Clooney's Fantasy on Broadway

Truth and Untruth about Ed Murrow

I have nothing against fantasy. After all, I taught imaginative writing for almost forty years. But fantasy masquerading as reality can be misleading or in the worst cases, dangerous. One recent and striking example is the Broadway play, “Goodnight and Good Luck,” based on a film by the same name, which just closed. The narrative appeals to those seeking reassuring answers to complex questions.

My complaint is not with the production. The sets for the play were terrific, the actors convincing. A bonus is Georgia Heers, as the jazz singer Ella, who is wonderful. George Clooney in the lead role did an excellent job impersonating Edward R. Murrow, the legendary broadcaster, down to Murrow’s staccato delivery, bespoke suits, chain-smoking and frequent visits to the 21 Club. That’s all fine. But a little background is necessary for those who may no longer be familiar with Murrow, a household name in the Fifties, long forgotten by most.

Murrow began as a radio reporter and became famous during World War II for his nightly broadcasts on the progress of the War. “This is London,” he would begin, as the nation sat transfixed in front of their radio sets. And his sign-off, “Good Night and Good Luck,” made more sense during the London blitz than later, on television. Murrow became a celebrity of sorts, socializing with Churchill and Eisenhower. He was a favorite of a generation of Americans thirsty for news of the War.

Radio was fading after WWII. Murrow and his “boys” migrated to the new medium where Howard K. Smith, Eric Severeid and Charles Collingwood became well known broadcasters. Murrow never trusted television, however, and thought of it as an unreliable source for news. Considering the state of TV news today, it’s hard to disagree with him.

The ascension of Senator Joseph McCarthy coincided with what may be considered Murrow’s descent. McCarthy, having scored a surprise victory over Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr. in the Wisconsin Senate contest of 1952, was part of the landslide that brought Eisenhower to the White House and delivered Senate control to the Republicans. McCarthy was rewarded with what many viewed as a minor ‘plum’, the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. Along with his sidekick Roy Cohn, the Senator and his committee became a national sensation because of his investigations into government employees whom he suspected of being communists.

Eisenhower and other respectable Republicans, like Senator Robert Taft, disdained McCarthy. However, they were loath to fight him head-on, in part because the Gallup Poll ranked McCarthy ahead of both Ike and senate leaders. McCarthy’s popularity even spawned rumors that he might challenge Ike for the Republican nomination in 1954.

And so, it was left to the media to press McCarthy on various assertions regarding government departments and finally the Army which in the end proved McCarthy’s undoing. Among early critics of the senator were the Allsop brothers, Herbert Block of the Washington Post, and William T. Evjue of the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times. In addition, a home-grown organization called “Joe Must Go,” made up largely of Wisconsin farmers unhappy with McCarthy’s priorities, which neglected their needs, launched a campaign to recall McCarthy in 1953. It came surprisingly close to succeeding.

During this time, Murrow was silent, his focus elsewhere. On March 9, 1954, however, Murrow entered the fray with an episode on his program “See it Now” entitled “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy”. This attracted attention despite criticisms from some who had been doing the heavy lifting for years who claimed Murrow was late to the party.

McCarthy had become great copy and was featured in newspapers, magazines, and national television when the Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast for thirty-six days straight from April 22, to June 17, 1954. a stretch equaled in my lifetime only by the Watergate Hearings in 1972. McCarthy, like Nixon, who supported him, was brought low and finally censored by the Senate on December 2, 1954, a full eighteen months after Murrow’s broadcast. The idea that Murrow could claim responsibility for this is at least an oversimplification, at most completely untrue.

The play also conflates McCarthy’s work with HUAC, of “Hollywood Ten” fame, which committee was established long before McCarthy’s election and continued ruining lives long after he was gone. Much is also made of the case of Annie Lee Moss, a low-level Pentagon clerk who was brought before McCarthy’s committee as a possible communist. In the play, Murrow makes much of McCarthy’s victimizing a poor black woman who in their view was guilty of nothing. Many Senators took up Annie Lee’s cause. That’s fine, except later records make the case questionable because Moss’s name appeared on Communist party records as well as FBI documents identifying communists. No question McCarthy lost on style points to Murrow and Clooney but the idea of the Senator wrongly accusing Moss is questionable to say the least.

America loves celebrities and Murrow was already cemented in the public imagination as an authority. The problem with all this, and with the play, is that the authors essentially credit the Murrow telecast as being the essential event that brought McCarthy low, and this is far from the case. While it would be wrong to claim Murrow had nothing to do with tarnishing McCarthy’s image, the fact is that the senator was in full voice long before Murrow acted and went on terrorizing various government officials for a year and a half after Murrow’s program aired. In the end, it could well be claimed that rather than anyone else being responsible for McCarthy’s fall, the senator doomed himself by over-reaching in challenging the Army.

The reality of the Red Scare as promulgated by Joseph McCarthy and others was in reality much longer and more damaging than Broadway audiences might have guessed as they left the theater thinking right was preserved only through the heroism of Edward R. Murrow. The memory of those whose lives were ruined deserves more than the version that recently closed on Broadway.