Horizon

I'm more concerned about whether the latest Harry Potter movie that I will inevitably be dragged to will seem as interminable as all the rest.

The Goblet of Fire isn't among Rowling's better efforts. Dunno about the quality of the movie but anyhow next year's will have better material to start from. The Order of the Phoenix at least has some Zorro stuff, an inventively haunted house, some implied political opinions, and a bit of punk sensibility to keep things interesting.

Will report back about the Murrow thing.

I've heard that Good Night, and Good Luck is pretty good, and that the filmmakers resisted the tempation to make it a clumsy diatribe about the PATRIOT Act. Thanks for the Ivins article.

Ben, there's even something for you to like in it: a cigarette.

Hmmm. Just wait for the DVD -- it'll likely be remastered into a cellphone.

Well, it's marvelous material and they've got a lot of the period stuff right but it's not the best script ever.

They have this David Strathairn guy playing Murrow as the perfect Bogart-type Iron Man of the Fifties -- strong, silent, unwavering, has seen worse in the war and doesn't think much of little civilian bullies, dryly witty but never silly, takes a stand and faces the consequences calmly, hits above the belt and expects the same of others, answers tirades with a simple "so what do you want?" Takes comfort in cigarettes and an occasional Scotch but never in self-pity. A man it's easy to want to be, except no real person ever says the right thing every time the way this guy does. Clooney, the director, plays Fred Friendly looking very much like Clark Kent.

The choice of period footage is so closely congruent to present-day situations that it's almost not shocking enough because it's so familiar. That and, well, the story isn't put together with as much drama as the material could permit.

I'm sure viewers are meant to see parallels to current similar injustices, especially when it comes to secret-evidence issues and due process violations in the Milo Radulovich case and elsewhere. There's a narratively gratuitous clip of Eisenhower praising the American system in which people are not imprisoned without trial for their political opinions and habeas corpus is respected -- perhaps to make the point that habeas corpus was once considered inviolable by the archetypal leader of the Republican Party?

There's a subplot that's difficult to understand about a couple in the newsroom who hide their marriage because CBS refuses to employ married co-workers. The couple are seen worrying whether to sign loyalty oaths and whether something in their personal histories will be brought out, and they seem to be saying it's something political, not just the fact of their marriage -- but it's just not clear what they're getting at. Towards the end of the film the couple are told that management knows they're married and to think about whether one of them should resign in order to spare others in a coming round of layoffs. But it's not clear if this has anything to do with their politics or what. The whole business with this couple was just confusing to us. I don't know if we missed something or what.

Similarly another CBS journalist is shown getting upset about political attacks on him by a pro-McCarthy New York Times columnist and then we're told he has committed suicide, but we're not helped to understand how it is that a single writer slinging insults could drive a man to such lengths. Is there something about his past that he's afraid will be pursued or what? Again, it's unclear.

There's a nice recurring device of breaking up the newsroom scenes with interludes in which an Ella Fitzgerald-type jazz singer is seen performing with sax and piano in a different studio at CBS, her choice of songs forming a kind of Greek-chorus commentary on the main action. It's kind of a Dennis Potter effect.

Oh, and for Orwell buffs, Harold Laski gets a mention. McCarthy accuses Murrow, among other things, of receiving a dedication in Laski's book. Murrow acknowledges it's true but says that doesn't mean he agrees with Laski's politics, nor vice versa, only that the man admired his London broadcasts during the Blitz.

I saw it last weekend. I thought David Strathairn was absolutely brilliant. It's as though he's channelling Murrow's soul. The direction is wonderful, brilliantly capturing a look not unlike the documentaries of the 50s and early 60s. The script, however is incredibly lightweight. It goes through all the motions and captures all the period detail but it's all depiction. There's no real emotion. You notionally root for Murrow and Friendly, but the context isn't adequately defined for you to really feel anything. By using footage of the real McCarthy and Milo Radulovich, you are confronted with their plunder and plight respectively in their own words and actuality, but the effect is that you're watching the footage with the rest of the cast. It's like watching TV once removed. I gather George Clooney originally intended this to be a live television play, much like the remake of Fail Safe he spearheaded a couple of years ago. I think it might have worked better in that form, as it might have provided more immediacy.

The CBS journalist in question is Don Hollenbeck, a colleague of Murrow's who was under fire from Jack O'Brian, a Hearst columnist and McCarthyite. Hollenbeck was fodder due to his connections with PM magazine, a left-leaning newspaper from the forties (Dr. Seuss was a political cartoonist). The point, which I personally thought was made quite adequately in the film (though you seem to differ, Martha) was that O'Brian's red-baiting campaign against Hollenbeck was enough to destroy him because even though it was guilt-by-association he felt it would impact his livelihood-- if enough people think you're a red, you're dead, so to speak. (The film plays up his maritial difficulties and implies he's got a lot of problems already). I thought one of the better moments in the film was when Murrow told Hollenbeck bluntly that he could only go after McCarthy, not Hearst.

That said, I had no clue what the point of the husband-wife thing was, other than possibly to misdirect the viewer into thinking there was something bigger and more menacing. The loyalty oath I think just pointed out the politics of the era: Murrow had no trouble waiving his own rights to declare himself to be not a communist, but had difficulty watching McCarthy prey upon the rights of others.

