Reporter: A Memoir by Seymour Hersh
Dec. 24th, 2023 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The Blurb On The Back:
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author and prominent investigative journalist of our time, a heartfelt, hugely revealing memoir of a career breaking some of the most significant stories of the last half-century.
Seymour Hersh’s fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every major newspaper in the English-speaking world, honours galore, and no small amount of controversy. In this memoir he describes what drove him and how, even when working for some of the US’s most prestigious publications, he worked as an independent outsider. Here, he tels the stories behind his own groundbreaking stories as he chases leads, cultivates sources, and grapples with the weight of what he uncovers, daring to challenge official narratives handed down from the powers that be. In telling these stories, Hersh divulges previously unreported information about some of his biggest scoops, including the My Lai massacre and the horror of Abu Grahib. This is essential reading on the power of the printed word at a time when good journalism is under fire as never before.
Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist known for his work uncovering the My Lai massacre, the Watergate scandal and the Abu Ghraib war crimes. This memoir focuses on his career and how he broke his biggest stories but offers nothing personal, no analysis of changes in the profession or the ways anonymous sources can be used and misused. I think the book suffers for that, leaving it an okay factual read rather than an insightful one.
I picked up this book because I was familiar with the reputation of Seymour Hersh and the work he did on the Vietnam War and Watergate and wanted to know more about his life and career. I can’t fault this book for giving a fairly comprehensive breakdown of his career in journalism, from how he got started to how he approached the stories that made his reputation. He gives a lot of detail on his coverage of the Mai Lai massacre in particular and his involvement in the Watergate reporting. Hersh is noted for his use of anonymous sources and he is more forthcoming about names and sources on his earlier stories (particularly where sources have since deceased or given permission to be disclosed). As a result, his account of uncovering the Abu Grahib atrocities and his coverage of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war really suffer, which is particularly disappointing because Hersh has been a loud critic of the view that President Assad was responsible for using chemical weapons against his people and in the absence of knowing who his sources are (aside from Assad himself and his generals), it does nothing to make his view convincing.
This is one of my big issues with the book. Hersh makes a big deal in the book about his need to protect the anonymity of sources (some of whom have been high ranking insiders at places such as the Pentagon) and how he has been able to demonstrate collaborative sources to reassure his editors. However, he criticises other journalists who have preserved the anonymity of sources even when those sources have been high ranking politicians who are essentially briefing them for their own political ends. His objection seems to be that such journalists are essentially toeing a party line on an unquestioning basis, which runs counter to journalistic ethics. It all seems to boil down to if Hersh agrees with the politics and motivation of the person making the disclosure then that’s fine but if he’s suspicious of the motives of the person making the disclosure then that’s not okay and that’s particularly problematic when he’s apparently willing to believe Assad, who does not have a good track record when it comes to human rights. Hersh doesn’t ever reflect on this or other changes in journalism within this book and that’s a shame because his career has lasted for over 50 years and he’s seen some huge changes in how journalism works, in part caused by the changes to and challenges to funding.
For a memoir that there is almost nothing personal in this book. There’s some information on Hersh’s childhood with his parents and brother and you find out that he’s married with two children, but you don’t even find out the name of his wife until over 200 pages in, when it’s mentioned in passing. I wonder if this is because as Hersh himself says, he never planned to write a memoir and has only done so now because he was under contract to write a book about former Vice President Richard ‘Dick’ Cheney and ran into issues with sourcing and so agreed to write this memoir instead. There’s also no reflection on mistakes and errors that he may have made, which I always think are integral to a good memoir and that is a shame given that Hersh is not shy of patting himself on the back - there are certainly a number of times within the book where he drops in how someone had to point out things that reflect particularly well on him, which did grate after a while.
None of this is to say that this is a bad or unreadable book. The section on how he broke Mai Lai is genuinely fascinating and also horrifying in terms of revealing the lengths that both the military and the government were prepared to go to in order to cover up that and other atrocities and use scapegoats to do so and he is incredibly damning of Henry Kissinger. However I’m not sure that it works as a memoir because by the time you get to the end of the book I don’t think you get much of a sense of what he thinks about his career or journalism’s importance and as a result, you don’t get much of a sense of who he is as a person, just where he’s coming from as a reporter.
