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When investigative journalist Seymour \u200b\u201c<\/span>Sy\u201d Hersh is asked what made him a\u00a0suitable candidate to run his father\u2019s store in Chicago, he shrugs, \u200b\u201c<\/span>Pizazz. Like people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Pizazz and liking people not only equipped Sy to work front of house at Isador Hersh\u2019s dry cleaning business, they have made him appealing to journalistic sources across an extraordinary 50<\/span>+ year career and they permeate this scintillating documentary by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. Hersh\u2019s language crackles with a\u00a0mordant Yiddish brevity such that even when describing US<\/span> war crimes and torture, he never loses his powers of speech.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Aged 88<\/span>, his brain has lost none of its sharpness as he recalls the damning details of the atrocity that made his name. On 16<\/span> March 1968<\/span>, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, hundreds of unarmed men, women, children and babies were rounded up and shot dead, but when the Army reported the incident later they said they killed 128<\/span> members of the Viet Cong. It took another year for a\u00a0sceptical young reporter to respond to a\u00a0tip and begin unravelling the institutional lie, travelling up and down the country to record first-person testimonies from US<\/span> Army soldiers who executed the massacre.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Hersh tracked down Paul Meadlo, a\u00a0former farmboy so unhinged by what he had been a\u00a0part of that he was willing to speak on camera to CBS<\/span> about shooting at babies, and the gang rapes perpetrated by US<\/span> soldiers. It was Meadlo\u2019s mother who gave Hersh the infamous line about the Army: \u200b\u201c<\/span>I sent them a\u00a0good boy and they made him a\u00a0murderer.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Poitras and Obenhaus illustrate Hersh\u2019s recollections with media coverage that blew up in the public domain to become part of our collective understanding of US<\/span> atrocities during Vietnam, but also \u2013 grippingly \u2013 Hersh has granted them access to his own source materials, while ferociously protecting the sources themselves. We see a\u00a0vertical print sourced from the army; it\u2019s a\u00a0black and white map of My Lai annotated with blue felt pen. Over one arrow it says, \u200b\u201c<\/span>30<\/span>\u221240<\/span> bodies found in ditch,\u201c; over another, \u200b\u201c<\/span>Had\u00a0lunch\u201c.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>I don\u2019t psychoanalyse those that talk to me, just like I\u00a0don\u2019t psychoanalyse myself, thank god,\u201d says Hersh early doors, possibly regretting saying yes to this documentary 20<\/span>\u00a0years after Poitras first approached him. Still, because he likes people and has spent his career listening to them (without necessarily believing them), he has a\u00a0standard of careful insight into why things happen the way that they do. As he reflects on why no one involved in the My Lai massacre reported it earlier, he gives two possible theories: one, that it felt so terrible as to be unspeakable; the other, more likely in his view, \u200b\u201c<\/span>Well, that\u2019s just another day in Vietnam.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n These comments invoke a\u00a0shiver because you could as easily say, \u200b\u201c<\/span>That\u2019s another day in Abu Ghraib,\u201d or, \u200b\u201c<\/span>That\u2019s another day in Gaza\u201d.\u00a0The use of war crimes and their attendant cover-ups is presented as a\u00a0matter of rinse-repeat in US<\/span> foreign policy as made irrefutable by Hersh\u2019s diligent reporting. For the film is a\u00a0sprint through the stories he went on to cover, from Watergate to Iraq to Gaza today, amounting to an ironclad reason to mistrust the official US<\/span> version of events.<\/span><\/p>\n Laura Poitras was last in Venice with her Nan Goldin vs the Sacklers documentary, the Golden Lion-winning, All The Beauty and The Bloodshed. If Cover Up feels more conventionally structured than her previous works, it is worth bearing in mind that she is sharing the directing credit with Mark Obenhaus, a\u00a0documentarian who has worked with Hersh before and earned the (wary) trust of a\u00a0man who has witnessed the worst abuses of\u00a0it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still, Poitras\u2019s trademark sensitivities and sophistication shine through in the inclusion of her voice during conversations with Hersh. For a\u00a0professional portrait of a\u00a0legacy figure who has exposed the coldest deeds, this film has a\u00a0warm lifeforce, pulsing with the personality of a\u00a0man whose instincts towards the truth mean that he gives more away about himself than he might have wanted to.<\/span><\/p>\n A third of the way through the film, we are taken back to Hersh\u2019s formative years in Chicago and learn in broad, economical strokes the facts of his ancestry. Neither of his parents \u2013 Eastern European Jews from Lithuania and Poland \u2013 ever spoke about the Holocaust. There is a\u00a0poetry to the fact that their son has dedicated his life to speaking on state-sanctioned crimes against humanity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The film gallops every onwards, wheels greased by Hersh\u2019s brilliant and prickly voice. He has a\u00a0way with words that would make a\u00a0hard-boiled detective novelist jealous. \u200b\u201c<\/span>There was this story that seemed impossible: it was called the truth,\u201d he says, rifling through one of many manila folders in a\u00a0home office full of America\u2019s worst kept secrets. Poitras and Obenhaus elegantly juggle focus between the stories themselves and the climate the storyteller was working in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n They source juicy clips to illustrate the hostile reactions to all of Hersh\u2019s endeavours, from Nixon calling him a \u200b\u201c<\/span>son of a\u00a0bitch\u201d on the leaked tapes, to up-in-arms regular Americans calling talk shows to call him unpatriotic. Then there is the insidious behaviour of The New York Times. Hired in 1972<\/span>\u00a0in the glow of winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1970<\/span>, he quit in 1979<\/span> shortly after he discovered that the corruption he was reporting on at the conglomerate Gulf &<\/span>\u00a0Western Industries was uncomfortably close to home for his colleagues. Now he reports using Substack.<\/span><\/p>\n Poitras questions him on the less glorious moments of his career, too, so that he emerges as a\u00a0flawed human rather than a\u00a0bastion of perfect judgement. This is not a\u00a0perfect documentary either, with the breathless dash through his post My Lai journalism sometimes feeling overwhelming. Yet perfection is not the point when something impossible has been bottled: it\u2019s something called the\u00a0truth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nGet more Little White\u00a0Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n