Looney Clooney Smears Senator McCarthy

Anyone viewing the George Clooney film, "Good Night and Good Luck," should bear in mind that media skill does not necessarily reflect historical truth.

Perhaps the most glaring distortion in the film is the failure to note that Murrow, a former director of the U.S. Information Agency, was motivated to go after McCarthy because one of Murrow's friends, Laurence Duggan, had been questioned about his communist ties and committed suicide as a result. As Stephen Hunter conceded in an October 7, 2005, Washington Post review of the film, it turned out that Duggan was a Soviet spy embedded in the U.S. State Department at the time.

Near the end comes a total distortion that is disingenuous, outrageous, and reflects the mindset of the movie producers. It glosses over the treason of Alger Hiss.

There is absolutely no doubt whatever that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent, who bored from within the government to do the bidding of his Stalinist masters in Moscow. That has been established through post-Cold War revelations in the Venona decrypts and other archived evidence.

"Owen Lattimore was a prime focus of attention shortly after McCarthy burst upon the national scene in 1950. The senator had come across a massive cover-up in the then 5-year old Amerasia case. In 1945, several persons were arrested after intelligence authorities raided an office in New York City where the magazine Amerasia was published. The pro-Chinese Communist sheet had published highly sensitive classified information. It appeared to be a transmission belt in the U.S. for sup-porters of the Chinese Communists who were then mounting an (ultimately successful) effort to overthrow the pro-Western regime of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

What McCarthy had discovered was a Truman administration cover-up that had used the clout and powerful contacts of the old Roosevelt administration "Mr. Fixit," Thomas Corcoran, or "Tommy the Cork" as FDR affectionately called him. His role in pulling strings behind the scenes was finally brought to light in the 1996 book, The Amerasia Spy Case by Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh. McCarthy, along with the rest of world, did not know of Corcoran's role in quickly making the Amerasia case just "go away." Those arrested got off with little more than a slap on the wrist, and the headlines disappeared.

McCarthy's focus on Amerasia led to the exposure of a carefully orchestrated campaign to convince U.S. government officials and the American media (notably the book-publishing world) that the Chiang Kai-shek government was hopelessly corrupt and incompetent and that the Communist crusade to take power was unstoppable. The result was the media of that day were telling Americans that the Chinese Communists were not really Communists, but instead were "simple agrarian reformers." Rarely—if ever—was it mentioned that the "reformers" were backed to the hilt with arms and ammunition from the neighboring Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union.

At the center of the propaganda effort was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), of which Owen Lattimore was a top official. IPR's influence was considerable—both in the State Department and the U.S. media.

McCarthy blew the whistle on the cover-up and the IPR, and (among others) Lattimore who protested his innocence. At first Lattimore was exonerated by the stacked anti-McCarthy Tydings committee which compounded the whitewash.

However, McCarthy was ultimately vindicated by another panel. The Democrat-dominated Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, of which McCarthy himself was not a member, was chaired by Nevada Democrat Pat McCarran. That thorough months-long investigation concluded in a voluminous report that "[Owen] Lattimore was for some time beginning in the middle 1930's a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy." The panel cited a long list of instances of Lattimore's willing collaboration with the enemies of this country."

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