Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

The title of this period political drama comes from the customary signoff of pioneering broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965). Murrow began his career in the mid thirties as "director of talks and education" at the Blue radio network of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which at the time had, strictly speaking, no news department, and in response to events in prewar and wartime Europe, built an effective, prestigious and influential news-gathering organization. He later went on to be the first broadcast journalist to criticize Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) on a special edition of CBS television's investigative news program See It Now on March 9, 1954.

The program, "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy," pointed out McCarthy's inaccuracies and points of contention from a wide variety of McCarthy's printed, audio-recorded and filmed remarks and speeches: it relayed his remark on the Democratic Party's "twenty years of treason," his inaccurate labeling of the American Civil Liberties Union as "a front for... the Communist Party," and his abusive treatment of witnesses such as World War II hero Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, whose intelligence he compared to that of a "five-year old child," and who he said was "not fit to wear that uniform." The dapper, chain-smoking Murrow, whose credibility with the listening and viewing public had been solidified through years of on-the-ground reports from Blitz-era London and the battlefields of Europe and Korea, concluded with a statement about the differences between dissent and disloyalty, between accusation and conviction, and the importance in American history and to American principles played by writing, speaking, associating, and defending unpopular causes.

Murrow was not the first journalist to criticize McCarthy -- New York Times columnist Joseph Alsop and political cartoonist "Herblock" were among those who scrutinized, in print, McCarthy's grandstanding, cockiness, bullying, his assumptions of guilt by accusation and by association, and his attempts to silence his critics -- but as a broadcast journalist, he was the critic with the widest reach, and the response to "A Report On Senator Joseph McCarthy" was huge as phone calls and telegrams -- most of them positive -- flooded the network. McCarthy's downfall came in December of that year with his "condemnation" by the Senate (a censure in all but name), but Murrow did not single-handedly turn the tide against McCarthy. McCarthy's methods had increasingly alienated many of his fellow Republicans, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, with its famous public chiding of McCarthy by Army counsel Joseph Nye Welch ("... Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? ... "), also contributed to the precipitous decline of McCarthy's public support and political power. But at a time when McCarthy was virtually unchallengeable without risk of being branded a Red sympathizer, Murrow's vigorous defense of the right to disagree with him gave many ordinary Americans a sense of liberation from a reign of terror, and the broadcast of "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy" remains an important moment in the history of American politics and media.

Good Night, and Good Luck is not a film so much about McCarthy as it is about the program that did so much to discredit McCarthy. More to the point, it is about news and the ethical problems of reporting the news, and it focuses mainly on the newsrooms at CBS where the program was created.

As the film begins, Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly (co-producer, director and co-writer George Clooney) discuss an item in the newspaper about a man in the Midwest named Milo Radulovich, who is threatened with separation from the Air Force due to the alleged political activities of some of his relatives, allegation he is not able to answer due to their secrecy and due to the secrecy of his accusers. While the Radulovich piece is not about McCarthy as such, it is manifestly a story about McCarthyism, and See It Now's report brings the broadcaster to the attention of McCarthy's office, who cook up a dossier of innuendo about Murrow's own supposed subversive leanings and activities which is leaked to Murrow-Friendly staffer Joe Wershba (Robert Downey, Jr.), forcing their hands to make a more frontal assault on McCarthy before he destroys the network. This they do despite the warning of CBS head William Paley (Frank Langella) that Murrow is departing from the established form of "presenting both sides." The story is book-ended by Murrow's speech before the Radio and Television News Directors of America in October 1958 in which he warned of television's emphasis on commercialism and entertainment at the expense of information and the public interest.

