Newspaper logo  
 
 
Bookmark and Share
Local News & Opinion

01.26 Local Democrats Invited to Brainstorming Session on Sun., Jan. 31

Ref. : Local Newsbriefs

Travel
Books, Films, Arts & Education

02.04 'The Power of Nightmares': Underwear vs. Reason

Letters

Ref. : Letters to the editor

Open Letters:
Health & Environment

Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries

02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block

01.18 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients

Media Watching

02.04 Err-America

02.03 The Right Gets Itself 'Wired'

Ref. : The Daily Howler

Legal Matters

01.25 Thinking About Fictions

01.24 US Democracy's End of the Road

01.22 Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court Nails Down the Coffin of Democracy

01.22 Security Fools

US Politics, Policy & Culture

02.09 Palin, Psy-Ops & 'Condescending' Libs

02.09 Growing Hunger in America

02.08 The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being

02.08 Thinking About Oracles

02.06 No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle

02.04 Howard Zinn and the State of the Union

02.04 The US Supreme Court: Vanguard of Friendly American Fascism?

02.04 The New War Against Money

02.04 David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers

02.02 Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts

02.02 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite

02.01 Thinking About Definitives

02.01 Remembering Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010)

01.29 American History 101: We Are Devo

01.29 Obama's Outreach to Americans: Empty Rhetoric, Business As Usual

01.28 The Supreme Court's Partisanship

01.27 Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power

01.25 Granny D on Campaign Finance Reform

01.25 S.C. Republican’s Plan: Starve the Poor So They’ll Stop “Breeding”

01.23 It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand

01.21 Massachusetts' Message of Stupid

01.21 Terrorism Defined: Bill Clinton Lights Our Way to Truth

01.21 How Obama Lost His Way

01.21 Political Earthquake Rocks Massachusetts

01.20 Obama Cuts Deal that Will Reduce Social Security, Medicare and all Entitlements

01.20 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors

01.19 Outsourcing War: The Rise of Private Military Contractors

“High Crimes?”

01.25 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power

01.19 Dark as a Dungeon: A Brutal System Stripped Bare

Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance

02.07 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist

02.06 The Free Market Fetish

02.04 The Crisis is Not Over

02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block

02.02 Rule by the Rich

01.29 The Battle of the Titans: JPMorgan vs. Goldman Sachs

01.27 State of the Union: Obama’s “Automatic IRA” Plan Could Make Bush’s Wildest Dreams Come True

01.26 Obama, Read Your Reagan on Capital Gains Taxation

01.24 Funding Public Health Care with a Publicly-Owned Bank: How Canada Did It

01.18 Thinking About Accelerants

International

02.08 Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustic

02.07 Annals of Liberation: Obama Surge Driving Thousands From Their Homes

02.05 Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine

02.03 Child Slavery in Haiti

01.30 Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry"

01.28 Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning

01.27 Haiti's Earthquake: Natural or Engineered

01.26 Helping Haiti’s Elders

01.26 Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs

01.25 Focus on Haiti: Washington's Militarized Takeover

01.22 The Lessons of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

01.18 Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti

We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
Google
This site Web
  ''Good Night, and Good Luck''

MOVIE COMMENTARY:

"Good Night, and Good Luck"

Background Review by Joseph Rosenberg
"GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK"
Directed and co-written by George Clooney
Produced by Grant Heslov
Warner Independent, 2005

A lot of people in government service lost their jobs due to McCarthy's false allegations, and had trouble being employed in their profession. Those are the people Murrow and Friendly protected, to their everlasting credit.
I was 11 years old in PS 229 Bath Beach, Brooklyn, when I first heard the word “pinko.” It was “show and tell” and one of the class mentioned that Don Hollenback of the 11 o’clock news had killed himself, he started to talk about the event, but our teacher, Mrs. Robinson, cut him off, saying we needn’t bother talking about this as the deceased was a “pinko." The next time I saw Senator Joe McCarthy on TV, I understood how he was not an entertainer, but the kind sort of person who affected people’s lives--but not only for the better. As I got older I began to read about McCarthy and that era. I read Richard Rovere on McCarthy and Alexander Kendrick on Murrow and a number of books on CBS’s early history. All did not get into the private lives of Murrow, William Paley, or McCarthy, but they did get to the essence of these men, who were the protagonists in Clooney’s docu-drama, one of the most accurate of that genre.

Edward R. Murrow and his partner Fred Friendly came to the issue of Joe McCarthy later then others. From the start of McCarthy’s “discovery” of the issue of communists in the Government in 1950, the left-wing press, notably the New York Post and magazines like The Nation and The New Republic, opposed him. At some point in time his tactics were denounced by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, and of course many officials in the Truman Administration.

Once in office Dwight Eisenhower thought McCarthy had served his political purpose: election of Republicans in Congress and the White House. Eisenhower was chagrined about McCarthy’s denunciation of military people formerly under Ike’s command. As McCarthy lost everyday control of his committee to his chief Counsel, Roy Cohn, they took on the US Army because Cohn’s of attempt to obtain special privileges for his associate and possible paramour, G. David Shine, when he, Shine, was drafted. Although initially the Secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, tried to appease Cohn, Eisenhower let the former textile firm owner know through VP Nixon that he had better oppose the McCarthy jihad. A message was also delivered to J.Edgar Hoover and the FBI to stop supplying McCarthy-Cohn with raw intelligence. Thus we had the spectacle on TV of the Army-McCarthy hearings, where a crafty lawyer representing the Army, Joseph Welsh, followed up on Murrow-Friendly’s depiction of McCarthy as a reckless bully. Walsh’s line, “Have you no decency, Sir...?” became a catchphrase, and satirist Stan Freberg put out a parody 45 rpm record about “Tailgunner” Joe called “Point of Order."

