(1953 Press Photo CIA director Allen Dulles talks with Senators Joseph McCarthy and Karl Mundt)
Rather than viewing the actions of CBS News against Senator Joseph McCarthy (as portrayed in the 2005 film Good Night and Good Luck, which received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Director (Clooney), and Actor (Strathairn) as a heroic case of the mainstream news media working against state power, I believe it was precisely the opposite.
The destruction of McCarthy and his populist crusade against the elites governing America was a triumph of the most powerful forces of the deep state.
(This speech was written by Murray N. Rothbard, and delivered by his colleague George Reisman in the 1950s at a Roy Cohn event at which Joe McCarthy was present.)
George Clooney’s film does not delve into Joe McCarthy’s preliminary investigation of CIA covert activities and how CBS chairman William Paley, CBS News president Fred Friendly, and CBS Evening News anchor Edward R. Murrow were part of the Agency’s Operation Mockingbird to provide deflection and cover for the Agency’s ‘family jewels’ of the day. CBS News president Sig Mickelson (1954-61) was later liaison to the CIA. Because of his frequent communications, Mickelson even had a direct private phone line installed to the Agency.
I would suggest reading chapter ten, ‘Things Fall Apart: Journalists,’ in Hugh Wilford’s book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How The CIA Played America, for background on these crucial events. It outlines how the Columbia Broadcasting Service was closely connected to the Central Intelligence Agency during this period.
CIA director Allen Dulles, CBS chairman William Paley, and CBS board director Senator Prescott Bush were intimate associates in various sociopolitical networks of the northeastern seaboard establishment found in Washington and New York during the days of the early Cold War.
Whether they would meet in their private clubs, at the Harold Pratt House of the Council on Foreign Relations, or in Wall Street corporate and bank board rooms, these old birds of a feather flocked, connived, schemed, and conspired together.
There is so much more to Senator Joe McCarthy, the CIA, and 1950’s America than found in a Hollywood film treatment or presented by ‘court historians’ anointed by the establishment regime media, particularly how the CIA mobilized its Operation Mockingbird media assets to engage in a counter-attack upon old “Tail Gunner Joe” when he was building up momentum in going after the Agency’s “family jewels” of the time after his highly-publicized campaigns against communist spies in the state department and the army.
For more on the mainstream news media and the CIA, see this article on Operation Mockingbird.
And see also the classic Rolling Stone article, ‘The CIA and the Media,’ by former Washington Post investigative journalist Carl Bernstein which is discussed in detail in The Mighty Wurlitzer.
Two interesting books of Establishment Studies (or power elite analysis) have outlined how CIA director Allen Dulles directed his counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to find a means of destroying McCarthy. Angleton chose a veteran of the OSS, James McCargar, to undertake this covert espionage/disinformation action against McCarthy. These facts are discussed in Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA; and Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington.
In the fascinating and absolutely compelling book by David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, we find the following:
In March 1954, McCarthy’s subcommittee convened a hearing on “alleged threats against the chairman.” One witness — a military intelligence officer named William Morgan who had worked for C. D. Jackson in the White House — stunned the subcommittee by recounting a conversation that he had the previous year with a CIA employ named Horace Craig. As the two men were discussing how to solve the McCarthy problem, Craig flatly stated, “It may be necessary to liquidate Senator McCarthy as was [assassinated Louisiana senator] Huey Long. There is always some madman who will do it for a price.” (pages 223-224)
As with much other conventional establishment history, Americans have been lied to and bamboozled yet again. Its time for yet more ‘revisionism’ on this topic. And libertarians should lead the way.
4:03 am on March 2, 2023
