Turning the lens on famed reporter

Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke My Lai, becomes the subject in 'Cover-Up.'

- BY JOSH ROTTENBERG

The New York Times INVESTIGATIVE journalist Seymour Hersh makes a call in his office in 1975.

For more than half a century, Seymour Hersh has been asking the questions the powerful would rather not answer.

As one of America's most relentless investigative reporters, he exposed the 1968 massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians — including children and babies — by U.S. troops at My Lai; revealed the Nixon administration's secret bombing of Cambodia and illegal wiretaps during Watergate; uncovered the CIA's domestic spying and mind-control programs; and brought to light the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Presidents and generals have dreaded seeing his byline. Editors have braced for the fallout.

But for all his zeal in exposing secrets, Hersh has never been comfortable turning the focus on himself. He's spent a lifetime protecting his sources and guarding their confidences, not inviting scrutiny. At 88, he's still very much a working reporter: sharp, skeptical and wary of being on the other side of the questions.

"I don't psychoanalyze my sources," he says by phone from Washington, D.C., where he has long been based. "And I don't want you to psychoanalyze me either."

It took 20 years of persistence, but Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras finally convinced him. Co-directed with Mark Obenhaus, her new film, “Cover-Up,” pulls back the curtain on a reporter who has spent his career unveiling what others try to hide.