This gripping documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, about the work of legendary reporter Seymour M. Hersh has just been released on Netflix. It is must-see viewing for anyone who wishes to know more about the murder, war crimes, rape, torture, and other abuses committed by the US government and its military, many of which were revealed because of the dogged work of Hersh. I have written about Hersh and his work multiple times before but if you have time to read just one of them, I would recommend my review of his memoir Reporter published in 2018. He is also scathing about the complicity of the mainstream media in enabling so many cover-ups, while patting themselves on the back for being courageous truth-seekers.

What made him distinctive was that he did not suck up to the top people, as so many ‘star’ reporters do in the effort to get what they consider ‘scoops’ but which in actuality made them conduits for government and military propaganda. The New York Times and Washington Post are particularly guilty of this. What Hersh did was to seek out lower level people who had principles and consciences and also had access to important information but were not careerists desperately seeking to climb the ladder by acquiescing to their superiors. He would go to great lengths to protect their identities, often speaking to many people whom he knew knew nothing about the story he was reporting, just so that his source could not be singled out. As a result, word got around that he could be trusted and more people would come to him with information and copies of secret documents.

In the documentary, he comes across as irascible, irritable even with the documentarians, which suits his personality of being an iconoclast. He was able to gain the confidence of his sources because he shared their skepticism of the top echelons of government, military, and media, and his crankiness shielded him from the desire to be accepted by the establishment. He was quite willing to be attacked by his peers and those in power, which happened a lot. He was often attacked by fellows in the media because his stories exposed how, since the stories were always there to be had, they were either blinded by their desire to be seen as ‘loyal’ Americans that they followed the official requests to not report them or because they were so easily duped into believing the lies of the official government sources. In fact, behind closed doors, government officials often remarked how easy it was to mislead reporters. Hersh seems to share with another legendary reporter I. F. Stone the realization that it is enormously liberating to be seen as a pariah. Freed from the worry about offending anyone or losing access to high-level sources, you could report what you found.

He described how he first learned about the My Lai massacre where US troops cold-bloodedly killed the inhabitants of an entire village, men, women, and children, from Ronald Ridenhour. Ridenhour was a soldier serving in Vietnam who heard from other soldiers about the massacre. He collected information from others who were eyewitnesses or knew about it but his efforts to get the truth out did not gain traction. When he looked into it, Hersh said that he was astonished that the story didn’t come out before because so many soldiers and their superiors were in the area and they had to have known. It was speculated that they tried to dismiss the massacre as the aberration of a few people (the usual excuse) but he realized that the lack of any reaction was likely not because they did not believe it or want to believe it but because this kind of atrocity was so routine. While the military tried to portray My Lai as an isolated incident, in reality similar killings were taking place on the same day in the same area. The US military was engaging in mass murder in Vietnam, crimes for which no one was held accountable and the biggest mass murderer in the military, general William Westmoreland who was commander of the war effort in Vietnam, was even promoted at the end of his tour.

An extremely poignant and also horrifying excerpt from Hersh’s memoir (discussed in the film) describes how Paul Meadlo, one of the troops who followed troop leader lieutenant William Calley‘s order to murder the people, never recovered from the guilt. Hersh tracked him down at his remote family home and asked him about his Vietnam experience.

We turned to the day of the massacre. Paul told his story to me without overt emotion; it was as if he’d clicked from on to off. He’d been asked to stand watch over a large group of women and children, all terrified survivors of the carnage, who had been gathered in a ditch. Calley, upon arriving at the ditch, ordered Meadlo and others to kill all. Meadlo did the bulk of the killing, firing seventeen-bullet clips – four or five in all, he told me – into the ditch, until it grew silent. I would be told later by other soldiers that a moment or two after the firing stopped, and the ditch grew quiet, the GIs heard the sound of a child crying, and Calley’s men watched as a three- or four-year-old boy, who had been protected by his mother, crawled to the top of the ditch, full of others’ blood, and began running toward a nearby rice paddy. Calley asked Meadlo to “plug him.” Meadlo, flooded with tears and confronted with a single victim, refused and so Calley ran up behind the child, with his carbine extended, and blew off the back of his head. (p. 131).
…

Calley’s company moved on in the late afternoon toward the South China Sea a few miles to the east. Early the next morning Meadlo stepped on a land mine and blew off his right foot. As he was waiting to be evacuated, he chanted, again and again, “God had punished me and God will punish you, Lieutenant Calley, for what you made me do.” Calley was shaken and began screaming for the helicopter. (p.130)

Meadlo’s mother’s bitter comment to Hersh “I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer” (p. 131) became the headline for many of the stories about this..

In 1971, Calley was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, later reduced to 20 years and then to 10 years. There was a huge outpouring of support for him from ‘patriotic’ Americans (including Jimmy Carter who was then governor of Georgia, no doubt with an eye on his future presidential run in 1976) and president Nixon released him after having served just four months in prison.

But Hersh went on after Vietnam to break all manner of big stories. The film goes on to describe his work on Watergate , the CIA’s domestic spying program, the horrors of Abu Ghraib, and Henry Kissinger’s crimes such as overthrowing governments and assassinations. He said that he left the New York Timesbecause they did not like that he wanted to write exposes about the abuses of US corporations, because the paper itself was a big cooperation and all their top people hobnobbed with the kind of people he was trying to expose.

The documentary at the end shows him (still vigorous at 88 years of age) investigating and uncovering abuse, focusing on what is going on right now in Gaza, collecting information from sources about the mass murders of Palestinians by the Israeli Defense Forces that must be giving him flashbacks about what the US military did to the Vietnamese.

The film ends with a clip showing the mass murderer Calley leaving prison in full uniform and escorted into a limousine and Westmoreland and other top people smugly preening themselves. Watching it, Hersh tells Poitras, “We are a culture of enormous violence. It’s just so brutal. There’s a level you just can’t get to.” Poitras then asks him, “So why do you keep doing the work?” He thinks for a bit, shrugs his shoulders, and replies, “You can’t have a country that does that. That’s why I have sort of been on the war path ever since. You can’t have a country that does it and looks the other way. If there’s any mantra to what I do, that’s it.”

‘You can’t have a country that is so brutal and look the other way’ is a motto that everyone can and should live by.

There is so much more in the documentary that I cannot adequately summarize. If you can get it, I strongly recommend watching it.

Here’s the trailer.

And here’s a short clip from the documentary.