Seymour Hersh, David Ignatius, Bernard Kalb, and John Burns went to Georgetown on Tuesday for their Weintal Prizes in diplomatic reporting:

The New York Times' respected John Burns opened the award ceremonies with optimism: "By early this year, many of us had come to gloomy conclusions about where it all was going," he said, "but Jan. 30 and the elections changed our assumptions.

"We stayed off the streets for the first few hours. We sent out our Iraqi scouts, and they called us on mobile phones. Suddenly, they were saying, 'There are people going to the polls!' We went out and found something quite impossible, and we began to wonder whether we had pulled back too far in our reporting: They were right and we were wrong.

"In that day, we found increasingly that the people of Iraq turned out overwhelmingly—because on that day, they amounted to something. The fact is that something remarkable has happened—the Iraqis are talking in conclaves of issues that have not been addressed for 50 years."

Seymour Hersh, another honoree who has done outstanding work in The New Yorker about the underside of the war, disagreed. "I think it's going to be a disaster," he told the audience brought together by the diplomacy and foreign service schools of the university. "Abu Ghraib was attacked twice last week. The people I talk to are very skeptical. Sure, the Shiites and the Kurds voted ... But we're still fighting the people we started fighting. And everything I know says we know little about the resistance."

About halfway through the evening, the talk among the four awardees—the other two were David Ignatius of The Washington Post and Bernard Kalb, formerly of CBS News—turned to the media, in the context of the Iraqi experience. Here the attitudes reflected not only the difficulties of working with this administration, but also a kind of new atmosphere in the country.

"I have never seen a time when what we write has such little effect on what the government does," Hersh said at one point. "This is not like Nixon and Johnson and Vietnam—this group in the White House has an agenda, and it won't stop."