Cover-Up review: Outstanding portrait of Seymour Hersh’s half-century of investigative journalism
Cover-Up
Director: Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus
Cert: None
Genre: Documentary
Starring: Seymour Hersh
Running Time: 1 hr 58 mins
Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus open Cover-Up by returning to the episode that both set Seymour Hersh’s career in motion and left a deep wound on the United States’ understanding of its own imperial skulduggery.
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On March 16th, 1968, about 100 US soldiers entered the Vietnamese village of My Lai expecting combat. Instead of enemy fighters they found civilians – families and farmers – who quickly became victims.
Some people were gathered and shot in groups; others were executed at close range. Women were raped. Even the animals were killed where they stood.
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The only American who died that day was a soldier who killed himself rather than participate. By evening, commanders insisted they had wiped out more than 100 Viet Cong – a narrative that held for about 18 months.
In late 1969 a little-known freelance journalist followed a tip and began tracking down scattered, traumatised servicemen willing to describe what had really happened.
Hersh’s investigation earned him a Pulitzer Prize and propelled him into decades of reporting on the hidden machinations of American power, from Watergate and CIA abuses to corporate malfeasance and, many years later, the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, during the Iraq War, a story sparked when a stranger phoned him after hearing him on the radio.
Poitras – the Oscar winner behind Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden, and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about Nan Goldin – and Obenhaus shape the film around Hersh’s voice and body of work. They condense 50 years of his revelations, tracing a line from Vietnam through today’s conflicts, including Gaza, to show a recurring pattern of official secrecy and manipulation.
Now 88, the man whom Richard Nixon once branded a “son of a bitch” still works surrounded by towering piles of documents, making calls and publishing his journalism on Substack.
When news breaks of children dying in Gaza, the film cuts to his childhood in Chicago, influenced by parents who rarely talked about surviving the Holocaust.
The film isn’t hagiography. It revisits his errors, notably the forged Marilyn Monroe material that marred his Kennedy book in the late 1990s, yet keeps focus on the institutions he has spent his life challenging: governments intent on denying and obscuring.
A comic subplot, composed of the sharp, charming, angular Hersh awkwardly and repeatedly asking why he agreed to be the subject of the documentary, belies its urgency.
At a moment when truth is increasingly relative, Cover-Up acknowledges the grim continuation of the state apparatus that Hersh first exposed in the aftermath of My Lai. Without journalists of his calibre, we’d be none the wiser.
Cover-Up is on Netflix from St Stephen’s Day
