Seymour Hersh

His father changed the name from Hershowitz when he took citizenship in 1930 and ran a dry cleaning shop on the South Side of Chicago, which his son helped run as a teenager. Hersh took a history degree from the University of Chicago in 1958, sold Xerox machines, got himself admitted to the university's law school in 1959, and was expelled inside a year for grades. He worked at a Walgreens, then spent seven months at the City News Bureau as a copyboy and then a crime reporter. In 1961 he started a weekly paper for the suburb of Evergreen Park, which did not last. By 1962 he was in Pierre, South Dakota, covering the legislature for UPI.

Life and Look both turned down his first My Lai piece. The antiwar Dispatch News Service sold it instead to 35 papers, and on November 13, 1969, Americans read that a lieutenant named William Calley faced charges for killing more than a hundred civilians. Hersh had found Calley's lawyer in Salt Lake City, then Calley himself at Fort Benning, then 50 witnesses over three months, 35 of whom talked. The Pulitzer came in 1970. At the New York Times he wrote more than 40 front-page Watergate stories in 1973, and on December 22, 1974, exposed the CIA's domestic spying on American citizens, which produced the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission. Three decades later, in The New Yorker, he laid out the torture at Abu Ghraib.

The method that broke My Lai — one source with real access, worked for months, named to nobody — did not survive contact with his later subjects. The New Yorker and the Washington Post both declined his 2013 piece arguing that Syrian rebels rather than the Assad government had used sarin at Ghouta, and the London Review of Books ran it. A 2017 sequel went to a German paper after the London Review passed, and a joint United Nations and OPCW panel later concluded that the Khan Shaykhun attack was a sarin bombing by the Syrian air force. His 2023 account of American divers destroying the Nord Stream pipelines rested on a single unnamed source. In the 2025 documentary Cover-Up he said plainly that he had got Syria wrong and had been too trusting of Assad.

He is 89 and still filing, on a Substack he runs himself, which is roughly where he began — outside an institution, selling a story nobody else would print. The prizes are permanent: the 1970 Pulitzer, five George Polk Awards spread from 1969 to 2004, two National Magazine Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award for the Kissinger book. The standing is not. The New Yorker, which had published Abu Ghraib, would not run the Syria piece. His defenders point to the long list of things he had first and alone, his critics to the sourcing, and the two sides have been talking past each other for a decade. In 2025 he conceded one story and stopped there.

Seymour Hersh's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal book
  The reporting his AP editors had cut, published in full 1968
• My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath book
  The book of the reporting that won the Pulitzer 1970
• The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House book
  National Book Critics Circle Award, and 41 chapters on one man 1983
• The Samson Option book
  On Israel's nuclear weapons program and American acquiescence 1991
• Torture at Abu Ghraib article
  The New Yorker, April 30, 2004, and a fifth George Polk Award 2004
• Reporter: A Memoir book
  Fifty years of method, including what he chose not to print 2018

• 1959 aged ~22 Expelled from law school, and starts at the City News Bureau of Chicago Seven months as a copyboy and then a crime reporter.
• 1961 aged ~24 Launches the Evergreen Dispatch, a suburban weekly that folds
• 1965 aged ~28 Transfers to the AP's Washington bureau to cover the Pentagon He befriended I. F. Stone and started walking out of briefings to find officers at lunch.
• 1968 aged ~31 Spends three months as press secretary for Eugene McCarthy He resigned before the Wisconsin primary and went back to reporting.
• November 13, 1969 aged 32 The My Lai story runs in 35 papers through Dispatch News Service Life and Look had both turned it down.
• 1970 aged ~33 Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting
• December 22, 1974 aged 37 Exposes the CIA's domestic spying on American citizens The story produced the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.
• April 30, 2004 aged 67 Publishes Torture at Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker
• February 2023 aged 85 Publishes the Nord Stream sabotage story on his own Substack It rested on one source with claimed knowledge of operational planning.

• I.F. Stone 1907–1989
  Investigative journalist whose self-published newsletter exposed government lies for nearly two decades. modeled himself on
• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. wrote the book on
• Bob Woodward b. 1943
  Investigative reporter whose coverage of Watergate with Carl Bernstein led to President Nixon's resignation. Watergate rival
• Carl Bernstein b. 1944
  Investigative journalist who, with Bob Woodward, uncovered the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post. Watergate rival
• Donald Rumsfeld 1932–2021
  Twice Secretary of Defense who directed the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and pushed military restructuring. reported on
• Ben Bradlee 1921–2014
  Editor who built The Washington Post into a leading national newspaper and directed its Watergate coverage. ran the paper that carried My Lai