We show that a radical has a semisimple essential cover if and only if it is hereditary and has a complement in the lattice of hereditary radicals. In 1971 Snider gave a full description of supernilpotent radicals which have a complement. Recently Beidar, Fong, Ke, and Shum have determined radicals with semisimple essential covers. Using their results, we are able to provide a lower radical representation of complemented subidempotent radicals. This completes Snider's description of hereditary complemented radicals.In the context of radical theory the usefulness of the essential cover operator £ has been known from Armendariz [2] and Rjabuhin [8], who showed that a semisimple class is closed under essential extension if and only if the corresponding radical class is hereditary. In 1970, Stewart [10] characterised semisimple radical classes in terms of subdirect sums of a finite set of finite fields. In 1983, Loi [7] showed that a radical class is semisimple if and only if it is closed under essential extensions (also see Gardner [6]). The last two results naturally lead one to consider the classification of the essential covers of radicals in terms of semisimplicity. In 1994, Birkenmeier [4] showed that the essential cover £p of a supernilpotent radical p is nearly a semisimple class: it is hereditary, closed under extensions, finite subdirect sums, arbitrary direct sums and products. Hence Ep only lacks the requirement of being closed under arbitrary subdirect sums to become a semisimple class. Thus the question arises in [4]: which supernilpotent classes have semisimple essential covers? Imposing this seemingly mild extra condition on the essential cover Sp has turned out to be very restrictive: none of the classical radicals have semisimple essential covers [5]. Recently, Beidar, Fong, Ke, and Shum [3] have fully described radicals having semisimple essential covers. Their description is reminiscent of Stewart's characterisation of radical semisimple classes [10].Working on the same problem we found an alternative solution: radicals whose essential covers are semisimple classes, are exactly the hereditary radicals which have