Why isn’t The New York Times covering — or, more to the point, uncovering — the Jeffrey Epstein story? It’s the one story that the left and the right seem to agree on: that something seriously scandalous and far-reaching went on, and that it’s being suppressed, and that it could all lead…God only knows where. (Let’s put it this way: Republicans and Democrats would have much to fear.) There are powerful people, and we know who many of them are, who have a vested interest in not allowing the real story to get out there. To this day, it never has.
Some would claim that the Times, and the mainstream media in general, is covering the Epstein story. The paper dutifully reports on what’s happening with the case files (always some variation on: No, the files will not be released), and recently it has provided a beat-by-beat chronicle of the prison saga of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s right-hand woman, who was moved to a minimum-security facility just before she gave an interview exonerating Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and others from any wrongdoing. Yes, the Times is certainly good for reading about all that.
But what the paper hasn’t done — at all — is dive into the underbelly of the story, digging up what isn’t known about it, not just reporting on the legal maneuvering or the already documented testimony of survivors but putting together the far larger and thornier picture of what went on. They’re not doing it the way that Seymour Hersh, the subject of Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s enthralling documentary “Cover-Up,” would have attempted to do it 50 years ago.
Back then, when Hersh was uncovering stories like the My Lai massacre, or the CIA’s domestic spying apparatus and its efforts to undermine elected governments in countries like Chile (or years later, when he uncovered the torture that was going on at the Abu Ghraib prison), he was climbing a high mountain of government stonewalling at every turn. He wasn’t handed the stories; they didn’t come easy. In the Epstein case, what has become the standard righteous plea — you can almost imagine it on a protest placard in the late ’60s — is “Release the files!” But here’s a news flash for you: If you think the Epstein files are ever going to be released, you’re dreaming. The forces arrayed against that happening are far too powerful. There’s only one way we’re ever going to see what’s in those files, and that’s if a reporter like Seymour Hersh uncovers them. That, as “Cover-Up” captures, is what reporting used to be.
When we think back to the fabled muckraking days of the ’70s, a time when Hersh, along with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, changed the meaning of American journalism, the feats of reporting that defined them are now so iconic that we can all act quite complacent about how any of those feats came to pass. They even made a classic Hollywood movie about it! When you watch “All the President’s Men,” brilliant and captivating as it is, there’s a way that we now view the uncovering of the Watergate scandal through the lens of inevitability. Of course Nixon and his colleagues were immersed in dirty tricks. Of course Woodward and Bernstein got on the trail of the story. Of course they had a whistleblower, the fabled Deep Throat, without whom the revelations would never have come out. Of course they worked on the story, step by step, for seven months (Hersh did too, writing 40 pieces about Watergate for the Times.) And of course their dogged reporting resulted in Nixon resigning the presidency.
But none of this was, in fact, inevitable. It was a series of actions and decisions made by America’s journalistic institutions during a time of crisis. The Epstein story would need to be uncovered in the same way — as a choice, driven by the will to pursue it, to do whatever it takes. Would a whistleblower be needed? No doubt. And that’s a major part of what defined reporters like Hersh and Woodward and Bernstein. They cultivated sources deep within the Deep State. Deep Throat (i.e., Mark Felt, the former Deputy Director of the FBI) didn’t just drop out of the sky; he was an old contact of Woodward’s. Who would be the whistleblower in the Epstein case? Someone willing to risk their life to leak the files.
I bring all this up because when you consider a documentary like “Cover-Up,” there’s a tendency to see it as long-ago history, which in a sense it is. But Seymour Hersh is very much alive, and still working (he’s 88, and now publishes his reporting on Substack). And part of the meaning of the movie is that the kind of fearless, dogged, deep-dive reporting he did can’t be allowed to go away.
When Hersh, in the documentary, talks about how American media works, how it’s too cozy with power, he can sound a lot like the Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” But part of what’s so compelling about “Cover-Up” is that Hersh, in his heyday, wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky purist agitator like Chomsky; he was a regular guy who simply wanted the truth to get out there. The film captures how he sort of fell into journalism, after helping to run his family’s dry-cleaning business on the South Side of Chicago. He was originally a crime reporter, and got his big break in 1963, when he went to work for the Associated Press. Assigned to cover the Pentagon, he would walk out of the scripted press briefings and, instead, wandered the halls and used his sports chatter to befriend high-ranking officers.
That’s how he got wind of the My Lai story, when an officer referenced what was going on with Lt. William Calley (without actually naming him). “Cover-Up” takes us inside the process of how this complex story was brought to light. A false mythology of the massacre lives on to this day (that American soldiers went “crazy” with violence in the jungles), but the far uglier truth is that the murder of Vietnamese civilians had been ordered as a way to inflate the casualty numbers (which was the Army’s yardstick of success). My Lai wasn’t the only My Lai — far from it. The story, which Hersh broke in 1969, made his name.
He has the same look and personality now as he did then: terse, buttoned-down, owlishly inquiring behind his horn-rims, with a clean-cut Middle American conventionality. What you saw is what you got; he married Elizabath Sarah Klein in 1964, when he was 27, and they’re still married. But Hersh was, and is, a spiky customer. He gave his files to the filmmakers (Poitras’s co-director, Mark Obenhaus, is an old associate of Hersh’s, which is part of why Hersh finally agreed to make the film, after talking to Poitras about doing it for 20 years), and we see a lot of those files — a messy mountain of documents and legal pads with scrawled notes, all calling up the reportorial karma of the pre-digital age. But when Poitras, her voice off-camera, asks Hersh to talk about sources (not to name them, just to talk about them), he acts like he just got scalded. His respect for confidentiality is beyond iron-clad — it’s literally life-and-death. (For some of his sources, that’s what the stakes are.)
Poitras and Obenhaus feature a lot of great archival footage, and we get a sense of how Hersh, having defined a new kind of mainstream adversarial reporting by breaking the My Lai story, got swept up into the power center of the New Yew York Times. He went to work for the Times in 1972, and two years later began his epic series of articles uncovering the Family Jewels Report, the 693-page internal CIA memo that documented the Agency’s most classified and at times illegal activities — everything from foreign assassination plots to the mind-control experiments of MK-ULTRA. But by 1977, when Hersh had turned his attention to corporate malfeasance, forcusing on internal misconduct by Gulf & Western Industries, he was entering territory that ran afoul of the Times itself (as when he learned that Abe Rosenthal, the paper’s executive editor, had gotten board approval for a sweetheart mortgage loan just like the ones Hersh had uncovered at Gulf & Western). In the documentary, he says that leaving the Times was really about acknowledging the limits of what could be done within mainstream journalism.
The film also chronicles the time Hersh got involved in a scandal of his own. On the eve of publishing his 1997 bestseller “The Dark Side of Camelot,” he had to remove a chapter based on letters that purported to show a hush-money contract between JFK and Marilyn Monroe. The letters, provided by Lex Cusack, had turned out to be forgeries, and Hersh was criticized for having had anything to do with them. But that probably says more about the collective sense of protection people still feel toward the myth of JFK than it does about Hersh’s journalistic integrity. (He’d been duped, but he rectified the mistake before publishing. So why the outcry?) As “Cover-Up” reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception. The movie is called “Cover-Up” because cover-up is the metaphysical state we live in. The true reporters, like Hersh, are those who dare to expose what they’re told not to.
