Seymour Hersh Quotes

American investigative journalist (born 1937)

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. In the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, and in 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won five George Polk Awards and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), a biography of Henry Kissinger that won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2013, Hersh disputed the claim that Bashar al-Assad's government used chemical weapons on civilians at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War, and in 2015, he reported that the U.S. had lied about the events around the killing of Osama bin Laden, both times attracting controversy and criticism from other reporters.
In 2023, he reported that the U.S. had sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, again stirring controversy.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alternative Names: Seymour M. Hersh • Seymour Myron Hersh • Seymour Hersch • S. M. Hersh • S. Hersh • Hersh • Hersh, Seymour Myron

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What’s courageous about telling the truth? Our job isn’t to be afraid. And sometimes it gets ugly. There have been times in my life, when — you know, I don’t talk about it. Threats aren’t made to people like me; they’re made to children of people like me. There’s been awful stuff. But you don’t worry about it — you can’t. You have to just do what you do.

I can tell you is that there’s an awful lot of good people in the government, believe it or not—an awful lot of people who don’t like lying. A lot of people in the military who get up to high positions and can’t stand what they had to do to get there and try to stop what they’re doing. A lot of people in the intelligence community that, you know.

What I did was really deconstruct the obvious. I mean, you have to hear what the president said. But, of course, there were secret plans, that I’m writing about, and they include — there was a committee set up. Jake Sullivan was directly involved. He was the national security adviser, still is. They set up a team to look at options about how to put pressure on the Russian government to back off.

I just flunked out of law school. I worked all the time through college, and I got into law school because the father of one of my good friends was a professor there... But anyway, the bottom line is I bummed around and I finally heard about a job as a police reporter. The requirements were a BA and you were alive and willing to work for $40 a week or something like that. It was 1960... So that’s how I started. Sheer serendipity. And I learned my own way. I assume that I was a better reporter for having worked as I did for w:United Press InternationalUnited Press International and then for the AP. And come up being a police reporter in Chicago. I thought I was more equipped to deal with the dirty world that existed than some guy that was editor of Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News... On the other hand, I met a lot of people who were editors of the Harvard Crimson or worked for David Halberstam [editor of the Crimson] who were great reporters... I’d like to think that being on the street like I was for years helped.

According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”..

Pentagon officials, in turn, accuse Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, of a loss of nerve.

Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline....

I think we got caught up in something that won't work, the war won't end well for this government.

As for the source question, you know, I’ve been doing this so long.... you know, I’m lucky. I’ve had, for 20 or 30 or 40 years, people inside who not only are faithful to what they’re doing, but also are not afraid to be critical of it. And so, that’s the kind of source that, you know, reporters dream about. And I’ve had people like that for forever. And I still do.

At least one avowedly antiwar member of Congress was among those placed under surveillance by the C.I.A., the sources said.

The Carter administration followed Ford's precedent by tightly restricting access to the high-quality imagery: even Great Britain, America's closest ally in the intelligence world, was limited to seeing photographs on a

The next morning, according to Allen, there was a meeting of Reagan's high command at which Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger proposed canceling the F-16 aircraft sale. Others at the meeting, including Vice President George Bush and Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, agreed that some sanctions against Israel were essential. Reagan glanced at Allen at one point and with a gesture made it clear he had no intention of taking any such step: "He rolled his eyes at me," Allen said.

I’ve never been interested in socializing with pols or cozying up to money types at the self-important cocktail get togethers—the star-fu----- parties, I always liked to call them.

I’ve been a freelancer for much of my career. In 1969, I broke the story of a unit of American soldiers in Vietnam who... were ordered to attack an ordinary peasant village.. and told to kill on sight. The boys murdered, raped and mutilated for hours, with no enemy to be found.

Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one: “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”