Seymour Myron Hersh

Seymour Myron Hersh 1937–, American investigative journalist, b. Chicago, grad. Univ. of Chicago (1958). He began his career (1959) at a local news bureau, then became a wire service correspondent, and was press secretary to presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy . Working as a freelancer, he broke (1969) the story of the My Lai incident , a civilian massacre during the Vietnam War. This reporting earned him an international reputation and a Pulitzer Prize (1970), and was amplified in the books My Lai 4 (1970) and Cover Up (1972). Hersh subsequently worked for the New York Times (1972–75, 1979), covering the Watergate affair , the CIA's role in domestic spying and the overthrow of Chile's President Allende , the downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007, and the India-Pakistan conflict. His reporting on the Nixon administration led to The Price of Power (1983), a scathing portrait of Henry Kissinger . A contributor to the New Yorker since 1993, Hersh has written extensively about post-9/11 America, the Bush administration, national security, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; in 2004 he broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story. Many of these articles were collected in Chain of Command (2004).