I have been reading Seymour “Sy” Hersch’s investigative journalism for just over 30 years. His reporting on the My Lai massacre was assigned to me at 17 as an A-level history student. Whenever I fell into a conspiracy rabbit hole, it felt like there was a Sy Hersch book that would confirm my worst suspicions about the inherent violence of the world’s superpower, a continuous flaunting of the Constitution by those in power, and a pattern of cover-up. I followed Hersch’s missives in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books (he had long since resigned from the New York Times when I came to my reading adulthood). And I have since followed him to Substack. This is the man who uncovered the US military’s massacre of children in Vietnam - who helped shepherd the Watergate and Pentagon Papers to public consciousness - who exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib and continues to expose the war crimes in Gaza. He continues to fight for liberal democracy and accountability and the US Constitution. His method and message have never been more urgent.
This new documentary by Laura Poitras (ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED) and Mark Oberhausen (a producer on the investigative show Frontline) was many years in the making because Hersch resisted it. He is prickly and angry and brutally funny about resisting the process even while agreeing to it. He is scrupulous about not revealing his sources, which in a Q&A he described as table stakes for a good journalist. But he is even resistant about describing why people trust him. Evidently, after the My Lai reporting, he was a famous name, and maybe not just a trustworthy name but also a glamorous name for people to confide in. But his key skills seem to be a talent for the written word, but more importantly a dogged tenacity, curiosity, and not giving a fuck about what people think or say about him. He might also add, as he does in this documentary, his talent for picking the right life partner, a wife who allowed him to grow up, and supported him through the dark emotional places that his reporting took him to.
The documentary does a phenomenal job of surveying Hersch’s monumental career and giving a fair assessment of its importance and flaws. The first 45 minutes of the 2 hour documentary is a play by play of how he put together the My Lai reporting. This is where you see the skill and character required to put together a ground-breaking piece like that. Then we get a 15 minute biographical essay that shows you Hersch’s childhood in a working-class black neighbourhood where his Latvian Jewish immigrant father withheld any kind of information about the extended family’s fate in the Holocaust. By a stroke of luck and his own talent, Hersch was plucked from a mediocre Junior College and given a chance to study at the University of Chicago by a teacher who spotted his talent. He was ready for that moment because he had devoured books as a child. He says of his childhood “I lived through books: they taught me to think.” God bless those assiduous and wonderful teachers everywhere who spot talent and give it a chance. In a film where Hersch alternates between irritation and anger for much of the running time, he only ever gets sentimental on two subjects: his wife and that teacher.
Act Three brings us through the 80s and 90s. Hersch finally quits the New York Times when they start blocking his reporting on corporate malfeasance at Gulf + Western. It’s kind of amazing to me that you can take on the CIA or the US President or the military, but somehow a company finally balks at you investigating another company. It’s also funny to think how contemporary readers think The Gray Lady has lost her courage and kowtowed to Trump but even back in the 70s, the NYT didn’t want to publish first on anything controversial. This section also covers Hersch’s mistakes, and they are grave indeed. First, a potentially career-ending error of judgment about some fraudulent letters between JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Second, giving a hideously nasty Syrian dictator the benefit of the doubt.
The final act brings the story home to more recent investigative successes: exposing Abu Ghraib and the more recent work on Gaza. And then we are back to how the people who perpetrated My Lai got away with it. The message is very clear. There is a pattern of extrajudicial violence, cover-up and getting away with it at the heart of the American Republic. This may be depressing, but it’s no excuse not to continue to fight for accountability.
If it’s not clear already, I absolutely loved this film. I am delighted that it has distribution with Netflix. To be honest, there’s nothing in here that I didn’t already know - although it was good to see Hersch’s career summarised and organised in such an effective and impactful way. I just really hope lots of younger viewers watch it and realise just how important supporting investigative journalism is.
COVER-UP played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date. It has a running time of 117 minutes.
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