GEORGE CLOONEY’S Good Night, and Good Luck takes its title from the legendary American broadcaster Ed Murrow’s customary sign-off; the film focuses on Murrow’s most courageous show on CBS’s controversial current-affairs programme See It Now. On March 9, 1954, Murrow turned his spotlight on the Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, whose anti-Communist demagoguery had held America in uneasy thrall for more than four years.
Murrow’s decision to present an anti-McCarthy special was an act of courage in 1954. The same can be claimed for Clooney’s film now. The parallels between McCarthy’s exploitation of anti-Communist hysteria and President Bush’s War on Terror are striking. In each case, a serious threat to America has been hijacked by right-wing ideologues and reconfigured as a moral crusade, with dissenters in danger of being labelled traitors. In an era when American government is drifting ever-rightward and Ann Coulter, the self-styled high priestess of neo- conservatism, has embarked upon a campaign to put McCarthy in the pantheon of American heroes, it takes guts to make a movie recalling the menace he posed to civil liberties.
The demagogue has long been a bête noire of American political films. Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949) starred the Oscar-winning Broderick Crawford as a Southern governor (modelled on Huey Long), originally an honest backwoods lawyer but finally corrupted by his lust for power. Crawford’s jowly, blustering rabble-rouser eerily prefigured McCarthy just before he attained national recognition.
Yet in the 1950s cinematic criticism of McCarthyism tended to be the preserve of safe, ostensibly conservative genres, such as the western (High Noon, Johnny Guitar), the war film (Stalag 17, From Here to Eternity) and the biblical epic (Quo Vadis?, The Robe). Demagogues in 1950s political movies remained marginalised as country boys with colossal egos — James Cagney as another Huey Long type in A Lion is in the Streets (1953), Andy Griffiths as loathsome Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd (1957) — if not quite quasi-Hitlerian hicks. The first film version of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s dramatic allegory of the witch-hunts, was actually a French production, co-written by Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre, released in 1957.
That same year McCarthy died. Even then US film-makers were in no rush to chronicle McCarthyism. Not until 1962 were filmgoers presented with movie senators explicitly based on McCarthy — then two came along at once. George Grizzard’s Fred Van Ackerman in Advise and Consent was a left-wing mirror image of McCarthy. His personal mantra was, in effect, “Better Red than dead”, but his tactics of smear and intimidation were readily recognisable as McCarthyite, and his resorting to blackmail eventually drives another senator to suicide.
If Van Ackerman was depicted as a willing collaborator with the Communists, James Gregory’s John Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate was their unwitting — and witless — dupe. Iselin shared McCarthy’s trait of claiming he had a list of known Reds in the State Department — and also the original’s trait of changing the alleged total on the list to suit his own purposes. One famous comic moment from The Manchurian Candidate features Iselin complaining that if he only had one concrete number he could stick to when making his claim, he would feel happier. We see him pouring from a bottle of Heinz ketchup — and the film cuts to Iselin on the floor of the US Senate declaring: “There are 57 card-carrying Communists . . .”
Yet the man who gave the scariest, most realistic performance as Joe McCarthy in a 1960s film was . . . Joe McCarthy. Shortly after Murrow had exposed McCarthy on See It Now, the Senator had opened up another front in his war against alleged subversives in government. The result was the Army-McCarthy hearings. For eight weeks in summer 1954 these first live televised congressional hearings commanded the attention of 80 million Americans — and the culmination was catastrophic for McCarthy. A puckish Boston lawyer named Joseph N. Welch, weary of the reckless accusations, smears and bullying which were McCarthy’s trademarks, shamed him, demanding, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” It was Murrow’s See It Now broadcast which shot McCarthy down, but it was Welch who buried him.
A decade after the hearings, the documentary-maker Emile de Antonio edited the 36 days and 187 hours of broadcast footage into Point of Order (1964), a 90-minute feature. A new generation of Americans had the chance to see McCarthy for what he was, condemned by his own actions.
That new generation was more concerned with current political crises; and as the 1960s unfolded, assassinations, race riots, cities in flames and especially the seemingly interminable, unwinnable Vietnam War all combined to erode faith in American society. Like McCarthy, Richard Nixon had first attained prominence as a witch-hunter, notably for his prosecution of FDR’s protégé Alger Hiss, who’d been accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Some liberals disparaged Nixon as “McCarthy in a white collar”. His resignation over Watergate was an even greater political embarrassment for the Republicans than McCarthy’s excesses.
Many of Nixon’s detractors had seen him as the logical (if unwelcome) successor to McCarthy. So, following Nixon’s downfall, McCarthy was in a sense discredited anew. The Watergate era revived interest in explicitly political films. Consequently, the blacklist of the McCarthy years featured prominently in key 1970s movies such as The Way We Were (1973) and The Front (1976).
Some of the best work on these themes was done in television movies, particularly Fear on Trial (1975), with William Devane as the folksy radio raconteur John Henry Faulk, who successfully sued the self-proclaimed “patriotic” watchdogs who had wrongly declared him to be a Red sympathiser; and Tail Gunner Joe (1977), with a virtuoso star turn by Peter Boyle as McCarthy, eventually brought low by the real-life blacklist victim Burgess Meredith as Joseph Welch.
In the Reagan-Bush Sr era, film-makers returned to McCarthyism sporadically, with television movies such as A Case of Libel (1983), Murrow (1986) and Fellow Traveller (1989). Harris Yulin was McCarthy in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1985). James Woods gave an electrifying performance as his sinister acolyte Roy Cohn in Citizen Cohn (1992). On the big screen, a politically neutral film director (Robert De Niro) fought back against the witch-hunters in Guilty by Suspicion (1991).
In the post-9/11 era of George W. Bush, Hollywood liberalism is on the resurgence again. With the United States mired in Iraq and the Patriot Act a genuine threat to the liberty of American citizens, it seems a number of film-makers, at least, don’t intend the US Constitution to go down without a fight. Hence, the new versions of The Manchurian Candidate and All the King’s Men. Hence, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Silver City and, yes, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore effectively tried to do for Bush what Murrow did for McCarthy, but he took his best shot before the 2004 election, and it didn’t work.
Could a Murrow succeed where Moore failed? Would anyone today have the guts to try? “In a nation terrorised by its own Government,” runs the tagline for Good Night, and Good Luck, “one man dared to tell the truth.” If we are willing to learn from history, we might learn from yesterday’s heroes. While there’s still time — See It Now.
- Michael Coyne is the author of The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western and American Political Films
A LIFE OF SLIME
November 14, 1908
Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin.
1946
Enters Senate.
1949
Defends legal rights of SS troops who massacred American PoWs in 1944.
February 9, 1950
Declares 205 Communists are in the State Department; number later shifts to 57, then to 81
March 9, 1954
Ed Murrow hosts See It Now, condemning McCarthy.
December 2, 1954
Senate votes to censure McCarthy for dishonourable conduct.
May 2, 1957
Dies of hepatitis.
