Seymour M. Hersh

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA's program of domestic spying. 

In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2013, Hersh's reporting disputed the claim that Bashar al-Assad's government, rather than Syrian rebel forces, had attacked civilians with chemical weapons at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War. In 2015, he reported that the U.S. and Pakistan had lied about the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden, both times attracting controversy. 

In 2023, Hersh reported that the U.S. and Norway were responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipeline between Russia and Germany, again stirring controversy. In particular, Hersh has been criticized for heavily relying on anonymous sources.

Seymour Myron Hersh was born in Chicago on April 8, 1937, to Isador and Dorothy Hersh (née Margolis), Yiddish-speaking Jews who had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s from Lithuania and Poland, respectively. Isador's original surname was Hershowitz, which he had changed upon becoming a citizen in 1930. 

As a teenager, Seymour helped run the family's dry cleaning shop on the South Side. Hersh graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1954, then attended the University of Illinois Chicago and later the University of Chicago, where he graduated with a history degree in 1958. He worked as a Xerox salesman before being admitted to the University of Chicago Law School in 1959 but was expelled during his first year due to poor grades.