It’s not hard to imagine why documentarian Laura Poitras spent 20 years trying to convince Seymour Hersh to make a film about his life. The 88-year-old Pulitzer-winning journalist has an impressive résumé. It was Hersh who broke the story, in 1969, of the horrific US army massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, invigorating the US anti-war movement; 35 years later, his reports for the New Yorker revealed the gruesome extent of US military torture at Abu Ghraib.
It’s also not hard to see why it took Hersh a full two decades to agree to make Cover-Up, Poitras’s new documentary, co-directed with Mark Obenhaus, on Hersh’s six-plus decades digging up the stories buried by those in power. An old-school reporter who has courted controversy for his extensive use of anonymous sources, Hersh is a prickly and resistant subject, reluctant to relive the past yet eager to excoriate abuses of power with a torrent of reporting.
