Near the end of Cover-Up, a documentary by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus about the legendary investigative journalist Seymour (Sy) Hersh, we see Hersh’s face, reflected in a rear-view mirror, This scene reminds me of, and perhaps is a homage to, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, in which we see his subject, Robert McNamara, reflected in a rear-view mirror. McNamara goes farther, and quotes T.S. Eliot’s iconic reflection on aging: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

A Life in Full

Poitras and Obenhaus’s objective is to, within two hours, permit us to see Hersh’s life in full, from childhood to the current day, at age 88. The documentary, which I saw at TIFF last Sunday – a full three months before its commercial opening – does deliver on its promise. Poitras and Obenhaus present Hersh’s investigative coups: the Mylai massacre, the existence of American military stockpiles of chemical weapons, the New York Times coverage of Watergate, the relationship between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

They also cover his youth in a lower-middle class Jewish family in Chicago, when he must run the family dry-cleaning business because his father is dying of cancer. He escapes from a lifetime of tedium because he starts taking writing courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is discovered by one of his professors who paves his way to the much more prestigious University of Chicago. The film also mentions Hersh’s long and happy marriage to a psychoanalyst who keeps him sane.

But the film does not avoid Hersh’s failings, such as a book about JFK that draws on a set of forged letters between him and Marilyn Munroe, or his unsubstantiated claims that the US sabotaged the Nordstream pipeline. It also includes instances when the impact of Hersh’s journalism is blunted, for example Mylai perpetrator Lieutenant William Calley’s popularity among Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” (precursor of the MAGA movement) that facilitates Nixon’s clemency for Calley. We also see criticism of Hersh by politicians and public servants and on conservative talk radio. Near the end of the film, Hersh, exasperated, asks Poitras to turn off her recorder and camera.

An Assessment as Investigative Journalist

Several years ago, Beth Herst and I wrote an article entitled “Beyond ‘Woodstein’: Narratives of Investigative Journalism.” (The article is behind a paywall, but I am happy to make it available for free). We examined 6 films about investigative journalism that ran the gamut from successes (All the President’s Men) to failures (Kill the Messenger), the latter a film you likely don’t remember. In the article, we developed a list of fourteen characteristics of investigative journalism narratives. Two are particularly relevant to Hersh: teamwork and the use of sources. We argued that teamwork was essential to investigative journalism because of the magnitude of the task, and the tendency of a team to prevent any one of its members from disappearing down a rabbit hole. Hersh usually worked alone, and for much of his career was a freelancer. Perhaps that explains some of his rabbit holes.

We suggest three types of sources for investigative journalism: victims, perpetrators, and knowledgeable observers. Hersh developed the cultivation of knowledgeable observers to an art form, particularly in the military. When at the Pentagon, he avoided the hive of other journalists and sought out officials who would talk to him off the record. What I think Hersh realized early on is that the military is not run along democratic lines: if someone wants to dissent, they have to do it by leaking to a journalist.

Given the focus of this film on the US military, I can suggest three films by Errol Morris that shed light on Hersh’s work: The Fog of War, about Robert McNamara’s late-in-life assessment of his own career; Standard Operating Procedure, in which Morris interviews the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib atrocities; and The Unknown Known, in which then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld absolves the perpetrators, one instance of which shown in Cover-Up is his drawing a legalistic distinction between abuse and torture.

To the best of my knowledge, Cover-Up will hit cinemas in mid-December. It is a well-crafted and thought-provoking documentary about one of the legends of American journalism. For people interested in journalism, politics, or history, I strongly recommend it.