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Renowned journalist visits campus

Seymour Hersh accepts the William Allen White award for excellence

By Francesca Chambers

Friday, February 8, 2008

Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, visits campus today to accept the William Allen White award for excellence in journalism. Hersh will receive the award at 1:30 p.m. this afternoon in Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story in The New Yorker in 2004, said he was not surprised by the scandal. He also said he was not the only reporter who knew about Abu Ghraib, though he was the first to report it.

“There was no moral leadership at all from the president. In 2001 he said we’re going to invite them out of their snake holes,” Hersh said. “Reporters limit themselves. I can guarantee I was not the first person to hear about Abu Ghraib. Any reporter had to know. It was so bad that the woman was sending messages home telling her family to come to the prison and kill them.”

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Contributed photo

Seymour Hersh

Ann Brill, dean of journalism, said Hersh was not receiving the award for exposing Abu Ghraib, but for his lifetime achievements. Abu Ghraib was not the first controversy that Hersh exposed. Hersh earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his article on the My Lai massacre and cover-up that took place during the Vietnam War. Hersh said other reporters knew about My Lai but they chose to censor themselves.

Sureva Towler, a Lawrence resident who was neighbors with Hersh in Washington D.C., said Hersh was incredibly opinionated, but that he was usually right.

“Sy is a class act. Sy calls him like he sees him,” Towler said. “He is one of the most honest people I have ever met. He serves the profession well, better than most reporters these days. He couldn’t not be controversial if he tried.”

Towler, who is a columnist for the Denver Post and commutes between Colorado and Kansas, said one her favorite Hersh memories occurred when her daughter was about 10 years old. Towler said her daughter had just come home from school and was holding a history book. She said Hersh grabbed it, turned to the page about the Vietnam War, swore and threw the book into the sewer.

“That makes a big impression on kids,” Towler said. “I think it made a thinker out of her.”

Towler said Hersh was a good friend of hers and they talked regularly but that she had not seen him in 10 years. She said she was looking forward to asking Hersh what he thought Karl Rove was doing lately.

“I don’t trust him. I haven’t heard from him lately and that makes me very nervous because he operates behind the scenes, and I don’t know what scenes he’s operating behind,”

Towler said.

Brill said a board of 72 trustees decided who would win the William Allen White award for the following year each spring. She said Hersh has been on the ballot several times before.

Brill said she asked Hersh in August, on a visit to Washington D.C., if he would come to the University of Kansas and accept the award. Brill said Hersh told her he has had a lot of invitations to speak this year and that he was focusing on college campuses.

Hersh’s visit to the University is not his first to the area. In 1962 Hersh worked on Fort Riley’s base newspaper while he was in the Army. Hersh said the Army was not for him, and so he pursued a career in journalism instead. Before he began regularly contributing to The New Yorker, Hersh worked at The New York Times. Hersh left the Times in 1979. He also published eight books, including his most recent book, “Chain of Command,” which is about his role in exposing Abu Ghraib.

Next week, Hersh’s latest article, “A Strike in the Dark: Why did Israel bomb Syria?” will appear in The New Yorker. The article, which is already available online, criticizes newspapers’ reports of an Israeli raid on Syria in September 2007.

Hersh’s article claimed there was no solid evidence of an ongoing nuclear-weapons program in Syria and thus the attack was unwarranted. Hersh said reports by the United States government and other major newspapers, like the Washington Post, incorrectly described the incident.

“The whole principle of a nation bombing another nation and we say what they did was an act of war. That’s an outrage,” Hersh said. “Who are we to help the Israelis do that? I don’t like that in the first place.”

Hersh said other news outlets printed the information they were given without further investigating the matter. He said these newspapers were used to spread the incorrect account. Hersh said journalists needed to think about who was using them, and why, before they print an article. He said he knew the article was complicated, and that it would be several days before most people read it, but that he preferred this form of journalism more than writing for a daily newspaper.

“The nice thing about the New Yorker is that it has over a million readers,” Hersh said. “It does have juice and it doesn’t matter when you do a story. It’s much harder than writing a story and saying George Bush is a dumbie.”

Hersh said he was unsure what he would speak about at the ceremony, but that he generally talked about what is on his mind. He said he has done speeches where he teaches people how to read that day’s newspaper.

“Just because it’s in the newspaper does not make it right,” Hersh said. “We’re probably in the biggest danger we have been in as a nation. I’m not sure if Bush lied, but what he did was knowingly wrong. Unraveling that is a really important message.”

— Edited by Jessica Sain-Baird

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