Overall, I thought it was technically brilliant and had a great way of making you feel like you were there in the 1950s. There was just too much of a remove for me to get emotionally invested in it. A shame as David Strathairn's performance is utterly brilliant.

Meant to thank you for this, Graeme, and hope you're feeling better lately. Yes, I agree, Strathairn himself and the 1950s footage are what you remember, not the script.

It certainly does make me miss smoking.

It certainly does make me miss smoking.

You know, my mother was Miss Tobacco when she was in seventh grade. The winner was chosen from the girls who brought the most tobacco to school one day, and as my grandfather ran a warehouse at the time, she was crowned. There's even a picture in the yearbook with her all decked out. On second thought, that was "Tobacco Queen" — nevermind.

But seriously, last night I picked up the third volume of William Shirer's memoirs from the local Half-Price clearance shelves. It covers the post-war period and spends a great deal of time on Shirer's relationship to Ed Murrow and his falling out with him after Murrow caved in to a sponsor's pressure and fired him. If there's a time period anyone's particularly interested in, I'll quote it, but right now my nose is in another book.

Mind just explaining what the sponsor had against Shirer?

p 93:

I was puzzled that the shaving-cream company would suddenly drop a show with high ratings. ordinarily a sponsor abandoned a program only because it felt the ratings were too low to justify the expense. Could it be, I began to wonder, that th esponsor, though pleased with the ratings, didn't like my supposedly liberal view of the news?

The tensions of the COld war already had made themselves felt in our country. There was a growing intolerance. There was increasing pressure, especially on independent and liberal journalists, to conform to the conservative views of Big Business and Big Government.

NBC had cleaned out its last two liberal commentators, John Vandercook and Bob St. John, the year before. CVS recently had edged QUincy Howe out of his 6 P.M daily spot as soon as a sponsor had bought it and had given it to Eric Sevareid, the new head of the Washington bureau. the era of McCarthy lay just ahead, but already there were signs foreshadowing it. I had not taken the change of climate as seriously perhaps as I should. I had been through it all before — in my years in Nazi Germany.

Recently, I had begun to notice a growing criticism of my broadcasts from the right. The archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, did not like some of the things I was saying on the air. His criticism was shared by other conservatives. Even the vice-president of the ad-agency that handled the shaving-cream company account began to hint that I was "too liberal." He himself was rising in Connecticut Republican party circles.

It occurred to me then, as I reflected on the matter, that since the sponsor was not dropping me because of low ratings, he could be taking such action only for some other reason: to silence me.

More of interest from p. 114:

For all his wild and misleading statements about me, he knew in his heart that, our friendshi aside, this was no time fo rhim or CBS to knuckle under to the hysterical forces of reaction that were beginning to take over the country by ousting me because a shaving-cream company and its Madison Avenue advertising agency thought my views a bit too liberal. I would be among the first victims, but he must have known that others would follow, though I do not believe he had the faintest inkling, as I did, that he himself eventually might meet a similar fate.

[General background on McCarthyism snipped -BWB]

Eventually Murrow realized where such hysteria was taking the country. And in the end he would turn on the shabby senator from Wisconsin in a memorable broadcast that exposed McCarthy for the mountebank he was and indeed hastened his end. But to some, Ed's move came late. David Halberstam, researching his book The Powers That Be, noticed it. It was "significant", he thought, "that Murrow's broadcast attacking McCarthy took so long in coming."

McCarthy was getting away with murder, "yet he [Murrow] did not act. McCarthy had given his first speech in March 1950, and that year had passed, and then 1951, and then 1952, and then 1953. Starting in 1952 friends began to ask Murrow and Friendly when they were going to take McCarthy on."

Halberstam thought Murrow became "seriously disturbed by the company's and his own failure to move earlier on McCarthy. . . . [Ellipsis in Shirer -BWB] Murrow's own failure to act had become an issue among journalistic colleagues. Afterward [he] was haunted by the fact that the program was so late."

But better late than never. No other network then, or later, allowed one of its commentators to take on McCarthy. The broadcast of Murrow on his See It Now program devastated the Red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, and he never recovered from it.

But it turned out also to be the first step in Ed Murrow's fall from grace at CBS. Several members of management and the board of directors were far from pleased. Frank stanton, president and the righthand man of Paley, returning from a business trip to the Midwest, called in Fred Friendly, Murrow's collaborator on See It Now, and told him that several affiliates there thought the broadcast had been bad for business. Some went further. They thought Murrow's attack on McCarthy "might cost the company the network."

Indeed, Ed soon confronted the same sponsor problems that had helped terminate my career at CVS. Alcoa, which had sutck by Ed through many a public controversy, decided the next year not to renew See It Now. Then, in a series of moves that resembled those he and Ed had taken against me, Paley decided to phase out See It Now, despite its enormous prestige as by far the best public affairs program on TV. Soon it was gone, and a poor substitute show was given to another (Friendly) to produce, and Ed found himself on the way out.

Thanks very much. Amazing. Always so many ambiguities in these stories.

And thanks for the impetus to read *Rise and Fall...* It was on our family shelves through my whole childhood and I just recently brought it here to finally read the thing but had half forgotten about it until you mentioned Shirer.

I've read Berlin Diary, Collapse of the Third Republic, and Nightmare Years, but never wanted to even start Rise and Fall for some reason. Hope you enjoy it.