{"id":36819,"date":"2018-08-19T10:31:59","date_gmt":"2018-08-19T15:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36819"},"modified":"2018-08-19T10:31:59","modified_gmt":"2018-08-19T15:31:59","slug":"seymour-hersh-and-the-disappearing-iconoclast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36819","title":{"rendered":"Seymour Hersh and the Disappearing Iconoclast"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seymour Hersh and the Disappearing Iconoclast<\/a><\/h3>\n

He won a Pulitzer for My Lai and cracked Abu Ghraib wide open. But this reporter is still a lonely breed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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Journalist Seymour Hersh in 2009. Credit: Institute for Policy Studies\/Flickr<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Seymour Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0Sy Hersh. Knopf, June 2018, 368 pages<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

When people are comforted by government lies, trafficking the truth becomes hellishly difficult. Disclosing damning facts is especially tricky when editors en masse <\/i>lose their spines. These are some of the takeaways from legendary Seymour Hersh\u2019s riveting new memoir, Reporter<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Shortly before Hersh started covering the Pentagon for the Associated Press in 1965, Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, berated a group of war correspondents<\/a> in Saigon: \u201cLook, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you\u2019re stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid.\u201d Hersh was astonished by the \u201cstunningly sedate\u201d Pentagon press room, which to him resembled \u201ca high-end social club.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hersh never signed on to that stenographers\u2019 pool. He was soon shocked to realize\u201cthe extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect their losing hand.\u201d Hersh did heroic work in the late 1960s and early 1970s exposing the lies behind the Vietnam War. His New Yorker <\/i>articles<\/a> on the My Lai massacre scored a Pulitzer Prize and put atrocities in headlines where they remained till the war\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

Hersh\u2019s 1974 expose on the CIA\u2019s illegal spying on Americans helped spur one of the best congressional investigations of federal wrongdoing since World War II. (Many of the well-written reports from the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities<\/a> remain regrettably relevant to the Leviathan in our time.)<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seymour Hersh and the Disappearing Iconoclast He won a Pulitzer for My Lai and cracked Abu Ghraib wide open. But this reporter is still a lonely breed. Journalist Seymour Hersh in 2009. Credit: Institute for Policy Studies\/Flickr Seymour Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir,\u00a0Sy Hersh. Knopf, June 2018, 368 pages When people are comforted by government lies, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[135,16594,462,512,21300,620,21301,21298,21299,21297,16732],"class_list":["post-36819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-cia","tag-james-bovard","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-my-lai-massacre","tag-pentagon","tag-pulitzer-prize","tag-reporter","tag-saigon","tag-symour-hersh","tag-the-american-conservative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36820,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36819\/revisions\/36820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}