“In case anyone cares, this is getting less and less fun. I’d like to quit this doc.”
Seymour “Sy” Hersh spars with director Laura Poitras at several points during her feature length documentary ,Cover-up, a career retrospective of the iconic journalist. At 88 years old, Hersh has not lost a milligram of moxie, and for the most part is content to walk one of his peers through his highs and lows (both Poitras and Hersh have won a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award over their careers) during the back half of the twentieth century in Vietnam to the front half of the twenty-first century of Russia new war.
Seymour “Sy” Hersh spars with director Laura Poitras at several points during her feature length documentary ,Cover-up, a career retrospective of the iconic journalist. At 88 years old, Hersh has not lost a milligram of moxie, and for the most part is content to walk one of his peers through his highs and lows (both Poitras and Hersh have won a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award over their careers) during the back half of the twentieth century in Vietnam to the front half of the twenty-first century of Russia new war.
Poitras is often a chronicler of whistle-blowers from Risk’s morally murky web-nerd Jullian Assange, to Citizen Four’s military operative Edward Snowden, to All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’s photographer and activist activist Nan Goldin. Here, she does this for Seymour Hersh, with a few other talking heads for context, as well as an epic amount of historical footage and documents. God bless Tricky-Dick and his bug-planting, as the illicit Nixon White House tapes alone have provided candid and compelling audio fuel for a thousand documentaries.
Hersh made a name for himself by breaking the story of the My Lai Massacre in the early 1970s, which earned him the Pulitzer and a reputation. He has never left his post since, of holding government and corporations alike to account for their shameful actions and atrocities. From Watergate (running solo but in parallel with Woodward & Bernstein), to American use of torture in Iraq, and The Abu Ghraib photos, to corporate America (a Gulf+Western corporate scandal which eventually cost him his job at the New York Times), the many dirty deeds from the CIA (exposing “Family Jewels” as a code for all their litany of scandals over the years), right up to modern day wars in Gaza, and Russia. Hersh has written several books on subjects as wide ranging as Henry Kissinger to Marilyn Monroe; the latter of which was a bit of a scandal due to bad single-source information, and forged love letters.
Cover-Up is far from a wikipedia page, nor is it hagiography. In fact the best parts of the film are when Hersh himself gets cantankerous about Poitras pushing him towards self-reflection or personal issues. I would have preferred to know more about his family life during the times when he was breaking stories people have been defenestrated over, even in a mostly-functioning democracy like the United States. His wife and children are mentioned passingly and with care, but also as a reflection of himself as an everyman, “I have a family, and children, I am not a wacko.”
His Jewish upbringing in the US (the family name was previously Hershowitz, before his parents emigrated from Europe), and his father operating in two modes, silence and rage, informed Hersh how not to be his life or career. This is about as much as we get from Cover-Up in terms of Hersh's self reflection, “I don’t psychoanalyse those who talk to me, nor do I do myself.”
Hersh is magnetic on screen, and has a way of being succinct when he wants to move on. Surrounded by a mountain of yellow legal pads, as well as books and file folders, he is the forthright mensh in an sea of fractured information. He is a straight shooter about it, and with good cause, “My lawyers said it is OK, is the statement of scoundrels,” for which Hersh is not one.
Controversial about the way he does his anonymous sourcing, Hersh pontificates about his Pentagon days: “The Pentagon was a strange place.” When his colleagues in the Associated Press and other media outlets sat in conference rooms for the official press release of the day, he made friends with mid-level staffers in the cafeteria. This would, consciously or unconsciously, on the part of the agents, give him leads on what were the major issues of the day for the spy organization, which would show breadcrumbs leading to a major story. Hersh’s superpower was in building trust, and preserving that trust. “You’d love to talk about sources. I do not want to talk about sources.” Hersh’s resistance to the filmmakers in Cover-Up is equal parts frustrating and noble.
In Errol Morris’ criminally underrated and likely under-seen, Wormwood, Hersh has a small, but memorable on-camera interview where he is the last interview in a long line of people talking about the CIA’s MK-Ultra and chemical weapons programmes during the Korean War. His segment which is equal parts frustrating, charismatic and savagely funny, is nothing if not self aware about his ethical duty towards his sources. He is less giving and less kind to Poitras, where he simply says, “It is complicated to know who trust. I barely trust you.” Hersh, however has, more often than night, got the last laugh. He has been proven far more correct in the more important stories, than he has been proven wrong, in the less important ones.
Cover-Up is far from a wikipedia page, nor is it hagiography. In fact the best parts of the film are when Hersh himself gets cantankerous about Poitras pushing him towards self-reflection or personal issues. I would have preferred to know more about his family life during the times when he was breaking stories people have been defenestrated over, even in a mostly-functioning democracy like the United States. His wife and children are mentioned passingly and with care, but also as a reflection of himself as an everyman, “I have a family, and children, I am not a wacko.”
His Jewish upbringing in the US (the family name was previously Hershowitz, before his parents emigrated from Europe), and his father operating in two modes, silence and rage, informed Hersh how not to be his life or career. This is about as much as we get from Cover-Up in terms of Hersh's self reflection, “I don’t psychoanalyse those who talk to me, nor do I do myself.”
Hersh is magnetic on screen, and has a way of being succinct when he wants to move on. Surrounded by a mountain of yellow legal pads, as well as books and file folders, he is the forthright mensh in an sea of fractured information. He is a straight shooter about it, and with good cause, “My lawyers said it is OK, is the statement of scoundrels,” for which Hersh is not one.
Controversial about the way he does his anonymous sourcing, Hersh pontificates about his Pentagon days: “The Pentagon was a strange place.” When his colleagues in the Associated Press and other media outlets sat in conference rooms for the official press release of the day, he made friends with mid-level staffers in the cafeteria. This would, consciously or unconsciously, on the part of the agents, give him leads on what were the major issues of the day for the spy organization, which would show breadcrumbs leading to a major story. Hersh’s superpower was in building trust, and preserving that trust. “You’d love to talk about sources. I do not want to talk about sources.” Hersh’s resistance to the filmmakers in Cover-Up is equal parts frustrating and noble.
In Errol Morris’ criminally underrated and likely under-seen, Wormwood, Hersh has a small, but memorable on-camera interview where he is the last interview in a long line of people talking about the CIA’s MK-Ultra and chemical weapons programmes during the Korean War. His segment which is equal parts frustrating, charismatic and savagely funny, is nothing if not self aware about his ethical duty towards his sources. He is less giving and less kind to Poitras, where he simply says, “It is complicated to know who trust. I barely trust you.” Hersh, however has, more often than night, got the last laugh. He has been proven far more correct in the more important stories, than he has been proven wrong, in the less important ones.
One of the more intimate eye-witnesses to the unwritten history of America, a country that has always, right from its founding in the 18th century, one of paranoia and conspiracies (where there is always another level) Hersh has been a diligent soldier in picking out which ones are actually true, and getting a high profile outlet to publish it. For him, it is not just the cover-up, it is the original crime as well as fighting against the kind of self censorship in a functioning democracy that leads it down the darker paths, that gets him out of bed every day. As the USA goes through an exceptionally tough decade of crumbling institutions and lack of global leadership or moral clarity, it is a small comfort to get a refreshing nakedly honest conversation about what is on the table, and what is not on the table, from one of the best mensch watchdogs that the country has ever let off the leash.