Posted on 10/06/2005 9:40:14 AM PDT by OESY
If Jesus Christ no longer satisfies your desire to worship a man as god, I suggest you buy a ticket for Good Night and Good Luck, the new movie about legendary CBS News broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. Good Night and Good Luck's Murrow burns cigarettes like altar incense. He speaks in a resonant, godly rumble. And he plods through the greatest story ever told about the hunting of communist hunter Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy like a man carrying all the world's sins.
Of course, Murrow was no god. Point of fact, he shouldn't be regarded as the patron saint of broadcast news his fans, among them Good Night and Good Luck director George Clooney, make him out to be. But the passage of time, the self-serving testimonials from the broadcasters he recruited to CBS ("Murrow's Boys"), and the usual nostalgia for newsrooms choking on their own cigarette smoke have puffed the considerable accomplishments of a mortal and flawed newsman into modern miracles. Good Night and Good Luck, a docudrama that pits Murrow against McCarthy, escalates the veneration to heavenly levels.
A terrific movie about the Murrow-McCarthy duel could be made, mind you, but Clooney and company ignore the material that might argue against their simple-minded thesis about Murrow, the era, and the press to produce an after-school special. It's a shame, too, because Good Night and Good Luck's unbeatable production values and sharp performances constitute key ingredients of a great historical drama. Plus, Clooney is an able director, artfully meshing the original documentary film footage from Murrow's weekly CBS series, See It Now, with recreations of the studio end of the broadcasts.
But it all goes wrong with the naive screenplay, written by Clooney and his collaborator, fellow actor/producer Grant Heslov. Plowing through the Murrow and McCarthy literature after viewing the film, I was impressed at how deeply Clooney and Heslov researched the topic yet dismayed at how they cherry-picked material to compose their sermon.
The film covers the five-month period from late 1953 to early 1954 during which Murrow combated the McCarthy-inspired hysteria over communist subversives with a quartet of programs on his weekly CBS series See It Now. The Venona transcripts have shown definitively that American communists and Soviet sympathizers, such as Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, did gather information for Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet for all his thuggery and congressional hearing grandstanding, hounding a suspected red dentist who got an Army promotion or a Pentagon clerk suspected of Communist Party membership, McCarthy bagged not a single commie spy.
Good Night and Good Luck never comes out and credits Murrow with single-handedly slaying McCarthy on March 9, 1954, with his famous See It Now program, "A Report on Joseph R. McCarthy." But if you want to form that impression, the moviemakers won't mind. David Strathairn plays Murrow as if he's Gary Cooper in High Noon, an unblinking stoic facing down and defeating evil with solitary courage.
In reality, McCarthy's takedown was much more complex. As the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson wrote in 1996, "McCarthy had been hanging himself quite efficiently in the several months before Murrow offered him more rope." Ferguson continues:
By the time the [March 9, 1954] show aired, a mutiny was underway on his own subcommittee to relieve McCarthy as chairman. Prominent Republicans had joined Democrats in publicly denouncing him, even, gingerly, his former comrade Vice President Richard Nixon. In the mainstream press, anti-McCarthy feeling was endemic. Among those routinely critical were Time magazine and Col. Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune. If Col. McCormick and Henry Luce were denouncing a right-wing icon, you could feel pretty safe in firing away.
But don't take Ferguson's word for it. The McCarthy program "came very late in the day," said one of Murrow's brightest "boys," Eric Sevareid, in a January 1978 broadcast. "The youngsters read back and they think only one person in broadcasting and the press stood up to McCarthy," Sevareid said, "and this has made a lot of people feel very upset, including me, because that program came awfully late." Sevareid named Elmer Davis and Martin Agronsky as two broadcasters who had taken on McCarthy long before Murrow.
