After Every Clue

If there has ever been a reporter who refused to practice herd behavior, it is  Seymour Hersh. “When I was at the Pentagon for the AP,” he tells Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus in their new Netflix documentary, Cover-Up, “instead of going to lunch with my colleagues, I’d go find young officers. You know, talk a little football, get to know them…. Eventually, Army guys would start saying, ‘Well, it’s Murder, Incorporated’” in Vietnam. Over his nearly half-century career, Hersh has broken innumerable stories, from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib, and proven to be one of America’s most significant investigative reporters. In a review of Cover-Up for Books & the Arts, Adam Hochschild follows the ups and downs of Hersh’s career and the endless scoops that has fueled it. “Cover-Up provides a vivid picture of Hersh at work. We learn how he tracks down every clue, whether by showing up at someone’s home unannounced, befriending an Army officer or a
CIA agent with a guilty conscience, or taking notes on a document he’s viewing upside down, on a lawyer’s desk, while the lawyer thinks Hersh is jotting down what he’s saying. Skillfully leaping back and forth across decades, Cover-Up weaves together archival footage, interviews with an often reluctant Hersh, and shots of him in action, usually on the telephone. We also hear him discussed by others, including President Richard Nixon.” Read “The Endless Scoops of Seymour Hersh”

Struggles for the Future

Must revolution always mean change? Does it require innovation, or can it bring back what is old? If it does not bring novelty but simply restores the past, is it truly a revolution at all? For centuries, this was the case: What was once called a revolution did not signify a break with the past but meant something more like a return to political origins. But in the early modern period, something changed: The very idea of revolution was revolutionized. In a wide-ranging review essay, Peter Gordon explores how the meaning of revolution has evolved from a conservative notion of restoration to a radical one of social change. Like many other works that are critical of “progress,” Gordon writes in his review, this new history “seems to believe that” something when wrong when revolutions became forward- instead of backward-looking. But is the idea of progress really all that “irredeemably tainted”? Read “How Has the Idea of Revolution Changed?”