Seymour Hersh Reflects on a Career of Exposing Government Secrets in Cover-Up

The Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is usually the one asking the questions. Now, the tables are turned, and the 88-year-old is the subject of the interview in the Netflix documentary Cover-Up, out Dec. 26.

Directed by Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras, the film showcases highlights of Hersh’s career writing for the Associated Press, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, focusing on the stories that exposed government cover-ups from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War. Hersh took a break from writing for his Substack newsletter to show the filmmakers years of reporting files, and his co-writers, editors, and fact-checkers talk about his reporting process.

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Here’s what to know about the film. 

“Falling in love” with journalism

A Chicago native, Hersh grew up helping his dad run a laundry and dry cleaning business.

While enrolled at a two-year college, an English teacher noticed Hersh’s talent for writing and insisted he apply to the University of Chicago. 

As an undergraduate at UChicago, he learned about the now defunct City News. After working a mailroom job there, he became a police reporter and “fell in love with being a reporter,” he says in the film.

Following the mob scene in Chicago and the city’s police force ended up being good training for covering cover-ups, Hersh argues, saying, “I saw tyranny up close.” 

Examples of his influence

Hersh made a name for himself with a 1969 Dispatch News Service investigation that exposed the My Lai Massacre, in which the U.S. army tried to cover up an incident of troops killing hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. Myrtle Meadlo of New Goshen, Indiana, the mother of Paul Meadlo, who was involved in the killings, told Hersh, “I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.” The story galvanized the anti-war movement, and it won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

His 1974 New York Times investigation on the CIA’s role in spying on student groups led to the Rockefeller Commission and the Church committee, which exposed the agency’s secret and illegal domestic operations.

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are household names for their Watergate coverage, but Hersh was in the thick of it too. As co-director Mark Obenhaus explains, his reporting revealed that “the burglars—the plumbers, as they were called—were in fact being paid, and even once they were indicted, they were still getting paid. So they were on the payroll of someone, and the implication was that it was the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. And so that story really brought the Watergate scandal, the Watergate burglary, into the White House and into the Republican Party.”

Hersh’s sources

Some of Hersh’s biggest stories, like his investigation into the My Lai Massacre, came from cold call tips and roaming the halls of the Pentagon as a reporter for the Associated Press. As a former member of the Army reserves, he’d talk to young officers about football just to get them comfortable speaking to him. He started exploring cover-ups in the U.S. military when these Army servicemen described the military branch as “murder incorporated.”

In the documentary, he loses his patience at times when he thinks they’re getting too close to a piece of paper with a source’s identity. “He was still very nervous every step of the way because he had to protect his sources,” says co-director Laura Poitras. “For me as a filmmaker, that also just reveals the importance of that source-journalist relationship and how serious it is.”

Viewers will hear for the first time from one of Hersh’s previously anonymous sources, Camille Lo Sapio, who provided him with photographs from the prison of Abu Ghraib where Americans were torturing inmates. She showed Hersh the photographs in a restaurant booth on a laptop that her daughter used while on deployment. Her daughter was not involved in the torture, but she had been sent the photos. When Hersh asked if he could have a copy of these photos, she recalls, “I was reluctant because I was afraid. But I wanted the facts to be exposed. I wanted the truth to be exposed.”

Sapio says Hersh convinced her to share the photographs with him because he emphasized how important it was for the world to see them. “If there hadn’t been photographs, no story,” Hersh says in the documentary.

His support system

Hersh met his wife Elizabeth Klein, a psychoanalyst, at the University of Chicago. While she’s not interviewed in the documentary, Hersh talks about how she helped him get through some of his toughest stories. 

“I married the right person who can calm me down and keep me from going into total despair because I was writing such terrible stuff,” he says in the doc. 

Reporting on the My Lai massacre and torture on toddlers made him think of his own two-year-old, and at one point, he called Liz, telling her he couldn’t do the story. 

As he cried into a payphone, she reassured him that the story had nothing to do with his family. “I was very lucky to marry her.” 

The takeaway

The documentary ends with Hersh explaining why he’s still doggedly following cover-ups at 88, working with an editor and a fact-checker at Substack: “You can’t have a country that does that. That’s why I’ve been on a war path ever since. If there’s any mantra to what I do, that is it.”

In an era where journalists are falsely accused of producing fake news, the filmmakers hope Cover-Up inspires the public and funders of journalism to see the value of investigative work and to inspire the next generation of journalists to keep asking tough questions.

As Obenhaus puts it, the film is about “the importance of investigative journalism and the importance of a skeptical journalistic class that does not take the official record as gospel and is willing to dig deeper and discover truths that perhaps are being covered up.”