George Clooney's Clueless Movie

Good Night, and Good Luck Misses the Point

If George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck is the best shot the left can unload on Joe McCarthy these days, the famous Red hunter is well on his way to a thorough rehabilitation. Ann Coulter has already begun the process in Treason and Stan Evans' much anticipated book-due out next year-is likely to boost the late Wisconsin senator's stock even further.

The movie is really about CBS's star journalist, Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn), and how he went after McCarthy, who is featured only in film footage from the archives. As Clooney (and most historians) would have it, the senator was a vicious, unscrupulous bully who ruined the lives of scores of innocent people by labeling them Reds. So where are the bloody corpses in Clooney's movie? They're totally missing. In fact, Clooney-who directed and helped write the movie-doesn't show a single person who was done in by the senator's supposedly reckless charges. Not one!

Murrow's Whitewash

Nor is it even clear from the movie that McCarthy ever seriously accused anyone unjustly. He might have, but Clooney certainly doesn't prove it. There are hints that McCarthy may have been wrong in charging Annie Lee Moss, the Pentagon code clerk, with having been a Communist Party member. But the Clooney picture is actually opaque on that point and the truth is McCarthy was absolutely right in charging her with party membership (see more on Moss below).

The Murrow character, who uses the journalist's real words, does suggest that McCarthy was engaged in smear-mongering when he laid the wood to the American Civil Liberties Union, insisting it had been labeled a "front" for the Communists. Murrow's retort was that the ACLU was not on any subversive list of the federal government. In Murrow's view (and clearly in Clooney's), that rebuttal clinched the case that the Wisconsin lawmaker was an irresponsible demagogue. But, as we shall note shortly, the ACLU was rightly considered a subversive organization during the early 1930s, the period the senator was referring to.

What's stranger still is that Clooney dwells at some length on the case of Lt. MiIo Radulovich, on the verge of being ousted as a security risk from the Air Force Reserve because two of his relatives were radicals, possibly Communists.

The movie shows Murrow, the star of CBS's "see It Now," publicizing Radulovich's plight. Weeks later, we find that he's been reinstated and the charges dropped. Cheers all around at CBS.

A major anti-McCarthy victory for Murrow? Well, only in the eyes of CBS and Murrow and other anti-McCarthy zealots. For Radulovich was never a McCarthy case.

Indeed, the Clooney film-but just barely-acknowledges this far from insignificant fact, yet it suggests that the "ambience" of McCarthy's Red hunting was somehow responsible. Clooney, it seems, couldn't discover a single bona fide McCarthy victim, so the closest he gets to it is a "victim" McCarthy had nothing to do with!

That should strike some people as rather odd in a film accusing the Wisconsin senator of smears and innuendo.

Clooney, as noted, does include a lengthy segment on the Annie Lee Moss case. Murrow made much of this case as well, persuading masses of liberal intellectuals that McCarthy had badly overreached and that he may have accused the wrong Moss. HUMAN EVENTS has discussed the Moss hearing on numerous occasions, most extensively by Evans in the May 26, 2003, issue. But it should be reprised in light of Clooney's latest effort to make it seem as if McCarthy smeared her. The film never quite says she's innocent, but leads one to believe she probably is and is certainly not being treated fairly by the senator.

The March 11, 1954, McCarthy hearing, in truth, was a devastating indictment of Army security procedures-and Moss herself. McCarthy's chief purpose was to find out how Moss, with her Red background, had been promoted from a cafeteria worker to a Pentagon code clerk with access to classified information.

During the hearings, Moss denied she was a Red, but admitted receiving the Daily Worker, the official organ of the Communist Party, at various addresses she had inhabited over the years. She conceded, after some prodding, the paper "might have been addressed to me" (instead of her husband). She acknowledged that Robert Hall, one of three top Washington, D.C., Communists, had visited her home and that she had lived, for a short while, with Hattie Griffin, an active party member who hosted Communist meetings at her house. Standing alone, this information should have been enough to raise questions as to why she had access to classified material.

Dues-Paying Communist

More damning evidence was produced. Moss, as the hearings revealed, had been identified as a dues-paying member of the Northeast club of the D.C. Communist Party by FBI undercover informant Mary Markward, and the committee's majority counsel, Roy Conn, stressed that Markward's testimony had been "corroborated" in "a sworn statement" by another witness in executive session.