situation to portray the Soviets as deliberate murderers of civilians.[39] In The Samson Option (1991), Hersh chronicled the history of Israel's nuclear weapon program, arguing that a nuclear capability was sought from the state's founding, and that it was achieved under a U.S. policy of feigned ignorance and indirect assistance. Hersh also wrote that Israel received aid from the U.S. in the 1973 Yom Kippur War through "nuclear blackmail" (Israel's threat to use the weapons against its Arab enemies).[40] Another major allegation was that the intelligence passed to Israel by convicted American spy Jonathan Pollard had been shared with the Soviet Union by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who denied the charge. Another allegation was that British media magnate Robert Maxwell was an informant for Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency; Maxwell filed a defamation lawsuit against Hersh, but died in a drowning incident two weeks after the book was published.[41]
Hersh's 1997 best-seller The Dark Side of Camelot, about the political career of John F. Kennedy, was controversial and heavily criticized. Shortly before publication, it emerged in the press that Hersh had removed claims at the last minute which were based on forged documents provided to him by fraudster Lex Cusack, including a fake hush money contract between Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. An article about the controversy in The Washington Post said: "The strange and twisted saga of the JFK file is part cautionary tale, part slapstick farce, a story of deception and self-delusion in the service of commerce and journalism". Hersh and a one-time co-author had received a $800,000 advance for the project.[1] Other aspects of the book also came under criticism, including its prying into Kennedy's alleged sexual escapades based on interviews with his Secret Service guards, and its claim that Kennedy used Judith Exner as a courier to deliver cash to mobster Sam Giancana, made by a source who later recanted it before the Assassination Records Review Board.[1]
In 1998, Hersh published Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government, about Gulf War syndrome. He estimated that 15 percent of returning American troops were afflicted with the chronic and multi-symptomatic disorder, and challenged the government claim that they were suffering from war fatigue, as opposed to the effects of a chemical or biological weapon. He suggested the smoke from the destruction of a weapon depot that stored nerve gas at Khamisiyah in Iraq, to which more than 100,000 soldiers were exposed, as a possible cause.[42]
Use of anonymous sources[edit]
Hersh's reporting is well-known for its use of anonymous sources, which his biographer Robert Miraldi described as his "trademark".[115] While working as a Pentagon correspondent for the AP, he developed many anonymous top- and mid-level military sources, leading Pentagon officials to deride the fact that he "broke every rule of bureaucratic journalism".[116] His AP colleague Richard Pyle later observed that "people were somewhat annoyed that he had no or few names in so many of his stories".[117] Hersh's articles on the Watergate scandal, like that of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, made extensive use of unnamed sources, including deep inside the White House, Justice Department, and Congress. Hersh's New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal warned him to halt his practice of "ascribing long, colorful pejorative comments in direct quotes to anonymous officials".[118] After Hersh's articles on CIA involvement in the Chilean coup, largely based on unnamed CIA sources, Rosenthal praised his work but again warned about sources: "It's our obligation to be extremely careful, restrained and judicious. Using them puzzles the reader at the best, and raises questions about the credibility of the story at the worst."[119]
Hersh's conservative critics frequently accused him of a left-wing bias in his reporting on the My Lai massacre and later stories.[120] Hersh responded that: "I don't go around getting my stories from nice old Lefties or the Weathermen ... I get them from good old-fashioned constitutionalists. I learned a long time ago that you can't go around making judgments on the basis of people's politics. The essential thing is: Do they have integrity or not?"[1] Henry Kissinger, in response to Hersh's 1983 book The Price of Power, accused him of including "inference piled on assumption, third-hand hearsay accepted as fact, the self-serving accounts of disgruntled adversaries elevated to gospel, the 'impressions' of people several times removed from the scene."[121] Hersh's 1986 book The Target Is Destroyed was especially noted for its anonymous sources, with Hersh admitting that: "This is a book whose key allegations hinge on unnamed sources ... mysterious 'government officials' and 'intelligence analysts'.",[122] and his 1991 book The Samson Option was similar, with journalist Steven Emerson writing in a review that it relied on Hersh's mere reputation: "If anyone else wrote this book, it would have never seen the light of day".[123] Hersh's 1997 book The Dark Side of Camelot used very few unnamed sources, but its document hoax controversy and dubious claims drew the criticism of many in the media, with Kennedy biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. calling him "the most gullible investigative reporter perhaps in American history".[124]
