It makes sense that investigative documentarian Laura Poitras (Oscar-winning “Citizenfour”) would admire investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. They share a distrust of institutional power, whether governments or publishing empires. Poitras saw a way to profile Hersh’s 50-year career and, at the same time, expose the failures of the United States and its media over decades.
Hersh broke out big time in 1969 when he exposed the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre and its cover-up in a cable filed through Dispatch News Service, which was picked up by more than 30 newspapers. It earned him the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970. His career spans stints at the A.P., The New York Times (where he filed 40 stories on Watergate), The New Yorker (where he broke the horrors of Abu Ghraib), freelance reporting and book-writing, and current filings on Substack.
Hersh was already renowned in his field when, after twenty years of chasing him, Poitras finally convinced him to participate in a documentary. Three years later, the result is festival favorite “Cover-Up,” which Netflix will release next month. Now at the ripe age of 88, Hersh carries this non-fiction thriller like a movie star.
Over the years, time and again, Hersh grew impatient with his employers, choosing to leave them. “When you do the kind of stuff I do,” said Hersh during an interview with Poitras on Zoom, “even at the A.P., that was hard for certain editors. The way I put it, at a certain point, even with somebody as bright and civilized as [New Yorker editor David] Remnick, this guy comes in every other year and drops a dead rat full of lice on his desk and said, ‘That’s the story I want to do. It’s going to take months and cost you a lot of money. And then if you do get it, you’re going to go broke with lawsuits.’ Somebody like me, it’s a little tiresome for editors. Whatever I did, I’ve left the A.P. and the New York Times and The New Yorker; there never was a goodbye party for me.”
Getting attention for his work isn’t new to Hersh. He’s been in the spotlight ever since My Lai. “I gave speeches to thousands of people not letting me leave,” he said, “in ’69 at McGill University, Harvard, and Michigan, so I’ve been there before. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now.”
Why did he resist Poitras for so long? “I just didn’t want to do it,” he said. “I didn’t want to start talking about myself at that time.” He thinks he was consumed with a book on Dick Cheney. Later on, when his old friend and documentary collaborator Mark Obenhaus raved about Poitras’ eventual Oscar-nominee “All the Beauty and Bloodshed,” Hersh caught up with more of Poitras’ films and came around. Obenhaus joined the filmmaking team as co-director.
Poitras was “obsessed” with Hersh. “The size, the body of work speaks for itself,” she said, “plus it had particular resonance with me to have somebody who is so consistently critical of this country and its policies and exposing them and then also the failures of the press throughout, across decades.”
What changed his mind? “You could argue, what is my ultimate motive? To make an America that’s a different America?,” he said. “I saw her work, and I knew that she’s always interested in more than just the person. It happened, and I’m not sorry about it, but I still I don’t like putting it all out there. I had to do a lot more than I wanted to with her.”
That included, over three years, just over 40 interviews and about 120 hours of interview footage. “We covered his whole career,” said Poitras. “There’s sections of his reporting career that we didn’t end up including that we spent a lot of time working on because we didn’t want to cross anything off the table too early. We want to give everything a shot. And then we had another 100 hours of interviews. And we had almost 7,000 different archival assets, from footage to audio to documents and declassified documents. And then there was Sy’s archive of notes. So it was a big undertaking from an editing perspective. And Sy’s written 11 books. He’s published hundreds, probably thousands, of articles. So we just had to wrap our minds around all of that.”
Somehow Poitras’ team edited the film down to just 117 minutes. Hersh had no say in the matter. “It was hard,” said Poitras. “I was committed to doing feature length and not making it episodic. I was interested in the connections across time between My Lai, Iraq, Gaza. And to tell that story through the lens of Sy’s reporting, we were going to be able to tell a history of this country. You follow the material, you see where it leads. And in that process some sections I love, and we spent months working on, didn’t make it into the into the film because we were trying to hit two hours.”
