Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is known for breaking some of the most intense stories in modern American history. He uncovered the truth about the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. He acquired photos of prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib. He unveiled a CIA operation to spy on student activists and investigated Watergate. Hersh has also been at the center of controversy for his use of anonymous sources and one memorable use of forged letters. A new documentary tells the story of Sey Hersh's career and includes a reluctant participant from Sey himself who was not always cooperative with the project. It's titled Cover-Up. It's directed by Mark Obenhaus and Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, who it's playing now at the Film Forum and streaming on Netflix. Laura Poitras joins me now in studio. It is nice to meet you.

Laura Poitras: Hi Alison, it's great to be here with you.

Alison Stewart: You pitched this project to Sey Hersh 20 years ago. What was the pitch?

Laura Poitras: Yes. Sey is a legend. Investigative journalism, as you outline. For over half a century, he's been breaking some of the most important stories. In 2000, after the 911 attacks, there was the buildup to the Iraq war, which I was very against and made a film about it. Right before I went to Iraq to document what was happening, Sey's Abu Ghraib torture story came out. It was some of the most shocking images I think we've ever seen as a country. I ended up going to Iraq.

I actually filmed at Abu Ghraib prison, came back, and I was feeling a lot of despair about the state of journalism, quite frankly, not asking hard questions about this war, about the war on terror, about the use of torture, secret prisons, Guantanamo Bay prison. It's a long list. Sey was doing really great adversarial journalism at that time. I called him up, and he said, "Yes, sure, come to my office." I joke that it was The Twilight Zone music should have been playing because it was going back in centuries to like this office that hadn't been painted in decades, and all the yellow notepads and Sey was just wonderful and funny and great and talked to me for a long time.

I could see the film in my head, and what I wanted to do was just film him doing what he does. I left. And then he called me up, he said, "There's no way that I can work with you because of source protection," and how sensitive his sources are. That lives in a city where he has to leave the city or leave the country to meet the people that are his sources. It was a no, but I never forgot about the idea, and it stuck with me. He and I stayed in touch over the years. Every now and then, I would say, "Hey, Sey," till interested.

Alison Stewart: "How's that documentary, Sey? How about that documentary?"

Laura Poitras: Then late 2002, I finished another film about the groundbreaking artist and activist Nan Goldin. I reached out to him again. I said, "Hey, Sey, let's talk. Maybe now would be a good time to do that documentary." The motivation was the same that it was 20 years ago, which I'm very worried about the state of investigative journalism and feel that it's so vitally important to our society and to hold power accountable, particularly government power.

Alison Stewart: It's very interesting. He has an interesting point of view about his sources. What does he say to you about his sources, especially when he has just one source?

Laura Poitras: Let me just break down a few different things because in your introduction, the use of anonymous sources is different than single source. Anonymous sources are often used. They've been criticized. I think using anonymous sources is very problematic. When it's the government, for instance, Henry Kissinger trying to spin a story, that person should not be given anonymity. Because that means they're just using the media to get a point across.

In the film, you meet somebody named Camille Lo Sapio who shared photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib. This is someone who was terrified of what the government would do to her. In that case, anonymity is absolutely appropriate. There's all these kind of factors that have to go in. Then, always in the process of using anonymous sources, the editors. At the New Yorker, David Remnick would know who the sources are. Single sourcing is more controversial because you never know. You never know if a source knows all the information, if a source is playing you, if the source doesn't have full context all of that. That's a separate issue. We go into that in the film.

I also wanted to clarify that there we do also talk about the instance where Sey received forged letters, but he never published them. I think that's really important to say. They discovered early, and they were never published. We'll get to all, we'll get into.

Alison Stewart: We'll get into the details about all of that. One thing that's interesting in the film, which I'm sure you've experienced before, I don't know to what extent, but he tries to quit the film at one point, and the cameras are rolling, and you stop cameras once you realize, like, "Oh, this is serious, he's actually going to quit the film." What was he upset about? As you're comfortable telling me, how did you come to an agreement?

Laura Poitras: First of all, you know, once Sey agreed to do the film, which was a long, patient waiting time of over close to two decades, he was really very, incredibly generous with his time. We did over 40 interviews. There's over 100 hours of footage with him. We knew he can also have a short fuse. This was about source protection. He'd given us access to his reporter's notebooks, which are, as you know, there's nothing more sacred than reporter's notebooks. Before he shared them with us, he had sequestered some away because there were some he didn't want us to see. Somehow, one of them slipped through. He knew that we see it, and he got upset.

