“The same thing you love about it. Are you kidding? Is there anything more fun than being on air with a good story?” That’s how Seymour Hersh responded when asked what he loved about being a reporter. And Hersh is a good story. For six decades, his reporting has reshaped public opinion and challenged government policy. His revelations about the torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War were just one in a long line of impactful scoops, beginning with his groundbreaking account of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
The life and career of this towering and sometimes controversial, investigative journalist are the subject of “Cover-Up,” a new documentary by Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras, now streaming on Netflix. The film premiered at the 2025 Venice, Telluride, and Toronto International Film Festivals.
Poitras, who won an Oscar for her documentary “CitizenFour” about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, described Hersh as someone who “loves people. Even though he can be a little cranky.” She added that his personality traits – consistently adversarial to power, resistant to being co-opted, and relentlessly pursuing truth regardless of who it angers – are precisely what make an ideal investigative reporter.
“He’s somebody who’s really driven by his pursuit of the truth no matter where it leads him and who it might anger,” Poitras said.
Hersh’s willingness to challenge authority often led to conflict, not only with the subjects of his reporting but also with his editors. It took Poitras 20 years to convince Hersh, now 88, to participate in a film about his life. “Older, time to quit, time to back off,” Hersh explained his initial reluctance.
However, he ultimately agreed, acknowledging the importance of the moment. “Can you give up what’s going on now? 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,” he said. He characterized the current state of affairs as “chaos.”
“They get to trust you”
Hersh’s reporting career began at the Pentagon, where he cultivated sources not through formal briefings, but through informal conversations with junior officers. “We talked football, we talked Redskins,” he recalled. He emphasized the importance of building trust. “If you talk to a guy and you don’t write anything, they get to trust you.”
During the Vietnam War, a tip about a potential atrocity led Hersh on a quest to identify the soldier involved. “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.” He admitted to struggling with the spelling, hesitant to ask for clarification. “But I had a name.”
Hersh laughed, acknowledging the common practice among reporters of “pretending we know more than we do.”
His reporting on Lt. William Calley and the My Lai massacre sparked a national reckoning with the realities of the war and earned him a Pulitzer Prize.
Hersh’s early life was marked by hardship. He grew up working at his father’s dry-cleaning store on the South Side of Chicago while his twin brother attended university. His father’s death when Hersh was 15 forced him to take over the family business. “My brother had to go to college, and I had to run the store. It was just a bad break.”
Despite these challenges, Hersh eventually earned a college degree and began his journalism career. “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.”
“He definitely has a short fuse sometimes”
Hersh’s work at The New York Times brought him into the Watergate scandal, where he uncovered evidence that the Watergate burglars were receiving hush money from intermediaries linked to the Nixon reelection campaign. His reporting quickly drew the attention of President Nixon himself, who, according to White House tapes, called Hersh a “son of a bitch” but acknowledged, “He doesn’t usually go with stuff that’s wrong… he’s usually right.”
Subsequent investigations focused on the CIA’s involvement in illegal domestic spying and foreign assassination plots.
Jeff Gerth, a former reporting partner, described Hersh’s approach: “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.”
During the production of “Cover-Up,” Hersh temporarily withdrew from the project, concerned about the security of his sources and the potential exposure of their names contained in his notebooks. Poitras explained that protecting his sources was paramount for Hersh. “Here’s really what makes him tick, to get the story, to expose wrongdoing, and to protect his sources.”
Hersh ultimately returned to the documentary, after a conversation with his wife, Elizabeth, a psychoanalyst. “She just told me what an a****** I was,” Hersh laughed. Poitras recorded 42 interviews with Hersh, totaling over 120 hours of footage.
Poitras described their relationship as a blend of friendship and journalistic inquiry. “I had to ask him about some of his reporting where he had misses,” she said, referring to instances where Hersh was misled by false information, such as forged documents related to an alleged affair between John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, and claims made by Syrian intelligence sources regarding the use of chemical weapons.
Hersh acknowledged his mistakes. “You take your licks. I didn’t disappear. I kept on doing what I did.”
“This is an amazing country. And we deserve better leaders”
When asked if he had mellowed with age, Hersh responded, “There’s so many good stories now.” He remains driven by a desire to uncover the truth and hold power accountable. “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 concluded. “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.”
