Movie reviewed by Bob Webb
Edward R Murrow, an icon of American television news who’d won fame as a London-based CBS correspondent in WWII, was a man’s man. He had guts. He had backbone. He had courage. He knew right from wrong. He pursued truth and detested falsity. Those qualities come boldly into focus in the acclaimed movie, Good Night, and Good Luck. Its title was Murrow’s trademark sign-off from his 1950s CBS-TV documentaries, See It Now.
His star never shone brighter than in his fight to end the terror of McCarthyism in the mid-1950s when US Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had a nation cowed with his savage, devil-take-the-hindmost version of anti-communism. Reputations were ruined, careers trashed as McCarthy branded as communists, “fellow travellers” or security risks many of the innocent in journalism, motion pictures, the military and elsewhere. Officials in high places who detested him failed to confront him for fear they, too, would be tarred.
But Murrow, a McCarthy target himself, finally had had enough. With the support of CBS’ top executives, along with that of news director Fred Friendly, played in the movie by George Clooney who co-wrote the script and directed the production, Murrow trained his laser beam of truth on McCarthy in perhaps the postwar era’s most historic broadcast on March 9, 1954.
‘We will not walk in fear, one of another,’ he said. ‘We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.
‘This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. … We cannot defend freedom by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it – and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Good night, and good luck.’ The rest, as they say, is history. McCarthy’s star soon faded as the nation took a fresh breath of freedom in one of journalism’s most shining hours.
The genesis of that broadcast was Murrow’s See It Now show, “The Case against Lt. Milo Radulovich,” on October 20, 1953. As Fred Friendly wrote in the foreword to Michael Ranville’s 1977 book, To Strike at a King: The Turning Point in the McCarthy Witch-Hunts (Momentum Books), ‘That night the face of television documentaries was changed forever.’ With the nation gripped by McCarthy’s anti-communist hysteria, Radulovich was rawhided out of the Air Force as a security risk because his Serbian immigrant father, John, subscribed to a pro-Communist paper from Serbia as well as to an anti-Communist one. The show posed a problem – the Pentagon refused CBS’ effort to get its side of the story. So Murrow went with what he knew. Five weeks later, the Air Force cleared Radulovich of all charges.
