Good Night, And Good Luck

President Truman said that Senator Joseph McCarthy, the junior Senator from Wisconsin, was “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has.” Agreeing with Truman were many anti-communist Hollywood liberals like Ronald Reagan, Hollywood labor leaders Roy Brewer and Howard Costigan, and Sidney Hook, a Marxist scholar who turned against the Communist Party.

Although there was a lot of fire in McCarthy’s smoke (one of his main claims, which is the prologue for this movie, was that there were “200 card-carrying Communists” in the State Department. Release of FBI files relating to the Verona Project after the fall of the Soviet Union pretty conclusively confirmed that Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official, was a Communist traitor in spite of 40 years of denials by the left, so the State Department was Communist-infiltrated, as McCarthy alleged, although he later reduced the number), his tactics were those of a police state. Even so, using this quote of McCarthy’s as the prologue for the movie discredits the movie because it leads the audience to believe that the basis for McCarthy’s anti-communism was false, when it was clearly not false. It wasn’t McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade that brought him down, it was his tactics.

For the record, there were communists in the United States, in Hollywood, and in the State Department. They were actively supporting Joseph Stalin, who is still the greatest mass-murderer in history. During the ‘30s he killed the Russian kulaks, its entire middle class, 50 million people, by starving them to death. There is nothing admirable or heroic about any of these American Communists. They were despicable people supporting a despicable monster.

As to the notorious Hollywood Ten, sometimes referred to as the Unfriendly Ten (because they refused to name the names of their fellow Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the alter ego for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, of which McCarthy was Chairman), legendary director Billy Wilder said, “Two were talented, the other eight were just unfriendly.” Even so, the Hollywood Ten who took their marching orders from Stalin have been elevated to secular sainthood by the Hollywood left, who are the people making this movie.

In 1954 McCarthy’s reign was attacked by a newsman, Edward R. Murrow, and it was the beginning of the end for Joe. This is a well-crafted, if sometimes draggy, documentary-style film about that attack. It is shot in black and white for a couple of reasons. First is that it adds to the verisimilitude of the story. The second is that the producers, rather than hiring someone to portray McCarthy, wanted to use Tail Gunner Joe uttering his own words, so they used old black and white news footage. Cutting back and forth between color and black and white to show McCarthy speaking would have interfered with the apparent currency of the film.

David Strathairm gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Murrow. If you never saw Murrow, what you see in Strathairm will give you a good feeling for what you missed. Writer-Director George Clooney plays Fred Friendly who was the co-producer, along with Murrow, of Murrow’s show, “See It Now” (1951-57). Frank Langella gives a brilliant performance as William Paley, the autocratic head of CBS, who backed Murrow’s attack, even though it threatened the viability of his network.

At one point in the film it is alleged that Paley said that McCarthy wanted William F. Buckley, Jr. to do his rebuttal to Murrow’s attack. Buckley graduated from Yale in 1950. He didn’t found “National Review” until 1955, one year after the McCarthy-Murrow dispute. I remember attending some of Buckley’s debates when I was at the University of Virginia Law School in the early ’60s. But I questioned whether he had the cachet in 1954, at the age of 29, to be considered as someone who could take on a national monument like Murrow on behalf of the most powerful man in the United States Senate. This is a strange, one line, insertion in the film that seems out of place with no apparent raison d’être. So I checked with Bill Buckley himself and he confirmed it, but he added something the filmmakers conveniently omitted. While McCarthy did ask him to do the rebuttal, and he agreed, when the McCarthy people submitted the request to Murrow, it was flatly rejected. Apparently Murrow wanted McCarthy to hang himself and knew that Buckley would be too formidable an adversary to achieve Murrow’s desired end. Clooney obviously didn’t want to reveal Murrow’s fear of Buckley, since the point of the film is to parade Murrow being steadfastedly brave. How would it look to have Clooney's valiant 50-year-old hero appear as a quivering lump of jelly, cowering in a corner hiding from an erudite 29-year-old?

Even so, this is an entertaining, behind-the-scenes docudrama about how one man propelled television into a powerful presence in its infancy. If you didn’t live through these times, this movie does a good job of recreating them.