The Verdict:
Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist known for his work uncovering the My Lai massacre, the Watergate scandal and the Abu Ghraib war crimes. This memoir focuses on his career and how he broke his biggest stories but offers nothing personal, no analysis of changes in the profession or the ways anonymous sources can be used and misused. I think the book suffers for that, leaving it an okay factual read rather than an insightful one.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
Seymour Hersh’s fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every major newspaper in the English-speaking world, honours galore, and no small amount of controversy. In this memoir he describes what drove him and how, even when working for some of the US’s most prestigious publications, he worked as an independent outsider. Here, he tels the stories behind his own groundbreaking stories as he chases leads, cultivates sources, and grapples with the weight of what he uncovers, daring to challenge official narratives handed down from the powers that be. In telling these stories, Hersh divulges previously unreported information about some of his biggest scoops, including the My Lai massacre and the horror of Abu Grahib. This is essential reading on the power of the printed word at a time when good journalism is under fire as never before.
Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist known for his work uncovering the My Lai massacre, the Watergate scandal and the Abu Ghraib war crimes. This memoir focuses on his career and how he broke his biggest stories but offers nothing personal, no analysis of changes in the profession or the ways anonymous sources can be used and misused. I think the book suffers for that, leaving it an okay factual read rather than an insightful one.
I picked up this book because I was familiar with the reputation of Seymour Hersh and the work he did on the Vietnam War and Watergate and wanted to know more about his life and career. I can’t fault this book for giving a fairly comprehensive breakdown of his career in journalism, from how he got started to how he approached the stories that made his reputation. He gives a lot of detail on his coverage of the Mai Lai massacre in particular and his involvement in the Watergate reporting. Hersh is noted for his use of anonymous sources and he is more forthcoming about names and sources on his earlier stories (particularly where sources have since deceased or given permission to be disclosed). As a result, his account of uncovering the Abu Grahib atrocities and his coverage of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war really suffer, which is particularly disappointing because Hersh has been a loud critic of the view that President Assad was responsible for using chemical weapons against his people and in the absence of knowing who his sources are (aside from Assad himself and his generals), it does nothing to make his view convincing.
This is one of my big issues with the book. Hersh makes a big deal in the book about his need to protect the anonymity of sources (some of whom have been high ranking insiders at places such as the Pentagon) and how he has been able to demonstrate collaborative sources to reassure his editors. However, he criticises other journalists who have preserved the anonymity of sources even when those sources have been high ranking politicians who are essentially briefing them for their own political ends. His objection seems to be that such journalists are essentially toeing a party line on an unquestioning basis, which runs counter to journalistic ethics. It all seems to boil down to if Hersh agrees with the politics and motivation of the person making the disclosure then that’s fine but if he’s suspicious of the motives of the person making the disclosure then that’s not okay and that’s particularly problematic when he’s apparently willing to believe Assad, who does not have a good track record when it comes to human rights. Hersh doesn’t ever reflect on this or other changes in journalism within this book and that’s a shame because his career has lasted for over 50 years and he’s seen some huge changes in how journalism works, in part caused by the changes to and challenges to funding.
For a memoir that there is almost nothing personal in this book. There’s some information on Hersh’s childhood with his parents and brother and you find out that he’s married with two children, but you don’t even find out the name of his wife until over 200 pages in, when it’s mentioned in passing. I wonder if this is because as Hersh himself says, he never planned to write a memoir and has only done so now because he was under contract to write a book about former Vice President Richard ‘Dick’ Cheney and ran into issues with sourcing and so agreed to write this memoir instead. There’s also no reflection on mistakes and errors that he may have made, which I always think are integral to a good memoir and that is a shame given that Hersh is not shy of patting himself on the back - there are certainly a number of times within the book where he drops in how someone had to point out things that reflect particularly well on him, which did grate after a while.
None of this is to say that this is a bad or unreadable book. The section on how he broke Mai Lai is genuinely fascinating and also horrifying in terms of revealing the lengths that both the military and the government were prepared to go to in order to cover up that and other atrocities and use scapegoats to do so and he is incredibly damning of Henry Kissinger. However I’m not sure that it works as a memoir because by the time you get to the end of the book I don’t think you get much of a sense of what he thinks about his career or journalism’s importance and as a result, you don’t get much of a sense of who he is as a person, just where he’s coming from as a reporter.
The Verdict:
Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist known for his work uncovering the My Lai massacre, the Watergate scandal and the Abu Ghraib war crimes. This memoir focuses on his career and how he broke his biggest stories but offers nothing personal, no analysis of changes in the profession or the ways anonymous sources can be used and misused. I think the book suffers for that, leaving it an okay factual read rather than an insightful one.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.