For more than half a century, Seymour “Sy” Hersh has maintained his reputation as one of the nation’s top investigative reporters through his landmark investigations of scandals such as the U.S. government’s 1968 My Lai massacre, the Nixon Administration’s year-long secret bombing of Cambodia, and the U.S. military’s torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib in 2004. His 1973 Watergate exposé drew the ire of then President Richard Nixon, who was recorded saying, “I mean, the son-of-a-bitch is a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s usually right, isn’t he?”
More than fifty years later, Laura Poitras’s new film Cover-Up documents the legendary journalist’s career highlights, which also include uncovering Nixon’s facilitation of the 1973 Chilean coup d’etat and, in 1974, revealing the CIA’s domestic spy operations against the anti-war movement. The documentary highlights Hersh’s tenacious approach to investigations, following through on all leads and cultivating sources inside the government, along with his sometimes-prickly personality. But it also highlights the national dynamics that limited the impact of Hersh’s work, and that still persist to this day: a general lack of accountability for government wrongdoing, the mainstream media’s reluctance to publish stories critical of the government, and a public that responds to bombshell reports with general apathy.
The first of Hersh’s major breakthrough investigations came in 1969, when he uncovered evidence that U.S. Army soldiers had murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in a village called My Lai the year prior, then covered up the massacre. In the 1970s, Hersh revealed the CIA’s efforts to assassinate foreign leaders and its covert operations to overthrow leftist governments in Central and South America—revelations that prompted Congressional hearings in 1975 to investigate abuses by the U.S. intelligence community. The documentary also highlights the reluctance of many of Hersh’s media employers to publish his investigations for fear of upsetting powerful government interests—most notably Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense after Hersh broke the story about torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Many outlets were initially hesitant to run Hersh’s My Lai investigation: As the film recounts, many in the mainstream press were often hobnobbing with Pentagon officials and acting as stenographers for Henry Kissinger rather than reporting directly from the field about what was actually happening on the ground in Vietnam.
When, in 1974, The New York Times published Hersh’s investigation documenting the CIA’s massive and illegal domestic spying operations, Times columnist Anthony Lewis noted in Hersh’s defense, some members of the Washington press corps had a built-in bias in favor of the CIA: “There is a reluctance to attack those with whom one dines.”
Hersh’s investigations also often drew scrutiny from the public, which often reacted with backlash or indifference. After Calley was convicted in 1971 of murdering twenty-two Vietnamese civilians, a Gallup poll showed that some 79 percent of Americans disapproved of the guilty verdict against him. Cover-Up features the song “Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley,“ which was recorded that year by a little-known musician named Terry Nelson selling more than 200,000 copies in 1971. Its lyrics portray Calley not as a killer, but as a brave soldier who had been falsely vilified and forgotten. Similarly, despite Hersh’s revelations and the subsequent Congressional hearings, the CIA’s transgressions were not a major issue in the 1976 Presidential election. Foreign affairs were viewed as the country’s most important problem by only 7 percent of all voters, according to a Gallup poll from the time.
In one clip of archival footage presented in the film, Hersh receives call-ins during a radio program guest appearance. The callers express harsh criticism of his work, claiming his investigations jeopardized national security and put U.S. troops at risk.
Indeed, many of Hersh’s revelations, extraordinary as they often were, failed to inspire any major concessions toward government accountability and transparency. Calley’s sentence was commuted after he had served only three-and-a-half years of his lifetime prison sentence, while the House of Representatives rejected a proposal to impeach Nixon for illegally bombing Cambodia, though they did successfully impeach him for his role in the Watergate scandal. And Congress’s efforts to rein in the CIA’s covert operations in 1975 didn’t result in any effective legislation—indeed, the CIA continues these operations to this day, most recently in Venezuela. Other recent CIA operations that operated with little oversight have included efforts in 2011 to destabilize the regime of Muammar el- Qaddafi in Libya and activities in Afghanistan during the twenty-year-long U.S. military presence in that country..
The realities of confronting government abuses within a mainstream press that is often deferential to those in power have followed Hersh into the twenty-first century, as well. Cover-Up asserts that in 2004, CBS delayed running the Abu Ghraib story for two weeks in response to pressure from the U.S. Department of Defense. After his election in 2008, President Barack Obama decided not to prosecute any members of the Bush Administration for war crimes during the Iraq War, pledging to “look forward, not backward,” and in so doing, effectively blocked any means of accountability for the illegal torture of Iraqis.
While dramatizations of investigative journalists’ work in films such as All the President’s Men and Spotlight tend to maintain an optimistic vision of holding the powerful accountable, Cover-Up is more of a wash. It highlights both the great public service of this sort of investigative reporting as well as the limits of its impact. And in the age of President Donald Trump—who is serving his second term despite being found guilty of business fraud and thirty-four criminal counts of falsifying business records, as well as being indicted for mishandling classified information, election interference related to the January 6 riots, and the Georgia election interference case—accountability for wrongdoing by those in power is as sorely needed as ever.
Cover-Up begins streaming on Netflix on December 26.