2026年2月22日 / 美国东部时间上午9:57 / CBS新闻
当被问及作为一名记者他热爱这份工作的原因时，西摩·赫什回答道：”这和你热爱它的原因是一样的。你在开玩笑吗？还有什么比带着一个好故事出镜更有趣的呢？”
西摩·赫什本身就是一个好故事。六十年间，赫什的报道改变了公众舆论和政府政策。他在伊拉克战争期间揭露的阿布格莱布监狱酷刑事件，只是他漫长职业生涯中的一个重要报道。他的报道生涯始于揭露美军在越南屠杀数百名平民的事件。
普利策奖得主调查记者西摩·赫什。CBS新闻
这位身材高大、有时颇具争议的调查记者的背景故事，是马克·奥本豪斯和劳拉·波伊特拉斯联合制作的纪录片《掩盖》（Cover-Up）的主题。该片目前正在Netflix平台上线。
曾因记录斯诺登事件的纪录片《第四公民》（CitizenFour）获得奥斯卡奖的波伊特拉斯评价赫什说：”他热爱他人。尽管有时会有点脾气暴躁。”
她对赫什时而情绪化的描述，听起来就像是理想调查记者的职业要求：始终与权力对抗；从不被权力圈子诱惑；坚持不懈地追踪最高权力中心（例如总统）。
“你会认为他很勇敢吗？是的，绝对勇敢，”波伊特拉斯说，”他是一个真正被追求真相驱动的人，无论真相将他引向何方，无论可能会激怒谁。”
而赫什确实激怒了很多人——不仅是他报道对象，有时甚至是他的上司。
波伊特拉斯花了20年时间才说服他接受采访，直到88岁的赫什有足够的理由说”是”。”年纪大了，是时候退出了，是时候退缩了，”他说。
他是否考虑过辞职？”你能放弃现在正在发生的事情吗？”他说，”你真的能现在就离开记者岗位吗？我是说，不行。看看我们现在身处何方，我们在一个从未经历过的境地。”
而我们今天身处何方？”混乱，”赫什说。
“他们开始信任你”
当西摩·赫什在五角大楼开始报道工作时，他不仅通过正式简报获取信息，还通过在走廊里行走、敲门、与年轻军官闲聊来收集情报。
“我们谈论足球，谈论红皮队，”他说。
他是在讨好他们吗？”我对他们很坦诚。我不知道这算不算讨好，”他回答道，”如果你和一个人交谈却不写任何东西，他们就会开始信任你。”
越战期间，他收到一个消息，称军队指控一名士兵犯下了可怕的暴行，他开始追查这个士兵的名字：”有一天，我看到一位曾去过越南的陆军上校一瘸一拐地走在走廊里。我说：’你对那个村庄被扫射的事了解多少？’他停下来，用他那只受伤的膝盖敲了敲地面。他说：’那个叫凯利的小伙子（威廉·凯利）杀的人不止那么多。’于是，我有了一个名字。花了我很长时间；我把名字拼错了。我不敢问他怎么拼写，我肯定说了’哦，我听说了，是的’之类的话。但我有了一个名字。”
我指出：”我们有时会假装自己知道得比实际多。”
赫什笑了：”有时？你在开玩笑吗？我们总是假装自己知道得比实际多！”
他关于威廉·凯利中尉和美莱大屠杀的报道，让美国人重新审视美军在越南的角色，并为赫什赢得了普利策奖。
西摩·赫什为Dispatch新闻社报道美莱大屠杀的独家报道，为他赢得了普利策国际报道奖。CBS新闻
对于一个在芝加哥南区父亲的干洗店工作的孩子来说，这是一项相当了不起的成就，而他的双胞胎兄弟则去上了大学。
“我哥哥必须上大学，而我必须经营商店，”赫什说，”我父亲在我15岁时去世。这真是个糟糕的打击。我很聪明，显然如此。我考试分数很高。但我无能为力，我不能去上大学。”
他对此感到怨恨吗？”不。我没有——事情就是这样。你知道，我必须照顾我的母亲。”
尽管如此，赫什还是获得了大学学位，并找到了一份记者工作。”作为一名警察记者，我从不同的角度看到了芝加哥。芝加哥很艰难。涉及黑帮，我不能报道警察腐败，也不能接触黑帮。我热爱这份工作，也明白它的局限性。所以，这是一个不同的世界。……在那个世界里，你必须是第一个出现在现场的人。”
“他有时确实脾气急躁”
他在《纽约时报》找到了一份工作，这家报纸在全国最大的政治丑闻之一中并非第一个报道的媒体。在赫什介入之前，伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦几乎独自报道了水门事件。而他得到了”很棒的东西”。