But don't take Sevareid's word for it, either. Listen to Murrow. Jack Gould, the New York Times television columnist whose Murrow praise is read aloud in the movie, took lunch with Murrow shortly after the McCarthy program. Murrow confessed his tardiness in taking on McCarthy, according to an interview Gould gave to Edwin R. Bayley for his 1981 book, Joe McCarthy and the Press. "My God," he recalls Murrow saying. "I didn't do anything. [Times columnist] Scotty Reston and lot of guys have been writing like this, saying the same things, for months, for years. We're bringing up the rear."
Gould had his own ideas about "who killed McCarthy," and it wasn't Murrow. "It was ABC's decision to put the [Army-McCarthy] hearings on. That was the exposure that did it," Gould told Sally Bedell Smith in her biography of CBS chief William Paley, In All His Glory. The Army-McCarthy Senate hearings, commencing the month after the Murrow broadcast, ended up sinking McCarthy. The struggling ABC network carried the Army-McCarthy hearings live for 36 days; Murrow's CBS declined to air the complete hearings because they'd interfere with its lucrative daytime soap operas.
Other evidence of Murrow's less-than-crucial role in toppling McCarthy can be found in histories and scholarly works about the period. The well-regarded mainstream history of McCarthyism, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joseph McCarthy by David M. Oshinsky, burns only four of its 597 pages on Murrow's role, regarding him as more cog than wheel in the flattening of McCarthy. Thomas Doherty's Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture, offers the revisionist view of Murrow as "a glory hog who played it safe, more puffery than paladin, an elite opinion-maker smart enough to strike at the heart of the beast already hobbled by braver hearts." Doherty cites Washington Post cartoonist Herblock and muckraker Drew Pearson as members of a "lengthy lineup" of Fourth Estaters who ridiculed and attacked McCarthy.
Good Night and Good Luck briefly acknowledges that Murrow wasn't standing alone when it recreates his See It Now program about McCarthy. The Murrow character cites the mainstream newspaper editorials criticizing the senator: the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Evening Star, the Washington Times-Herald, the Milwaukee Journal, the New York World Telegram & Sun, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Good Night and Good Luck viewers not fluent in McCarthyese might ask how Murrow could be knock-kneed about the Wisconsin mad dog when the newspapers obviously weren't. We can pardon Clooney for not slowing to explore the topic, but Murrow's trepidations were more institutional than personal. Newspapers had complete First Amendment rights to criticize whoever they wanted to in government without worrying that federal agents would shut down their presses. Broadcasters, on the other hand, lacked First Amendment parity with their print cousins (they still don't enjoy parity, but things are much better now). They existed at the sufferance of the federal government, by virtue of the Communications Act of 1934, which required them to air news and public affairs. Irritating the government could prompt a congressional investigation or worse yet, a dressing down by the Federal Communications Commission and revocation of a network's radio and television licenses.
Such a shutdown could have been deadly in the early years of television, with networks struggling for a foothold. You could argue Murrow only risked his livelihood with his McCarthy broadcasts, but CBS chief William Paley (played by Frank Langella) risked his broadcast empire. (Though Paley didn't really have that much to fear. An Eastern moderate Republican, he'd befriended Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II. The broadcast executive and the president golfed and played bridge together, according to In All His Glory, and in Washington, presidents always trump lone-nut senators who go on rampages.)
Because the essence of drama is conflict, it's odd that Clooney ignores the turmoil the McCarthy program caused Murrow. Biographer A.M. Sperber (Murrow: His Life and Times) writes that Murrow "was always uneasy about" the McCarthy attack, "almost anxious at times to disown it." When See It Now published its greatest hits as a hardcover book in 1955, Sperber writes, it did not include "A Report on Joseph R. McCarthy."
Part 2
What bugged Murrow was that he had used a bludgeon, not a scalpel. The McCarthy See It Now episode, available on The Edward R. Murrow Collection DVD , portrays the senator as the scumbag that he was. But it is a peculiar work of journalism—there's very little reporting in it, as the transcript shows. It gathers the available film on McCarthy and lets the man speak for himself. Well, not really speak for himself. Andrew Ferguson describes the program's mise-en-scène as "a compendium of every burp, grunt, stutter, nose probe, brutish aside, and maniacal giggle the senator had ever allowed to be captured on film."
