SEYMOUR M. HERSH was born in Chicago in 1937 and graduated in 1958 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 speech writer 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, distributing five newspaper stories on the atrocity through Dispatch News Service. He joined the New York Times in 1972 and worked out of both Washington and New York until his resignation in 1979 to begin The Price of Power. In early 1983, he joined the Atlantic magazine as National Correspondent.
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 for his stories on the CIA and Chile and on CIA domestic spying. And 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.
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; and Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre of My Lai. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Saturday Review, the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. He lives in Washington with his wife and three children.