Murrow, McCarthy, and the echoes of today

How we survive a new era of fear

Apr 13, 2025

As we rode into the city for a performance of the new Broadway play Good Night and Good Luck, the train was full of people heading to the “Hands Off” demonstration in midtown Manhattan. The timing was a coincidence. The intersection of messages was not.

The play, an adaptation of the 2005 movie, vividly tells the story of CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow’s decision to call out red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy for his lies and demagoguery, and the fallout from Murrow’s broadcast.

To his credit, writer/performer George Clooney doesn’t belabor the link between McCarthy’s reign of terror in the 1950s and the Trump administration today. He doesn’t need to. The similarities emerge from the narrative organically, as Murrow and his team assemble the evidence documenting McCarthy’s tactics of intimidation and defamation – and brace for the inevitable blowback.

There is a brief but arresting visual link, as a clip of McCarthy in action shows him sitting next to his young aide Roy Cohn, who would go on to become Donald Trump’s attack-dog lawyer in his early business career. And there is an inescapably relevant ring to Clooney’s recitation of Murrow’s closing comments in his broadcast:

“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.”

At that point, in the performance we were attending, the audience burst into applause.

But fear was present, then and now. It was, and is, inescapable.

As they prepare for the McCarthy broadcast, Murrow and producer Fred Friendly assemble their staff and ask if anyone has anything in their background that might provide McCarthy with an opportunity to attack. One staffer stammers that his wife – now his ex-wife – attended left-wing meetings years ago. He apologizes, stands up and starts to leave. Murrow tells him to stay. Then he observes: “The terror is right here in this room.”

Fear was in the corporate suite, as well. CBS boss Bill Paley didn’t stop Murrow’s McCarthy program, but he didn’t really embrace it, either. The network took out no ads to promote the show; Friendly and Murrow had to buy them out of their own pockets. And Paley, alluding to pressure from sponsors and local affiliates, eventually whittles Murrow’s flagship program down from a weekly show airing in prime time to five episodes per season on Sunday afternoons.

The corporate mentality hasn’t changed much. Seven decades later, Paley’s successors are facing a $20 million lawsuit from Trump claiming his presidential campaign was damaged because of the way CBS edited an interview with his opponent, Kamala Harris. Legal experts have called the suit preposterous, and CBS’s own lawyers characterized it as “an affront to the First Amendment” – but the network’s parent company, Paramount, may settle rather than fight. Paramount happens to be pursuing a merger with another entertainment company, Skydance, that requires approval from the Trump administration.

“The terror is right here in this room.” – Edward R. Murrow

The play doesn’t mention Trump once, perhaps because it doesn’t need to. In a new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, journalist Clay Risen is much more explicit about drawing a through-line between McCarthy and Trump. “There is a lineage to the American hard right of today, and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare,” he writes, in an excerpt quoted by a New York Times review of his book. Risen likens McCarthyism to a subterranean “coal-seam fire” that has never been extinguished.

His analogy reminded me of the work of historian Richard Hofstadter, who wrote 60 years ago of a “paranoid style” in American politics, an undercurrent of nativist populism that can remain dormant for decades only to erupt in destructive fury during times of crisis.

In today’s fragmented media environment, no single entity can command the audience that CBS once enjoyed, and no individual journalist has anything close to the cachet that Murrow wielded. Murrow alone didn’t bring McCarthy down, but he played a major role in it. “The tide was turning and the Murrow show was part of the turning,” David Halberstam wrote in his classic history of the news media, The Powers That Be.

Yet Murrow himself felt that he was late in bringing his journalistic guns to bear against a reckless demagogue, Halberstam wrote. And there was another reporter of that era, Murrey Marder of the Washington Post, who was far less reticent. Well before Murrow’s 1954 broadcast, Marder convinced his editors that any story reporting McCarthy’s accusations had to be fully fleshed out with context, carefully fact-checked, and balanced with a response from the target. The year before Murrow’s McCarthy program, Marder wrote a series of stories exposing as utterly hollow McCarthy’s accusations about espionage at an Army base in New Jersey.

No Broadway plays have been produced about Murrey Marder. But perhaps this doesn’t matter, because courage, like cowardice, can be contagious. Marder’s stories on the Army base triggered a chain of events that led to congressional hearings, lawyer Joseph Welch’s devastating televised takedown of McCarthy (“Have you no sense of decency?”) and a Senate vote to censure him.

Those events, along with Murrow’s program, eroded McCarthy’s support among the American public – the public that had embraced and enabled him, and frightened so many officials into silence or acquiescence. And Murrow, in the final words of his broadcast, held up a mirror to his viewers and asked them to recognize where that ultimate responsibility for McCarthy belonged.

“We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities,” Murrow said. McCarthy, he continued, “didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it – and rather successfully. … ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”

Holding up a similar mirror today would show us a citizenry that has now voted Trump into the presidency, twice, if narrowly.

As we returned from the play, the Metro-North train buzzed with the camaraderie of activism instead of the more usual weary slump of homebound commuters. Two men with Rivertowns for Refugees T-shirts held their rain-sodden homemade protest signs. Somewhere between Harlem and Yonkers, they befriended a woman who also had been at the rally. “See you at the next one,” another woman said as she got off.

As Murrow/Clooney’s coda echoed in our minds, the energy surrounding us kindled a hope that perhaps the solution, as well as the fault, lies within us.

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.

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