他得到的消息是，水门事件的闯入者正通过与尼克松竞选连任活动相关的中间人支付封口费。《纽约时报》参与了调查，尼克松总统也知道了这件事。
正如理查德·尼克松的白宫录音带中记录的那样，总统说：”该死，《纽约时报》上的那篇文章，赫什写的那篇。他通常不会报道错误的东西。这狗娘养的是个混蛋，但他通常是对的，不是吗？”
他接下来的重大报道涉及中央情报局（CIA）的非法国内间谍活动和外国暗杀计划。
在纪录片《掩盖》中，赫什的前报道伙伴杰夫·格思解释了赫什的一种技巧：”西摩找到了一种引起人们注意的方法。大喊大叫当然是一种方式。但这不是他唯一的工具。但他有时确实脾气很急躁。”
事实上，在《掩盖》制作期间，赫什大发雷霆并退出了影片。
为什么？”西摩只是受够了，并且对我们能接触到他的大量笔记本感到不安，他觉得自己的消息来源受到了威胁，”波伊特拉斯说。
笔记本上记录了他的消息来源。”这就是导火索，”波伊特拉斯说，”这确实是他的动力所在——获取新闻，揭露不法行为，保护他的消息来源。”
当被问及为什么重返该片拍摄时，赫什回答：”我娶了一个比我聪明得多的人。”
赫什和他的妻子伊丽莎白——一位精神分析师——已经结婚61年了。
她是怎么让他回到镜头前的？”她只是告诉我，我是个混蛋，”赫什笑着说。他回到了纪录片的拍摄中，之后还进行了更多采访。波伊特拉斯总共记录了42次对赫什的采访，超过120小时的素材。
那么，他们是朋友、合作者还是伙伴？”我会把他视为朋友，”波伊特拉斯说，”但在电影制作中，我们也有新闻记者的关系。所以，我必须问他一些他报道中出现失误的地方。这必须是影片的一部分。”
比如，他曾被伪造的文件欺骗，这些文件显示肯尼迪与玛丽莲·梦露有染，赫什不得不在出版前将其从书中删除。他也曾被当时的叙利亚领导人巴沙尔·阿萨德和情报来源误导，这些人告诉他阿萨德没有对本国人民使用化学武器。
“你要承受这些打击，”赫什说，”我没有消失。我继续做我该做的事。”
“这是一个了不起的国家。我们值得更好的领导人”
在我们的交谈中，有一点让我感到惊讶：”你一点也没有变得温和。”
“现在有这么多好故事，”他说。
这些故事让他愤怒还是激励他？”哦。不，不，不，不。情况要复杂得多。我出身平凡。当我还是个孩子时，我读体育报道，看到那个出身平凡的孩子成为纽约扬基队的中外野手……”
“很多成功的人都出身平凡，”我插话道。
“不，不，”赫什说，”这是一个了不起的国家。我们应该有更好的领导人。这是我非常强烈的感受。”
“但是当你看到你揭露的那些谎言、那些不光彩的行为、那些腐败现象时？”
“听着。我本可以感到震惊。但我一直很震惊。美国，对我来说，你知道，你要记住，我15岁时在做什么？在经营我父亲的商店。没有任何退路。
“这是一个伟大的国家，”赫什说，”我认为这位总统正在玷污它。但这没关系，因为我们会挺过他。但你怎么能不迷恋我们生活的地方，不迷恋我们所处的时代？这是一个了不起的国家。”
要观看《掩盖》的预告片，请点击下方的视频播放器：
Cover-Up | Official Trailer | Netflix
更多信息：
本文由Reid Orvedahl制作。编辑：Ed Givnish。
另见：
- Seymour Hersh – 一名”记者”的人生（”Sunday Morning”）
分类：
https://youtu.be/9CxEnECKs9U
Seymour Hersh: A reporter’s reporter
February 22, 2026 / 9:57 AM EST / CBS News
Asked what he loved about being a reporter, Seymour Hersh replied, “The same thing you love about it. Are you kidding? Is there anything more fun than being on air with a good story?”
