Hersh, Seymour

American investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner, former Associated Press and New York Times reporter, longtime contributor to The New Yorker, author of numerous books including The Price of Power and The Samson Option

VIETNAM, ISRAËL, IRAK : LES RÉVÉLATIONS D'UN JOURNALISTE DE GUERRE - Seymour Hersh

Elucid · Aug 6, 2022

• Seymour Hersh
• My Lai massacre investigation
• CIA domestic spying revelations
• Abu Ghraib torture exposé
• The Samson Option and Israel's nuclear program
• Hezbollah and Hassan Nasrallah
• Iraq War post-invasion chaos
• decline of American cable news journalism
• Vietnam War forgetting
• journalistic method and verification

Core ideas

Hersh traces his path into war reporting back to research on U.S. chemical warfare in Vietnam that began in 1966, when he covered the Pentagon for the Associated Press and grew increasingly troubled by the indiscriminate use of toxic defoliants over populated areas of South Vietnam — friction with McNamara's Pentagon over his reporting eventually pushed him out of the AP. He recounts in detail how he uncovered the My Lai massacre in 1969, working as a freelancer with no editorial gatekeeping: a tip led him to track down soldiers from the unit across the country, culminating in a night-time phone search through local operators that located Paul Meadlo, the young soldier who had executed dozens of villagers on Lieutenant Calley's orders and later lost his foot to a landmine, screaming that God would punish everyone involved. Hersh recalls Meadlo's mother telling him, "I gave them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer," a line he cites as emblematic of what investigative journalism can surface. He estimates that despite the story's massive national impact, the war continued for four more years and that today only a small fraction of Americans know anything about My Lai, noting that West Point has since dropped its Vietnam War courses altogether — a forgetting he attributes partly to the discomfort of having lost the war to an underestimated adversary.

He describes his most consequential years at The New York Times (1972–1980), where he reported on Watergate, CIA operations in Chile, and — in a major 1974 story — revealed that the CIA had illegally spied on American antiwar activists for years in violation of its founding charter, a story that triggered the Senate's Church Committee investigations. He recounts his reporting on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal for The New Yorker two decades later, tracing it to a phone tip from a mother who found thousands of photographs on a laptop her daughter — a traumatized Army Reserve traffic controller reassigned without training to guard Iraqi prisoners — had brought back from deployment; the daughter's response, covering her body in tattoos as if trying to change her skin, is presented by Hersh as another instance of journalism's capacity to expose institutional failure through individual testimony.

Hersh recounts writing The Samson Option (1991) on Israel's nuclear program, arguing the book's real focus — secret American support for Israel's bomb under every president since Kennedy, even as Washington publicly opposed nuclear proliferation elsewhere — was largely eclipsed in press coverage by sensational claims about the size of Israel's arsenal; he cites a scientist's account of confronting Pakistani leadership over its own nuclear ambitions only to be told, in effect, that Washington's own hypocrisy over Israel undercut its authority to object. He describes his repeated interviews with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, including one instance where Nasrallah predicted Iraqi election results to within a tenth of a percentage point weeks in advance, and argues that America's disregard for figures like Nasrallah after the 2003 invasion of Iraq — a war he calls "crazy" given Iraq's lack of connection to 9/11 — helped unify Arab opposition to U.S. policy in the region. He details the chaotic post-invasion decisions in Iraq (disbanding the army and cutting off officers' pay, privatizing industries, detaining young men indiscriminately at Abu Ghraib) as concrete illustrations of what he characterizes as America's persistent failure to understand the societies it intervenes in.

He delivers a sustained critique of the transformation of American journalism under 24-hour cable news, contrasting his own era of deliberate, unhurried reporting — filing stories as late as 7:30 pm for first edition, spending months chasing a single lead — with a contemporary incentive structure that rewards immediacy over verification, exemplified by a reporter who broke the Hillary Clinton private email server story on air within days rather than investigating it for months. He criticizes cable panel shows for platforming people willing to begin every sentence with "I think" precisely because those who actually know something rarely risk going on air, and laments that CNN and MSNBC's anti-Trump orientation and Fox News's pro-Trump orientation have left no perceived neutral outlet, unlike the Times of his early career which, while arguably too neutral on Vietnam, was trusted across the political spectrum. He voices skepticism toward the Russian-interference narrative around the 2016 election, arguing he has seen no internal evidence for it, and offers a mixed assessment of Trump — criticizing him personally while praising his willingness to call NATO obsolete and to meet with North Korean and Russian leaders. He closes by reflecting on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as proof of institutional failure, expresses relative equanimity about China's rise (noting the U.S. maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases compared to China's one), and identifies climate change and industrial pollution as more urgent priorities than geopolitical rivalry, while affirming that his lifelong journalistic method rests on one governing question applicable to any war plan: how many human beings will die as a result of this.

Excerpts