During the course of such discussions, Mr. Cohn asked the Secretary about an assignment in the New York City area for Mr. Schine when inducted. Mr. Cohn stated that it was desirable to have Mr. Schine available for consultation to the staff of the committee to complete certain work with which Mr. Schine was familiar, and that the Army must have several places in the New York City area where Mr. Schine could perform Army work.
The Secretary did not agree with this suggestion and pointed out that Mr. Schine should follow the same procedures for assignment as any other private in the Army . . .
McCarthy then took on the United States Army. And lost. Most of us have seen the Army’s lawyer Joseph Welch take down McCarthy in the video linked below, and I recommend watching the short clip:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Most of us know that McCarthy was censured by the Senate, though, as Rachel Maddow notes in her podcast Ultra: Season 2, Episode 8:
Maddow: When the censure resolution is officially put up for debate, it’s not at all clear that it will have the votes to pass.
After those messy, televised hearings where McCarthy came off so poorly, the broad public might have been cooling on McCarthy and his tactics, but his supporters still are legion. And their support for him, if anything, is becoming more fervent, maybe even more radical.
McCarthy’s colleagues in the Senate are made well aware of that.
McCarthy’s supporter’s were almost violently opposed to the censure:
Maddow: Some senators resorted to disconnecting their phones because of McCarthy supporters’ late night screaming phone calls to their homes.
And they came in person too.
When the censure debate formally began in the Senate, McCarthy supporters come by bus, by carload from Wisconsin, from Texas, from Florida. They chartered their own train from New York City.
Gerald L. K. Smith, the rabidly antisemitic preacher from the America First Party and the Christian Nationalist Crusade, he came to Washington himself to help lead the grassroots opposition. He set up a makeshift war room inside a hotel room right near the Capitol, a detail reported with characteristic punch by the journalist Drew Pearson.
After all that support, and rallies, and threats to those who supported the censure, the Senate decided to postpone the vote until after the 1954 mid-term elections, and it was watered down considerably to a slap on the wrist. I recommend listening to Maddow’s full podcast, or at least this episode.
While his shows may have shifted public opinon, Murrow was always the first to admit that he did not bring down McCarthy. As both the book and the show make clear, Murrow went after McCarthy because he knew that McCarthy was coming for Murrow, and it was important for Murrow to strike first.
But Murrow continued to speak truth to power long after McCarthy was gone, even when the target was his own industry.
The speech that starts with the words on the mug was delivered almost 18 months after McCarthy died, May 2nd, 1957, of complications of alcoholism, at age 48.
The speech is titled, “Wires and Lights in a Box”. It was delivered by Murrow in Chicago on October 15th, 1958, to the convention of the Radio-Television News Directors Association (now the RTDNA) in Chicago. Murrow confused many in the audience when he began his speech with the line on the cup. But he continued:
At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts. But ... it is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeyman with some candor about what is happening to radio and television....
You can read the entire speech here.
Sperber’s book notes that when Murrow finished, “There were a few seconds of silence, then roaring acclamation.”
As would be expected, some wanted copies of the speech, and others condemned Murrow without mincing words. It might, indeed, have done nobody any good.
The book's prologue ends with a journalist asking Murrow, that October, “exactly why he had 'lashed out at the hand that feeds him.’”
He sat back and grinned, for the first time in days.
"'I've always been on the side of heretics against those who burned them,' he replied, 'because the heretics so often proved right in the long run. Dead -- but right!'"
That is what I have admired about Murrow for over a half century now. He spoke truth to power -- at great cost, regardless of consequence.
Clooney adapted that speech into the show. Clooney did a masterful job of creating a show uncomfortably relevant. Clooney, and the show,
Good Night and Good Luck, deserve all the accolades and Tony nominations they have accumulated. Don Hewitt, a character in the play who worked on
See It Now with Murrow, later created the CBS show
60 Minutes.