Seymour Hersh is a good story. For six decades, Hersh’s reporting has changed public opinion and government policy. The torture that he revealed at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war was just one scoop in a long run that began with his account of the slaughter of hundreds of civilians by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. CBS News
The backstory of this towering, sometimes controversial investigative journalist is the subject of “Cover-Up,” a documentary by Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras, now streaming on Netflix.
Poitras, who won an Oscar for “CitizenFour,” her film about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said of Hersh, “He loves people. Even though he can be a little cranky.”
Her description of the sometimes volatile Hersh could read like the job requirements for an ideal investigative reporter: Consistently adversarial to power; never seduced into the club; consistently going after the highest powers (the president, for instance) over and over.
Would she call him courageous? Yeah, absolutely,” Poitras said. “He’s somebody who’s really driven by his pursuit of the truth no matter where it leads him and who it might anger.”
And anger, he did – not only the subjects of his stories, but sometimes his bosses.
It took Poitras 20 years of schmoozing to bag her subject, until Hersh – now 88 – had enough reasons to say yes. “Older, time to quit, time to back off,” he said.
Did he think he might quit? “Can you give up what’s going on now?” he said. “Can you really walk away from being a reporter now, what’s going on? I mean, no. Look where we are. We’re in someplace we haven’t been.”
And where are we today? “Chaos,” Hersh said.
“They get to trust you”
When Sy Hersh started out reporting at the Pentagon, he got his information not just from formal briefings, but by walking the halls, knocking on doors, and chit-chatting with junior officers.
“We talked football, we talked Redskins,” he said.
Was he charming them? “I was straight with them. I don’t know if that’s charming or not,” he replied. “If you talk to a guy and you don’t write anything, they get to trust you.”
He got a tip during the Vietnam War that the Army had accused a soldier of a terrible atrocity, and set out to find his name: “One day I saw one of my colonels in the Army that had gone to Nam, Vietnam. I saw him limping in the hallway. And I said, ‘What do you know about this shooting up of a village?’ And he stopped, and he went like this, hit his bad knee. He says, ‘That kid Calley didn’t kill anybody higher than that.’ And so, I had a name. It took me a long time; I spelled it wrong. I didn’t dare ask him how to spell it, and I’m sure I said, ‘Oh, I hear you, yeah,’ whatever. I’m sure I said something. But I had a name.”
I noted, “We sometimes pretend we know more than we do.”
“Sometimes?” Hersh laughed. “Are you kidding? We always pretend we know more than we do!”
His reporting on Lt. William Calley and the My Lai massacre caused Americans to reexamine the role of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and won Hersh a Pulitzer Prize.
Seymour Hersh’s exclusive reporting on the My Lai massacre for Dispatch News Service won him the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. CBS News
Quite an achievement for a kid who grew up working at his dad’s dry-cleaning store on the South Side of Chicago, while his twin went to university.
“My brother had to go to college, and I had to run the store,” Hersh said. “And my father died when I was 15. It was just a bad break. And I was smart, obviously. I mean, I tested high. But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t go.”
Was he bitter about that? “No. I don’t – it just was. It is what it was. You know, I had to take care of my mother.”
