According to the legend established in this film, director Laura Poitras (an Oscar winner for Citizenfour and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed) asked Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to allow her to make a documentary about him 20 years ago. He refused but agreed to consider it at some point down the line. Now, Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus have put together the expertly assembled Cover-Up, which traces Hersh’s impressive and, in some cases, history-defining, career, drawn from access to his notes, archival footage and documents, and new interviews with the journalist.
Always a somewhat reluctant subject (at one point, he even threatens to pull the plug on the entire doc because he’s afraid the filmmakers will expose a few of his confidential sources), Hersh talks us through some of his most well-known, groundbreaking stories, including exposing U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War and the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia; certain elements of the Watergate scandal; the CIA’s program of domestic spying; and the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the U.S. War on Terror. In every case, he revealed that the U.S. military, various intelligence agencies, and the highest levels of government acted without fear of consequences, and they all ended up hating him above all others, even though many of his prized sources were within these same institutions.
Even though many of these events are decades old, there’s an immediacy and current relevance to the material that makes us wonder if any journalist working today works as fearlessly as Hersh once did and continues to do to this day. His dedication cost him jobs, but in the end probably gave him access to people and outlets most others did not have. The film also details a few times when he was caught off guard with bad information and how he handled those rare instances.
As much as I love the skill and detail-oriented work that clearly went into piecing together Cover-Up, I could have just sat there and listened to Hersh talk to the camera for two hours. His stories and storytelling abilities are captivating and give each new investigation the feeling of a political thriller with genuine stakes—probably because they really had them. This is easily one of the best documentaries I’ve seen this year (and seeing it so late in December is one of the reasons I don’t finalize my end-of-year lists until the year has actually ended), and one of the finest ones made about the investigative process.
The film is now streaming on Netflix.
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