We, of course, were never going to publish anything in it, but just the fact that we had it made him upset. He did quit the film. It was, of course, tense by that point. We'd been filming for over a year. I think we were committed to continue with the film. We would have finished the film not how we'd wanted to, but we also knew Sey well enough to think that he probably was going to come back. I think in 24 hours, he was like, "I'm not going to give up. I really care about this project. It's all fine." As soon as we explained that we would never publish anything sensitive, and he knew that. My track record on source protection speaks for itself.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras. We're talking about her new film, Cover-Up, which profiles investigative journalist Sey Hersh. It's streaming now, and Netflix is playing at Film Forum through Christmas Day.

Initially, Sey was not going to go to college, which is an amazing thing to think about. A teacher saw him, saw something in him, gave him the opportunity to go to the University of Chicago. How did that one teacher's decision to help him change his life?

Laura Poitras: First of all, the film, we're really telling it's a portrait of Sey, but it's a portrait of the United States through Sey's reporting. We did want to understand how he became. How did he learn the trade of investigative journalism? He's the son of immigrants who came from Eastern Europe. They fled in the '20s. The family and extended community left behind did not survive the Holocaust. There was a lot of silence in the house growing up. His dad owned a dry cleaning store. Sey started working there very young. He had a gift with people. Then his dad became sick. His dad basically said, "You don't have to go to college. Your siblings are going to go to college, and you'll run the dry cleaning store-

Alison Stewart: Because you're good with people.

Laura Poitras: -because you're good with people." He talks about it. He said he had pizazz. He has a way with people. He likes people. He's curious. If he was here with you, he'd be asking you where you're from, what your story is. You'd find out that he knew more about you than some of your friends do pretty quickly.

He went to a community college and wrote an essay. The teacher said, "Sey Hersh, here." He rolls his eye and comes up. Then the teacher says, "What are you doing here?" Sey, he knows what he's saying. He was brilliant, basically saying he's a brilliant writer, he's a brilliant thinker. He needs to be at the University of Chicago. Gets him. Walks him into the administrative. The admissions office. He gets in. It does change his life. It just opens up to be in an intellectual environment at that time.

Alison Stewart: What is something that he learned there that was useful to him outside of the studies, but just something that opened his mind?

Laura Poitras: I think he said he didn't understand how the world worked. He had been in this very insular world, just taking care of family. Then all of a sudden there are these intellectuals, and he didn't know; he just didn't have that education. He actually talks about his main education when he was growing up, is he joined the Book of the Month club, if you can imagine. That's how he learned about history.

Then, by total chance encounter, he goes to a bar and has a conversation with somebody who says that he's working at City News. Sey was like, "What's that thing?" He applies and gets in, and the rest is history. He talks about falling in love with journalism. It just everything aligned with that. His great writing, his allergy to secrets and silence, wanting to get to the bottom of things, loving people, being curious, and being a bit of a punk, anti-authoritarian.

Alison Stewart: Before we talk about some of the journalism aspects of his life, something else that was very interesting me was his wife. He doesn't talk about her a lot. He talks about her with love. When he describes her and their children, was he protective of that?

Laura Poitras: He's very protective of his family. Sey's been in the public eye since the breaking the My Lai Massacre story in the late '60s, which I'm sure we're going to talk about. I think he's been protective of his family. His wife is a psychoanalyst, as he says in the film, explains in the film. He's protective of her privacy. I always knew that that was a boundary, and it's one I really respected. I also felt it was very important to include her in the film because they actually met at the University of Chicago. They've been together for over six decades. It's an incredible partnership. I think his work is possible because of that partnership.

I always felt that she was always one of the most important parts of the film, and understanding how Sey is able to talk about and do such really hard reporting. It takes a toll on a person, myself or Sey, to talk about some of these dark chapters.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the film Cover-Up with director Laura Poitras will have more after a break. This is All Of It.

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You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras. We're talking about her new film Cover-Up, which profiles investigative journalist Sey Hersh. It's streaming now on Netflix and playing at Film Forum through Christmas Day. My Lai, how did his reporting on the My Lai Massacre change the trajectory of the Vietnam War?