Hersh's articles for The New Yorker, like his previous articles at the Times under Rosenthal, were reviewed by an active editor (David Remnick) and a team of fact-checkers.[125] In a 2003 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Remnick stated that he knew the identity of all of Hersh's sources: "I know every single source that is in his pieces ... Every 'retired intelligence officer', every general with reason to know, and all those phrases that one has to use, alas, by necessity, I say, 'Who is it? What's his interest?' We talk it through."[1] Hersh's reporting on the Middle East after 9/11 drew renewed criticism of his unnamed sources; journalist Amir Taheri wrote in a review of Hersh's 2004 book Chain of Command that: "Hersh uses the method of medieval scholastics: first choose your belief, then seek proofs. ... By my count Hersh has anonymous sources inside 30 foreign governments and virtually every department of the U.S. government."[126] Remnick defended Hersh, arguing that unnamed sources were needed in intelligence reporting due to the risk taken by sources, who faced dismissal or prosecution. Hersh said of his reporting of the "war on terror" that: "[T]he only way you measure my stories in any reasonable way is to say that I've been writing an alternative history of the war. And the question is: Is it basically right? And I think overwhelmingly it's right."[127] Journalist William Arkin, who worked with Hersh in the 1990s, responded to critics of Hersh's errors that: "He can get every fact wrong but get the story correct."[128]
Hersh's reporting outside of The New Yorker has been criticized for allegedly being subjected to less editorial review and fact-checking. Hersh stated that his 2013 article on the Ghouta chemical attack, published in the London Review of Books (LRB), had been rejected because "[Remnick] didn't feel it was strong enough". In 2015, he stated that the LRB had used a former fact-checker from The New Yorker for his article on the killing of Osama bin Laden.[83] Journalist James Kirchick criticized Hersh's later reporting for uncritically treating information provided to him by "cranks", which he wrote were attracted to Hersh because he shared a "conspiratorial" view of the world where "dark, shadowy" forces ruled. Hersh replied that: "There's zero value in taking just the line of government agencies and official spokespeople ... So that makes you reliant on people who have agendas, as all sources usually do, and it attracts people who believe in conspiracies. A lot of intelligence work is finding connections, a bit of an occupational hazard."[87]
Criticism of Hersh and his sources was renewed after his 2017 article on the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, published by Die Welt after LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers told him she "didn't want to be accused of being too pro-Russian and too pro-Syria",[62] and Hersh's 2023 post on the Nord Stream sabotage, self-published on Substack.[98] Hersh defended his use of a single anonymous source for his Nordstream story, saying that "I don’t want to talk specifically about any particular meeting because I have to protect my source."[129]
In 2015, during the bin Laden controversy, Hersh's biographer Robert Miraldi noted that his stories were often controversial when they were first published, being considered too conspiratorial or relying too heavily on unnamed sources, but that many were later proven correct. He added that: "This is typical Sy... He explodes onto page one, his critics say it ain't so, and yet in the end he's proven to be correct. He's loving this. He revels in these moments."[83]
In 2023, after Hersh cited an alleged U.S. official describing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a "poor waif in his underwear" — a translation of an idiomatic Russian expression and not otherwise common in English — some commentators speculated that Hersh's source had in fact been Russian-speaking.[130]
Hersh's journalism and publishing awards include the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, five George Polk Awards (making him that award's most honored laureate as of 2004),[132] two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting:
