George Clooney's Goodnight and Good Luck omits the fact that at least 349 Americans were actively spying for the Soviet Union.
Declassified documents from the
Venona Project show that McCarthy was right about Communist infiltration in the American government. Now,
Hollywood attempts to peddle their self-indulgent version of martyrdom yet again. This time from the perspective of Edward R. Murrow - patron saint of today's mainstream media.
Who is buying it? Not many anymore. This witch hunt version of history is quickly becoming fiction in the "Information Reformation" age:
The Washington Post rips Clooney:
"...many Soviet spies [were] 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."
Slate rolls its eyes:
"The film covers the five-month period from late 1953 to early 1954 during which Murrow combated the McCarthy-inspired hysteria over communist subversives with a quartet of programs on his weekly CBS series See It Now. The Venona transcripts have shown definitively that American communists and Soviet sympathizers, such as Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, did gather information for Moscow..."
And, of course, Conservatives laugh:
From Human Events: "If George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck is the best shot the left can unload on Joe McCarthy these days, the famous Red hunter is well on his way to a thorough rehabilitation."
Read my take on McCarthy and Venona below (originally posted last July)
Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist."
--Charles Baudelaire
Thanks to the Venona project, a secret FBI/NSA/CIA program that intercepted and deciphered Soviet diplomatic transmissions from 1937 until 1980, it is clear now that McCarthy was exactly right about Communists in the American government. In fact, he had underestimated the depth, scope, and severity of the breach.
Soviet cables now make clear that 349 Americans were in fact working for Stalin from 1939-1957. The most famous among those confirmed as spies were Alger Hiss (whose unfortunate code name was "LIBERAL") and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. See below for a listing of identified Communists.
Although Venona became public in 1995, relatively little attention has been paid to it. Conservatives must champion this as the biggest "I told you so!" of the ages. If we don't, apparently no one else will. The lack of attention paid to Venona tells us as much about academic and media agenda today as it does during McCarthy's time.
Simply put - Joe McCarthy deserves a posthumous apology from the US Senate. Further, the Democratic Party should own up to its grim history of Soviet appeasement, collaboration with, and support for a regime responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people. Some estimates have the Soviet machine responsible for over 170 million deaths worldwide.
Had the Democrats and Hollywood Left rejected and exposed Communists in their midst, perhaps the Cold War could have ended decades earlier with millions of lives saved.
However, with so many pledging their loyalties to the Russian cult of State, Liberals chose instead to destroy McCarthy, write fiction portraying "victimhood", and sling counter charges that the only danger we faced as Americans was from reckless Republicans with the audacity to ask about their fraternization with the enemy. While millions were marched off to gulags to dig their own graves, American Liberals sobbed hysterically about being blacklisted by film studios or questioned about their actual support for actual Communists. {Keep in mind that Democrats during this time supported the internment of thousands of innocent Japanese citizens.}
I guess it should come to no surprise how little attention has been paid to Venona by major media, the Democratic party, universities, high schools, show business, popular culture, etc.. Kids today are still reading Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and Arthur Miller's The Crucible as allegories for McCarthy's crusade. Ann Coulter does a great job detailing this dynamic in her book, Treason.
How does this happen? CNN's Harvey Klehr examines the Red Scare and sums up major media's thoughts on the Venona revelations thus:
"This new evidence is forcing the revision of many of the prevailing myths about the internal communist threat to American democracy in the postwar era. None of it exculpates McCarthy. He remains a political bully who hurt a number of people."
A bully who hurt people? This would be a fine assessment of things had McCarthy not been right. How does Klehr suggest one should react to those secretly sending Stalin sensitive information? Tickling them into submission? I'm sure Nazi collaborators were "hurt" too when they were outed. And, I'll bet that cockroaches don't like it when the light turns on in the basement either.
In another "circle the wagons" assessment, the late Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan reviewed the impact of Venona in a book entitled Secrecy: The American Experience published in 1998. In typical Liberal fashion, he blames everyone but the spies themselves and his own party's complicit tolerance of them. Below he specifically blames the FBI four decades later for keeping the spy list secret:
"Not for another forty years would government tell what it actually knew about the Communist conspiracy: there had indeed been one, but it had never been massive; it has first been contained, then suppressed. A democracy does not leave its citizens uninformed on these matters."
Not been massive? If you don't think that 349 Soviet spies working inside all three branches of government qualifies as massive, then what does? It's well known today that publicizing the names would have tipped off the Soviets that we had broken their codes. Knowing the risks involved, the names of those spying were kept confidential at the personal request of General Omar Bradley.
Suppressed? How so, Senator? Not one victim can be produced from McCarthy's crusade. Or, would detailing the damage done by Democrats during this era be too much even for today's Democrats to explain away? It's simply easier to claim, "There was no threat."
Sound familiar?
I take heart in the fact that what happened to McCarthy won't happen again. With tens of thousands of bloggers coming online everyday we're part of an "Information Reformation" that is returning truth to its rightful owners. The OMSM (once mainstream media) can no longer operate as the Ministry of Information for the Left. If they won't apply scrutiny - bloggers will.
Thanks to this new dynamic, Liberals now have to back up their charges as well as their denials. The Dick Durbins of the world now have to explain what they mean as their speeches are heard. Their behavior is observed. Their hyperbole deflated and their support for our enemies is more evident than ever. It's apparent now that we can't trust media to act as the "watchdog of government" if they attack and destroy those who would otherwise protects us.
In light of Venona, words like treason, sedition, and traitor have new relevance. Despite what Liberals would have you believe, loyalty is a valid topic for debate. There is dissent and loyal opposition - then there are lies from the mouths of Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, Dick Durbin and company designed to embolden our enemies, slander our good names, and create more dangerous conditions for our soldiers.
Most likely, McCarthy will remain a bogeyman for some time to come. Without his convenient ghost to conjure , the Left would actually have to answer to critics questioning their aiding and abetting of our enemies.
Although the names and times have changed, the players are no different today than in McCarthy's time. We're at war, with many among us (mostly on the Left) claiming there is no real danger but that posed by John Ashcroft, or Alberto Gonzales, or Karl Rove, or Halliburton, or Conservatives in general. Meanwhile, the media seem content to report solely on the operational efficiency of the enemy or how American soldiers are forcing terrorist inmates to listen to rap music.
So when Michael Moore states, "Somebody needs to just say this: there is no terrorist threat..." you might reconsider his motives and take a look at the list of American traitors who comprised "no threat" 50 years ago.