Give a skilled editor 15,000 feet of film of Barney the purple dinosaur and he could perform a similar demolition. Murrow makes no attempt to determine if there is any substance to McCarthy's charges. The program's manipulative and partisan techniques were enough to creep out two of McCarthy's dedicated foes in the press, liberals John Cogley and Gilbert Seldes, who shared their misgivings in Commonweal and Saturday Review, respectively. Murrow, who once said he favored "ringing a bell every time a newscaster is about to inject his own view," ended the program with a direct slam of McCarthy that could have set church bells pealing.
If paranoid bullies deserve a fair presentation of their views in a television program, Ed denied Joe his. Instead, Murrow and CBS gave McCarthy rebuttal time on See It Now (April 6, 1954), which the senator wasted. He barely referred to the previous broadcast and ratified Murrow's portrayal of him as a loon. Murrow's producing partner, Fred W. Friendly, played by Clooney in the movie, wrote this about McCarthy's performance in his 1967 memoir, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control:
It was twenty-five minutes of unrelieved McCarthy, denouncing Murrow as "the leader of the jackal pack." The long shots consisted of contrived posturings of the anti-Communist instructor at a desk with maps and photos. In close-up, it was as though some gifted "menace" actor was playing one of his juiciest roles. Caked in make-up that attempted to compensate for his deteriorating physical condition, the senator gave the appearance of a mask drawn by Herblock. His receding hairline was disguised by a botched mixture of false hair and eyebrow pencil. At the beginning his voice was muted and flat, but eventually this gave way to the fanatical trumpeting that was his basic style.
Any movie based on a true story must collapse events, yet a very jarring compression comes near the end of Good Night and Good Luck: Paley informs Murrow and Friendly after the McCarthy broadcasts that he wants to reduce See It Now from its weekly slot to sporadic placement in the CBS schedule, reduce its frequency, but expand it to an hour. The implication is that they must be punished for their triumph and he must distance himself from them.
Actually, the show remained in its half-hour, weekly prime time for another season and didn't move until 1955-56, staying on the air until 1958. Television had arrived as an advertising medium: According to Sperber's book, by this time CBS TV had become the single largest advertising medium in the world. See It Now had never made a penny. To leave a ratings loser in a coveted time slot when so much money could be made with a quiz show or other fare would have been insane.
Quadruple hypenate: Actor, producer, director, writer George Clooney.
There's another scene in Good Night and Good Luck worth reviewing. Two Air Force officers visit Friendly at CBS to pressure him about See It Now's soon-to-be broadcast investigation of Lt. Milo Radulovich (Oct. 20, 1953). Radulovich, a reserve officer, was being drummed out of the service as a security risk because family members were suspected security risks. The officers look and act like cousins of Dr. Strangelove's Gen. Jack D. Ripper as they confront Friendly.
In life, both Friendly and Murrow attended the session. Far from being an enemy of the Pentagon, Murrow counted many friends there. As a radio reporter during World War II, he had flown along on 24 combat missions, receiving a "Distinguished Service to Air Power" award from the flyboys. In the postwar period, Murrow maintained his close relationship with the military and did voice-over work for Department of Defense films. Friendly describes the encounter between See It Now's aces and the Air Force officers as no more ominous than a routine visit from an institution a journalist is about to knee-cap.
"The dialogue with the officers was restrained and there was a minimum of discussion of Milo Radulovich himself," Friendly writes. The Air Force general doesn't want the show to run, but the closest he comes to threatening anyone is saying, "You have always gotten complete co-operation from us, and we know you won't do anything to alter that."
Visits such as this only embolden journalists. After the officers departed, Murrow told Friendly he couldn't postpone the Radulovich program if he wanted to. "I had never seen him display quite such an appetite for a broadcast," Friendly writes. The show ran, Radulovich was subsequently reinstated, and Murrow remained so enamored of the military for the rest of his life—and it of him—that he joined the Naval Reserves in 1959.
