Review: Cover-Up

Hersh talked to a lot of people to get tips that led to stories

Journalism students idolise people like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in 1972. 

But there's another journalist they should look up to too -- Seymour Hersh.

Poitras and Obenhaus who directed Cover-Up

His life and career is covered in the fascinating 117-minute documentary, Cover-Up, by directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. She is best known for her documentaries on Edward Snowden and the Sackler family.

In 2005 Poitras approached Hersh about doing a documentary about him, but it took him 20 years to finally agree.

He's a prickly character, and Hersh is filmed in his office, with piles of files all around him, files filled with faded yellow note pads filled with illegible handwriting, and a Rolodex on his desk. But hey, he uses an iPhone and Macbook to keep reporting.

During the Vietnam War Hersh was a freelancer -- a freelancer(!) when he uncovered American soldiers had shot and killed up to 500 civilian men, women, children and babies in a remote Vietnamese village.

Hersh says the US military officials were angry their soldiers were being killed and to up the numbers of Vietnamese deaths, they randomly killed innocent people. He managed to get a tip on the soldier charged with killing 109 people, tracked him down and spoke to him.

He then managed to interview other soldiers who were eyewitnesses or participated in the massacre. 

Hersh's reporting gave more ammunition to those opposed to the war.

Hersh is still his prickly self, trusting no one

It was his ability to track down and talk to people that made Hersh either praised or feared. US President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were caught on tape calling the journalist "a son of a bitch", angered that he was able to find out so much information.

Is it no wonder Hersh was either praised or feared.

After Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story, Hersh, who was then at the New York Times, was told to go find stories, and he managed to find out the burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters were still being paid hush money. 

This story helped keep the story alive and bring more information to the public about the scandal, that eventually led to Nixon's resignation. Hersh wrote over 40 stories about Watergate, that were mostly published on the front page.

Hersh also reported on how the CIA spent millions to destabilise the socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende and after a coup d'etat, installed a military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.

The documentary also gets Hersh to talk about his father, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who played the violin. He says his family was very short on words and he never knew his father had escaped the horrors of the Nazis and wished he had known before so he could ask.

He still has lots of files all over his office

His family had two sets of twins -- Hersh had two twin older sisters, and he and his brother were twins too. His father had a dry cleaning business, and expected Hersh to take over. He didn't like the work but did what was expected of him. He had to quit school to look after his ailing father and on the side Hersh read a lot of books. But when his father died of cancer, this gives Hersh the opportunity to get a college education and the instructor felt he was more qualified for university and got him enrolled into the University of Chicago.

He randomly met a reporter and thought the job was so exciting that he started as a copyboy and a month later became a crime reporter.

Cover-Up also recounts the torture in the prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq from 2004-2007. When he was able to get the photographs of prisoners tortured by US soldiers, and obtained a report by a general that listed all the things that were done to prisoners, Hersh was able to write the story that put Secretary for Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the hot seat.

Rumsfeld even tried to explain the difference between abuse and torture in a bid to disclaim the article.

But Hersh didn't get everything right. When he was researching into US President John F Kennedy's alleged romance with Marilyn Monroe, he claimed to have letters between the two, but they turned out to be fabricated by a known forger. That put a big dent into Hersh's reputation, but he looks back at it as dodging a bullet, as those so-called letters did not make it into his book, The Dark Side of Camelot.

Strangely he also felt Syrian President Bashir al-Assad couldn't have used chemical warfare on his own people...

Nevertheless, Hersh is still kicking and writing on his Substack account. During the filming he is shown talking to a source on the phone, getting information about Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Cover-Up was intense to watch, with a few sarcastic moments sprinkled throughout, but also eye-opening for someone like myself who is not familiar with Hersh's work. It's people like him who inspire younger journalists to try to find the truth. What he did was just talk to people and you never know -- they might just slip some information that could lead to something big.

Cover-Up

Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus

117 minutes