Asked what he loved about being a reporter, Seymour Hersh replied, “The same thing you love about it. Are you kidding? Is there anything more fun than being on air with a good story?”
Seymour Hersh is a good story. For six decades, Hersh’s reporting has changed public opinion and government policy. The torture that he revealed at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war was just one scoop in a long run that began with his account of the slaughter of hundreds of civilians by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.
The backstory of this towering, sometimes controversial investigative journalist is the subject of “Cover-Up,” a documentary by Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras, now streaming on Netflix.
Poitras, who won an Oscar for “CitizenFour,” her film about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said of Hersh, “He loves people. Even though he can be a little cranky.”
Her description of the sometimes volatile Hersh could read like the job requirements for an ideal investigative reporter: Consistently adversarial to power; never seduced into the club; consistently going after the highest powers (the president, for instance) over and over.
Would she call him courageous? Yeah, absolutely,” Poitras said. “He’s somebody who’s really driven by his pursuit of the truth no matter where it leads him and who it might anger.”
And anger, he did – not only the subjects of his stories, but sometimes his bosses.
It took Poitras 20 years of schmoozing to bag her subject, until Hersh – now 88 – had enough reasons to say yes. “Older, time to quit, time to back off,” he said.
Did he think he might quit? “Can you give up what’s going on now?” he said. “Can you really walk away from being a reporter now, what’s going on? I mean, no. Look where we are. We’re in someplace we haven’t been.”
And where are we today? “Chaos,” Hersh said.
“They get to trust you”
When Sy Hersh started out reporting at the Pentagon, he got his information not just from formal briefings, but by walking the halls, knocking on doors, and chit-chatting with junior officers.
“We talked football, we talked Redskins,” he said.
Was he charming them? “I was straight with them. I don’t know if that’s charming or not,” he replied. “If you talk to a guy and you don’t write anything, they get to trust you.”
He got a tip during the Vietnam War that the Army had accused a soldier of a terrible atrocity, and set out to find his name: “One day I saw one of my colonels in the Army that had gone to Nam, Vietnam. I saw him limping in the hallway. And I said, ‘What do you know about this shooting up of a village?’ And he stopped, and he went like this, hit his bad knee. He says, ‘That kid Calley didn’t kill anybody higher than that.’ And so, I had a name. It took me a long time; I spelled it wrong. I didn’t dare ask him how to spell it, and I’m sure I said, ‘Oh, I hear you, yeah,’ whatever. I’m sure I said something. But I had a name.”
I noted, “We sometimes pretend we know more than we do.”
“Sometimes?” Hersh laughed. “Are you kidding? We always pretend we know more than we do!”
His reporting on Lt. William Calley and the My Lai massacre caused Americans to reexamine the role of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and won Hersh a Pulitzer Prize.
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Quite an achievement for a kid who grew up working at his dad’s dry-cleaning store on the South Side of Chicago, while his twin went to university.
“My brother had to go to college, and I had to run the store,” Hersh said. “And my father died when I was 15. It was just a bad break. And I was smart, obviously. I mean, I tested high. But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t go.”
Was he bitter about that? “No. I don’t – it just was. It is what it was. You know, I had to take care of my mother.”
Still, Hersh managed to earn a college degree, and found employment reporting. “I got to see Chicago from a different point of view, as a police reporter. Chicago was tough. The mob, I couldn’t write about police corruption, and I couldn’t touch the mob. I loved it, and I also understood the limits of it. So, it was a different world. … It was a world where you had to be first on a scene.”
“He definitely has a short fuse sometimes”
He got a job at The New York Times, a newspaper that was not first on the scene for one of the nation’s biggest political scandals. Until Hersh got into it, Woodward and Bernstein had the story of Watergate mostly to themselves. And he got “something great.”
What he got was that the Watergate burglars were being paid hush money by intermediaries linked to the Nixon reelection campaign. The New York Times was in the game, and President Nixon knew it.
As recorded on Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, the president said, “Goddamn it. The story in the Times. The one by Hersh. He doesn’t usually go with stuff that’s wrong. The son of a bitch is a son of a bitch, but he’s usually right, isn’t he?”
His next big scoops were about the CIA’s role in illegal domestic spying and foreign assassination plots.
In the documentary “Cover-Up,” Hersh’s former reporting partner, Jeff Gerth, explains one of Hersh’s techniques: “Sy has found a way of trying to get people’s attention. Screaming is certainly one way to do it. It’s not his only tool. But he definitely has a short fuse sometimes.”
In fact, during production of “Cover-Up,” Hersh blew up and quit the film.
Why? “Sy just got fed up and nervous about the fact that we had so much access to his notebooks, and felt very protective of his sources,” said Poitras.
The notebooks had the names of his sources. “That was the trigger,” Poitras said. “This is really what makes him tick, to get the story, to expose wrongdoing, and to protect his sources.”
Asked why he returned to the film, Hersh replied, “I’m married to somebody much smarter than myself.”
Hersh and his wife, Elizabeth, a psychoanalyst, have been married for 61 years.
And what did she say to get him back in that chair? “She just told me what an a****** I was,” Hersh laughed. He returned to the documentary, and then some. In all, Poitras recorded 42 interviews with Hersh, over 120 hours of footage.
So, were they friends? Collaborators? Partners? “I would consider him a friend,” Poitras said. “But you also have a journalist relationship to the filmmaking. So, I had to ask him about some of his reporting where he had misses. That had to be part of the film.”
Like being duped by forged documents showing an affair between JFK and Marilyn Monroe, which Hersh had to pull from a book prior to publication. And he was taken in by then-Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and intelligence sources who told him that Assad did not use chemical weapons on his own people.
“You take your licks,” said Hersh. “I didn’t disappear. I kept on doing what I did.”
“This is an amazing country. And we deserve better leaders”
I noted something that was a surprise from our conversations: “You haven’t mellowed at all.”
“There’s so many good stories now,” he said.
Do they anger or motivate him? “Oh. No. No, no, no, no. It’s so much more. I came from nowhere. When I was a kid reading sports stories, the kid from nowhere who became centerfielder for the New York Yankees …”
“A lot of people who make it come from nowhere,” I interjected.
“No, no,” said Hersh. “This is an amazing country. And we deserve better leaders. And that’s what I feel very strongly.”
“But when you see what you’ve uncovered, you’ve come upon such dishonesty, such dishonor, such corruption?”
“Look. I could be shocked. I was always shocked. America, for me, you know, you gotta remember, where was I at age 15? Running my father’s store. There’s no bar.
“It’s a great country,” Hersh said. “And I think this president is dishonoring it. But that’s okay, because we will survive him. But how can you not be enamored by where we live, and our time? It’s just an amazing country.”
To watch a trailer for “Cover-Up,” click on the video player below:
For more info:
- The documentary “Cover-Up” is now streaming on Netflix
Story produced by Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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