In the movie, Hersh looks uncomfortable being interviewed in his private sanctuary, although he has high praise for the film’s research team, led by producer Olivia Streisand. “I would call it more like an invasion,” he said. “The archival stuff they did was superb by any standard. And I’ve worked with a lot of good archivists, people who research for me. It was also a little terrifying, because they often got on the edge of people that I talked to. I was dealing with a lot of people that nobody knew about. They could have gone a lot further with different things. There are people still in public life that talk to me.”
Hersh freaks out in the movie because he and his sons had gone through the papers and notebooks and sequestered the things they didn’t want the camera to see, but some had crossed over. “We were committed to protect all of his sources,” said Poitras. “Even though it made him nervous that we were seeing things. I would have a hard time with people going through my notebooks.”
Hersh had deep sources at the epicenter of the Washington beltway. “Confidentiality of sources is essential in my business,” said Hersh. “There was just so much I didn’t want people to know I knew (laughs) in terms of protecting people who had public lives that were honorable, but they also worked on the black side.”
One flattering moment comes from one of the Nixon tapes: the President calls Hersh “a son of a bitch,” followed by, “but he’s always right.” These tapes surfaced some ten years after the initial round of revelations, Hersh said, which is why he had never heard this one. “They were doing the kind of research that I like to think only I do,” he said, laughing.
The rich archives allowed the filmmakers to build dramatic scenes, like Hersh debating William Colby, the head of the CIA, in the aftermath of the Family Jewels story. “That’s out of the ‘Parallax View’,” said Poitras. “You see him standing up and telling the head of the CIA that he needs to resign and they need to clean house. That’s so cinematic. We were inspired by ‘All the President’s Men’ and ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ that whole ’70s idea that the government is not to be trusted and is lying to you, and is doing things like mind control.”
Poitras is tickled to have Netflix’s marketing muscle behind her: she wants the movie to reach a global audience. “I’m interested in the bigger issues about violence in the United States, about cycles of impunity, about wars that never should have happened, about the failure of the press to ask the right questions at the right time,” she said. “I’m looking forward to those people who don’t know Sy’s body of work who get to encounter it, because it’s truly inspiring to see Sy consistently countering the status quo, not accepting the official line. And we need more of it that pisses off everyone. It doesn’t matter which political party. Sy has gotten under everybody’s skin.”
That’s because Hersh always calls it like he sees it. And he’s worried. “Whoever heard of having a president as a felon?,” he said. “We have a felon in the White House and and we have a collapse of morality and a collapse of integrity. I feel sorry for the editors of newspapers right now. When the founding fathers were in the first Continental Congress, they were making the Constitution. And if you go back and look at those debates they had, the assumption always was that those in office would have integrity. The Founding Fathers had in mind the notion of a check and balance: the presidency would be checked by the Congress and the Supreme Court. And to see the dissolution of integrity that’s happened now is very frightening to me. We’re still in the middle of it.”
He added, “I don’t know how it’s going to play out in the next round of elections. These are desperadoes in the White House. They’re not honest people, and they’re not fair people, and they don’t meet any of the standards that the country was founded on. The newspapers are doing better now than they were six months ago. They’re beginning to get it. We’re in a real crisis, but the significance of the crisis isn’t quite portrayed by the newspapers. They still see a process, a president makes a decision, etc. I don’t, I see a destruction of what our founding fathers thought would be a just society.”
Poitras and Obenhaus’ “Cover-Up” is a dark portrait of the United States. “It talks about not just the wrongdoing,” said Poitras, “but this country’s failure to hold people accountable once those crimes are exposed. It’s like ‘The Hunger Games’ we’re living in. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who butchered a journalist in Istanbul comes to dinner at the White House and there’s Tim Cook around, and Elon Musk.”
In the end, Hersh is glad he did the film. “It’s an amazing movie, much better than I thought anybody could ever do,” he said. “I didn’t think anybody could get it right. It’s so complicated, because I’m full of dead rats full of lice.”
“Cover-Up” will be released in select theaters in December, with a streaming release on Netflix to follow on Friday, December 26.