One of Good Night's central devices is the use of archival footage within the context of the narrative: the actors playing Murrow, Friendly, Paley and staff inhabit the same story-world as the actual protagonists of the events the film concerns: Milo Radulovich, his sister and lawyer, Joe McCarthy and his assistant Roy Cohn and others are all represented on newsfilm that has been preserved from the time. It is by no means uncommon to see historical footage being used as exposition -- President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam war footage or anti-war protests, for instance, to establish that a film is set in the sixties -- but I cannot think of a film in which actual historical figures, many long dead, are used in such close proximity to actors doing a dramatic re-enactment of history. Screenwriters Clooney and Grant Heslov scrupulously researched their story, basing the dialogues of the film on accounts of actual conversations and exchanges of memos or telegrams, and overall they did justice to the substance and truth of the events portrayed. Nevertheless, it does serve as a subtle reminder that this is a film of the age of Photoshop, one in which media can be used to serve many purposes, only some of which might be truthful. It would be just as easy to do a movie in the same style that is more "spun" and less truthful to accepted historical accounts but still convinces because it appears truthful, in the way all media appears, on first glance, to be truthful.

This is an ethical qualm I have not seen expressed in reviews of this film, and I am a little surprised that it has not been brought up by others. But the double-edged way that historical footage is used in this film can be considered to be noted in the film when we see Strathairn-as-Murrow interviewing entertainer Liberace (represented by actual footage) on his other program on CBS television, Person To Person: in an age before satellite feeds, interviews over long distances could not be done live; therefore a film of the interviewee, giving answers to scripted questions, was shot beforehand and the host went through the motions of posing the questions and chatting while reading from cue-cards. This obvious artifice is shown in the film, and it is difficult determine if the set-up was meant to fool the audience or merely considered a convention and understood as such. It does suggest that Clooney and Heslov gave some thought about their postmodern use of narrative-blending in a film that is otherwise in straightforwardly-done, comprehensible style.

While Murrow and Friendly tangle with military brass, network executives, McCarthy's office and finally McCarthy himself, we also see the discussions of Joe Wershba and his wife Shirley (Patricia Clarkson), who, in order to keep their jobs with the network are keeping their marriage a secret from their employers: At the beginning of the film, Joe has received his copy of the new loyalty oath which all members of the staff must sign; both these factors, the secret marriage and the loyalty oath, serve to put you in the repressive atmosphere. In part, the conversations are a concession on the part of the outspokenly liberal Clooney and Heslov to the conservative beliefs of Robert Downey, Jr., who plays Joe, and he poses to Shirley the nagging ethical questions as to whether what they are doing is right or proper. Meanwhile the newsroom prepares for scrutiny as staffers who have any ties that may attract notice come clean, leading to Murrow's famous comment that "the fear is right here in this room."

The Wershbas provide one Greek-chorus-like counterpoint to the film; another is the singing of Dianne Reeves, whose rendition of standards such as "I've Got My Eyes On You" and "How High The Moon" provide a different, mood-centered counterpoint for the events of the film (the latter is particularly effective for the other subplot of the film, concerning troubled Murrow colleague Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), a journalist whose recent divorce and unremitting Red-baiting attacks from Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian results in his suicide). The soundtrack CD of the film, which I happened to find recently, is, incidentally, a treat for fans of fifties-style small-group jazz.

Ed Murrow never wavered from his conviction that the broadcast media had a responsibility to educate and inform that took precedence over its powers to amuse and divert.. He resigned from CBS in 1961 for a position as director of the United States Information Agency (which gives the official US government position abroad, and parent of the Voice of America broadcast service) under President Kennedy. Illness forced Murrow to resign from the USIA in 1964, and he died in Pawling, New York on April 27 1965.

I viewed Good Night, and Good Luck on a letterboxed 2006 DVD release from Warner Home Video, which also includes a commentary track by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, a making-of documentary which includes appearance by the real-life Wershbas, Milo Radulovich and Edward R. Murrow's son Casey Murrow.

See it now: An excerpt from Murrow's March 9, 1954 broadcast, with his famous concluding remarks on dissent and disloyalty.

And while we are talking about McCarthy, let's learn about the actual, little-known history of the Communist Party itself, in a little side article I like to call:

About the Communist movement in the United States

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was founded in 1919 by members of the Socialist Party who were impatient with that party's moderate, reformist stance and who were galvanized by the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which resulted in the first national government to be founded explicitly on socialist ideals (although whether and how it lived up to those ideals is another discussion entirely). The party, modeled after the Bolsheviks and adopting Leninist principles, was one of many similar organizations forming throughout the world in response to events in Russia and soon joined the Communist International, an international organization of Marxist-Leninist parties intended to coordinate efforts in what was then expected to be an imminent global revolution.

