Guest Post by Morbo
It is remarkable to me that in this day and age some people still defend Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
A few of these loons emerged from underneath slimy rocks recently after the release of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s new movie about Edward R. Murrow and the early years of television news. Writing in Human Events, Alan H. Ryskind notes that Ann Coulter has already begun the rehabilitation of McCarthy. Perfect. I can’t think of a better candidate to handle the job. No better form of poetic justice could exist than to leave McCarthy’s reputation in the hands of the Wicked Witch of Right.
I had occasion to see “Good Night, and Good Luck” recently. It’s a truly amazing piece of work in part because of what it does not do: It doesn’t set up a dramatic re-creation of a smack down between Murrow and McCarthy. Rather, McCarthy’s is discredited through his own words and images. In the film, Murrow is portrayed by actor David Straithairn, but McCarthy is portrayed by himself through the use of archival footage. This stuff is damning, and it remains the reason why attempts to rehabilitate McCarthy will always fail.
The film’s most powerful moment, which features no actors, is footage of the famous salvo by attorney Joseph N. Welch: “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” The camera pans to a sputtering McCarthy, struggling to phrase a coherent response. Priceless.
Ryskind complains that the film never singles out a specific person whose life was ruined by McCarthy. “So where are the bloody corpses in Clooney’s movie?” he demands. “They’re totally missing. In fact, Clooney — who directed and helped write the movie — doesn’t show a single person who was done in by the senator’s supposedly reckless charges. Not one!”
I have to wonder if Ryskind actually saw the film, because I find it hard to believe that even a writer for Human Events could be so dense.
Let me try to explain it for him: “Good Night, and Good Luck” isn’t about individual victims of McCarthy. It’s about the poisonous atmosphere created by the Red Scare and the effect it had on the entire country. You see, Mr. Ryskind, everyone was a victim because, thanks to McCarthy’s antics, Americans couldn’t trust one another any more. They were living in fear. People who hadn’t really done anything wrong worried that they might be denounced and thus lose their livelihoods, their families and even their freedoms. The movie criticizes McCarthy for creating that atmosphere.
Thus, the film makes a big deal out of Murrow’s remarks on his March 9, 1954, “See It Now” broadcast when he said, “We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into the age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”
Ryskind also complains because a portion of the film deals with the case of Milo Radulovich, an Air Force officer who was declared a security risk because of allegations that his family members read publications deemed subversive. Ryskind charges that Radulovich was never singled out by McCarthy.
True but irrelevant. Once again, allow me to explain: Radulovich was a victim of McCarthy because McCarthy helped created an atmosphere in which the military felt it necessary to conduct witch hunts against officers based on what their family members read. The Air Force would not have done this had McCarthy not made such a stink. Today, we have a name for this type of behavior. We call it “McCarthyism.” So in a sense, even people today can still be victims of McCarthy, despite his being long dead.
Here’s the great irony of the film: Despite Murrow’s courage in standing up to McCarthy on “See It Now,” he and CBS eventually fell victim to the mentality McCarthy had created. What was Murrow’s reward for challenging McCarthy and helping to dethrone him? Less than a year after that March 1954 broadcast, an event that has been called television’s finest hour, CBS kicked “See It Now” off of Tuesday night and relegated Murrow to occasional one-hour specials on Sunday afternoons. Murrow had become controversial, and CBS decided it could make more money on Tuesday nights with a quiz show. By the summer of 1958, even the occasional Murrow broadcasts were gone.
In the end, “Good Night, and Good Luck” reminds us of the promise of television news in its early years — and offers a broadside against that medium for betraying that promise.
Mr. Ryskind, go back and watch the movie again and this time pay attention. Listen carefully to the speech Murrow gives at the end of the movie. Note it’s not about McCarthy; it’s about the future of television. After the film, go home, turn on your TV and watch what passes for television news these days. Tell me then that Murrow was full of it.