Vetting Clooney

George Clooney has made a new movie on the McCarthy Hearings of the 1950's called "Good Night and Good Luck." It comes out today. It looks good.

Good thing I've got my boys Stephen Hunter and Scott Galupo to help me sort through the lies of omission and bias in Clooney's presentation.

I'll let the Washington Post's Hunter (who says the movie is fairly well done) expose all that needs to be said about the historical accuracy of Mr. Clooney's picture. Mr. Hunter points out that the centerpiece of Mr. Clooney's movie is broadcaster Edward R. Murrow going on the TV to denounce Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had so fiercely attacked many suspsected soviet spies in the government.

Clooney wants to paint Murrow as the hero, and McCarthy as the villain. But Hunter says it was not that simple.

One of the men McCarthy attacked was Laurence Duggan, a former State Department employee, who killed himself because of the McCarthy hearings.

That's sad. It's also not the whole picture.

Duggan, as it turned out, was a Soviet spy, code-named "19," then "Frank" and finally "Prince."

He was, moreover, one of many Soviet spies embedded in the U.S. government at the time.

That's not all Clooney leaves out in his account of the Murrow-McCarthy fight: He leaves out the Cold War, the hot war in Korea, the Venona decrypts that proved how sophisticated and exhaustive the Russian intelligence initiative against the American target was. He even leaves out McCarthy himself, relying on archival footage and sparing himself the ordeal of trying to imagine such a fellow as a human being. He also leaves out nuance, context, empathy, anything that suggests the larger truth that nothing is as simple as it seems. The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

Fundamentally, he refuses to acknowledge that, as Joseph Persico wrote in his New York Times review of the 1999 book that brought these realities out, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev's "The Haunted Wood," "the hardest part of these revelations to accept, at least for those of us who deplored the over zealous Red-hunting of the late 40's and early 50's, is that the hunt rested on more substance than we cared to admit, the phony posturing of Senator Joseph McCarthy aside."

The result does a disservice to history: It suggests that McCarthy was an arbitrary sociopath disconnected from a larger issue. That he was just a bad Republican who liked to bully and destroy people out of his own pathology and he was smitten by the powerful moral force of a flawless crusader. Good whupped bad. Good hit bad upside the head. Good kicked butt. But nothing in real life is ever that simple, and to pretend that it is has to be a lie itself. That's the truth that should be spoken to the power that Clooney represents.

I LOVE that last line.