We had a house in Kill Devil Hills until last fall, and for many years the beaches on the Outer Banks were my refuge.
We had fresh fish for breakfast on many mornings following my sunrise forays. Of course, I had to catch, clean and cook.
George Clooney’s Clueless Movie
by Allan H. Ryskind
Posted Oct 14, 2005
If George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck is the best shot the left can unload on Joe McCarthy these days, the famous Red hunter is well on his way to a thorough rehabilitation. Ann Coulter has already begun the process in Treason and Stan Evans’ much anticipated book—due out next year—is likely to boost the late Wisconsin senator’s stock even further.
The movie is really about CBS’s star journalist, Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn), and how he went after McCarthy, who is featured only in film footage from the archives. As Clooney (and most historians) would have it, the senator was a vicious, unscrupulous bully who ruined the lives of scores of innocent people by labeling them Reds. So where are the bloody corpses in Clooney’s movie? 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!
Murrow’s Whitewash
Nor is it even clear from the movie that McCarthy ever seriously accused anyone unjustly. He might have, but Clooney certainly doesn’t prove it. There are hints that McCarthy may have been wrong in charging Annie Lee Moss, the Pentagon code clerk, with having been a Communist Party member. But the Clooney picture is actually opaque on that point and the truth is McCarthy was absolutely right in charging her with party membership (see more on Moss below).
The Murrow character, who uses the journalist’s real words, does suggest that McCarthy was engaged in smear-mongering when he laid the wood to the American Civil Liberties Union, insisting it had been labeled a “front” for the Communists. Murrow’s retort was that the ACLU was not on any subversive list of the federal government. In Murrow’s view (and clearly in Clooney’s), that rebuttal clinched the case that the Wisconsin lawmaker was an irresponsible demagogue. But, as we shall note shortly, the ACLU was rightly considered a subversive organization during the early 1930s, the period the senator was referring to.
What’s stranger still is that Clooney dwells at some length on the case of Lt. Milo Radulovich, on the verge of being ousted as a security risk from the Air Force Reserve because two of his relatives were radicals, possibly Communists.
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