Seymour Hersh at the Washington bureau of The New York Times in 1975, from 'Cover-Up.' The New York Times/Redux Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment When Seymour Hersh remarks, in one of the superb archival clips excerpted in Cover-Up, that "nobody likes the messenger," he knows what he's talking about. For nearly 60 years he's been delivering tough truths that some people don't want to hear, with My Lai and Abu Ghraib topping the list of explosive stories he's broken as an investigative reporter. His intrepid work has brought laurels and admiration, but for those who don't appreciate damning truths about the U.S. government, that work makes him a pariah. As a documentary subject, Hersh is thoroughly engaging - by turns charming, surly and vulnerable. He opens himself to the attention of filmmakers Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus with a sense of purpose, a bit of squirming, and occasional flares of regret. Holding forth in his home office, he's surrounded by neatly organized boxes of research and yellow legal pads of notes. Rolodex cards with famous names scrawled on them are a museum unto themselves. At one point, his fierce protectiveness of his sources becomes a point of contention. But he perseveres. Related Stories Movies Luca Guadagnino Reveals Why He Used Woody Allen-Style Credits for #MeToo Film 'After the Hunt' Movies Seymour Hersh Issues Grave Warning in Venice: "Trump Wants to Be Commander of America -- He Wants to Not Have Another Election" Cover-Up The Bottom Line An exhilarating portrait of an American hero. Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)Directors: Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus 1 hour 55 minutes In the 20 years since Poitras first approached Hersh about making him the subject of a documentary, some things have changed, but the need for diligent muckrakers is as strong as it's ever been. Hersh's investigative reports no longer appear in The New Yorker or The New York Times; like many journalists who make it their business to question rather than transcribe the official story, he's working independently, publishing on Substack. Cover-Up moves between past and present with a fitting sense of discovery and momentousness, Maya Shenfeld's score pulsing with suspense and at times eerie with foreboding. The clacks of a manual typewriter accompany evocative vintage footage as the film explores some of Hersh's key areas of focus and revelation, among them the CIA's domestic spying and mind-control experiments, the Watergate scandal, the post-9/11 war on terror, the Iraq War and corporate malfeasance. Bob Woodward, interviewed for the film, recalls that he and Carl Bernstein welcomed Hersh's coverage of Watergate for The New York Times as a "lifeline" after the many months they and The Washington Post were alone on that front in the journalism universe. The doc plunges straight into the stories that Hersh broke back in those keyboard-clacking days, beginning with his exposé on the fallout of nerve gas testing at an Army facility in Utah. The Army denied there was a connection between its activities and the rural area's dying sheep and ailing people. "I don't care what the Army says," Hersh tells a TV interviewer. "I investigated it." Richard Nixon might eventually believe that Hersh was a "communist agent," but his administration did end its chemical and biological warfare program not long after his reports were published. As it delves into Hersh's role in uncovering the physical horrors and psychic wounds of Vietnam, Cover-Up is especially strong. (It takes its title from one of his 11 books, a 1972 volume about My Lai.) For some viewers, the parallels between that story and current atrocities - and denials - could not be clearer. If you need a more explicit reminder, a little more than a half-hour in, the cameras capture Hersh on the phone with an anonymous source regarding the ongoing devastation of Gaza, one of several areas of interest for the still-on-the-beat 88-year-old. Hersh was a 32-year-old freelancer when, in 1969, he followed a tip, crisscrossed the country on borrowed money to track down sources, and exposed the "point-blank murder," as one American soldier described it, of civilians, including children, in a Vietnamese village. Look and Life passed on the story of the My Lai massacre (originally called the Pinkville massacre), but thanks to the diligent startup Dispatch News Service, an alternative news agency, Hersh's exposé made it onto the front pages of more than 30 papers across the country. Speaking with the filmmakers, Dispatch's David Obst recalls with humor and amazement how he bluffed his way through negotiating with CBS to get the story on 60 Minutes. Poitras and Obenhaus include the most haunting moments from that TV report, along with a brief and shattering clip of Michael Bernhardt, an