‘He’s a son of a bitch – but he’s usually right’: why did Seymour Hersh quit the film about his earth-shattering exposés?
He is the prickly, hotheaded journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and torture at Abu Ghraib prison. Making Cover-Up, a film about his astonishing life and countless scoops, was never going to be easy One morning last month, Seymour Hersh set off to buy a newspaper. The reporter walked for 30 minutes, covered six blocks of his neighbourhood, Georgetown in Washington DC, and didn’t see a single sign of life. No newsstands on street corners selling the glossies and the dailies. No self-service kiosk where you can slide in a dollar and pull out a paper. “Finally, I found a drugstore that had two copies of the New York Times in the back,” Hersh recalls. He bought one for himself. He can’t help but wonder whether anybody bought the second. Hersh was born in Chicago in 1937, the year the Hindenburg airship blew up and the aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. That makes him a man of hot metal, the media’s ancient mariner, with metaphorical newsprint on his ...