# Seymour Hersh Seymour Hersh (born 1937) is the American investigative journalist who exposed two of the defining atrocities of modern American war — the [[My Lai Massacre]] and the [[Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal]] — across a career built on uncovering the things governments most wanted hidden. For the vault he is the recurring figure of accountability journalism: the reporter who, again and again, made official cover-ups public. ## My Lai Hersh's breakthrough came in 1969, when he tracked down Lieutenant [[William Calley]] and broke the story of the [[My Lai Massacre]] and the Army's year-long effort to bury it — reporting that earned him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The story helped turn American opinion against the [[Vietnam War]] and established the template for his life's work: pursuing atrocities and cover-ups that the institutions involved insisted had not happened. ## A Career of Exposés Over the following decades Hersh revealed CIA domestic spying, [[Henry Kissinger]]'s secret diplomacy and the secret bombing of Cambodia, and, in 2004, the systematic torture of detainees at [[Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal]] — work that won him five George Polk Awards, the most of any recipient. His later, more contested reporting (including disputed claims about the killing of Osama bin Laden and the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage) drew criticism even as he continued publishing independently on Substack into his late eighties. A 2025 Netflix documentary, *Cover-Up*, surveys his career. ## RWKB Significance Hersh embodies the adversarial-press function that the vault treats as a counterweight to official narratives and [[Manufactured Consent]]. His My Lai and Abu Ghraib work are the journalistic pillars of the accountability story the vault tracks around American war crimes — the reporting that forced impunity into daylight when the military and the executive branch would have preferred silence. ## See Also - [[My Lai Massacre]] - [[Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal]] - [[William Calley]] - [[Vietnam War]] - [[Henry Kissinger]]