“Tailgunner” Joe’s first major deception was his alleged service as a tailgunner in World War II. “Desk jockey” Joe only cadged a few safe flights in the Pacific seated in the tailgunner position. This was the basis of his successful 1946 challenge to Robert LaFollette, Jr.’s reelection as Senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy was very much a backbencher until he had a meal with two Georgetown professors to come up with issues to run on in 1952. They suggested anti-communism, and McCarthy signed up for a series of speeches sponsored by the GOP around the US. In Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy took a piece of paper out of his pocket and said there were X number of Communists in the State Department. The US was attacked in Korea, Mao was in charge of China and someone was to blame, according to Republicans like Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The press latched on to McCarthy’s paranoia and wanted to know what was on that paper. McCarthy kept changing the numbers and had the Senate Committee he was on begin investigations of these charges. Robert Taft, Nixon and other Republicans cheered McCarthy on, and he cleverly had a new allegation a day for the press right before deadline, so people read up on the latest exposure in their morning paper. Other than a shot of McCarthy making another accusation, TV coverage was scarce, and until Murrow-Friendly put on their “See It Now” depiction of the senator’s tactics in prime time, few had seen the Senator in action at previous hearings that were shown live in daytime.

William Paley, the son of a wealthy cigar maker and distributor, had an adventurous nature when he bought into the Columbia Broadcast System in a market dominated by Robert Sarnoff’s NBC. In time Paley was competing with Sarnoff for talent. CBS had a modest news operation when Edward R. Murrow was appointed Director of Talks. Murrow had been a national student leader at Washington State. Although his post-collegiate career in the national student movement sent him to Russia, he was very much an FDR liberal and rejected Marxism in theory and as practiced. Murrow was sent to Europe to recruit a staff for CBS and found himself on the other side of the microphone broadcasting the Battle of Britain and the rise of Hitler’s war machine. Murrow found a new staff from his London base; not just pretty voices but journalists. He had roundtable remote discussions with CBS correspondents and basically set up the framework for today’s news reportage. His London broadcasts during the “Blitz” made him famous and a friend to both America’s and England’s political establishment. By the time of the “See It Now” broadcast, he was a pretty smug “Son of a Gun."

Murrow was in the White House for dinner with FDR on December 7, 1941, and when he finally talked to Roosevelt in the evening, he was told of the tremendous losses of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor and the Pacific. Without being asked, Murrow, the patriot, never reported on what he saw and heard that day. Upon his return to Europe, Bill Paley, who wrangled a job under Supreme Commander Eisenhower, joined Murrow in London. As a very popular and social American, Murrow introduced his boss to Great Britain, especially the social and extracurricular side of London nightlife. They bonded and worked hand in hand until "See It Now" affected CBS’ bottom line. Upon his return to post-war America, Murrow became a CBS executive and board member. Being an executive and off the air was not Murrow’s métier. He had to fire old friends like William Shirer, whose political commentaries crossed the line towards advocacy. Like the present, CBS was concerned about being viewed as“too liberal” in the anti-communist atmosphere of the time.

Murrow was back on the radio with a news and commentary show and formed a partnership with Fred Friendly to produce “Hear it Now” and a series of Long-Playing records. "Hear It Now" became "See It Now" as TV became the dominant media. Although not quite fluff, many of the early shows stayed in the mainstream as Murrow visited Korea and other hot spots. To soften his image, "Person To Person" was introduced and Edward R., with cigarette in an easy chair, “interviewed” celebrities like Liberace, Roy Campanella, Arthur Miller and Jack Kennedy. Almost constantly, the non-communist left, headquartered in New York, urged Murrow to take on the Junior Senator from Wisconsin. By then, corporate CBS, led by Dr. Frank Stanton, had its eye on "See It Now"’s time slot. The programs on Radulovich and McCarthy only hastened Murrow-Friendly’s exile to Sunday afternoons, where they competed with roller derbies and wrestling. The speech Murrow gives at the beginning of the "Good Night, and Good Luck" movie was his reaction to being marginalized. Stanton retaliated for Paley by including "Person to Person" in his denunciation of rigged quiz shows. That cut it with Morrow and CBS. He was one of the regional reporters for the 1960 election night coverage and was very uncomfortable. The anchor rarely asked him anything. Soon after, he became the head of the US Information Agency under Kennedy and began his long battle with the cancer that killed him.

Paley and Stanton moved on at CBS. Fred Friendly quit because the network wouldn’t interrupt the soaps for a hearing on Vietnam. The Murrow “boys” soldiered on at CBS and other venues, but news as news was gone, as was Paley, who didn’t have the mega-bucks to compete.

After the Army-McCarthy hearings, Roy Cohn left McCarthy to become an uber-shyster in New York. The Senate conducted a quiet hearing on McCarthy, where, thanks to a kind-hearted Nixon, he was censured rather than condemned. By all accounts, he drank himself to death, rarely surfacing in the light of day.

Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were found to be Communist spies when the USSR files became available, but that had nothing to do with the Tailgunner’s investigations. I don’t think McCarthy found any real Communists in the Government, although there were a few discovered by Hoover, HUAC and McCarthy. A lot of people in government service lost their jobs due to McCarthy's false allegations, and had trouble being employed in their profession. Those are the people Murrow and Friendly protected, to their everlasting credit.


Joe Rosenberg, of Baltimore, is retired from federal government work. He may be reached at rosenbergjoseph@hotmail.com.



Copyright © 2005 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved.

Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.

This story was published on November 28, 2005.

 

Public Service Ads:
Verifiable Voting in Maryland