[Clips] 'Romantic Radicals'

[R. A. Hettinga]

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 'Romantic Radicals'
 By Lauren Weiner
  Published
  11/17/2005

 It is the way of the bien pensant intellectual to reason thusly: Because
 Senator Joseph McCarthy was a demagogue, nobody in America was rooting for
 Josef Stalin or helped him. And here's the logical corollary, subscribed to
 by the bien pensant actor and director George Clooney: Because McCarthy was
 a demagogue, CBS news legend Edward R. Murrow's fiery denunciations of
 "hysteria" about communism were not only plucky and self-righteous but
 uttered in defense of opinionated yet essentially innocent Americans.

 Some of the people Murrow spoke up for were more than just opinionated,
though.

 Clooney's picture "Good Night and Good Luck" gives moviegoers some idea of
 the motive behind Murrow's famous anti-McCarthy television report, a
 half-hour broadcast of "See It Now" that informed a wide audience of the
 Wisconsin Senator's reckless way of going after people who were or were
 reputed to be members of the Communist Party. (McCarthy would be censured
 by the Senate nine months after it aired.) But the film simplifies that
 motive, leeching from it a whole lot of its historical import and personal
 drama.

 Murrow's March 9, 1954 "See It Now" salvo was a pre-emptive strike against
 "Tail Gunner Joe," who was poised to go after the newsman in retribution
 for covering him critically on CBS. The threat of imputing Red associations
 to Murrow was based on his work during the 1930s for a New York-based
 organization called the Institute of International Education, which
 promoted exchange visits for foreign scholars, including Soviet scholars.

 The name of this institute is bandied about several times by the characters
 in "Good Night and Good Luck" -- to indicate that McCarthy was digging into
 Murrow's past -- but there is no mention of the people who ran it. They
 were Murrow's mentor, Stephen Duggan, and Duggan's son, the late Laurence
 Duggan. And therein lies the fascinating tale. McCarthy's bullying of
 Murrow with the use of Duggan-related dirt infuriated him, according to
 Alexander Kendrick in his 1969 Murrow biography. His CBS assistant brought
 him the details of the accusation, and said a creepy member of McCarthy's
 Senate staff (depicted in the film) was waving around an old newspaper
 clipping as the supposed proof that the newsman had been "on the Soviet
 payroll." Kendrick quotes Murrow's reaction: "The question now is when do I
 go against these guys." He and his producer Fred Friendly then carefully
 prepared, and put on the air, the famous expose of McCarthy.

 Edward R. Murrow wasn't a communist. He took umbrage on behalf of both
 himself and the Duggans -- particularly Laurence, whose death six years
 earlier was a raw wound for the East Coast establishment of which Murrow
 was a part. They had lost one of their own when Duggan jumped or fell from
 the 16th floor of his Manhattan office in 1948 in the midst of the legal
 and political maelstrom of the Alger Hiss spy case.

 Larry Duggan, former chief of the State Department's Latin American
 division, a charming, smart, and warm-hearted Ivy Leaguer who strived to
 bring about world peace, had a lot in common with Hiss. Murrow, justifiably
 angry that America's loudest counter-subversive was trying to intimidate
 him and sully his friend's memory, did not know that that friend was, like
 Hiss, a dedicated communist who passed sensitive information to Stalin's
 agents in the United States. The FBI interviewed Duggan in connection with
 the Hiss prosecution in December 1948. His shocking death days later at the
 age of 43 preserved his secret, for the media and his friends and family
 made him into a martyr -- a liberal destroyed by right-wingers who enjoyed
 impugning respectable citizens without due process. For decades afterward,
 those interested in the history of this period generally viewed the Duggan
 affair in the same way as the literary lion Archibald MacLeish, who wrote a
 poem upon Duggan's death that began:

 "God help that country where informers thrive! Where slander flourishes and
 lies contrive."

 It was not Senator McCarthy who had pursued Duggan as an underground
 communist but those active in the Hiss case: Representative Richard Nixon
 of California, the ex-communist Whittaker Chambers, and the ex-communist
 Isaac Don Levine. These were the people accused of symbolic manslaughter by
 university presidents, diplomats, newspaper columnists, and other worthies
 when Duggan died. The tragedy received front page coverage in the New York
 Times. Prominent people attended Duggan's memorial service. In Washington,
 a group of his friends put out a statement deploring the congressional
 panel on which Nixon sat, the House Un-American Activities Committee.
 HUAC's investigations, they charged, dragged the names of good Americans
 through the mud. Some Duggan supporters even suspected foul play.

 Foul play there had actually been, but not what MacLeish, Nicholas Murray
 Butler, Sumner Welles, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the other grieving
 friends of Duggan might have thought. According to the account of Allen
 Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (1999), when in 1937 a
 man named Ignatz Reiss broke from Stalin's secret service, a pair of KGB
 assassins hunted down the defector in Switzerland and killed him to stop
 him from blowing the cover of Laurence Duggan and another American official
 who secretly assisted the KGB out of devotion to world communism and the
 Soviet Union, Noel Field.

