If the American government is hiding something, Seymour Hersh wants the public to know. From the horrific My Lai massacre to the war crimes committed in Abu Ghraib, Hersh’s investigative reporting has uncovered some of the United States’ most infamous atrocities and abuses of power in the last half-century. What drives Hersh after all these years?
“Cover-Up,” Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s new documentary about Hersh’s reporting, provides a close and incisive look into the man and his career. Hersh owns the screen, his bristly demeanor and whip-smart asides flowing naturally from him. What flows far less easily are the details behind his cases, past and present alike.
“Cover-Up” picks up with Hersh’s reporting on Palestine in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023. Hersh is fiercely protective of his sources, a tactic that has garnered controversy over the years, and it makes his admittedly hard to extract candidness in this film so unique. Across a two-hour runtime, Poitras and Obenhaus craft a portrait of a singular man’s century-defining discoveries.
Interview
The following edited excerpts are from Golden Gate Xpress’ conversation with Obenhaus.
Hammel: You’ve known Sy [Hersh] for decades now. How did you two first come to meet and how did your relationship develop?
Obenhaus: I met Sy in 1985, when it was suggested that I meet him. The suggestion was made by the executive producer of the PBS series, “Frontline,” which had just started a couple of years before, and he thought that we might be able to collaborate on a documentary. I had done a lot of documentaries for PBS, but more for “Frontline.” Sy was quite prominent at that point, and he was writing a lot for The New York Times. I went to Washington [D.C.] and I met him at his office, a rather legendary office, and we decided, “Yes, let’s collaborate. Let’s make a film.” He had the idea that he could investigate a case that I think wasn’t really dropped, but was not being pushed by the Justice Department against a man named [Nazir Ahmed] Vaid, who was allegedly trying to smuggle or export illegal triggers for nuclear bombs. At that point, the Pakistani government was quite controversial in their pursuit of nuclear weapons. He was an interesting target, a Pakistani national, and was, at that time, incarcerated in Houston. Sy and I chased the story all over the country from Washington [D.C.], Boston, Houston and other places. It exposed me to his journalism and the way he approached the story. It was a very active film. I was, at that point, doing cinema verité films so I shot the whole thing and it was pretty much without any narration and just following Sy, and we made the case. We got him and we got the “smoking gun,” which proved that he had indeed been doing what he had done. Then there was a story that was on the front page of The New York Times and a documentary for “Frontline.” From that, we developed a friendship and made a number of other films together over the years and have stayed in touch.
Hammel: Laura Poitras had been trying to chase him down for a few decades now. How did you two come to know each other and come to work on this documentary?
Obenhaus: We came to know each other because of Sy, really. Sy and I had been in the process of actually producing a film back in the end of 2019 [into] 2020, and we had funding and all that. Then COVID-19 hit and the whole thing fell apart. We adapted in various ways and [were] still pursuing to go out and make a film. When Laura appeared, and it seemed like rhythms, every five years, she was going to appear to ask him to make a film, or that’s how she tells it anyway. She popped up on the radar, and we thought, “Well, she wants to make a film. We’re making a film. Let’s see what we can work out together. Maybe we can, together, get the funding and proceed.” The timing was right. We were pretty active in pursuing it and we were looking for funding, and she was as well, coming into this project, so we decided to collaborate. It made a lot of sense.
Hammel: The title “Cover-Up,” it’s mentioned so many times in the film and all the cases that you highlight from Sy’s career have to deal with cover-ups from the U.S. government and international governments. How did that throughline come to be? Was that immediately natural or something that you discovered over the years of filmmaking?
Obenhaus: No, that was Sy’s work. He’s been involved in uncovering cover-ups and it was a pretty obvious choice of a title. I think it’s a good title and it’s very much in the spirit of Sy’s work. The foundational story of his career is uncovering the existence of the My Lai massacre. It’s what an investigative journalist does, is seek to uncover secrets.
Hammel: Speaking of My Lai, that is kind of the central focus point of the film. You also tie it in with his reporting on what was, and is, happening in Palestine and his current coverage with Substack. How did you go about the threading of the past, present and future?
Obenhaus: We wanted to have a present tense story of his reporting, to see him working and to work a story. When we started, the events in Palestine and Israel had not started. So we were looking for, “What is he doing now? What is he interested in reporting on?” When the Gaza situation developed, and after Oct. 7, it became clear that that was something that was going to occupy him. We then started, on a regular basis, filming him as he reported. It so happens that, in contrast to the film that I made in the past, “Buying the Bomb” and a couple of other ones, where he was running around the country being much more active, this is one where he largely was talking to people in Washington [D.C.] and talking to people on the phone. Even without action, it became a through line for us because he, during the time we were filming, was indeed talking to various people about the situation in Palestine and writing about it on a pretty regular basis on his Substack.
