I am going to apologize here, because my post is not about the “Jews & McCarthy”, but this article also talks about the two films “A Beautiful Mind” and “Goodnight & Good Luck” as “lies”.
When I saw “A Beautiful Mind” and that figment of the title character’s imagination was going on about “McCarthy being right and there were Communists in the US government, but McCarthy went about it wrong”, it really had me. We already knew about the Cambridge Set in England that pre-dated WWII, so it was probably true here, too. It made sense, and it really pissed me off to find out that this character was just a delusion because he made perfect sense on the issue of “communists at high levels in the US government”.
But, I have a more direct insight into “Goodnight and Good Luck”.
I knew Milo Radulovich personally for many years and Radulovich’s real life story was the one that Murrow used to bait McCarthy and was featured in “Goodnight & Good Luck”. (Milo just died two days ago.)
“McCarthyism”, as opposed to McCarthy, himself may well have been two different issues, but there was an atmosphere of fear created by McCarthy in this country at the time that was unwarranted and was taken to extremes — especially in Milo’s case. And that was what the film “Goodnight & Good Luck” was about — and it wasn’t “a lie”
Instead of going after “the big fish”, the government started offering up “little sacrifices” of people who had NO communist leanings, and Milo was one of those. Even the military said that “Milo’s loyalty to the US, was not in question”, but they demanded that Milo renounce his family because his father (a WWI US veteran, who also had no communist leanings) read two newspapers from the land of his birth and one of those newspapers was labeled “subversive”. (Ironically, it was Britain & the US who had supported the establishment of a communist government in the country of his dad’s birth to appease Stalin, post-war!) And Milo’s married sister was an early civil rights activist.
Ironically, this was one of those instances where the US military started acting like the very communists that they claimed to be fighting — “renounce your family for political reasons” and “guilt by association” were typical communist tactics. And yet, they were used against Milo in the name of “anti-communism”. It was bizarre.
Even more ironically, Milo was not only “not a communist”, he had been a conservative married guy with kids who just wanted to work in the field he loved and had trained in, yet if he didn’t fight back, the military was going to make his finding work in his field impossible unless he “renounced his family”. That was equally impossible.
Edward R. Murrow had been looking for that “little picture” story and Milo’s story became the one he chose for, “See It Now”. It turned the country against McCarthy and it baited McCarthy into debating Murrow — a debate that McCarthy eventually lost.
Although, McCarthy personally, may not have been quite the villain he was made out to be, and he may have been right about high level communists in the government, McCarthy also never removed those “real communists at high levels” and he allowed himself to get outmaneuvered by allowing (and not denouncing) “witch-hunts of the innocents” in his name. And he didn’t seem to care that he was trampling all over the rights of ordinary citizens who weren’t communists. For those reasons, I’d really think twice about making McCarthy into some great “martyred hero of American patriotism”.
Having said that, I will read the recommended book on McCarthy.
There are also sad little tradgedies that go the other way.
Katherine Graham owner of the washington post was married to phillip graham. She took his name and had some kids by him. The post was her family’s business but her dad let Phillip run it while Katherine raised the family in the 40’s & 50’s. In the early 60’s Phillip and Katherine had a falling out. He tried to take ownership of the business and then he took a mistress and then he committed suicide.
A very strange story that makes no sense until you add a couple pieces of information to the story. Katherine’s family were liberal new deal jews. Phillip was a liberal new deal christian. They were both secular progressives. None of this is particularly significant until you add one last piece of information. Phillip was one of the very few people in the who were told of the venona cables by Col. Carter Clarke, the head of Army intelligence.
The revelations “deeply concerned” Mr. Graham. Graham knew that the Democrats were in trouble. VENONA was a time bomb that could explode and destroy the party of the New Deal . . . So his staunchly liberal paper did not endorse a candidate in the 1948 presidential election, and in 1952 he campaigned for Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. Mr. Graham never revealed that he knew the VENONA secret.
Its clear that there was a radical disconnect between what Phillip knew and what he experienced at the Washington Post.
Venona didn’t destroy the democratic party. Rather it destroyed Phillip Graham.