Move Over, Michael Moore

Rating: 1/10 (18 October 2005)

If you have long bought into the popular liberal Hollywood premise that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was the "anti-Christ" of free speech -- and most of us were taught exactly that in school and still hold to it, then this film production from self-avowed liberal George Clooney will be that manipulative paean that satisfies your sense of self-righteous indignation about the mythical "witch-hunt" of the 1950's.
Fortunately for us but unfortunately for Clooney, that premise has been called into question with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the resulting release by our government in 1995 of decryptions of Soviet intelligence cables from the 40's and 50's. These cable messages, called the Venona cables, confirm Sen. McCarthy's suspicions of Soviet agents in essential government agencies.
If you examine the Venona cables, it turns out that McCarthy was right, after all.
Eleven years later and it is surprising that the release of these decoded "spy messages" from the former Soviet Union are not better-known. Hollywood, a bastion of liberalism, has no plans to produce anything that examines the Venona evidence since it will put McCarthy in a more reasonable light. Where's the entertainment value in admitting someone might have been wrongly smeared?
With the release of the Venona papers -- and eleven years later, the release of "Good Night and Good Luck", one can see Hollywood "circling the wagons" as more and more of these decryptions of Soviet messages become known and McCarthy's suspicions and allegations turn out to have been either true or well-based.
With the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991 leading to the opening of Soviet archives that had never been examined by independent scholars, the whole question of McCarthy's charges is reopened. This film addresses none of it.
The historically rich documentation first made available in Moscow's archives in 1992 has resulted in an outpouring of new historical writing, as these records allow a far more complete and accurate understanding of central events of the twentieth century.
Not only do the Venona files supply information in their own right, but because of their inherent reliability they also provide a touchstone for judging the credibility of other sources, such as defectors' testimony, FBI investigative files and, ultimately, Joseph McCarthy's warnings and revelations.
Through most of the twentieth century, governments of powerful nations have conducted intelligence operations of some sort during both peace and war. None, however, used espionage as an instrument of state policy as extensively as did the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Stalin directed Soviet intelligence at nearby targets in Europe and Asia. America was still distant from Stalin's immediate concerns, the threat to Soviet goals posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. This perception changed, however, after the United States entered the world war in December 1941. Stalin realized that once Germany and Japan were defeated, the world would be left with only three powers able to project their influence across the globe: the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States. And of these, the strongest would be the United States.
With that in mind, Stalin's intelligence agencies shifted their focus toward America.
One mission of these Soviet intelligence officers, however, was espionage against the United States. The deciphered Venona cables do more than reveal the remarkable success that the Soviet Union had in recruiting spies and gaining access to many important U.S. government agencies and laboratories dealing with secret information. They expose beyond cavil the American Communist party as an auxiliary of the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. While not every Soviet spy was a Communist, most were. And while not every American Communist was a spy, hundreds were. The CPUSA itself worked closely with Soviet intelligence agencies to facilitate their espionage. Party leaders were not only aware of the liaison; they actively worked to assist the relationship.
Information from the Venona decryptions underlay the policies of U.S. government officials in their approach to the issue of domestic communism. The investigations and prosecutions of American Communists undertaken by the federal government in the late 1940s and early 1950s were premised on an assumption that the CPUSA had assisted Soviet espionage. This view contributed to the Truman administration's executive order in 1947, reinforced in the early 1950s under the Eisenhower administration, that U.S. government employees be subjected to loyalty and security investigations. The understanding also lay behind the 1948 decision by Truman's attorney general to prosecute the leaders of the CPUSA under the sedition sections of the Smith Act. It was an explicit assumption behind congressional investigations of domestic communism in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it permeated public attitudes toward domestic communism.
The Soviet Union's unrestrained espionage against the United States from 1942 to 1945 was of the type that a nation directs at an enemy state.
Sen. McCarthy knew this.
Of course, where's the benefit to Clooney if he had to re-examine his beliefs and address how Hollywood has wrongly smeared an American senator who turned out to be patriotic and correct after all? Who in Hollywood would fund such a film? Ah, but Hollywood millions will pour into a film like this.
Move over, Michael Moore. George Clooney is now in town.