 In 1948, the furor over Duggan knocked the counter-subversives back on
 their heels. Nixon dove for political cover. Pressed for comment by
 reporters, his fellow anticommunists awkwardly tried to say nice things
 about the deceased, a sensitive family man and pillar of the community,
 even as they stuck by their conclusion that he was in league with Moscow's
 agents. Chambers, cornered by a New York Times reporter in the corridor of
 the federal court house where the Hiss grand jury was meeting, said that
 he'd testified to Duggan's being one of the covert communists he'd heard
 about, but he was not personally acquainted with the man nor had he used
 him as a source in the pre-war spy ring that he, Chambers, managed for
 Soviet military intelligence.

 Chambers sounded defensive, but his testimony was borne out later, when
 archival documents and decrypted cable traffic between Moscow, New York,
 and Washington came to light after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The
 Soviet cables and documents showed that Duggan's deliveries to the KGB
 (known in those years by other acronyms) included a confidential cable from
 the U.S. ambassador in Moscow back to the State Department, U.S. diplomatic
 dispatches from Europe offering U.S. perspectives on the civil war going on
 in Spain, and a State Department personnel list. Two of his code names were
 "Frank" and "Prince." His handler was Norman Borodin, whose boss was KGB
 station chief Izhak Akhmerov.

 Murrow and the rest had been unable or unwilling, in the heat of the
 communist controversy, to distinguish between McCarthy's theatrics and the
 more considered charges leveled by people who actually knew a lot about
 communism. Murrow, according to his biographer, wanted to follow up his
 television broadcast on McCarthy with one on the untimely demise of
 Laurence Duggan. This, he believed, would drive home the moral point about
 the evils of anticommunism. He never got to make that show.

 What if he had? Or better yet, what if he knew then what we know today?
 Would it have affected his airy indifference -- well conveyed by actor
 David Straithairn as the movie's Edward R. Murrow -- to whether a targeted
 individual was a communist or not?

 "Good Night and Good Luck" is a missed chance in this regard. For Laurence
 Duggan was one of several "romantic radicals" in the federal government in
 the 1930s and 1940s, to borrow a phrase from The Haunted Wood's chapter on
 Duggan. He is described there as an idealist in the cause of revolution who
 would not deign to take money from the Russians for risking his career to
 give them intelligence. The double life of the spy apparently took a severe
 toll. Judging from the Soviet records plumbed by Weinstein and Vassiliev,
 Duggan was one skittery pigeon. First there was his anxiety to protect his
 job, his family, and his reputation as a loyal American. Then -- and more
 interestingly -- there was his stricken conscience as he took in news of
 the bloody political purges in Moscow during the late 1930s. It bewildered
 and embarrassed him, his Soviet handlers wrote to headquarters, that famous
 Bolshevik heroes of the October Revolution were being tried and executed,
 one after another, as "Trotsky-fascist spies." Some of the Soviet diplomats
 he knew were getting recalled home and liquidated, to his horror.

 Like guidance counselors fussing over a fragile high school student,
 Duggan's handlers conferred with Moscow repeatedly on strategies to
 reassure Duggan so he would not lose faith in the revolution or lose the
 nerve to keep serving it clandestinely. He was worth their trouble. Unlike
 some of the other sources in government positions in Washington, Duggan
 gave Moscow information it valued highly, including the U.S. Navy's data on
 war materiel that foreign governments were ordering from manufacturing
 firms in the United States. He did beg off for certain periods, but Borodin
 would coax him into resuming, into the mid-1940s, his pilfering of official
 information.

 After years of betraying the people he worked with at the State Department,
 Duggan finally had to leave government, amid suspicions that he was a
 security risk. He returned to New York, first to a United Nations job and
 then to take the helm of the Institute of International Education. Then,
 the Hiss case broke; the FBI knocked on the door of the Duggan home in
 Scarsdale; and the fear and even perhaps the shame may have welled up in
 Laurence Duggan past all enduring.

 George Clooney walked up to this human drama, brushed lightly against its
 edge and passed right around it. Given his politics, one can see why. But
 any self-respecting cinematic storyteller ought to kick himself for failing
 to find room for the psychic tension, the tragedy, the surprise, and the
 supreme irony of the fact that the crusading journalist Edward R. Murrow,
 believing he was vindicating the dignity and rights of the loyal
 opposition, took his potent shot at "McCarthyism" partly in defense of a
 Soviet spy.

 The author works on Capitol Hill for a Republican member of Congress.

 --
 -----------------
 R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
 The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
 "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
 [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
 experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'