Seymour M. Hersh was born in Chicago in 1937 and graduated from the University of Chicago. He began his newspaper career as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago. After Army service, he was hired by United Press International in Pierre, South Dakota. In 1963 he joined the Associated Press in Chicago and in 1965 went to Washington for the AP to cover the Pentagon. He served as press secretary and speechwriter for Senator Eugene H. McCarthy in the famed “Children’s Crusade”—the 1968 New Hampshire Democratic primary campaign against Lyndon Johnson. In 1969, as a free-lance journalist, Mr. Hersh wrote the first account of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam, distributing five newspaper stories on the atrocity through Dispatch News Service. He was hired by the New York Times in 1972 and worked out of Washington and New York until his resignation in 1979 to write The Price of Power. In 1986, he rejoined the Times’s Washington bureau to write a series of critical articles about Panama’s Manuel Noriega. He again joined the Times in Washington in September 1991, on a special assignment.
Mr. Hersh has won more than a dozen major journalism prizes. For his account of the My Lai massacre he earned the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, the George Polk Award, the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award, and the Worth Bingham Prize. For his reporting on the secret B-52 bombing of Cambodia, he was accorded the Roy M. Howard Public Service Award and a second Polk Award in 1974. The next year he won the Drew Pearson Award, the John Peter Zenger Freedom of the Press Award, the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, and a third Polk Award for his stories on the CIA and Chile and on CIA domestic spying. In 1981 he received a second Sigma Delta Chi Award and his fourth Polk Award for two articles in the New York Times Magazine on the involvement of former CIA agents in arms sales to Libya. He is also the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House.
Mr. Hersh’s previous books are Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal; My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath; Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre of My Lai; The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House; and “The Target Is Destroyed What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the New Republic. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and three children.