Like a long lecture by a very boring professor

Rating: 1/10 (25 April 2006)

Perhaps George Clooney did about as much as he could with a story that really did not have a lot of depth. I suspect that Clooney set out to make an "All the President's Men" sort of movie featuring Murrow as the crusading journalist. Murrow was a very competent and very popular journalist - one of the first of the TV editorialists - but in the McCarthy case he did not really have to crusade. Like many of today's journalists, he used his show to voice his opinion about a very controversial man who was on a very controversial committee investigating reports of Communists in high government positions. In 1980, this might have been an interesting and informative movie, but much more has been learned since then. We now know that the agents of the Soviet Union McCarthy was searching for did exist, as information from the Venona files has verified. Actually, had Clooney chosen to include the Venona Project he might have made a truly historic movie.
The Venona Project was carried out during and after World War II. American military intelligence officers secretly recorded transmissions between Washington and the Kremlin. (You can find information about it on many web sites, including an article entitled "Significance of Venona" on Wikipedia.) The transcripts were sealed until Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan sued under the Freedom of Information Act in the mid-90's to have them released. It would make a great movie. Hollywood has not chosen to tell the Venona story, just as they have not chosen to make movies about the Soviet gulags or China's Cultural Revolution.
So, Murrow was no hero, he was doing what Sixty Minutes (or, perhaps, The O'Reilly Factor) does now, although in a manner more suited to the dignified 1950's. McCarthy's popularity faded as a stream of witnesses "took the fifth" (as they said back then) and the investigation produced very little. McCarthy was indeed very heavy-handed and overly zealous in his approach and his treatment of witnesses (as was Richard Ben Veniste of the 9/11 commission). He was not really responsible for the "black-listing" of some of the people who were called before the committee, nor was he responsible for the apparent suicide of Don Hollenbeck. It was movie producers and publishers who decided (often as a result of investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee rather than the Senate's Tydings committee) who they would and would not use, just as they do today, and it was other reporters who attacked Hollenbeck, who chose (as the movie indicated) to involve himself.
Ultimately, McCarthy's "crusade" lost its popularity and he was demonized and driven from his position in disgrace. Anyone who reads the papers or watches the news has seen this happen to numerous senators and congressmen in the past fifteen years or so. It is what is called "hardball politics." Even if McCarthy was as bad as he is portrayed, his effect was minor. The Tydings committee (on which McCarthy served) was active for only one month and led nowhere.
So, that's the story. It could be told very well in 30 minutes. McCarthy's story has been kept alive by Hollywood and book publishers. Much better movies such as "The Crucible" (ostensibly telling of the Salem witch trials) have been based on these investigations and, as fiction, have had interesting stories woven into them.
People who cannot remember back to that period find it hard to understand our concern with Communism, which is now viewed by many as a benign alternate form of government. I think the people who risked their lives to escape Cuba, East Germany, Stalin's USSR or Mao's China could probably explain it.