The morning of November 13, 1969, the presses rolled at the Chicago Sun-Times with an explosive front-page story: “Officer Charged With Murdering 109 in Viet.”
The shocking incident uncovered in the report would come to be known as the My Lai Massacre, in which soldiers of a U.S. Army platoon led by Lt. William Calley Jr. slaughtered hundreds of innocent Vietnamese men, women, children and babies at the height of the Vietnam War. The byline on the story: Seymour Hersh.
The riveting documentary Cover-Up, directed by Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, explores the extraordinary career of Hersh, who is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest investigative journalists in American history (except perhaps by those whose misdeeds he has exposed). It premiered at the Venice Film Festival today and will hold its U.S. premiere at Telluride this weekend, followed by a berth at TIFF.
The film grips the attention from the opening frames – grainy archive footage of a man wearing a gas mask who drives a pickup truck down a road bordered by white cylindrical storage containers. We learn this is the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where the U.S. military secretly tested chemical and biological weapons. An inadvertent release of nerve gas in March 1968 killed 6,000 sheep and harmed an untold number of people. The reporter who broke the story: Seymour Hersh.
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The journalist, now 88, has been publishing exposes for over six decades – on Vietnam, the Abu Ghraib scandal during the Iraq War, on corporate America, CIA espionage on American citizens, on Watergate. He’s used to getting sources to divulge secrets but displays considerable reluctance to share much about himself or his methods.
“You’d love to talk about sources,” Hersh tells his interlocutors Poitras and Obenhaus. “I’d love not to talk about sources.” He adds, “I don’t psychoanalyze those who talk to me just like I don’t psychoanalyze myself, thank God. Which you want me to do, I know, but I’m not gonna go there.”
Hersh may not want to go there, but the directors still succeed in crafting an insightful portrait of a man who sometimes reveals more about himself by what he won’t say than what he will. There are multiple scenes of him as a younger man walking briskly on city streets, briefcase tucked under an arm – purposeful, directed, not idling or taking in the ambiance around him. He’s got the singlemindedness of a truffle-hunting dog sniffing out a buried mushroom; once on the scent, he won’t give up. The film offers fascinating insights into how Hersh got the My Lai Massacre story – a result initially of a phone tip, then pursued through acquaintanceships he had cultivated at the Pentagon. A key break came when he interviewed a lawyer for Calley who left a charging sheet outlining the lieutenant’s alleged crimes on a desk as the two talked. The document was upside down from Hersh’s perspective across the desk, but he feigned taking notes about what the lawyer was saying while actually copying every word he could read from the printed page.
Wisely, the filmmakers don’t leave the Hersh-My Lai story at that – lauding him for the scoop and then moving on. Instead, they explore the “why” of the story – why would Calley (allegedly) order his troops to murder hundreds of defenseless civilians? At the beginning of the section of the film devoted to Vietnam, Poitras and Obenhaus include telling remarks by then-President Johnson who assured reporters, “We are making progress. We are pleased with the results that we are getting [in Vietnam]. We are inflicting more losses than we are taking.”
That tragically misguided thinking imposed pressure on ground troops to kill as many Vietnamese as possible, whether combatants or otherwise. Hersh tells the filmmakers, “The whole army ran on body count.” That hideous incentive triggered My Lai and other similarly heinous attacks.
Obenhaus has collaborated with Hersh on three previous investigative documentaries. Poitras, we learn, first tried to convince Hersh to participate in a documentary 20 years ago. It’s safe to say they admire and respect his work, yet the relationship between the directors and their subject, mercifully, doesn’t come off as chummy. Just like Hersh on his beat, they want to get the story, and part of that involved looking at his reporter’s notebooks and also asking him about his personal life.
Hersh grows increasingly uncomfortable with the scrutiny, especially of his yellowed and frayed notepads (which he acknowledges agreeing to hand over to Poitras and Obenhaus). Looking over one page of notes they have presented to him, he exclaims, “What the fuck is this doing in there!” He becomes alarmed about preserving the anonymity of his sources: “Putting their name out there would be murderous,” he declares (though there is no indication the filmmakers planned to recklessly reveal identities of his sources).
Finally, he vows, “I’d like to quit” – meaning he wants to abandon the documentary. (For those who have seen the documentary Pee-wee as Himself, it will recall the friction between protagonist Paul Reubens and director Matt Wolf, who battled each other over creative control of that film).
Hersh eventually cools off and sits down again for more questions. He even shares a few details about himself (while clearly not relishing the process), speaking briefly and affectionately about his wife Elizabeth Stein; they’ve been married for 61 years. She’s a psychoanalyst, he notes – interesting given what he says earlier in the film about not wishing to be psychoanalyzed.
Hersh, of course, has his critics. His 1997 investigative book on the Kennedy presidency came under attack and the film delves into a blot on Hersh’s reputation — when he came close to publishing details of purported letters between JFK and his mistress Marilyn Monroe, letters that proved to be a forgery.
The film also gives some attention to Hersh’s relationship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator ousted last December. The journalist interviewed Assad several times, including at least once in Damascus in the early 2000s, and wrote stories that portrayed Assad somewhat favorably. In the film, Hersh admits thinking Assad would never gas his own people. “Let’s call that wrong,” he tells the filmmakers. “Let’s call that very wrong.”
Poitras and Obenhaus probe him about his reliance on anonymous single sources for some of his reports and his answer may feel incomplete to some. On balance, however, I would call Hersh’s work an incredible service to American democracy and to the American public – an assessment with which I doubt the filmmakers would take issue.
Indeed, the film includes audio of Pres. Nixon snarling about Hersh in conversations with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. In one of the White House tapes, Nixon grouses, “The son of a bitch is a son of a bitch. But he’s usually right, isn’t he?”
Title: Cover-Up
Festival: Venice (Out of Competition)
Production companies: Praxis Films, Project Mockingbird, Plan B
Sales Agent: mk2 Films
Directors: Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus
Running time: 117 min.