Profile: Chris Hedges

On a windy Saturday in May 2003, Chris Hedges rose to give the commencement address to about a thousand people at Rockford College in Illinois. In the video of the speech, posted on Youtube.com, Hedges stands in a purple gown in front of a purple fabric background flapping in the wind. Well under six feet, with thin blond hair, Hedges has heavy-lidded eyes and thick, wire-rimmed glasses. At his side sits a woman translating his words into sign language. As Hedges speaks and the audience begins to react, loudly and violently to his words, the translator’s smile becomes increasingly helpless. Her gesticulations grow frantic as she looks out upon an audience screaming, sneering, blowing air horns and turning their backs to the stage. Hedges does not stop speaking until someone unplugs his microphone cord.

The speech was a meditation on war focusing on Iraq. It was at once a condemnation of United States military action there up to that point, and a grim prediction of what was to come. Three years later its prescience is striking.

“We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand,” Hedges said. “Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us as well.”

After the microphone is cut out and applause erupts, the college’s president pleads with the audience to allow Hedges to continue amidst boos, air-horn blasts and “U-S-A” chants.

“As someone who knows Iraq, speaks Arabic, and spent seven years in the Middle East,” Hedges went on, “if the Iraqis believe rightly or wrongly that we come only for oil and occupation, they will begin a long, bloody war of attrition.”

After Hedges finished the 18-minute speech, he was rushed from the scene by campus security.

The speech and the audience’s reaction became national news. At the time, Hedges was a reporter for The New York Times and conservative commentators seized on the incident as proof of liberal bias at the paper.

A May 23, 2003 editorial in The Wall Street Journal wrote of Hedges, “His opinions aren’t much different from those that appear everyday in the newspaper that employs him, and those views are shared by an influential minority of Americans.”

The Times issued Hedges a reprimand for “public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper’s impartiality.”

Shortly afterward, he would leave the Times after fifteen years reporting from the Middle East, the Balkans, and winning a Pulitzer as part of a team covering global terrorism after the September attacks.

When asked whether he would have done anything differently on that day in Rockford, Hedges replied, “Well, I probably would begin by congratulating the graduating class and then probably would have done everything the same.”

It was the first and last time he would give the commencement address at a college.

“If you invite me to give a commencement talk, that’s what you get,” Hedges said. “If you want ‘follow your dreams’ then you better invite somebody else.”

In his book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Hedges writes that he was evacuated from El Salvador three times because the U.S. Embassy there had received tips that death squads planned to kill him.

“When I finally did leave,” Hedges writes, “my last act was, in a frenzy of rage and anguish, to leap over the KLM counter in the airport in Costa Rica because of a perceived slight by a hapless airline clerk. I beat him to the floor as his bewildered colleagues locked themselves in the room behind the counter. Blood streamed down his face and mine. I refused to wipe the dried stains off my cheeks on the flight to Madrid, and I carry a scar on my face from where he thrust his pen into my cheek. War’s sickness had become mine.”