Writing in 1940, George Orwell opined in a review of a Bertrand Russell book that “we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Much the same can be said about the more than fifty-year career of journalist Seymour Hersh, whose pioneering exposés of the lies of the Great Powers report and affirm facts that follow Orwell’s dictum.

His memoir Reporter showcases Hersh as nothing less than journalism’s energizer bunny, unstoppable in exposing not only the My Lai massacre in Vietnam — for which his accumulated freelance pieces won him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1970 — but for essential information breaking the Watergate scandal cover-up and the Nixon administration’s development of offensive chemical and bacteriological weapons.

Reporter works its way through a conga line of miscreant US presidents, from Kennedy to Bush (though Obama and Trump get scant attention) and the venality of Henry Kissinger, of whom Hersh says, “the man lied the way most people breathed.” We’re told about the excesses and connections of a major West Coast mob fixer, the domestic spying efforts of the CIA in direct violation of its governing charter, the sexual abuse by soldiers of male Iraqi inmates at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, and the incapacity of the bulk of a credulous US press corps to do more than cozy up to administration sources and miss the big stories.