Seymour Hersh Exposes My Lai Massacre Cover-Up After Army Conceals Atrocity for 20 Months - Wins Pulitzer Prize

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh publishes explosive revelations about the My Lai massacre through Dispatch News Service after both Life and Look magazines refuse the story. Hersh’s investigation begins when he receives a tip on October 22, 1969 about a soldier being court-martialed at Fort Benning for allegedly killing 75 civilians. Following leads from whistleblower Ronald Ridenhour, who had investigated the massacre while serving in the 11th Infantry Brigade, Hersh conducts an independent inquiry that breaks through the Army’s 20-month cover-up.

The Army initially glosses over the massacre, calling it “a successful search-and-destroy mission” and claiming 128 Viet Cong killed without mentioning civilian casualties. On April 12, 1968, the Trident military newspaper reports that operations in My Lai “cost the VC 276 killed” without acknowledging mass civilian deaths. A subsequent criminal investigation finds that “Both individuals failed to report what they had seen, the reporter wrote a false and misleading account of the operation, and the photographer withheld and suppressed from proper authorities the photographic evidence.”

Hersh’s story, published through Dispatch News Service and picked up by more than 30 newspapers on November 13, 1969, reveals the murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians—mostly women, children, and elderly men—by U.S. soldiers. Life Magazine subsequently publishes gruesome photographs taken by an Army photographer during the attack, creating global outrage and accelerating domestic opposition to the war. Hersh wins the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, and the exposure is credited as a turning point in public discourse about Vietnam, emboldening voices demanding an end to the war and making continued justification far more difficult.