Good Night and Good Luck's heaviest Hollywood air-brushing comes in its treatment of the See It Now program about Annie Lee Moss ("Senator McCarthy Against Annie Lee Moss," March 16, 1954). In committee hearings McCarthy accused Moss, a matronly Pentagon Signal Corps employee, of being a member of the Communist party based on the word of an FBI informant. Her job in a Pentagon code room, in McCarthy's mind, makes her a communist spy. See It Now's newsreel footage of the hearing makes her seem the simple-minded victim of mistaken identity by a inquisitional monster as she denies party membership. McCarthy correctly senses that things are going badly for his side and departs from the hearing, leaving his counsel Roy Cohn holding the bag. As other senators on the panel proceed to hector Cohn and coddle Moss, the hearing turns into a disaster for McCarthy.
How innocent was Moss? In Salon, Clooney says the issue for Murrow is Moss' right to face her accuser, which she was denied. For the record, however, McCarthy appears to have been more right than wrong about her membership.
In 1958, the federal Subversive Activities Control Board reported that "the Communist Party's own records, the authenticity of which the Party has at no time disputed … show that one Annie Lee Moss, 72 R Street SW, Washington DC, was a party member in the mid-1940s." Joseph E. Persico's 1988 biography, Edward R. Murrow: An American Original, reports this finding as does historian Arthur Herman's 1999 revisionist account, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator.
Now, just because Moss was in the party doesn't make her a traitor, as McCarthy would have it, although it would make her a perjurer. If Clooney has researched the story as deeply as I believe he has, he knows of the evidence against Moss and has chosen to ignore it to make his story as black and white as its film stock. Likewise, in the Radulovich program, Murrow made no effort to explore whether the reservist might be a security threat if his family members are. But is it journalism when the only question asked by a reporter is whether a beleaguered citizen is receiving due process? In a recent review of the Murrow DVD set, Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin posed the question this way: "Would we be comfortable these days with an Air Force officer with a security clearance whose father belonged to al Qaeda?"
Rereading the Murrow-McCarthy literature, I began to imagine a dark comedy about the Red Scare based on the broadcaster's life, something in the vein of Clooney's compelling 2002 flop, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, or Dr. Strangelove. Just last month, Clooney despaired to the Wall Street Journal about the difficulty of marketing the movie: Only half of the audiences at June test-screenings knew about the witch hunts and, he said, "literally no one knew" who Murrow was. Consider the fabulous unused historical material.
Instead of a black-and-white docudrama, what if Clooney had exploited the humor in McCarthy's manic-depressive cycles, his crazed periods of insomnia, and his battles with the bottle? Play Roy Cohn's closeted homosexuality for laughs, too, and enlist McCarthy's good friends from the Kennedy clan—patriarch Joseph P. and Bobby.
In a montage sequence, he could have established Murrow's early success at myth-building. In his teen years, Murrow made his first and wisest show-biz move by abandoning his given cracker name, Egbert Roscoe Murrow, for the more sonorous Edward R. Murrow. Upon applying for a CBS job at the age of 27, he added five years to his age, inflated his speech major at Washington State University into a major in political science and international relations, and falsely claimed to have attended classes at the University of Washington and earned an M.A. from Stanford University. The lies continued once he established himself as a broadcaster in England. Scribner's Magazine was led to believe in a profile that Murrow had worked two years as a compassman in British Columbia and Alaska—both untrue, writes biographer Persico. Shades of Chuck Barris!
I imagine a madcap scene—rooted in fact—that explains how Murrow and CBS were able to hand out a point-by-point rebuttal of McCarthy's rebuttal right after airing it while honestly saying he hadn't seen it before noon that day. Somebody close to the post-production of McCarthy's film sold the Murrow team an audio dub of Joe's film for $100 a couple of days before it broadcast. Sounds like something out of The Front Page, doesn't it?
