Sy Hersh and the ‘Culture of Enormous Violence’

At turns reverential and critical, the biographical documentary “Cover-Up” chronicles the life, success and occasional controversies of Seymour “Sy” Hersh, America’s iconic independent investigative journalist. From his most famous work exposing the horrors of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, through his continued fact-gathering on the genocide in Palestine, the film uses Hersh as a lens to explore the systems of violence and power that he has long held to account.

Directed by investigative documentarians Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras and coming to Netflix on Dec. 26, “Cover-Up” begins with Hersh’s cub years at the Associated Press in the early 1960s, a job he quit when his editors softened an exposé he filed on biological weapons testing. The film moves quickly and with confidence to Hersh’s ground-shaking investigations into war crimes in Vietnam, as he recalls how hearing rumored details about the My Lai killings propelled him to challenge the Nixon government and push back against direct intimidation from Henry Kissinger. We learn about his painstaking reporting process, from cold calls to the subterfuge involved in his manufacturing of “chance” encounters with potential sources on Army bases. As with Hersh’s methodology, this groundwork is the backbone of the film. 

Other elements of the movie’s form are also vital to its telling. “Cover-Up” shifts between historical clips of the breadcrumb articles and documents that inspired Hersh’s reporting, to contemporary reflections captured during a lengthy interview with the directors. We see the subject speaking to the camera, working sources on his office landline and scribbling notes on yellow legal pads. As Hersh’s recollections move further along in time — into MKUltra, the CIA’s “Family Jewels” reports and eventually Abu Ghraib — it becomes apparent that the “Cover-Up” of the movie’s title refers not to any one headline crime, but to the never-ending cover-up required by the Pentagon’s globe-spanning operations. “We are,” says Hersh, “a culture of enormous violence.”

Hersh’s longtime friend Obenhaus (NBC’s “Frontline”) and Poitras (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” “Citizenfour”) have produced a document of this violence that is also an investigative portrait. It is an imperfect film about what Hersh admits is an imperfect career. He reflects, for example, on the criticism of his controversial Kennedy bestseller “The Dark Side of Camelot” — which, at the eleventh hour, removed foundational claims based on forged letters — and how his proximity to Syrian strongman Bashar Assad may have colored his reporting of the Syrian conflict. The film does not revisit Hersh’s controversial counternarrative to the Obama government’s claims about the killing of Osama bin Laden, but the filmmakers do challenge him on the ethics and limits of single-source reporting. Hersh has long rebuffed such provocations and stood by his work, as he does when the filmmakers confront him over the practice of sometimes relying heavily on anonymous sources — whose identities he’s so paranoid about protecting that he nearly leaves the interview altogether.

Despite these moments of tension, “Cover-Up” presents a largely admiring picture, and the directors no doubt pulled some punches. (All documentary directors must walk the line between interrogation and ensuring the continued cooperation of the subject.) More important than their differences is the fact that Hersh shares institutional enemies with the filmmakers, whose own work testifies to the debt they owe Hersh. Just as the art of uncovering war crimes demands ethical bargains and moral ambiguities, so too does portraiture, even and perhaps especially when the subject is one who’s brought so many of those crimes to light.