our speakers:

Seymour Hersh

Topics:

• Chain of Command

Travels from: Washington, DC

Seymour Hersh is widely acknowledged as the most influential and acclaimed investigative reporter of the past 50 years. He is author of the best-selling book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. His special focus is, and has always been, the abuse of power in the name of national security.

Hersh's journalism and publishing prizes include the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes (Sigma Delta Chi, Worth Bingham, Sidney Hillman, etc.) for investigative reporting. His ground-breaking reports include many that are landmark events in American journalism: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the C.I.A.'s bombing of Cambodia, Henry Kissinger's wiretapping of his own staff, and the C.I.A.'s efforts against Chile's assassinated President, Salvador Allende.

Most recently, Hersh's articles in The New Yorker have probed the underside of the Iraq war and the intelligence and military quagmire caused by the conflict.

During the 15 months, Mr. Hersh:

• broke the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story with articles published in The New Yorker Magazine
• won the Ono-Lennon United Nations Peace prize
• made two provocative appearances on the Jon Stewart Show
• won an unprecedented 5th George Polk Award for journalistic accomplishments
• has been interviewed repeatedly on CNN, ABC, NPR, NBC and other major broadcast networks
• won the Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award from the National Press Foundation
• authored the best-selling "Chain of Command", about which The New York Times wrote:

  "the best book we are likely to have, this close to events, about why the United States went from leading an international coalition united in horror at the attacks of 9/11, to fighting alone in Iraq and, in Abu Ghraib, to violating the very human rights it said it had come to restore."

• broke the story about secret military reconnaissance forays into Iran

Hersh 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 speech writer and press secretary. Mr. 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 since, with two six-month returns on special assignment to the Times' Washington bureau.

Mr. Hersh has published seven books. 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. Mr. Hersh has also won two Investigative Reporters & Editors prizes, for the Kissinger book, in 1983, and in 1992 for a study of American foreign policy and the Israeli nuclear bomb program, The Samson Option.

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