The investigative reporter who broke the story of the My Lai Massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Seymour Hersh talks to Ralph about his life and career, chronicled in his memoir, “Reporter.”
Seymour Hersh is the pre-eminent investigative journalist of our time. He has won five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. In 1970, Mr. Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. In 2004, Mr. Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces in The New Yorker. Among his many books are “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House,” “Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” “The Dark Side of Camelot,”, “The Samson Option,” “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden,” and his latest, a memoir of his storied decades-long career, entitled simply “Reporter.”
“We’re now told with ‘high confidence ‘ that the Russians did it… I know what the phrase ‘high confidence’ means inside the intelligence community… And I will tell you that ‘high confidence’ means, ‘We don’t know.’ Or, ‘If we do know, we don’t want to tell you.’ It doesn’t mean that we believe the Russians did it.”
Seymour Hersh, author of the memoir, “Reporter”
Seymour Hersh