Over a static shot of a peculiar address comes a voice we know oh so well. “The son of a bitch is a son of a bitch,” growls Richard Milhous Nixon. “But he’s usually right, isn’t he?”
These filmmakers must have pinched themselves when they dug up that old soundbite, because what else is there to say? Where else could such unlikely perspectives align than in a backhanded tribute to journalist Seymour Hersh, bringing together the 37th President of the United States – dead since 1994 – and directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, very much alive and in Venice to premiere their latest film?
Though sharing its title with Hersh’s 1972 book on the My Lai massacre, Poitras and Obenhaus’ “Cover-Up” casts a wider net, digging into the journalist’s personal life – though there’s little dirt to be found – while tracing his work straight through to the present day. The result is an always engaging, sometimes enraging, and occasionally revelatory doc, stretching from Civil Rights to Substack, that every so often reveals something more jarringly (and appealingly) adversarial.
As shot by Poitras and Obenhaus, holding court from his home office, Hersh cuts an idiosyncratic figure: too ornery and obstreperous to pass for an éminence grise, yet too woven into American political and media history to be regarded as anything less. He even leans into his own mythology, likening his herky-jerky marriages of convenience with various press outlets to his far sturdier domestic arrangement, now 61 years strong. “You see,” he winks, “I don’t leave everything.”
Born far from the corridors of power and raised to run a dry-goods store, Hersh remains the perennial outsider upon whose work the modern establishment was nonetheless built – a contradiction the film underscores in its joint credit between Poitras, the rabble-rouser, and Obenhaus, the ABC News insider and longtime Hersh collaborator. For better or worse, the film often feels tugged between those two poles.
At first, “Cover-Up” barrels ahead like a meticulous tick-tock, retracing the deliberate, methodical ways Hersh broke and advanced stories from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, Watergate to the CIA’s domestic surveillance. The result is a sobering and consistently valuable tribute to hard reporting, even if it rarely uncovers anything the subject hasn’t already dug up himself. After all, that authority – and the mountain of archives the film draws from – comes through insider access to a sphinx understandably reluctant to show too much of his hand.
For investigative reporters, access is always conditional, granted with the implicit promise of protection so long as the source is still breathing. Asking one to disclose the mechanics of their own reporting is about as useful as asking a magician to reveal a trick. And with a reporter as storied (and as surly) as Hersh, such a request is sure to earn an adversarial reply. Which is why “Cover-Up” proves most thematically satisfying when it stops counting down the greatest hits from the 1960s to today and starts framing Hersh less as a subject than as a source.
While the directors have clearly come to praise Hersh, not bury him, holding the film to the subject’s own rigorous standards proves a far more compelling tribute than simple hagiography. “Cover-Up” truly comes alive when Poitras’ voice cuts in from offscreen, challenging Hersh’s claims and pressing him on his blind spots. That the documentary lacks the same clarity of purpose as some of the directors’ previous work is a minor quibble; Poitras and Obenhaus are too proficient to deliver anything less than absorbing. And Hersh – still publishing on Substack, still shining light on ongoing atrocities and cover-ups – remains a beacon of rumpled integrity. He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB, and it’s a genuine thrill to watch him at work.
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