My letter to Geo. Clooney:

Mr. Clooney:

Having specialized in Russian history as an undergraduate, I am always left with a vague unease at the general ignorance of the period in question, particularly the Soviet role; it's like the recent breakthrough in our knowledge of the Soviet Era over the past decade never took place.

Even with a large (and growing) body of evidence of the absolute horrors of Soviet terror and mass murder, the regime always seems to get a pass with the Hollywood cognoscenti, who seem either poorly informed, willfully ignorant, or both. But mostly I think it is just the effect of years of mythmaking and devotion to the tribal idols, which this film upholds with perfect fidelity. Hell, look around at the reviews, the Hollywood left loved it largely because of their untenable and ahistorical politics, such as they are.

If you want a clearer picture of what the Soviets were, how they operated, and the extent to which they did penetrate the United States at so many levels, I’d recommend any number of important works over the past decade, starting with the Yale series on communism by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Both men have made monumental strides in pulling back the veil on Soviet espionage and why it created a man like Joseph McCarthy. It will also help to understand the most inscrutable aspect of the Cold war: how so many otherwise thoughtful Americans could be so credulous as to the reality of the Soviet Union.

At no time in “Good Night, And Good Luck” is the back story to the McCarthy era presented." The whole "back story" that the film drops is the Soviet Union itself. My problem with this film is that it never seems inclined to address the fact that the fictitious “witches” of the film were actual Soviet spies, saboteurs, propagandists, party-members, and fellow travelers of all sorts (Hiss, by the way, was a Soviet spy, as were the Rosenbergs, and so was Laurence Duggan, Mr. Murrow’s mentor and one of the main reasons Murrow loathed McCarthy. I feel no sympathy for any of them. You may, of course, continue to be one of a slender few people who continue to uphold their innocence, but you may as well believe OJ was framed if you are so inclined).

As far as "blacklisting," the generations of Russian intellectuals (Mandelstam, Babel, Anna Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Alexei Tolstoi, Gorky, Bulgakov, and Prokofiev just to name a small handful) who were tortured, murdered or relentlessly hounded by the very entity that people like John Henry Lawson were defending, would have viewed the HUAC trials a little differently. Also, the “suffering” of Hellman, Hammett, Trumbo, Lawson, et al. was so slight as to almost risible, especially in contrast to the very real persecution of the Soviet intelligentsia. If anything, the “blacklist” gave their case cause celebre status among the leftist industry types who were to rise during the next generation—where it remains decked out in Hollywood tinsel. What a farce! While assholes and liars like Ring Lardner and Lillian Hellman feigned injury, the whole of Eastern Europe was being force to swallow a boot heel, and while the champions of freedom among the American left were rallying to their new icons, the icons were completing a lifelong whitewash of the gulag archipelago. Of course, the real horror of the Soviet Union was known very early on, but with so many western leftists working so hard for the Comintern, it took decades longer than it should have for us to realize the danger.

If Czeslaw Milosz is right to be concerned about "the vulnerability of the twentieth-century mind to seduction by sociopolitical doctrines and its readiness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future,” then why shouldn’t we remain perplexed at the unwillingness of Hollywood to at least come to recognize that the people saying that it was OK to be a Communist or say laudable things about the Soviet Union were either nuts or vile or both. No one would be defending the fellow travelers anymore if they were Nazi apologists, so why should people whose guiding ideology (and I mean that in an ironic and pointedly Marxist sense) was so hostile to liberal democracy be treated as mere dissenters? If it is indeed true that McCarthy was reckless and irresponsible, and both Klehr and Haynes argue he was, then when will the movie be made showing that Whittaker Chambers and Elia Kazan were actually right, that the apologists for the Soviet gulag state were abetting mass murder as a political program.

One more thing, HUAC and McCarthy were not the same thing. McCarthy did not emerge until 1950, and in the Senate, but by that time Truman had largely taken care of the problem; McCarthy was grandstanding for partisan purposes, mainly, but as for the substance of his grandstanding, that there really were Reds, he was quite correct.

Regards,

Gio Bruno

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