i thank them for coming here to hear me talk about seymour hersh hersh -- "seymour hersh: scoop artist." who is this man i call the scoop artist? sy hersh, seymour hersh, born in 1937 in chicago to immigrant parents. his father owned a dry cleaner -- had a dry cleaning business in chicago. his mother was a housekeeper. he went to public school in chicago. he went two years to a community college and then went to the university of chicago, got a degree in history. he then started law school, did do very well. he failed out of law school in less than a year. sy hersh is the man most people regard as the best investigative reporter in american history. he is the man who is one more word prices than any other journalist. he has an icon and a hero with hundreds and hundreds of american journalists. he is the darling of the political left. he is the man the political right for us to despise and demonize. he is the man who back in 1969 revealed to us the massacre by american soldiers of 500 civilians in a small village in vietnam called me live. he is the man who almost single-handedly got th

in drugs seymour hersh. i know i'm particularly searing and in saying i've got to do something about this guy because at the top of my thing is has hersh file. i was beginning to stuff the file with all sorts of stuff on seymour hersh. somebody has to do this guys were free at some point in time. in the year 2004 i wrote a biography of the now forgotten but once very famous american journalist charles edman russell russell didn't like seymour hersh and he was angry about the conditions. he had the story that was most realistic known as the muckraking journalists. i do his biography and i'm trying to figure out okay what comes next? of course what becomes to mind for me was sy hersh. charleston russell was dead. i could only find one person who knew him. when you write a biography about someone who is dead it's actually easier. you don't have to worry about offending them. you don't have to worry about making contact with them. you don't have to worry about where they are. you know where they are. on the other

whether anyone can persist and have as many scoops and stories as seymour hersh, that i am not sure. certainly there will be tremendous investigative reporting and investigative journalism out there. the internet has given us all sorts of possibilities. what is a little bit weird is no deletes his material and it gets right up there. in 1975 he would have leaked that material to a journalist and now the direct publications can use it. in some ways it's the nature of traditional journalism that has been turned upside down. some of that is good and some of it is not good. >> maybe i miss remembering that the articles in "the new yorkere u.s. would be invading iran and didn't he take a strong stand on that? i am wondering if you know anything about that? >> he wrote a number of times that the bush administration had very specific and was making very specific plans for an invasion in iran. that never happened and of course he got it wrong. what i say in the book and what a number of people told me is when his articles kept coming out in "the new yorker" it was impossible for them to do a

at 7:30, robert moraldi profiles seymour hersh. at 9 p.m. eastern, ishmael beah follows up his memoir with his novel, "radiance of tomorrow." and at 10 p.m., "after words," with john rizzo. he talks about the 30 years he sent with the cia. and we wrap up tonight's prime time programming at 11 eastern with co-authors of "the second machine age." they talk about the technological advancements that have taken other our -- over our lives and our economy. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> i was a candidate -- [inaudible] my interest sort of fell in that field. but i feel like before 9/11 i would call us accidental muslims because, ultimately, i think many of us are perhaps of a certain religion through an accident of birth. and i think what 9/11 did was -- and i'm not alone that way, i think it did that to many american muslims -- it forces you to grapple with the notion of what it means to be american islam. after all, 9/11 was on trial. and every talking pundit on tv was an expert suddenly, and you were told that you couldn't be

. >> next on booktv, robert miraldi talks about life and career seymour hersh. mr. hersh broke stories on the chemical and biological weapons. the beeline massacre and it, watergate, cia domestic spying on the abuse of prisoners at abu ghraib prison in iraq. this is about an hour and 20