-This fight to expose those who would destroy this nation will go
on and on.
-Populism is a force that is as old as the American republic.
It tends to become very much of an
us-versus-them ideology.
And I think populism is a somewhat
dangerous force because it tends to undercut the authority of every
institution in American life.
Early in the 1950s, a little-known Wisconsin senator named Joe McCarthy
latched onto a populist message sure to get attention.
-Our nation may well die.
Our nation may well die.
And I ask you, who caused it?
Was it loyal Americans?
Or was it traitors in our government?
Following the Second World War, as the Soviet Union’s power grew,
the idea that Communism was creeping across the globe was
concerning to many Americans, particularly conservatives.
-In the early years of the Cold War, they saw the Soviet Union taking
over land in Eastern and Central Europe.
China had become a Communist country, and it’s likely
there were Soviet agents working in the government in the
United States.
-Even if there were only one Communist in the State
Department, that would still be one Communist too many.
-Growing up, playing cops and robbers with kids in the
neighborhood, I don’t tell anybody, I'm not shooting
robbers.
I'm shooting Communists.
I just came to the world knowing thems is bad
people.
And we responded to people who would stand up and
speak truth to power.
-McCarthy saw himself and presented himself as a figure in a
drama, a drama where the elite was betraying the American
people behind closed doors in places of power, and he was going
to expose them.
-Senator McCarthy said he had found 205 communists in the
State Department.
Among the many charges was one that the
State Department had many homosexuals in its employ.
-Are you a member of the Communist conspiracy as of this
moment?
-Who protects Communists is not fit to wear that uniform, General.
-Did he have 100 names of Communists in the State
Department, did he have ten, did he have none?
-I will not give those names.
-Senator, would you like to hear this?
It’s about you.
-It wasn’t important.
What was important is that he was speaking
emotional truths about what had happened to the country as his
supporters saw it.
McCarthy’s flair for the dramatic made him a media sensation.
He was a natural for the new
communication device rapidly populating American households:
television.
-I don’t think that Joe McCarthy would have been successful if not
for television.
It’s the whole idea, it’s an interesting person to look
at, and he’s saying these outrageous things, and what if
they’re true?
You watch almost every time.
McCarthy became attuned to the news cycles, timing his latest
Communist revelations right when they would go to deadline…
-Dateline, Washington D.C. …assuring he would be the big
thing in the news that evening.
-He would do things like he would give a speech and he would tell
the reporters who were filming him, I’ll knock on the podium
when I’m going to say something good and you can turn the lights
on.
And he would make these specious charges and move on to
something else while other people tried to fact-check.
-At that time, people were genuinely frightened.
People lost their jobs because it was believed
that they might be a Communist.
And you didn’t even have to be a Communist, you could just have
leftist views.
There were people out in Hollywood who lost their
jobs as screenwriters, actors, directors because they were
trying to put into movies ideas considered damaging to America.
McCarthy was the second most powerful Republican in the
country.
And the only thing he had to do was to sell his point of view.
But as McCarthy's accusations mounted, CBS reporter Edward R.
Murrow entered the fray.
-Hello America, this is Edward Murrow, speaking from London.
The public trusted Murrow because he had been with them
during some of the darkest hours of World War II.
-The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air
raid sirens.
-It had such intimacy to it.
He was reporting in a blow-by-blow
fashion what was happening over there.
And so it allowed people of America to feel that they were
experiencing the war in an almost tangible, visceral way.
And now Murrow was telling the nation he was set to take on
McCarthyism as well.
-CBS television presents the distinguished reporter and news
analyst Edward R. Murrow.
-There were plenty of newspapers that were already circling the
wagons around Joe McCarthy by March 1954.
But then Murrow went on CBS to just say, let’s go to
the videotape.
-Because a report on Senator McCarthy is by definition
controversial, we want to say exactly what we mean to say.
-He just used McCarthy’s own words against himself.
Here’s what he said then, here’s what he
said six months ago.
-The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and
the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly.
-The public wasn’t used to seeing on television a respected reporter
demean a sitting U.S. Senator.
-The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused
alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given
considerable comfort to our enemies.
-Murrow started building a public consensus to say McCarthy is a
scoundrel.
McCarthy hit back at Murrow.
-Murrow is a symbol, the leader, and the cleverest of the jackal
pack, which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to
expose individual Communists and traitors.
But by this point, Murrow had the upper hand.
-When the record is finally written, as it will be one day, it
will answer the question: who has helped the Communist cause and
who has served his country better, Senator McCarthy or I?
-It was the beginning of showing the power of TV that suddenly,
Edward R. Murrow was more powerful than Joe McCarthy.
Dwight Eisenhower, the president, saw things the Murrow way.
The U.S. Army saw things the Murrow
way.
Public opinion began to turn on McCarthy, particularly after
watching him try to turn his tactics against the military.
-Even members of the Republican Party thought that this was hitting
below the belt.
-I want to make it clear that the United States Army does not
coddle Communists.
This committee knows that, and the
American people know that.
-Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your
recklessness.
Have you no sense of decency, sir?
While his populist strain of politics would live on, Joe
McCarthy would die from complications likely due to
alcoholism, just a couple years after being exposed on the
airwaves by Edward R. Murrow.
-McCarthy was great theater.
And he made that tribal case for us
versus them.
But ultimately it was television that brought him down.
Because Edward R. Murrow, the broadcaster, was able to set
himself up as the anti-McCarthy, calling out his lies.