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A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy

The 2005 movie, Good Night and Good Luck, tells the story of the See it Now special for which Edward R. Murrow is perhaps best known. It is the broadcast on the Junior Senator of Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, on March 9, 1954. On the air and in print, numerous reporters and journalists had long attacked the senator for his undemocratic persecution of alleged Communists. Eric Sevareid, one of the Murrow Boys, and others had criticized Murrow over the years for not using his prominence to report on Senator McCarthy.

One exception was his 1951 Thanksgiving evening radio broadcast in which he stated: 'This is a day when it is customary to list reasons for thankfulness. ... We should, I think, be grateful to Senator Joe McCarthy. He has become a symbol of accusation without proof. We shall have to decide - we are in the process of deciding, - whether as a people, we are prepared to proceed upon that premise.' Murrow, in fact, had lost a personal friend to an early campaign of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Richard Nixon in 1948. HUAC and one of its more famous members, Richard Nixon, turned the accidental death of Laurence Duggan, director of International Institute of Education, into an admission of guilt in 1948. Laurence, Stephen Duggan's son and a friend of Murrow's from the 1930s, had been interviewed in connection to the Hiss investigation the day of his accident. Upon Laurence's death, rumors were spread by HUAC. In response, Murrow did a scathing radio broadcast about the accident and HUAC's allegations which were soon found to be without foundation.

Against a backdrop of rising opposition to McCarthy in 1953, Edward R. Murrow and his See it Now producer Fred Friendly finally found an interesting angle to address McCarthy's tactics. In October 1953, they aired a See it Now program regarding the case of Milo Radulovic (1926-2007). Radulovic, a second-generation U.S. citizen, was discharged as reserve Air Force lieutenant due to his family's alleged Communist contacts. After Murrow's program and the ensuing publicity, Radulovic received a hearing and was reinstated.

Murrow and Friendly followed this up with their March 1954 See it Now Special on the Senator from Wisconsin himself, paying for the program's advertisement out of their own pockets. Consisting largely of excerpts from McCarthy's television appearances, this broadcast and McCarthy's televised response did much to reveal the senator's illogical, crude, and undemocratic crusade to a general public. Murrow's stature and analysis did the rest. Murrow's broadcast came right in the middle of the Army - McCarthy dispute over Gerard David Shine. Starting in late April 1964, the 36 days of televised Army - McCarthy hearings were key to three developments: McCarthy's eventual censure by the Senate in December 1954, his loss of political power, and the public's disenchantment with the senator after his behavior was exposed on ABC over seven weeks.

Sponsors and Program Content

Murrow always appeared reluctant to have sponsors for his programs or, rather, to have sponsors involved in his programs. Of course: he made excellent money with his sponsoring contracts, the most famous of which was with ALCOA (Aluminum Company of America). His first sponsorship, during the war, appears to have been with Silver Industries soon followed in 1943 by the American Oil Company (AMOCO) and the Campbell's Soup Company.

Murrow's first public comments regarding his sponsors in April 1943 are typical for his skills. He managed to allude to his reservations, praise his first sponsor International Silver for their non-intervention, and at the same time do some publicity work for International Silver in a contemporary political context:

Murrow was critical of the potential editorial role of sponsors, the role sponsors played in making or unmaking radio or television programs, and he was opposed to their advertisements infringing on or interrupting his reports and analyses. When he began Edward R. Murrow with the News, for instance, he successfully insisted that Campbell's Soup Company was not allowed to break into the middle of his program with a commercial. At the height of his fame and stature, Murrow was long cushioned from usual commercial pressures on program content. With radio news and, later on, television maturing, corporate sponsors gained in power over the U.S. media industry, however. At the same time, the media industry itself was turning increasingly corporate and was thus even more sensitive to corporate pressures. In a parallel development, the broadcasting industry increasingly passed over news and education broadcasts in favor of more lucrative entertainment programs. This weakened Murrow's position further.

As long as ALCOA produced aluminum goods for industry, it stood behind Murrow's programs - and as long as it needed to reinvent its corporate image, which had been partially tarnished by a 1937 antitrust lawsuit. In sponsoring See it Now, which usually cost ALCOA about $50,000 per week, ALCOA relished the positive image that Murrow's programs gave to its company. Given little notice and no indication of what was about to be aired, ALCOA also sponsored Murrow's McCarthy special. It stood by Murrow after the show had aired and refused to pay the production cost of McCarthy's filmed reply, as the senator had demanded. Instead, CBS picked up the bill. However, the more the company moved into producing household goods, such as aluminum foil, the less enchanted it became with Murrow's provocative broadcasts. The final straw was a See It Now program called The Power of the Press regarding a land grant scandal involving Texan state officials and veterans in May 1955. ALCOA was trying to expand its production in Texas at the time and in response to the show it cancelled its sponsorship with the end of the season. This killed the weekly See It Now program.

While the See it Now series had never been a big crowd pleaser, it had brought CBS numerous awards, industry leadership in the making of news documentaries, and public acclaim. During the Harris Congressional subcommittee hearings over the quiz scandal in 1959, Frank Stanton opportunistically pointed to CBS's continuing, albeit lukewarm support for See it Now Specials to escape more trenchant criticism and action given the network's rigging of quiz shows.

These are some of Murrow's accolades:

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Credits

Text and Selection of Illustration	Susanne Belovari, PhD, M.S., M.A., Archivist for Reference and Collections, DCA
Digitization	Michelle Romero, M.A., Murrow Digitization Project Archivist
Images	All images: Edward R. Murrow Papers, ca 1913-1985, DCA, Tufts University, used with permission of copyright owner.

Partial Bibliography

For a full bibliography please see the exhibit bibliography section.

Books consulted include Sperber (1986); also Persico (1988) and Kendrick (1969).

The Edward R. Murrow Papers, ca 1913-1985, DCA

Wersheba, Joseph, The Senator and the Broadcaster: An intimate history of the most famous program in television history: Edward R. Murrow's 'See it Now' documentary on Joe McCarthy, November 1953 - March 1954.

Filardo, Meyer Peter, "The Counterattack research files on American Communism, Tamiment Institute Library, New York University - weekly anti-Communism newsletter published by American Business Consultants, Inc., 1947-1968," Labor History, May, 1998.