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Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was never played in a film by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, like the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But as this documentary portrait argues, he’s probably more important than either. Hersh has a longer record of breaking big stories, from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to torture by US army personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – the latter a historic scoop underscored by the stomach-turning photos which Hersh brought to light. Hersh is asked if Abu Ghraib would have been the story it was without those pictures and replies: “No pictures, no story.” Well, maybe. But his other scoops had no pictures of this kind. One incidental thing Abu Ghraib showed was how ubiquitous digital photography became at the beginning of the century; how easy it was to take and share photos. Now, in the new era of AI, photos are ceasing to be the smoking gun of truth.
The title of this movie speaks for itself. Hersh is always on the hunt for things that powerful people would prefer to stay hidden – although a paradox of the film is that Hersh has to protect his sources, cover them up as it were. Secrecy plays a part in his own professional life, and when it appears as if film-makers Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus have sensitive names in the notes that he has turned over to them, Hersh becomes agitated and appears ready to back out of the documentary entirely.
From My Lai onwards, the authorities’ MO and Hersh’s MO are pretty plain. The government will deny and stonewall, until faced with something flagrant and undeniable, when it will claim that it’s a one-off and a bad apple. But Hersh tends to see that these aren’t single, shocking events; it’s just the only time you’ve become aware of one. With an old-fashioned reporter’s dogged “shoe leather” instincts, Hersh goes to see the people involved, talks to them, spends time on a story, and doesn’t take no for an answer.
Hersh emerges as a tough, combative, peppery personality from this movie. We only get a taste of the volcanic temper he can deploy when he needs to tongue-lash some cringing editor into giving him the resources he needs. It’s how you have to be. Hersh is pretty candid about his chagrin at missing out on the Watergate story (though he made some of the running later on), and almost being duped by fake letters between John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. He is also very derisive about those centrist pushovers in mainstream journalism who just print the press release and become complicit in abuse – although his attempts to investigate the corporate behemoth Gulf + Western were hampered by the realisation that his corporate employers at the New York Times were themselves not above criticism. Hersh is a true freelancer who is happy enough writing on Substack: an independent and a nonconformist.
