So last week a little documentary treasure trove from our anti-communist past was released — transcripts of 160 behind-the-scenes grillings of the famous and the unknown by 1950s red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. These sessions were, as both Victor Navasky of the Nation magazine and Ruth Rosen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, so aptly comment below “dress rehearsals” for the public hearings to come. (By the way, for those of you too young to remember the era of the Great Red Hysteria, that domestic underpinning to the Cold War, there is no better place to begin to learn about it than Navasky’s classic account, Naming Names, now in paperback with a new afterword by the author.)
As a term, “dress rehearsal” is also a perfect image to consider at the present moment. The Senator, like a number of the other red hunters, was a publicity hound. No area fascinated these guys more than Hollywood and the Communist affiliations of various screenwriters, actors, and a few directors. Congressional investigators were drawn there for the obvious media attention movie stars and those associated with them garnered. But, as I wrote in my own book, The End of Victory Culture,
“another kind of affinity existed between that great story-making machine, the studio system, and the developing world of anti-Communist investigations. The various hearings not only drew on Hollywood’s acting pool (voluntarily or not) in the fashion of wartime mobilization of talent but organized themselves in a Hollywood-like fashion, for the anti-Communist investigatory ‘crusade’ was a complex production process for the creation of a new-style war story in a boundaryless age. The FBI agents, informers, defectors, and ex-Communist testifiers were its stars, pampered, image-massaged, loaned from one ‘studio’ to the next, and intimidated if they got out of line. Like Hollywood stars, they were surrounded by professional support teams to coach and direct their performances and publicists to project their images and protect them against detractors.”
We now stand at a distant end of this process. Take a look at Senator McCarthy again. How crude he looks today — bejowled and blustering about “brutalitarianism” (a great word by the way), sweating and bullying before the klieg lights and the flashing cameras. But how tiny and crude that little screen on which he first appeared in our homes still was. Ashcroft excepted, most of our hunters and baiters of today — witness the president landing on that aircraft carrier or the stand-up comedy routines of our secretary of defense — are so cool, so self-composed by comparison. They have learned all too well how to combine intimidation and publicity, how to mobilize screens big and small, and how to put them with just the right images at the heart of imperial politics. It was no mistake that before the second Iraq War, the Pentagon imported someone from Hollywood to build a full-scale set for the Centcom generals in Doha. They practically own television (think Fox), but unlike the Senator, they also understand it. Or rather they understand how to make it flatter them.
If you don’t believe this, take a look at the front-page nuts-and-bolts piece in the New York Times today by embedded White House journalist Elisabeth Bumiller, Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights. The White House is now a traveling TV show, its staff including a former ABC producer, Scott Sforza, hired to create the White House “message of the day” backdrops (he also helped design the Doha set), who works closely with a former NBC cameraman, “a master at lighting,” and Greg Jenkins, a former Fox TV producer, head of the group of people who “stage” all White House events. “‘They seem to approach an event site like it’s a TV set,’ said Chris Carlson, an ABC cameraman who covers the White House. ‘They dress it up really nicely. It looks like a million bucks.'” Just think about that aircraft-carrier moment, with a speech “specifically timed for what image makers call ‘magic hour light,’ which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.” Eat your heart out Senator McCarthy.