After a first decade of intensive government persecution and factional conflict, the party became one of the most dynamic and visible organizations on the American left in the 1930s and 40s. American Communists were instrumental in labor organizing as well as prominent and consistent opponents of segregation and racism. The party's attraction to artists and intellectuals led to an influence on American cultural life and thought that went far beyond the party's numbers and political clout.

But on the other hand, their dependence on the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) for nearly all their policy cues led them through a succession of contradictory positions. They opposed working within the mainstream labor movement and then supported it; they opposed FDR and the New Deal and then supported them. They opposed working with other organizations on the left and then called for a "United Front" against fascism, after which they went virtually silent on the issue of fascism with the signing of the non-aggression pact between Hitler's Germany and the USSR, advocating a "peace platform," which changed to a pro-war platform when Germany broke the pact and invaded the USSR. And as documents in former Soviet archives confirm, the party did indeed recruit certain of its members to gather intelligence which ended up in the hands of the Soviet government, doing this through a parallel secret party apparatus which was, in part, a relic of the early party's illegal existence at the height of anti-radical government activity in the 1920s.

Part of the rationale for the CPUSA's close relationship with the Soviet Union can be found in the long-standing socialist tradition of internationalism and in the Leninist principle of democratic centralism, whereby in theory, individual members within the party, and individual parties within the International, had a voice in shaping policy, but policies once adopted were to be strictly adhered to, just as troops in the field are expected to carry out orders and not subject them to additional debate. In practice, since the International was sponsored and largely administered by the CPSU leadership, the world's Communist parties increasingly became appendages of the CPSU and became apologists for Soviet domestic policy and instruments of Soviet foreign policy, and this became especially pronounced with the accession of Josef Stalin to the leadership of the CPSU after Lenin's death. This continued in a less open fashion after Stalin's public dissolution of the Communist International in 1943.

After the end of the Second World War, a wave of back-to-normalcy and conservatism turned the US government's sights on the Soviet Union and on radical activity in the United States, including but not limited to the activities of the CPUSA. Congressional investigations, prosecutions of party leaders under the Smith Act, infiltration of the party by informants, blacklists, loyalty oaths, and, for a time, the outlawing of the CPUSA under the Communist Control Act, devastated the party. Further blows to the party came with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Nikita Khrushchev's criticisms of Stalin.

The CPUSA attempted to recover in the sixties as the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements gathered momentum, but the party was largely written off by the sixties New Left as irrelevant or even dangerous in view of the USSR's increasingly hegemonic role in global politics, their new role as a new set of "bad guys" to be struggled against. The party finally severed its ties with the Soviet Union in the late eighties over the political and economic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, and further soul-searching and readjustment came with the fall of the Soviet Union and the satellite regimes of the East Bloc.

The CPUSA continues to soldier on with an active membership of about 2500 and without patronage from foreign capitals. The party never regained the influence of its heyday, and today very much follows rather than leads what remains of the American left with its "me-too" positions on every progressive issue from unemployment to war, from racial and gender equality to LGBT rights, from health care to the environment, while promulgating its vision of "Bill of Rights socialism" and its view of the capitalist causes of the problems facing the world today.

By most estimates, over a million Americans have, at one time or another, been members of the Communist Party. The majority of these American Communists were not engaged in cloak-and-dagger machinations but in peaceful and constitutionally-protected political activity. The Cold War anti-communist crusade demonstrated what could happen to anyone who stepped outside the boundaries of mainstream politics, and in so doing effectively marginalized dissent in the US without resorting to open and violent repression. It also institutionalized red-baiting as a permanent factor in American political discourse: even today, a generation after Communism ceased to be a factor in world politics, branding one's opponent a "communist" or "socialist" continues to be an effective weapon in the dirty game of American electoral politics and in reining in the limits of what is thinkable. The legacies of Murrow and McCarthy, the one who insisted on dissent as the foundation and the test of American freedom and the other who rode to political power on innuendo and fear, continue their mutual combat today.