The film—call it Confessions of a Dangerous Smoker—could flash forward to 1956 to document Murrow's intense partisanship. He secretly tutored the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, on how to speak to the camera effectively. The lesson failed, writes Jean H. Baker in The Stevensons: A Biography of an American Family, as Adlai had no patience for performance. Or watch Murrow offer a deaf and spent Winston Churchill $100,000 for a series of interviews. The material is that rich.
But Clooney is too blinded by his love for Murrow to think his way through his hero's inconsistent relationship with the medium: Murrow both chased hard news and whipped up celebrity fluff on Person to Person, his interview program from the same period. If we're going to praise Murrow for producing fearless TV news, we should also be ready to damn him for paving the way for Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey, and all the celebrity bootlickers on red carpets. Instead of grappling with the Murrow paradox, Clooney bookends the movie with the broadcaster's sanctimonious 1958 speech about television's lost promise.
If I judge it correctly, Good Luck and Good Night intends to serve as a parable for our times and not a history lesson. Its makers want us to find contemporary "resonance" in the film and conclude that, compared to the giants of 1954, modern journalists have been cowed by those in political power. What a facile, Hollywood cliché. Journalism has improved vastly since 1954, certainly eclipsing the likes of Edward R. Murrow's overrated TV output, and today's reporters are more independent and willing to confront presidential administrations and powerful political figures than Murrow and his boys ever were.
******
This I've got to admit: Murrow had a splendid voice and knew his way around a cigarette better than Howard Hawks characters. Send your Murrow-Clooney-Hawks musings via e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
So, did Murrow drink Evian, Dasani, or Deer Park??????
When the Left wanted to make a movie about the Scopes Trial, they made "Inherit the Wind". It was grossly unfair and inaccurate, but it got the message across.
When the Left wanted to make a play about the McCarthy Era, Arthur Miller wrote "The Crucible". It was grossly unfair and inaccurate, but it got the message across.
Now the Left has made a movie about the McCarthy Era. Apparently it's not very accurate. But it will get the message across.
My conclusion: The message of the Left is incompatible with the Truth. Only lies can convey what they want us to believe.
I have not read much about Senator McCarthy. The most I read about him was in Ann Coulters book. One thing I remember her stating was how McCarthy was an American success story. High school dropout, went back as an adult, more or less self-made. No Audie Murphy but did better than average in WW II. What books are out there that tell the real story on Joe McCarthy?
Filling In the Gaps in the Rosenberg File
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19740
Prior to reading this, about the only thing I knew about Edward R. Murrow was that he is credited with establishing the benchmark practice of having two independent sources before running with any story.
I admire that. It's something that too many of today's so-called "journalists" no longer practice.
It seems that the American public are not the only ones who don't know who Edward R. Murrow is.
Dan Rather one claimed that he conversed regularly with the ghost of Edward R. Murrow, which haunts the 3rd floor of the CBS news building. Whether he was being literal, or waxing allegorical is another matter.
I think that it does. Shafer is the scumbag who dealt the race card after Katrina. Most of this article is in the classic anti-anti-communist mode: we're not pro-commumist, honest, we just don't approve of the tactics of the anti-communists. Murrow's weaknesses are too well known now for anyone who fancies himself at all intelligent or vaguely honest not to be embarrassed by the sort of worshipful film Clooney has apparently made.
Look at Walter Cronkite, the "most trusted man in America." He went to Vietnam once, totally misrepresented the meaning of the Tet offensive where the back of the Viet Cong was broken, came home, and sabotaged the war effort as effectively as John Kerry and Jane Fonda. We know so much more today only because the libs' media monopoly has been broken.
From what happened with the Swiftvets we also know beyond any reasonable doubt that one of the libs' most effective weapons is news suppression. We can only imagine what weasels like Morrow were able to get away with when they had a monopoly.
Let's just hope Clooney never does a movie about Walter Duranty. He'd probably use the same "In a nation terrorized, one man dared to tell the truth" tagline.
I would think 2 independent sources was just common sense, not journalistic rocket science.Then again, I never went to J school with the goal to change the world.
'Inherit The Wind' was more Broadway then Hollywood. Originally a play.
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