I once wanted to write an essay about my childhood called “Thank God for Senator McCarthy!” In 1953, my mother, who was a theatrical and political cartoonist, was hired by the (then liberal tabloid) the New York Post to draw the Army-McCarthy Hearings, about to be shown in the afternoons on ABC. For this we got our first TV, for which I had been begging fruitlessly all of the previous year. It was a major moment in my young life and the Senator’s iconic face was the first image I saw on a TV screen in my house — on coming home from school one afternoon. The truth was I found him unsurprising. He looked to me like half the fathers I knew, including my own. So I was thankful to him as a child. After all, he brought me Disney and Lucy and Ed Sullivan and I’ve never doubted since the connection between the intimidators of our society and the many screens and entertainments in our lives. Tom
McCarthy’s Secret Show
by Victor Navasky
The Nation
May 26, 2003
We now stand at a distant end of this process. Take a look at Senator McCarthy again. How crude he looks today — bejowled and blustering about “brutalitarianism” (a great word by the way), sweating and bullying before the klieg lights and the flashing cameras. But how tiny and crude that little screen on which he first appeared in our homes still was. Ashcroft excepted, most of our hunters and baiters of today — witness the president landing on that aircraft carrier or the stand-up comedy routines of our secretary of defense — are so cool, so self-composed by comparison. They have learned all too well how to combine intimidation and publicity, how to mobilize screens big and small, and how to put them with just the right images at the heart of imperial politics. It was no mistake that before the second Iraq War, the Pentagon imported someone from Hollywood to build a full-scale set for the Centcom generals in Doha. They practically own television (think Fox), but unlike the Senator, they also understand it. Or rather they understand how to make it flatter them.
If you don’t believe this, take a look at the front-page nuts-and-bolts piece in the New York Times today by embedded White House journalist Elisabeth Bumiller, Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights. The White House is now a traveling TV show, its staff including a former ABC producer, Scott Sforza, hired to create the White House “message of the day” backdrops (he also helped design the Doha set), who works closely with a former NBC cameraman, “a master at lighting,” and Greg Jenkins, a former Fox TV producer, head of the group of people who “stage” all White House events. “‘They seem to approach an event site like it’s a TV set,’ said Chris Carlson, an ABC cameraman who covers the White House. ‘They dress it up really nicely. It looks like a million bucks.'” Just think about that aircraft-carrier moment, with a speech “specifically timed for what image makers call ‘magic hour light,’ which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.” Eat your heart out Senator McCarthy.
I once wanted to write an essay about my childhood called “Thank God for Senator McCarthy!” In 1953, my mother, who was a theatrical and political cartoonist, was hired by the (then liberal tabloid) the New York Post to draw the Army-McCarthy Hearings, about to be shown in the afternoons on ABC. For this we got our first TV, for which I had been begging fruitlessly all of the previous year. It was a major moment in my young life and the Senator’s iconic face was the first image I saw on a TV screen in my house — on coming home from school one afternoon. The truth was I found him unsurprising. He looked to me like half the fathers I knew, including my own. So I was thankful to him as a child. After all, he brought me Disney and Lucy and Ed Sullivan and I’ve never doubted since the connection between the intimidators of our society and the many screens and entertainments in our lives. Tom
McCarthy’s Secret Show
by Victor Navasky
The Nation
May 26, 2003The other night I went to see Trumbo, an Off Broadway trial run of Christopher Trumbo’s play based mostly on his father, Dalton Trumbo’s, amazing letters about life under the Hollywood blacklist and other assaults on individual liberty in the name of national safety and security. The evening includes his famous dictum that those too young to remember the McCarthy era should not waste time searching for “villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims.” Survivors are still debating the moral implications of his generous injunction, but as it turns out, those too young to remember that dark time may have only too many opportunities to revisit it.
By coincidence, the showing of Trumbo (it plays only on Mondays) coincided with the release by the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs of five volumes of secret testimony from 160 closed hearings held during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s redbaiting rampage through our democracy fifty years ago.
To read more Navasky click here
Could it happen again?
By Ruth Rosen
The San Francisco Chronicle
May 12, 2003McCarthyism. The very word conjures up the image of someone using smear tactics to question a person’s patriotism and to silence dissent. Could such political persecution happen again in our country?
That is the question some Americans pondered last week when the U.S. Senate unsealed 4,000 pages of transcripts from secret sessions held by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1953-54. He used these closed hearings to weed out witnesses who refused to be intimidated and as dress rehearsals for public hearings.
What are the lessons to be learned from this poisonous period in our nation’s past?
One is how quickly our fragile freedoms can be eroded. McCarthy rose to power in 1950 on a tsunami of anti-communist hysteria, brandishing a list of “known communists” in the State Department, and held public trials to enhance his own political clout