Hammel: Sy is a singular figure and journalist. What is it about him and his reporting style that you cover in the past, but also how he is today – because in all of the current day interviews, he still has that same personality – that made him such a potent figure for a documentary right now?
Obenhaus: For a documentary? Let me divide that into two sections. One is, I think he’s a great and very capable, skilled investigative journalist because he’s profoundly skeptical of people in power and and the official narrative, that’s something that I think every journalist should be, but he has that attitude in spades and seeks out stories where that skepticism can be applied and you can uncover the truth behind the headlines. That approach animated his work on Gaza, he’s a skeptic of the official narrative. In landing on Gaza as a story point, we found a story where, indeed, his skepticism of the official narrative was, I think, justified. There were a lot of revelations about the machinations of the Israeli government, but to some degree, the U.S. government. In any case, he’s a person who has an abiding skepticism of the official narrative. In many instances, that skepticism has been borne out.
Hammel: He makes people angry, I’m sure, many editors and sources, but he covers so many stories that also enraged the public because of what they were uncovering. How did you and Laura decide on which cases you would cover?
Obenhaus: With great difficulty. His career stretches over a very long period of time and, just as an example, in Watergate, I think he wrote 40 stories or maybe more in that period. A lot of them are quite interesting, but there were some very obvious stories that are so foundational and were so important to his times and had an impact on history, certainly. My Lai fits that definition, as does Abu Ghraib. They were building blocks that we knew existed of strong, big stories and we interviewed him and others about a lot of stories. We distilled this version from that mass of stories and it was just the process of deciding that we had X amount of time, we’re not making a series. We had roughly two hours, so what fits elegantly into that? That was the driver. And with certain clear building blocks, we knew My Lai, we knew Watergate, we knew Albu Ghraib, we knew the family jewel. These were all stories that we had to touch on, those are just monumental stories. It was a process, you begin to weave them down and see how to connect them. We wanted to feel, at the end of it, that we have given a really, really good sample of his work that illustrated the range of his work. There are definitely stories that aren’t there that, if it were a three-hour film, would be there, but it’s a two-hour film and I’m glad it is.
Hammel: It moves at a clip. You mentioned the Abu Ghraib story and that is, looking back at it, one of the last major reveals of a cover-up that was trusted through images. [Sy] mentions that it wouldn’t have run if they didn’t have the photos. Has he spoken about his thoughts on moving into an AI generation and the public distrust in images and is that part of why he moved to Substack?
Obenhaus: I can’t speak for him, but I don’t think that was a driver for him going to Substack at all. I think that you’re right in suggesting there’s great skepticism about imagery now, but it’s part and parcel of the great skepticism towards facts. Now, there are no gatekeepers anywhere. When he was starting out, there were basically three television networks [and] two, maybe four, major newspapers. Those newspapers and some others were given a great deal of credibility by those who read them, and there was not this almost knee-jerk skepticism about every fact that’s presented that undermines the notion of facts, period. Again, I can’t speak for him and I don’t, but I don’t think he has any solutions. I don’t think any of us do, as to how to regain a situation or return to a situation where facts are appreciated and believed. Perhaps one of the takeaways of the film is to draw an even starker depiction of the reality that we’re in right now, because you see how, even with skepticism – look at the My Lai story for example – there was when it initially came out. There were people, “Oh, it can’t be true, it can’t be true.” But then with the accretion of story after story after story and people talking, soldiers and so forth, it finally reached the critical mass of truth. That’s hard to achieve in this environment and I do not have an answer to or suggestion as to what might remedy that. I have no idea. I think AI is going to be bad on social media and they are going to create huge challenges.
Hammel: What is something that you’ve either noticed from student journalists who come up to you after the film or that you hope fellow journalists will take away once they see the film?
Obenhaus: Pretty simply, I would like them to see a process. You see Sy at work and you see how he thinks, but I think it illustrates how dogged one has to be to dig beyond the official pronouncements and the official record. That’s an important fact for journalists, young journalists or journalists of any age, quite frankly, to digest and to appreciate and to understand. Sy is emblematic of that, of an investigative journalist at work. The film, perhaps, is a demonstration of how to go about investigative journalism. Not in all the little details, but you get the – it takes energy, it takes skepticism – it’s not something that you’re born with either. Sy happens to be, to some extent, but it’s also [about going] “You can learn that.” So I think it’s important for journalists to digest the film, see the film.
“Cover-Up” is now playing in select theaters and is streaming on Netflix.