Laura Poitras: It really shifted the consciousness. There was a growing anti-war movement at that time. Seeing images of innocent civilians massacred shifted the consciousness, and I think it grew the movement. Sey, before that, he broke that story after being in Chicago. He went to the AP in Chicago, then was assigned to the Pentagon, which was an interesting choice, and started looking around and said, "Well, these are all lies here." He hears people saying things like it's Mortar Incorporated over there. He's really disturbed by the war. He ends up quitting the AP over a fight with an editor, which is Sey does quit.

Alison Stewart: He's quit a couple places [crosstalk]--

Laura Poitras: Including our film briefly for maybe 24 hours. He joined actually briefly the presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy, which was an anti-war campaign. He was his press secretary and speechwriter quit after actually a falling out. Then he describes it as feeling useless. I think he was seeing something awful happening. Sey is s

omebody who's his best reporting is really, it's evidence-based, it's fact-based, it's not opinion-based. He gets a tip that there is going to be a court-martial. He doesn't know much. Then he gets a name and then tracks down this guy William Calley, who was being court martialed, and learns that in the spring in March of 1968, over 500 civilians were massacred by US soldiers in My Lai.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it was interesting watching him. He didn't have a name, but then someone drops a name, and he clocks it, and then he looks like he doesn't have quite the spelling right. "Oh, but it's spelled like this." It's this step-by-step process he uses.

Laura Poitras: Yes, we really wanted that in the film to have it be a procedural film that we're showing how investigative journalism works. Its stories don't fall fully formed. His kind of how you track it so that the audience can go along to see how he puts the pieces together. Ultimately, I think what the real tipping point is, he meets this young soldier, Paul Meadlo, and his mother says, "I sent them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer." Then Meadlo does an interview on television with Mike Wallace and talks about killing civilians. Wallace asks him, including babies? He says, "Yes, and babies."

It's an interesting story about journalism, also because originally his story was rejected by some of the legacy media, including Life magazine. They syndicated it, him and David Oates. They wrote it up and then syndicated it to 30 different news organizations. By the third story, it was global headlines. Then we learned that there were photographs and that were taken by an army photographer, Ron Haeberle.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about Mainstream media in the process of making this, especially in the '60s and '70s, you can even say today, but especially in that era.

Laura Poitras: One of the big themes in the film is both the power of investigative journalism, but also a critique of it when it doesn't do its job, and how that has happened across decades, across administrations. It begins with Sey saying in the '60s that the problem with the press in the United States is not censorship, but self-censorship, that the press don't always report the facts or they're too close to power, too close to access.

We saw that in the Vietnam War. We see headlines after Sey's stories about the massacre, saying evidence is hazy, which is shocking. Then, fast forward, we see the same thing happening in the buildup to the Iraq war, where the journalists and legacy institutions are not asking hard questions about why are we going to war with a country that had nothing to do with the 911 terrorist attacks? For me, I've been very obsessed with that, both the importance of investigative journalism, but then also its shortcomings that I think has a lot to do with institutional cowardice and not wanting to anger the government.

I experienced that myself, doing the NSA reporting, the National Security Agency reporting about global mass surveillance, and Edward Snowden. He came to outside journalists like myself and Glenn Greenwald because he was worried that the story could get suppressed. It happens. Sey tells a story about one of his big stories getting suppressed at the New York Times in the '70s.

Alison Stewart: What do you think is Sey Hersh's biggest blind spot as a journalist after spending so much time with him?

Laura Poitras: I think maybe his strengths also can be weaknesses. He's very anti-authoritarian, very skeptical of power. In a work situation, maybe somebody is your ally, but maybe he's alienated some editors who are really just trying to get his back. I think his best work has been done at institutions that really, I think, supported him, but then also let him do what he does best, which is really challenge power.

Alison Stewart: Some of Sey's most powerful stories have been backed up by photo evidence, Ali Abu Ghraib. What did he understand about the power of images that would help him tell his story? Because some writers are like, "No, no, no, it's just the words."

Laura Poitras: Sey's a writer and he believes in writing, and that's what he's driven by, he's probably writing right now as we're talking. I saw him yesterday at Film Forum, and he got there early, so he's like, "I need a desk, and I need to write." He was not having coffee and chatting, so he's constantly writing. I think he believes in that, but I think he also understood that, in the case of specifically Abu Ghraib torture, what initiated the investigation were photographs. Joseph Darby turned them in, and then an investigation was started.

