It’s the birthday of one America’s greatest investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh, born on this day in 1937. He became famous for breaking some of the major stories of our times, including the Abu Ghraib story for for The New Yorker, and numerous shockers about Watergate for the New York Times. That on top of award-winning books such as The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House.

But the story that made him famous was a story none of the major publications would pick up and he wound up selling as a free-lancer thorugh the wires — his uncovering of the American army massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. He turned those reports into two stunning books, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath, and Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4.

Below, an excerpt from a speech Hersh gave at Northwestern University, in which  he talks about those reports ….