Seymour Hersh to speak Feb. 15 at UNC about U.S. foreign policy
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh will give a free, public lecture at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 15, in Gerrard Hall on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus.
Hersh, who reports on U.S. foreign policy and national security for The New Yorker magazine, will discuss the Obama administration’s continuing war effort in Afghanistan, among other topics, in his talk titled “A Report from Washington on the Obama/Bush Foreign Policy.”
His visit is sponsored by the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, the UNC Center for Global Initiatives, and the UNC Global Research Institute.
In 1969, Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre and cover up during the Vietnam War, earning him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His other journalism and publishing awards include five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting.
In 2004, Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces in The New Yorker. In 2005, he received the National Magazine Award for Public Interest, an Overseas Press Club Award, the National Press Foundation’s W. M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award and his fifth George Polk Award.
Hersh was born in Chicago and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1958. He began his newspaper career as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. After serving in the Army, Hersh worked for a suburban newspaper and then for UPI and the Associated Press until 1967, when he joined the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy as speechwriter and press secretary. Hersh joined The New York Times in 1972, working in Washington and New York. He left the Times in 1979 and has been a freelance writer since. He first wrote for The New Yorker in 1971 and has been a regular contributor to the magazine since 1993.
Hersh has published eight books, most recently, “Chain of Command,” based on his reporting for The New Yorker on Abu Ghraib. His book prizes include the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Award for Biography and a Sidney Hillman Award for “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House.” He has also won two Investigative Reporters and Editors prizes – one for “The Price of Power” and one in 1992 for “The Samson Option,” a study of American foreign policy and the Israeli nuclear bomb program.