Reel Rundown: ‘Cover-Up’ documents life work of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh

You may not know the name Seymour Hersh, but you certainly know his work.

Hersh is the journalist who in 1969 broke the story of the infamous My Lai massacre. That story, plus a number of others over the years, earned him the title of – at least among journalists – the reporter’s reporter.

His life’s work, including the controversies that surround him, is the focus of “Cover-Up,” a documentary co-directed by Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras that is streaming on Netflix.

Regarding My Lai, reports of the incident – in which American soldiers murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in March 1968 – had been investigated by U.S. Army officials. But little had leaked outside of military circles.

That is, until Hersh began looking into the case. Working freelance, Hersh followed a tip and located Lt. William “Rusty” Calley, who was in command of one of the platoons involved in the operation. At the time, Calley was being held at Fort Benning, Georgia, charged with having killed 109 people.

The interview with Calley ended up being published in November 1969 in a number of national papers, including the Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and Seattle Times. Hersh’s follow-up investigations helped the case attract wider attention, earning him criticism from some but adulation by others.

At the time, government officials and members of the public blamed Hersh for defaming American troops. As “Cover-Up” points out, a popular song at the time titled “Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley” described Calley as an actual hero.

Others, though, lauded Hersh’s reporting. The latter group included the Pulitzer Prize committee, which in 1970 awarded Hersh its annual prize for International Reporting.

Obenhaus and Poitras reveal all this, while taking us into Hersh’s world and outlining his humble origins, his first newspaper jobs and the subsequent investigations that cemented his reputation. Among those reports were everything from the Watergate scandal, which he wrote while working as a staff writer at the New York Times, to his 2004 stories in the New Yorker about the prisoner-abuse allegations at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

In addition to his award-winning newspaper and magazine reporting, Hersh has written 11 books. His study titled “The Price of Power: Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House” won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

As the film shows, even at age 88 Hersh is still involved in his investigative trade. Yet considering how he has developed valuable, if anonymous, sources over the decades – another practice that critics have used to discredit him – it should come as no surprise he himself is a reluctant interviewee.

At one point he even questions the directors. “It’s complicated to know who to trust,” he says to them. “You know, I barely trust you guys.”

Which is ironic since all three work in the same general field. Poitras is a veteran documentary filmmaker. She’s perhaps most famous for the 2015 Best Documentary Oscar-winning feature “Citizenfour” in which she films journalist Glenn Greenwald’s interview with former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden.

Obenhaus, meanwhile, is a longtime, Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, writer and director.

And as for Hersh’s credibility, the film makes clear that no less than the former president Richard Nixon delivered him a compliment, if reluctantly. In a 1973 conversation, captured in one of the White House’s vast collection of secret recordings, Nixon described Hersh with a profanity.

But then he added, “he’s usually right, isn’t he?”