Word: hersh
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When the New York Times last week published its dramatic story on the CIA's domestic snooping, the article and those that followed carried a familiar byline: Seymour Hersh. At 37, Hersh ranks as an almost unrivaled master of the governmental exposé. Woodward and Bernstein have Watergate, but Hersh's revelations over the past six years read like a historic road map to a generation: the massacre at My Lai, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's wiretapping of his aides (Kissinger has called him "my nemesis"), Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia, the Pentagon...
...honors have been commensurate. For the My Lai exposures, Hersh earned the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Memorial, the Sigma Delta Chi and the Worth Bingham awards. He also collected another Polk, a Front Page and a Scripps-Howard Award for his disclosure of the U.S. bombing of Cambodia...
What makes Sy Hersh gallop? He explains it in his expansive way: "I'm smart and I work hard." Hersh was brought up in a middle-class Jewish family in Chicago (his father ran a dry-cleaning shop). "I had a happy enough childhood," he told one interviewer, "lived for baseball, had no idea what I wanted to be." Which may explain why Hersh, a B student at the University of Chicago, dropped out of law school after a year and drifted into journalism in 1959. He ended up with the Associated Press but abruptly quit when...
Incredible Story. After an unsuccessful stint as Eugene McCarthy's press secretary in 1968, Hersh picked up a tip and traveled 30,000 miles around the country to track down 45 participants in the My Lai massacre. However, he failed to peddle the story to several national magazines because he was relatively unknown and the story seemed so incredible. Finally, David Obst, manager of the Dispatch News Service, a loose confederation of anti-Establishment freelancers, broke the story by selling it to 36 papers in the U.S. and abroad. In 1972 the New York Times, which had once turned...
...Hersh's complex personality seems suited to his work. He is in turn talkative, churning, abrupt, zealous, egotistical and abrasively honest. His impact is like a blast of air rushing in and out of the insulated corridors of Washington's secretive institutions. On a story, he goes day and night: tousle-haired, tie askew, he searches out sources high and low, working the phone, visiting homes, establishing rapport-often among junior staffers-and furiously scratching notes (he does not use a tape recorder...