Wacko right-wing news spewing hate and conspiracy theories, the rest of the media intimidated into silence, countless people forced out of jobs because they supported ‘liberal causes’, a Congress and Senate acting as right-wing rubber stamps, censorship and religious prudery, death threats, black lists.
Sounds familiar, of course, but it may surprise many to know I’m describing the FIRST time the GOP went mad in my lifetime, the McCarthy era.
It’s fashionable today to believe it was mostly in Washington and Hollywood, or that it ended the day Ed Murrow made his famous TV broadcast, but it went far deeper than that.
On March, 1954, Ed Murrow went after McCarthy on the air. It was enormously effective, although his network, CBS, was extremely nervous about how far he would go, and even held back promoting the show. He showed film footage of McCarthy in action, and when it was all over, he said these words:
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”
The immediate reaction to what Murrow did was largely positive. Murrow’s colleague and fellow WW2 broadcaster Don Hollenbeck, who was on the CBS station WCBS-TV, saw the broadcast and immediately told his viewers he wanted "to associate myself with what Ed Murrow has just said, and say I have never been prouder of CBS."
The right-wing hate machine, the Chicago Tribune, and the Hearst newspaper chain went after Hollenbeck. The usual charges that he and Murrow were ‘Communists’ littered their conspiracy world. Tragically, their attacks literally drove Hollenbeck to suicide.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was also very active on McCarthy’s side. The day after the show, he sent out a memorandum to his subordinates to find out everything they could on Murrow.
But despite right-wing fury, Murrow had succeeded in starting what would become a swinging of the pendulum. America had the good fortune that Republican President Ike Eisenhower was no fan of McCarthy, and he allowed the Army-McCarthy hearings to go forward, which centered on McCarthy’s attacks on a highly respected general. Those hearings finally finished the senator, especially when attorney Joseph Welch, after listening to McCarthy raging over the supposed Communist sympathies of a colleague, shot back: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
As a footnote, it should be remembered that McCarthy’s chief counsel in the hearings was Roy Cohn, who is considered to be the mentor of Trump.
