(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
In Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney absolutely crushes master red-baiter Joe McCarthy (right). I mean, he crushes him! Old Joe doesn't stand a chance! Big George is all over him! I mean, all over him! Of course, it helps that old Joe has been dead for forty years, but still.
Good Night, and Good Luck, like recent television programs ranging from Spin City to West Wing, essentially lets media folk play themselves, or at least play themselves as they imagine themselves to be: smart, funny, ambitious, sexy, irreverent, and, sometimes, just a little bit shallow. The suits, at least the suits upstairs like CBS Chairman Bill Paley (Frank Langella5, right), want no part of a showdown with McCarthy. They prefer Murrow's Person to Person show, featuring softball (so to speak) interviews with effete ephemera like Liberace.6
Good Night, and Good Luck sells its melodrama with a soupçon of honor. In conversation, the boys acknowledge that others, including "the Alsops8 and Herblock,9" have been fighting McCarthy for a long time. When CBS reporter Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise) urges Murrow to take on the New York Daily News, Ed replies "I can't fight Hearst and McCarthy at the same time."10 And when Fred and Ed face off with Paley, Bill notes that Murrow didn't have the guts to correct McCarthy when Joe said (wrongly) that Alger Hiss was convicted of treason — "You didn't want to be seen defending Hiss."11
It is Clooney's solution, rather than his analysis, of the problem that bothers me. It is no longer, if it ever was, the role of Ivy League white boys to tell America what to think. In any event, there's no real evidence that America ever listened. But the real point, of which Clooney seems entirely ignorant, is this: thanks to talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet, there is approximately 5,000 times as much hard-hitting political reporting, commentary, and analysis available to the American people than in the glory days of See It Now. Clooney may not like what he hears, but that's not the point. The First Amendment doesn't guarantee that you'll like what you hear, only that you'll hear it.
1. Both groups, I'm happy to say, have lost their taste for jodhpurs (right) — a small step for mankind, perhaps, but a very real one.
2. Actually, he doesn't say "assets." It's "fat debentures" or "fat retirement plans" or something of that sort. I didn't feel like sitting through the picture twice to pick up one lame fifties double entendre.
3. But there is some excellent jazz singing from Diana Reeves.
4. And what, I ask you, is more honest than fake vérité?
5. Langella, playing Paley as a fat, dark, oily Machiavel, makes his 1979 version of Dracula look like a beach boy.
6. Straithairn/Murrow, after asking Liberace about his plans for marriage, makes a face off-camera of utter disgust, as though he just kissed a turd. Helping a queer stay in the closet! The shame of it! The shame!
7. But what's so brave about doing a show that over 90 percent of your audience thought was terrific? The See It Now audience, one suspects, consisted largely of educated WASPs and Jews, who had no use for McCarthy. Joe's real base was blue-collar Catholics and Midwestern isolationists, particularly Germans, many of whom did not own a TV in 1954.
8. Joe and Stewart Alsop, well-born WASPs who wanted to make a difference in DC, wrote a political column together. Joe (right), the more driven of the two, was a highly closeted, highly fastidious homosexual. He hated communism but seemed to hate Midwesterners even more, and found all Republicans a bore. The New Left opposition to the Vietnam War drove him right, and he became one of the few Nixon Democrats with a Groton accent.
9. Herbert Block, famous cartoonist for the Washington Post, which was not nearly the national force in 1953 that it is today.
10. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst (the famous model for Charles Foster Kane) was playing the red card when McCarthy was still in diapers. The real Hollenbeck was constantly being attacked by the News' TV critic Jack O'Brien as a "pinko" and eventually committed suicide, as described in Good Night, and Good Luck. I haven't been able to find any background on Hollenbeck.
11. Hiss was convicted of perjury, for lying when questioned by a grand jury in 1948 about being a communist and engaging in espionage as a State Department official in the thirties. Evidence of Hiss's crimes was supplied by Whittaker Chambers, who withheld it until the statute of limitations for espionage had lapsed, because he did not want to be convicted himself. Hiss could not have been convicted of "treason" — defined in the Constitution as supplying aid and comfort to the enemy — because the Soviet Union was never our "enemy." The U.S. never declared war on the U.S.S.R.
12. Well, yes, W is an asshole, but is he major-league or big-time? I can never decide.
13. W believes that the Constitution should be interpreted strictly or ignored completely, whichever is easier.
14. But doesn't the Constitution forbid "cruel and unusual punishment"? Yes, but that's punishment. This is torture. It's totally different, dude! Totally!
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