Hedges Profile

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Hedges began writing for the city desk of TheNew York Times in 1990 after taking time off to learn Arabic. His first article described the decline in Protestant ministers willing to work in poor, inner-city areas. He told the story through a young, idealistic minister in Brooklyn, who left after two and half years, exhausted and disillusioned.

After a few months the first Gulf War began to rumble and Hedges was sent to the Middle East. He reported first from Jerusalem and later became the Times’ Middle East bureau chief based in Cairo, where he was responsible for covering twenty-two countries.

On his brisk rise to one of the most important positions in modern media Hedges, now 50, is noncommittal.

“My career was never the point. I think I was always more interested in the issues that I was covering,” Hedges said. “If you care deeply about issues, especially volatile issues, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s not always career-enhancing to do what I do. In fact, it’s [often] not. But I cared more about what I was writing. I cared more about explaining a reality or giving a voice to people who weren’t heard in American society than I did about my career.”

While covering the first Gulf War Hedges’ press credentials were revoked several times for his refusal to speak only to designated personnel and his unwillingness to remain in specified areas. At the close of the war, he was taken prisoner for four days by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion in southern Iraq. When the Iraqis stripped him of his M-65 jacket, he wrote, he had three books in the pockets: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, The Iliad, and Joseph Conrad’s Outcast of Islands.  In an account of those four days published afterwards, he describes how the young Iraqi soldiers demonstrated compassion by covering their sleeping captives with extra blankets at night and giving their prisoners the lion’s share of what meager food and water they had.

A few months after returning from Iraq, Hedges wrote a story describing a poor, isolated group of people of mixed Indian, black and European ancestry called Sloughters who live in a valley in Hedges’ hometown of Schoharie, forty miles west of Albany in upstate New York. As a child, Hedges’ father was one of few townspeople to show sympathy for the Sloughters and stand up for them against the Schoharie principal, who tried to kick them out of school. The article reflects the class difference that has existed since the Civil War between the Sloughters and the people who live in the town. It is a brief portrait of a forgotten area, but one that renders precisely the poverty and cultural history that exist at the end of a dirt road. As Hedges described the small homes in the Sloughters’ valley, he writes, “Some houses lack indoor plumbing, but few lack American flags.”

Hedges was continually drawn to such people, within the U.S. and abroad. In 1993 he wrote a similar story about the isolation of lepers in Mulkalla, Yemen. Hedges hiked to their isolated outpost on the side of a mountain and described the alienation and discrimination the Lepurs have suffered for hundreds of years. Two months later he wrote about the Yazidi, a small, dwindling religious sect in northern Iraq that incorporates Satan into their worship. Living among the Kurds and persecuted by Saddam Hussein’s regime, a few thousand Yazidi remain around Mosul carrying out ancient rituals.

It is this dichotomy that makes Chris Hedges’ journalism so compelling. He has reported unflinchingly on the most brutal acts of humanity in recent history, calling governments to task for their policies. He allows himself to be consumed by savagery and acknowledges that war was, for many years, a narcotic for him. But in the midst of these stories he demonstrates a compassion and sympathy for the oppressed and forgotten. He remains hopeful.

“He holds together things that are in conflict with each other and refuses to let either go. He holds both a tragic sense of life and the reality of much of our happiness and excitement coming through addictions,” Brown said of Hedges. “He tells the truth because he hasn’t despaired.”

In 1995 Hedges moved to the Balkans to report on the conflicts there. His wife and son lived in Zagreb while he traveled throughout the region. At the time, he would tell friends that war is a young man’s game and he, now in his late thirties, was getting old. After the war in Kosovo, he decided he’d had enough.