An Evening with Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh

12:00AM / Monday, February 05, 2007Print Story | Email Story

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh will discuss his bestseller "Chain of Command" on Tuesday, Feb. 13, at Williams College. The talk is scheduled for 8 p.m. in Chapin Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is available on a first come basis. "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" chronicles the path from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to the American prisoner abuse scandals of Abu Ghraib. The book is based on articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. In a 2004 interview in Salon, Hersh said that he thought that Rumsfeld and senior administration officials had a chance in the fall of 2002 to set the limits and chose not to. "The chain of command is very responsive," he said. "If you put out the word that you're not going to tolerate this, it's not going to happen. But that's not the word they put out." Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and has written dozens of stories on military and security matters surrounding the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. One of the most controversial and award-winning journalists in the past 40 years, he was the first to expose the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War in 1969. He also revealed the wiretapping authorized by Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration and the C.I.A.'s sale of U.S. weapons to Libya during the 1980s. More recently, Hersh uncovered the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. His work has won more than a dozen major journalism prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and four George Polk Awards. His best-selling books, "The Dark Side of Camelot" about President Kennedy and "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," won major national awards and were on bestseller lists for weeks. His other book prizes include the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times award for biography, and the Sidney Hillman award. He won an Investigative Reporters & Editors prize for the Kissinger book in 1983, and another in 1992 for "The Samson Option," a study of American foreign policy and the Israeli nuclear bomb program. In 2004, Hersh won a National Magazine Award in public interest for his three pieces, "Lunch with the Chairman," "Selective Intelligence," and "The Stovepipe," an investigation of neoconservatives at the Pentagon. Richard Perle threatened to sue Hersh for libel after "Lunch with the Chairman" was published, but he failed to file suit. Hersh began his career in journalism working for The New York Times.

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Williamstown Board Hears Concerns About 'Hometown Heroes' Banners

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:32AM / Wednesday, September 16, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Kurt Durocher told the Williamstown Select Board that he had received nothing but positive feedback from the North County communities where he proposed participation in the Hometown Heroes banner program.

Then Williamstown residents started to weigh in.

Durocher was before the board Monday evening to seek its blessing to put banners recognizing living and deceased military veterans on utility poles in Williamstown, an initiative that has been embraced in all but one of the other municipalities in the district where he serves as Veterans' Service Officer.

"The only negative I've had right now, and it's not really negative, [the Town of ] Florida doesn't want banners to go on Route 2, the Mohawk Trail, for safety reasons, understandably," Durocher said. "So we're trying to figure out an alternate way to make that work in Florida."

By and large, though, the reception to the program has been encouraging, Durocher said.

"I'll use Adams as an example," he said. "They've had a program for many, many years, but it's only for [military personnel] killed in action. Now that I've been allowed to take over that program … there's been a huge outpouring of support, because now we get living veterans on the poles as well.

"The only negative I've had is certain people want their banners in certain locations. So what we did in North Adams is we just did a random draw. I can't please everybody. I've got people who want a banner in a certain location, but three other people want that same location.It was a straight random draw for them."

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