Good Night and Good Luck
by Wes Vernon

The movie, “Good Night and Good Luck” is a classic case of the winners writing history at the expense of the losers. In the world of public relations, CBS icon Edward R. Murrow was the clear winner and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was the loser 50 years ago and this motion picture tries to repeat the same propaganda for today.

Television is extremely effective at this. A skilled TV performer with a wide audience can successfully demonize almost anybody. The clash over the senator’s investigations of Communists in and out of government and Murrow’s commentaries on them came to a head just as TV was emerging. With his 5’o clock shadow and inadequate public relations skills, McCarthy never stood a chance.

But that is “showbiz.” What about substance?

George Clooney (who also plays the CBS News boss Fred Friendly) has produced a movie that attempts to enshrine several myths of the classic battle. Space allows us to deal with just four of them.

1-    It was Murrow who brought McCarthy down.

No. The seeds for bringing down McCarthy and his committee were planted well before that. Kai Bird in his 1992 book, “The Chairman: John J. McCloy. The Making of the American Establishment,” reveals how the “establishment” used its considerable clout to do in the Republican senator from Wisconsin.

Bird, when he wrote the book, was a contributing editor of “The Nation,” hardly a “right-wing” advocate.

McCloy was a Republican of the Eastern Establishment mold that dominated the GOP before the later Barry Goldwater revolution of 1964 when conservatives gained the levers of the party and ultimately elected Ronald Reagan in 1980. The titan was a Wall Street lawyer, confidante of industry moguls and ultimately of eight presidents.

What really got him to go after McCarthy was the senator’s investigation of people working for McCloy when he served after World War 2 as High Commissioner of Occupied Germany (HICOG). The committee interrogated one Theodore Khagan, who had worked at HICOG, and whose testimony showed he had knowingly signed a petition for a Communist candidate in New York (whom he promised to support), wrote plays where blatant Communist propaganda was gratuitously inserted, and roomed with a man he knew to be a Communist, but did not so inform the FBI. He had been sent an “interrogatory” about his background, with a follow-up investigation by the FBI.

None of these actions violated the law. But McCarthy’s concern was whether people with that kind of mindset and background should have been serving in that place at that time—especially when East and West Germany were being created right at the nerve center of the Cold War face-off. McCarthy’s probe led to the State Department dismissal of hundreds of Americans and Germans.

McCloy urged Eisenhower to take action against McCarthy. He pleaded his case with the president in several venues, including a stag party at the White House. That—not Murrow’s broadcasts-- was the major factor leading to the Army-McCarthy hearings.

2-    Code clerk Annie Lee Moss was an innocent victim of McCarthy’s “witch-hunts.”

Senator McCarthy wanted to know why the Army had ignored an FBI warning that Annie Lee Moss, a Signal Corps cafeteria worker, had been transferred to the highly sensitive position of Pentagon code clerk. She had been identified under oath as a Communist.

With selective editing, Murrow showed Moss’ testimony backfiring on McCarthy and his committee. Moss appeared as a befuddled middle-aged woman who said she had been confused with another Annie Lee Moss. She had been identified as a Communist by Mary Stalcup Markward, a Fairfax, Va. wife and mother who had joined the D.C. Communist Party to do undercover at the behest of the FBI. Markward had been the party’s membership chairman.

Four years later, after McCarthy had died, the Subversive Activities Control Board presented the Justice Department with solid evidence that Markward’s testimony on Moss was accurate.

3-    Alger Hiss was guilty of nothing more than perjury.

In the movie, this line was put into the mouth of the legendary CBS founder and chairman William S. Paley. Whether Paley actually uttered that half-truth, its insertion into the movie was gratuitous. McCarthy had little to do with the Hiss case.

While Hiss was not formally convicted of treason per se (a statute of limitations problem), he was convicted of lying when he denied knowing Whittaker Chambers (the man who fingered him) or passed him documents. He lied when he said he was not a Soviet spy.

Hiss’s guilt was confirmed for all times in the Soviet archives and the Venona decrypts. Placing the misleading half-truth in this movie insults one’s intelligence.

4-    McCarthy never nailed any powerful person as being pro-Communist.

Or, as “Murrow” says in the Clooney movie, McCarthy was off-base “99 percent of the time.” A figure of speech, perhaps, but literally this represents inaccurate history.

As with other committees investigating Communism, McCarthy’s panel turned up many who pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked to affirm or deny under oath the validity of documented evidence that they were Communists.

Perhaps the most prominent figure nailed by McCarthy was Owen Lattimore, a leading light at the Institute of Pacific Relations. McCarthy charged—with much evidence--- that the IPR was a transmission belt to steer official policy and U.S. public opinion in favor the Chinese Communists. Ultimately the Communists overthrew the pro-Western Chinese government. Today Communist China has missiles pointed squarely at the United States.

Lattimore and the IPR were initially whitewashed by the Democratic Congress, but later Senator Pat McCarran—Nevada Democrat and true patriot, investigated the IPR. The McCarran panel, of which McCarthy was not a member, unanimously found Lattimore to be “a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.”

McCarthy made mistakes—mostly in public relations---but in substance, his investigations were right on target.

“Good Night and Good Luck” would make a mediocre—at best—fiction entertainment flick. But it is very poor history.

 Wes Vernon is a Washington-based writer and veteran broadcast journalist.

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