Introduction to Seymour Hersh
On the morning of November 13, 1969, the presses rolled as part of the Chicago Sun-Times, with an explosive front page: "Officer who is charged in Viet for murder 109." The shocking incident discovered in the report would be known as the My Lai massacre, in which soldiers under Lt. William Calley Jr. slaughtered hundreds of innocent Vietnamese men, women, children, and babies at the peak of the Vietnam War. The byline about history belonged to Seymour Hersh.
The Documentary "Cover"
The native documentary "Cover", directed by Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, explores the extraordinary career of Hersh, widely recognized as one of the greatest investigative journalists in American history. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will hold its US premiere in Telluride, followed by a berth at TIFF. The documentary grabs the attention from the opening framework, with granular archive material of a man who carries a gas mask and drives a pickup down a street lined with white cylindrical warehouse containers. We learn that this is the Dugway evidence in Utah, where the US military secretly tested chemical and biological weapons.
Seymour Hersh’s Career
The now 88-year-old journalist has been publishing exposés via Vietnam, the Abu Ghraib scandal during the Iraq war, via Corporate America, CIA spy for American citizens. He is used to getting sources to reveal secrets but shows considerable reluctance to share a lot about himself or his methods. Hersh may not want to go there, but the directors still succeed in creating a revealing portrait of a man who sometimes reveals more about himself by what he won’t say than what he will.
The My Lai Massacre Story
The film offers fascinating insights into the way Hersh got the My Lai Massacre story – a result of a phone call and then through acquaintances that he had cultivated in the Pentagon. A key break came when he interviewed a lawyer for Calley who left a loading sheet in which the alleged crimes of the lieutenant were listed on a desk while the two conversed. From Hersh’s point of view, the document was on his head, but he set out to make notes about what the lawyer said when he copied every word he could read from the printed side.
The "Why" of History
With carefully, the filmmakers do not leave the Hersh My Lai history and attract him for the shovel and then continue. Instead, they examine the "why" of history – why should Calley (allegedly) order his troops to murder hundreds of defenseless civilians? At the beginning of the section of the film dedicated to Vietnam, Poitras and Obenhaus contain the statements of comments by the then President Johnson, who assured reporters: “We are making progress. We are happy about the results we achieve [in Vietnam]. We cause more losses than we take."
Hersh’s Investigative Methods
Hersh tells the filmmakers: "The whole army ran on body count." This terrible incentive triggered My Lai and other similarly hideous attacks. Obenhaus worked with Hersh on three earlier investigative documentaries. We learn that Poitras first tried to convince Hersh 20 years ago in a documentary. One can certainly say that they admire and respect his work, but the relationship between the directors and their topic is graciously not as a chummy. Just like Hersh in his beat, they want to get the story, and part of it included a look at the notebooks of his reporter and also ask him about his personal life.
Criticisms and Controversies
Hersh naturally has his critics. His investigative book from 1997 on Kennedy’s presidency was attacked, and the film deals with the call of Hersh – when he was close to the details of the alleged letters between JFK and his lover Marilyn Monroe, which proved to be falsified. The film also pushes Hersh’s relationship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator, displaced in December. The journalist interviewed Assad several times, including at least once in Damascus in the early 2000s, and wrote stories that Assad represented a bit cheaply. In the film, Hersh admits that Assad would never found his own people. "Let’s call it wrong," he says to the filmmakers. "Let’s call that very wrong."
Conclusion
In fact, the film includes the audio of President Nixon, who grieves over Hersh in conversations with his national security advisor Henry Kissinger. In one of the ligaments of the White House, Nixon examines: "The son of a bitch is a son of a bitch. But he is usually right, isn’t it?" Overall, however, I would describe Hersh’s work as an incredible service for American democracy and the American public – an assessment with which I doubt that the filmmakers would have problems. The documentary "Cover" is a must-see for anyone interested in investigative journalism and the power of the press to shape public opinion.