Still, Hersh managed to earn a college degree, and found employment reporting. “I got to see Chicago from a different point of view, as a police reporter. Chicago was tough. The mob, I couldn’t write about police corruption, and I couldn’t touch the mob. I loved it, and I also understood the limits of it. So, it was a different world. … It was a world where you had to be first on a scene.”
“He definitely has a short fuse sometimes”
He got a job at The New York Times, a newspaper that was not first on the scene for one of the nation’s biggest political scandals. Until Hersh got into it, Woodward and Bernstein had the story of Watergate mostly to themselves. And he got “something great.”
What he got was that the Watergate burglars were being paid hush money by intermediaries linked to the Nixon reelection campaign. The New York Times was in the game, and President Nixon knew it.
As recorded on Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, the president said, “Goddamn it. The story in the Times. The one by Hersh. He doesn’t usually go with stuff that’s wrong. The son of a bitch is a son of a bitch, but he’s usually right, isn’t he?”
His next big scoops were about the CIA’s role in illegal domestic spying and foreign assassination plots.
In the documentary “Cover-Up,” Hersh’s former reporting partner, Jeff Gerth, explains one of Hersh’s techniques: “Sy has found a way of trying to get people’s attention. Screaming is certainly one way to do it. It’s not his only tool. But he definitely has a short fuse sometimes.”
In fact, during production of “Cover-Up,” Hersh blew up and quit the film.
Why? “Sy just got fed up and nervous about the fact that we had so much access to his notebooks, and felt very protective of his sources,” said Poitras.
The notebooks had the names of his sources. “That was the trigger,” Poitras said. “This is really what makes him tick, to get the story, to expose wrongdoing, and to protect his sources.”
Asked why he returned to the film, Hersh replied, “I’m married to somebody much smarter than myself.”
Hersh and his wife, Elizabeth, a psychoanalyst, have been married for 61 years.
And what did she say to get him back in that chair? “She just told me what an a I was,” Hersh laughed. He returned to the documentary, and then some. In all, Poitras recorded 42 interviews with Hersh, over 120 hours of footage.
So, were they friends? Collaborators? Partners? “I would consider him a friend,” Poitras said. “But you also have a journalist relationship to the filmmaking. So, I had to ask him about some of his reporting where he had misses. That had to be part of the film.”
Like being duped by forged documents showing an affair between JFK and Marilyn Monroe, which Hersh had to pull from a book prior to publication. And he was taken in by then-Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and intelligence sources who told him that Assad did not use chemical weapons on his own people.
“You take your licks,” said Hersh. “I didn’t disappear. I kept on doing what I did.”
“This is an amazing country. And we deserve better leaders”
I noted something that was a surprise from our conversations: “You haven’t mellowed at all.”
“There’s so many good stories now,” he said.
Do they anger or motivate him? “Oh. No. No, no, no, no. It’s so much more. I came from nowhere. When I was a kid reading sports stories, the kid from nowhere who became centerfielder for the New York Yankees …”
“A lot of people who make it come from nowhere,” I interjected.
“No, no,” said Hersh. “This is an amazing country. And we deserve better leaders. And that’s what I feel very strongly.”
“But when you see what you’ve uncovered, you’ve come upon such dishonesty, such dishonor, such corruption?”
“Look. I could be shocked. I was always shocked. America, for me, you know, you gotta remember, where was I at age 15? Running my father’s store. There’s no bar.
“It’s a great country,” Hersh said. “And I think this president is dishonoring it. But that’s okay, because we will survive him. But how can you not be enamored by where we live, and our time? It’s just an amazing country.”
To watch a trailer for “Cover-Up,” click on the video player below:
Cover-Up | Official Trailer | Netflix by Netflix on YouTube
For more info:
- The documentaryCover-Upis now streaming on Netflix
Story produced by Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Ed Givnish.
See also:
- Seymour Hersh – The life of a “Reporter”(“Sunday Morning”)
In:
https://youtu.be/9CxEnECKs9U
