Back to New York City

After only a couple of days back in East Hampton, we were off to New York City for a brief stay, the highlight being George Clooney’s closing-night performance in Good Night and Good Luck, the Broadway stage version of a movie he wrote and directed 20 years ago. The one-and-a-half-hour show dramatizes the harm to democracy perpetrated by the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, and his protégé, Roy Cohn, during the Communist witch hunts, until they were finally stopped by the Senate. The show brought back memories of watching the hearings in black and white on my parents’ first television set in 1954. I was about 14 years old. I recall the CBS broadcasts of Ed Murrow’s show, “See It Now,” in which Murrow exposed and challenged McCarthy’s fear-mongering tactics. My mother was a political junkie, watching every party convention and presidential address on the newly acquired television—one of the few nonessential appliances we had in the home.

I grew up watching President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon on the TV before I left for college in 1958. It was Edward R. Murrow, however, who made the biggest impression on me, because he put politics in context in a compelling way, especially during the McCarthy hearings. I met him personally in 1963 when I interned in Washington, D.C., for Senator Estes Kefauver. It was a different world then politically. JFK was President, and both the economy and world events were stable. By then, Murrow was suffering from lung cancer and would pass away in less than two years. As I shook the trembling hand of this elderly and obviously ill hero, I told him how my mother and I had watched him religiously on CBS during the hearings. This world-class figure in my presence encouraged me to pursue public service when I graduated law school. Of course, my life took a different direction later on. It was only a few months after my encounter with Murrow that Kennedy was assassinated.

As I watched George Clooney play the part of this courageous journalist, I thought of my mom and me sitting on the plastic-covered living room sofa, looking at each other as Murrow spoke the truth about McCarthy and his lack of “decency.” At the time, Murrow famously quoted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, implying that Americans were responsible for allowing McCarthy’s rise to power and the resulting damage to civil liberties: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”