A seminarian who read Orwell to train himself became a Pulitzer-sharing war correspondent
Chris Hedges studied for the Presbyterian ministry at Harvard, then left for a year to learn Spanish in Bolivia and prepared for reporting by working through Orwell's collected works. He went on to cover wars for The New York Times for fifteen years and shared in a 2002 Pulitzer Prize.
A Vermonter by birth, from St. Johnsbury, Hedges arrived on September 18, 1956, and grew up in rural Schoharie County, New York. His father was a Second World War veteran, a Presbyterian minister and an anti-war campaigner. On a scholarship to Loomis Chaffee boarding school in Connecticut, the young Hedges started an underground paper that the school banned, earning him probation. At Colgate University he helped found an LGBT student group and took an English degree in 1979.
At Harvard Divinity School he studied under James Luther Adams, learned classical Greek, ran a small church in Boston's Roxbury neighbourhood and boxed for the Greater Boston YMCA. Correspondence with the British journalist Robert Cox, then covering Argentina's Dirty War, persuaded him that journalism could serve his ministry. Based in Buenos Aires, he reported on the Falklands War for NPR before returning to finish his Master of Divinity in 1983.
Through the 1980s he reported on conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, and from 1984 to 1988 ran The Dallas Morning News bureau for Central America. Noam Chomsky counted him among the few American reporters there worthy of the name. Hired by The New York Times in 1990, he refused to join the military's press pool during the first Gulf War, was detained by the US Army and lost his credentials, yet kept reporting and entered Kuwait alongside sympathetic Marines. He later led the paper's Middle East and Balkan bureaus.
In 2003 the Times formally reprimanded him for speaking out against the Iraq War, and he resigned two years later. He then wrote a Truthdig column for 14 years, hosted a programme called On Contact on the Russian state-backed RT America, and now writes weekly for Scheerpost. His 2002 book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Source: Chris Hedges
