It’s not hard to imagine why documentarian Laura Poitras spent 20 years trying to convince Seymour Hersh to make a film about his life. The 88-year-old Pulitzer-winning journalist has an impressive résumé. It was Hersh who broke the story, in 1969, of the horrific US army massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, invigorating the US anti-war movement; 35 years later, his reports for the New Yorker revealed the gruesome extent of US military torture at Abu Ghraib.
It’s also not hard to see why it took Hersh a full two decades to agree to make Cover-Up, Poitras’s new documentary, co-directed with Mark Obenhaus, on Hersh’s six-plus decades digging up the stories buried by those in power. An old-school reporter who has courted controversy for his extensive use of anonymous sources, Hersh is a prickly and resistant subject, reluctant to relive the past yet eager to excoriate abuses of power with a torrent of reporting.
But he makes a wry, undaunted and absolutely scathing guide through 60-plus years of US government abuses, from indiscriminate killing in Vietnam to underwriting Israel’s massacre of civilians in Gaza. As in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Poitras’s outstanding 2022 film on artist Nan Goldin’s efforts to remove the Sackler name from the prestigious art galleries that managed to weave together the opioid crisis, Aids activism and personal history into a singular narrative, Cover-Up demonstrates Poitras’s genius for structure. The 117-minute film, which premiered at the Venice film festival, proceeds chronologically through Hersh’s most significant scoops and scattershot through his personal life, masterfully integrating his tart personal accounts with over half a century of shameful US history.
Cover-Up smartly spends large sections enmeshed not just in Hersh’s process of reporting, but the reporting itself. It often plays, to its benefit, like a straightforward history documentary, relying on sharply edited and restored archival footage to evoke and educate on some of the US government’s most ignominious recent chapters. Among them: My Lai, in which US soldiers raped and murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, including infants; the CIA’s illegal surveillance of the US student movement against the war in Vietnam; the CIA’s illicit and ultimately failed attempts to breed their own Manchurian candidate via LSD; covert US involvement in the installment of the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile; the slow-motion executive car crash that was Watergate.
All the while there’s Hersh, a consistent gadfly to the people in power, be they US presidents or executives of Gulf+Western or New York Times editors with a direct line to Henry Kissinger, feeding “official source” information to the daily pages like the Kris Jenner of foreign policy. (As Richard Nixon described Hersh in a call to Kissinger: “This son of a bitch is a son of a bitch, but he’s usually right, isn’t he?”) Restless, kinetic, energized by the word no, he’s quick to recite the facts and loath to put himself in the story. “In case anyone cares, this is less and less fun,” he says in what appears to be two sit-down interviews at his home office, surrounded by mountains of faded yellow legal pads. Soon after, fearing leaks of his anonymous sources, he (temporarily) quits the project entirely. Poitras coaxes out details of his upbringing – born to Jewish refugees from Lithuania and Poland, raised in an “unthinking” family on the south side of Chicago, expected to take over his father’s dry cleaning shop – like pulled teeth.
That ironically makes for a pleasurable viewing experience, despite the utter atrocities at hand, though it does leave some trickier aspects of his career unexplored. The bulk of Hersh’s career post-New York Times, in the 80s and 90s, go unmentioned, other than brief clips on the controversies surrounding some of his 11 books. Hersh, who now has a Substack newsletter (retirement seems like a foreign concept) is quick to admit when he was wrong, but the film is light on context. At one point, he acknowledges underestimating the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s cruelty, but the film barely lingers on why that merits a mention (for years, Hersh maintained that the regime’s sarin gas attacks on civilians were misattributed).
But whether inaccurate or, mostly, scarily accurate, Hersh’s dogged pursuit of truth serves to underscore the film’s point, framed by man’s prolific ability to rationalize evil, to metabolize or celebrate or numb to unimaginable violence. In the past: a map of My Lai annotated by a US soldier – “observed approx 50 bodies” next to “ate lunch”. In the present: Hersh on the phone with a source in Gaza, poring over photographs of Israeli military plans on destroyed homes in Gaza, showing they know exactly where civilians are before they bomb them. Cover-Up adeptly illustrates the patterns of official cruelty: deny, downplay, quibble, destroy. Justify on the grounds of “national security”. Repeat. “We’re a culture of enormous violence,” Hersh remarks. “You can’t just have a country who does that and looks the other way.” Brisk, lucid and sweeping, Cover-Up assures that some, at least, will not.