Alison Stewart: You were sharing earlier. I worked at MSNBC at the time. When those came over, they were shocking. We were like, "What are we looking at?"

Laura Poitras: Exactly. When Sey got that story, he'd heard that CBS had the story, but it was being suppressed because of government pressure on CBS. They were holding the story. The investigation, that was done by General Taguba, which goes into great detail about the sadistic treatment of prisoners by US Soldiers. I don't think would have ever happened without the photographs. The photographs were undeniable. Sey's reporting was both photographs and this report by a general.

What was important about the general's report is that he was calling out not just the soldiers, but the people who ordered it. That's always been Sey's obsession. We need to understand the chain of command and what creates the conditions.

Alison Stewart: You said that you saw him yesterday, and I'm imagining him given 60 Minutes last night, pulling CBS's Chief Bari Weiss pulling the story last night about Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador. If he were covering the story, and he may be, for all we know is who would be his first call? What would be interesting to him in that story?

Laura Poitras: It certainly wouldn't be going to a Pentagon press briefing. That's just not where news is. He talks about that. You're not going to news at a White House press briefing. You're going to get the lies. You're going to get the government's narrative. I think he's smart. He talks about certain tactics. He goes, "Okay, if you knock on doors or you find somebody who's retired." Somebody who's retired is maybe more willing to talk. I think that's how he's developed some of his sources.

He used to go into the army library and read their Internal magazines to find out what general has recently retired from what part of the military and say, "Huh, that's a good person to reach out to." I think it's shoe leather reporting that, and follow your instincts always.

Alison Stewart: Do you think that's possible, the way he works? It is shoe leather reporting, but given now with AI and deep fakes and documents that look absolutely real, is it possible to do what he used to do?

Laura Poitras: Yes, I think we have to-- There are facts in the world that we need to be reporting on, and those facts exist. There are journalists risking their lives every day that are imprisoned, that are putting their lives on the line to share knowledge and information about what's happening in the world. Of course, yes, it's also being spun, and there's misinformation, but that's why you need people to be skeptical and fact-check and do all the due diligence you need to do. I believe in power of investigative journalists.

There's another great film about journalism released this year called My Undesirable Friends, which is about Russian journalists and who talk about how they were the only independent journalists working and then they were labeled foreign agents, and then the war started, and they had to leave the country. Journalists are essential to check power.

Alison Stewart: When you look back on Sey Hersh's reporting, what do you think his work reveals about America and power in America?

Laura Poitras: That's a big question. This is everything that this film is about. What I'm interested in doing with this film it's covering over half a century. It's about patterns and cycles, cycles of abuse of power, of atrocities, of lies, of cover-ups and impunity, and the impunity where nobody gets held responsible. The people who created the policies, for instance, General Westmoreland and the Vietnam War, or Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War, when those people are not held accountable, you set the stage for that to happen again. This film, hopefully, will make the viewer more skeptical of government lies when they happen in real time, so that we can stand up and demand answers to questions. We're seeing that now, I think, with the Epstein, talk about the definition of a cover-up that's been going on. The public has a right to know what's happening and why is it being hidden.

Alison Stewart: Is it possible to do now with our divided sense of political beliefs?

Laura Poitras: One of the best things about Sey's reporting is that he's pissed off every administration he'd ever covered. It's not about partisanship, and news is not about partisanship.

Alison Stewart: Shouldn't be

Laura Poitras: Yes, it really shouldn't be. I think we need to tell the truth as it is, and whoever it angers, that's goes with the territory.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras. We're talking about her new film Cover-Up.

Laura Poitras: I want to correct one small thing. It's not on Netflix yet, so I don't want anyone going to Netflix to try to find it.

Alison Stewart: That's true. I saw it on Netflix. I had a preview. It's on Netflix, what day?

Laura Poitras: December 26th.

Alison Stewart: December 26th. Put that on your calendar, or you can go see it at the Film Forum through Christmas Day. Thank you so much for being with us.

Laura Poitras: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Coming up, tomorrow's show, we'll go back in time 100 years, the Harlem Renaissance, a look at the richness of gay life at the time. It's the subject of a new exhibit at the New York Historical and we'll talk about it with its curators. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.