Seymour M. Hersh
2005 recipient of the Ridenhour Courage Prize

Hersh first wrote for The New Yorker in 1971 and has been a regular contributor to the magazine since 1993. His journalism and publishing prizes include the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, the National Magazine Award and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting on My Lai (with Ridenhour serving as one of his key sources), the CIA’s bombing of Cambodia, Henry Kissinger's wiretapping and the CIA’s efforts against Chile's Salvador Allende, among other topics.

In 2004, Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces in the magazine; early in 2005, he was awarded the National Press Foundation’s W.M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award and received his fifth George Polk award, making him that award’s most honored laureate.

Hersh was born in 1937 in Chicago and graduated in 1958 from the University of Chicago. He began his newspaper career as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. He served in the Army and worked for a suburban newspaper and then for UPI and AP until late 1967, when he joined the presidential campaign of Eugene J. McCarthy as speechwriter and press secretary. Hersh joined the New York Times in 1972, working in Washington and New York. He left the paper in 1979 and has been a freelance writer ever since, with two six-month returns on special assignment to the Times’ Washington bureau.

Hersh has published eight books, most recently Chain of Command, which was based on his reporting for The New Yorker on Abu Ghraib. His book prizes include the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times award for biography and a second Sidney Hillman award, for The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Hersh has also won two Investigative Reporters & Editors prizes, for the Kissinger book in 1983 and for a study of American foreign policy and the Israeli nuclear bomb program, The Samson Option, in 1992. In 2004, Hersh won a National Magazine Award for public interest for three pieces: “Lunch with the Chairman,” “Selective Intelligence” and “The Stovepipe.”

Selected Books and Articles:

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
HarperCollins, 2004

The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy
Random House, 1991

The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House
Simon & Schuster, 1983

Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4
Random House, 1972

My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath
Random House, 1970

“The Coming Wars,” The New Yorker. January 24, 2005

“The Gray Zone,” The New Yorker, May 24, 2004

“Torture at Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2004

Profiles, Interviews and Reviews:

Hajjar, Lisa. “In the Penal Colony,” The Nation, January 20, 2005

Chaudhry, Lakshmi. “Seymour Hersh: Man on Fire,” AlterNet, October 27, 2004

“Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib – Interview with Seymour Hersh,” Democracy Now! September 14, 2004

Sherman, Scott. “The Avenger; Sy Hersh, Then and Now,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2003

Rubien, David “Seymour Hersh,” Salon, January 18, 2000