James Y. Lee
The United States is not a country keen on self-reflection–in fact, it is actively hostile towards it. The universal social contract that exists in both our political discourse and our historical education is one based on civility and a benign understanding of societal progression. We are permitted to look back on our previous sins insofar as we perceive them exclusively as lessons to learn from, that our history is not something we look back on with profound shame, but something that we digest, palatably comprehend, and then mindlessly shelve in the back of our minds as we look obliviously and blindly towards a “better horizon.” It’s this attitude of comfort, of absorbing our history in ways that encourage complacency, in ways that permit us to shrug off current injustices as merely the detritus of prior atrocities committed on our soil and in our name, that has gotten us to this unfathomable national nightmare—one where our individual perceptions of our privilege and the absence of institutionalized historical shame permit us to look away from the eroding of democracy and human rights occurring before our very eyes.
In moments like these of times past—where atrocities and human rights abuses were exposed to public outrage primarily through legacy media—we had figures like Seymour Hersh, the man who stood at the forefront of exposing the horrors of the My Lai massacre and the torture campaign at Abu Ghraib, two separate instances of the United States military’s capacity for wanton bloodshed and suffering that would not have been made public had journalists with ethical standards not stood up for what they knew to be the truth. As of now, we also have figures like Laura Poitras—the luminary documentarian behind Citizenfour and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, who became one of the primary witnesses of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing campaign against the NSA’s surveillance efforts, and who deftly assembled the story of photographer Nan Goldin’s activism for the queer communities dismantled by the AIDS epidemic and the victims of the Sackler-accelerated opioid epidemic.
These are two people with a deft eye for exposure, who have the insight to stare down the horrors of the United States’s abuses of power and come out the other side with something that even closely resembles truth—something lost on us in an era saturated by online data points and social media algorithms stripped of all meaningful societal context. Cover-Up—Poitras’s latest film, co-directed by Mark Obenhaus, a documentarian with a history of frequent collaboration with Hersh—is the end result of these figures’ joint efforts. Poitras and Obenhaus are filmmakers too smart and perceptive to let Hersh’s story slide into maudlin, talking-head storytelling, using a chilling grip of formal filmmaking and editing efforts that eliminates sentimentalism in their telling of the atrocities that Hersh helped uncover. At the same time, the spirit of truth drives nearly every moment of Cover-Up‘s storytelling, one that resonates in our post-truth ecosystem, and one that’s made clear by the relentless and deft pace through which this examines the uncoverings of Seymour Hersh’s journalism.
Cover-Up is a well-oiled combination of several well-trodden documentary techniques, fitting for a work of these filmmakers’ formal expertise and unsentimental approach to the truth. One among them is talking-head interviews, filmed by Sorry, Baby cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry’s sage lens, where Poitras and Obenhaus approach Hersh directly with questions about his work, to which his responses are interestingly guarded while still being engagingly interesting. He has a staunch refusal for exposing any of his sources, which the filmmakers abide by themselves. Hersh also states multiple times on the record his unwillingness to be “psychoanalyzed.” Although the filmmakers do probe at his more internal personality, they’re also smart enough to not linger too heavily on the family background of silent repression he came from, or to unnecessarily mythologize the sudden and unexpected rise to journalism he experienced in his university years. It’s also not just Hersh that the directors are persistent about interviewing and presenting in a direct, matter-of-fact way—Poitras and Obenhaus know better than to be solipsistic about presenting Hersh as a visionary. Frequently, they spread outwards to his colleagues and competitors in journalism, as well as the sources he interviewed for various stories, without all of whom, of course, said stories would never have gained any sort of traction.
Archival footage in Cover-Up is elegantly interspersed between each of these painstakingly assembled testimonials as well, presenting a wide-ranging portrait of the sheer extent of Hersh’s impact with each of the incidences, atrocities, and crimes he uncovered. Maps on which the steps of the My Lai massacre are outlined in blue Sharpie remain some of the film’s most haunting images, a coldly traced recreation of sorts of how the United States military procedurally and relentlessly slaughtered, raped, and defiled hundreds upon hundreds of Vietnamese civilians under the pretext of taking out “Viet Cong militants.” Its utterly barbaric reasoning is only hammered in further by a preceding speech from then-President Lyndon Johnson edited in towards the beginning of the film, in which he states, “We are inflicting more losses than we are taking.”
When Cover-Up reaches the moment that Hersh helped to uncover the story of Watergate, we not only see the headlines of the articles he published that got the Nixon presidency to such a dire point, but also phone calls between and correspondences between Nixon and Henry Kissinger, many of which record both of them actively decrying Hersh as a Communist agent. When it comes to Hersh’s exposure of Abu Ghraib, the already-terrifying images of the prisoners tortured there are given new, hauntingly recontextualizing life when you realize the unexpected places they came from, and just how pivotal they were to making Hersh’s story about the torture occurring there possible.
It’s only in the more recent stretch of Hersh’s career that Cover-Up falters only slightly. It’s clear that Poitras and Obenhaus aren’t totally willing to valorize him, given how they explore the near-grave error he committed when he nearly published falsified Marilyn Monroe letters “sent” to John F. Kennedy for his book The Dark Side of Camelot. At the same time, their more unequivocal penchant for endorsing Hersh’s holistic career seems to prevent them from exploring these areas much further than they already do, leaving episodes like the Monroe letters as partial afterthoughts in their portrayal of a more present-day stretch, showing how Hersh’s career and approach to journalistic integrity has shifted since his more prime years.
That said, even this stretch is portrayed faithfully, never complacent with portraying Hersh’s prime years and simply leaving it at that. In current-day glimpses that Poitras and Obenhaus offer, we see how Hersh has largely been ostracized from the broader journalistic community, even despite extended tenures at The New York Times and The New Yorker. He’s now primarily publishing independently on Substack, still using the same methods for investigation he once used, most recently publishing an exposé about the Biden administration’s involvement in the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.
Even now, the work Hersh is doing with Cover-Up could not be more necessary. Among the filmed footage that Poitras and Obenhaus include are moments where Hersh speaks with an anonymous source about Israel’s ongoing barrage on the Gaza Strip—the methods that the Israeli military is using, and how they have continued to cause untold amounts of suffering in Palestine as a result of their uncontrolled streak of war crimes. Looking at all this carnage, funded in large part by the United States government, and then gazing back at the events of the My Lai massacre… what truly has changed? Has the course of our history really improved to an extent where we can comfortably look at the horrors of now, and still say “we’ll come back to the right track,” and “history will sort things out,” among other obliviously optimistic platitudes? One of the last things Hersh says in the documentary is “We can’t have a country that does these things,” a summation of the ethos that drives his work to bring these horrors and abuses of power to light.
Cover-Up is well aware that what we need to counteract such a country are people like Hersh who have the grit and the maneuverability to bring these truths to the public eye. It also knows, perhaps subconsciously, that the era of journalists like Hersh is fading; that we need a different approach to truth and outrage than the time that he most urgently thrived in, even as the spirit of those two things must always remain the same, always constantly burning beyond the blood-stained shroud of “truth” that the United States has so diligently crafted.
