Hollywood
releases a movie featuring (the late, lamented) Edward R. Murrow
and (the late, unlamented) Sen. Joe McCarthy. It is called "Good
Night, and Good Luck," and it portrays a famous broadcast
denouncing McCarthy, shown in March 1954, on the eve of the Army-McCarthy
hearings.
Murrow concluded
his half-hour blast by inviting McCarthy to take the half-hour
slot the following week to reply to Murrow's charges.
McCarthy's
office advised CBS that the senator had decided to turn his half-hour
over to this writer to reply to Murrow. The film depicts this
scene. William Paley, CBS boss, is leaving the office with Fred
Friendly, Murrow's producer. "They want to give the time
to William Buckley," Paley says. "I'm opposed."
Friendly agrees.
A few weeks
have gone by since the film was released. In Stamford, Conn.,
on Saturday, Buckley is seen at a movie house watching "Good
Night, and Good Luck." "Are you going to comment on
it?" a fellow viewer asks at the film's close. Buckley says,
"I don't think so. I've written two books about McCarthy."
But the next
day there are large headlines in the Stamford Advocate,
which is co-sponsoring an evening -- the day this column is being
written, Tuesday, Dec. 6 -- featuring an award to Buckley by the
distinguished Ferguson Library of Stamford, the first-ever Ferguson
Award. It was 51 years ago that McCarthy named Buckley as best-equipped
to answer Murrow, and now -- tonight! -- he can do so in the heart
of Stamford.
The Ferguson
Library is an intensively active culture center presided over
by a librarian determined to exhaust every advance in modern technology
to elevate the literacy of the community. Ernest DiMattia has
of course books and periodicals, but also films and computers
and multicolored simultaneous translators -- the Ferguson Library
is the most concentrated aggregation of cultural hypodermics this
side of the next world's fair.
The evening
is not designed to elicit my views on Edward R. Murrow's views
on Joe McCarthy, but the Stamford Advocate is a newspaper,
and perhaps will look me in the face before the evening is over
and say: Well. What would you have said, in March 1954, if the
cameras had rolled and you were talking back to Edward R. Murrow?
If that happens,
I'll probably say what is correct, namely that my own study of
McCarthy ended with his activity in September 1953, that his fight
with the Army, which was what the fracas was about in 1954 --
and which got him censured, and which loosed Edward R. Murrow
-- was something else, that McCarthy had thrown restraint to one
side, that he was deep in booze in those days and did some flatly
inexcusable things, for instance his attack on Gen. Ralph Zwicker.
But, if pressed,
I'd have recalled that the current movie makes a heroine out of
Annie Lee Moss, the black code clerk allegedly mistaken by McCarthy
for another Annie Lee Moss, who was indeed a member of the Communist
Party. Never mind, what mattered in the current production was
melodrama, and orderly thought bars chiasmic effects: McCarthy
smeared the opposition/the opposition smeared McCarthy.
Murrow accomplished
this mostly by camera manipulation. When he died, in 1965, I reflected
on the point in National Review. Murrow had uniquely
the skill to wrest the highest dramatic content out of any situation.
There were the bad boys and the good boys; and he was the good
boys' best boy on TV. But more than just that, he did develop
a form, he and Fred Friendly, that hadn't been fully developed
theretofore. It went like this: PAN ON FULL FACE OF SENATOR MCCARTHY.
He is perspiring and weaving a little in front of a microphone,
preparing to speak. No music. Total silence. Then the senator
lets out a long burp. SHIFT TO ED MURROW. "Ladies and gentlemen,
this evening we'll take a look at Senator McCarthy ..."
That half-hour
on McCarthy was Murrow's most important show. All the obituary
writers mentioned it, and the great courage it took to attack
McCarthy -- which certainly indicated that this is a nation whose
people are courageous, since everybody was doing it, or at least
everybody who counts. Everybody moral. And Edward R. Murrow was
the most moral man on television, because he had the guts to show
up Senator McCarthy for what he was.
The lonely
demurral came from the television critic for The New Yorker.
He made the point that there wasn't anybody in the world you couldn't
demolish by doing to him what Murrow did to McCarthy. If there
were 5 million feet of film on St. Francis of Assisi, you could
probably find a shot of him running away naked from his father's
house (he did), and Ed Murrow could prove he was an exhibitionist
and a poseur (he affected to talk to the birds!).
I don't know
what I'd have said on CBS, if cleared by management to come on.
At this remove, one has only passing thoughts.
