We can't defend freedom abroad when we deny it to ourselves here at home!

Rating: 8/10 (19 March 2006)

Documentary-style account of the Edward R. Morrow Joseph P. McCarthy battle over the airwaves. The historical battle was over the right to be confronted by one's accuser on the issue of being a Communist or former member of a Communist, or Communist front, organization.
It's October 1953 and the big news is about a US Air Force officer Let. Milo Radulovich being drummed out of the USAF because of Let. Radulovich's association with his own father John, a suspected Communist sympathizer. This story was something that was a little bit over the top in the opinion of CBS News commentator Edward R. Morrow, David Strathairn, who decided to run with the story on his weekly new program "See it Now".
It eventually turned out that John Radulovich's only sympathy with the Communist regime in his native Yougaslavia was his scribing to a newspaper, who yearly colorful calender he liked. The fact that he didn't speak or read English only Serbian, which the newspaper was printed in, was the only reason that Mr. Radulovich had anything to to with it in the first place!
Realizing that people like Wisconsin's junior Senator Joe McCarthy, convincingly and brilliantly played by himself,are a bigger danger to America's freedom and democracy then any outside Communist threat Morrow took on the case of Let. Radulovich who was being pressured by not only the USAF but Sen. McCarthy as well. The case was later dropped by the US military since it was so ridicules and un-American that it would have in fact helped the cause of Communism more then hurt it.
Edward R. Morrow now turns his guns on Sen. McCarthy himself but this could very well backfire on him since McCarthy at the time was a very popular Communist fighter in the Senate. An attack on him would end up not only having Morrow smeared as a Communist, or Communist stooge, but cause his news network CBS to go bankrupt with all it's sponsors deserting it and having himself and his fellow newsmen on CBS out of a job and a career.
The movie centers on two Edward R. Morrow "See it Now" shows, March 9, & April 6, 1954, that in the end began the study downfall of the powerful Joseph R. McCarthy. For all intents and purposes Joseph McCarty's political career ended with him being censored by the Senate, on December 2, 1954, for his unprofessional-like and rude behavior. There was also of course the disastrous, for Joe McCarthy, Army-McCarthy Hearings in the spring of 1954 that the movie "Good Night and Good Luck" almost completely ignored or overlooked? Properly because Edward R. Morrow and the staff of CBS' "See it Now" had nothing to do with them.
The battle with Joe McCarthy did in the end take a lot out of Edward R.Morrow and his colleagues. His best friend and fellow news commentator Don Hollenbeck, Ray Wise, ended up killing himself because of his wife leaving him and the brutal criticism from the press that he got for supporting Edward R. Morrow.
The movie starts and end at a banquet for Morrow on October 25, 1958, a year after Senator Joe McCarthy's death, which he tells his audience that we can only lose our freedoms from the inside by not standing up to those in political power who want to take them away from us, under the guise of patriotism and national security. Hopefully what we learned in the early 1950's, at the hight of the Cold War, will not be forgotten by future generations of politically educated, in the words of US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and freedom loving Americans; we can only hope and pray that Edward R. Morrow was right.