Seymour Hersh

Hersh was born along with a twin brother to a middle-class family. His father ran a dry-cleaning plant, and he had older sisters who were also twins. He attended the University of Chicago, and after flunking out of law school, he was hired by the Chicago City News Bureau for $35 a week. In 1969, he gained worldwide recognition for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. He later became a correspondent for United Press International in South Dakota, correspondent for the Associated Press, and a reporter for The New York Times Washington Bureau. His book `The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House' won him the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hersh has written a total of eight books and contributes regularly to The New Yorker on military and security matters. He continues to stir controversy with his stories. A 2004 article investigated how Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld circumvented the CIA in their quest to invade Iraq; his coverage of Richard Perle in another article led Perle to say that Hersh was the "closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist." In May 2004, Hersh published a series of articles describing and showing with photos the torture by US military police of prisoners in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib.