Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

In 1963 Emile de Antonio culled 93 minutes from the 188 hours of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, which had been broadcast live on ABC in their entirety (the other two networks returning to other soap operas). With no narration and jumping around considerably more even than Congressional hearings do, it must be difficult to follow for those not familiar with the cast and the historical context.

Building on the smear tactics pioneered by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), the Republican junior senator from Wisconsin, went on a rampage of claiming to know the identities of communist agents in government during the last two years of the Truman Administration, and at the present-time of the movie, a year and a half into that of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Various messengers of the unpopularity and epic-scale corruption of Chiang Kai-Shek (notably Owen Lattimore) had been symbolically shot and blamed for "losing China." Fear of "sleeper cells" of communists was fanned into flames justifying attacks on "premature anti-Fascists" and other pre-WWII leftists.

McCarthy, who seems to have known next to nothing about international (Stalinist) communism or the American Communist Party, specialized in waving sheets supposedly containing names of communists in one branch or another of the US government. Two of McCarthy's attack dogs were Roy Cohn (1927-1986) and G. David Schine (1927-1996). There were rumors at the time that McCarthy and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and his live-in assistant, Clyde Tolson, were homosexual. Cohn was a very predatory and very closeted homosexual (as he is shown at the end of his tether, disbarred and dying of AIDS in "Angels in America"). Some observers at the time thought that Cohn and Schine were lovers. Schine went to his grace (in 1996 plane crash) having refused to talk about his relationships with either McCarthy or Cohn.

Homosexuality in 1954 was literally unspeakable. The Army's lead counsel, Joseph N. Welch (1890-1960), alludes (for those in the know) by defining a "pixie" as "a close relative of a fairy" after McCarthy sarcastically says that Welch must be an expert on pixies.

A Senate subcommittee, chaired by South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt, was investigating whether Senator McCarthy had been making demands (accompanied by threats) for special treatment of Pvt. Schine, after he had been drafted). There is little doubt that the US Army had never received so many demands for special treatment for any other private, and there is no evidence that the Army treated Schine any worse than any other draftee.

McCarthy claimed that the Army (and behind it its former General of the Army, now President Eisenhower) was holding Schine hostage to prevent investigation of communist infiltration of the Army. This struck Cold Warrior senators of both parties as ludicrous and as discrediting any communist threat. The Army-McCarthy hearing offered McCarthy a tv audience estimated at 20 million. The other senators were confident that if given enough rope McCarthy would hang himself.

They were right. The testimony about cajolings and threats from Cohn was devastating, capped off with his being forced to defend a photograph of Schine with Secretary of the Army Stevens. They seemed to be looking at each other, because the colonel at whom Stevens was looking was cut out of the picture presented by Cohn (why a private seeming to hobnob with the Secretary of the Army was evidence of the private's persecution is unclear to me, besides).

Then McCarthy starts waving one of his lists, this one with the names of 133 subversives in the administration of the Army. The letter is supposed to be from J. Edgar Hoover, who sends an emissary to deny that the letter came from him or his office. (So, from doctored evidence, to concocted.)

At this point (chapter 24 on the DVD), McCarthy takes on a lawyer who had been in the Lawyer's Guild, represented as a communist front organization, whom Welch had tried to foist on the committee. Senator Mundt pipes in that Welch did not recommend anyone to be on the Senate subcommittee staff, but McCarthy goes on. With a gravitas none of the senators have shown, Welch tells how he found out about the junior associate in this firm's adolescent associations and excluded him from his own staff for the case. McCarthy sneers on, and Welch cuts loose, sadly but firmly, with "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" It is one of the most electrifying moments ever broadcast on live tv, and remains electrifying with repeated viewings. Welch was, like any good trial lawyer, playing to win, but his controlled fury strikes me as genuine—and as the fatal cut to the already wounded beast who was flailing at not just the army, but investigations needing to be made at the CIA and the AEC. A few months later McCarthy was censured (the motion was proposed by Vermont Republican Senator Ralph E. Flanders).

Some have taken comfort from the demagogue going down in (whisky-fueled) flames. As de Antoniono stresses in interviews that have been turned into a commentary track, McCarthy had ruined many lives first and probably would have continued to smear people had he not taken on the US Army and the president from his own party, one with more than a little military standing, Gen. Eisenhower. (At one point, McCarthy sneers, "Presidents come and go.")

Although adding nothing in the way of explanation, showing only what was telecast, the editing raises some questions in my mind. Having wielded Robert's Rules of Order with some skill in my time, I am amazed that McCarthy who was not a member of the subcommittee investigating him (and his charges against the Army) was allowed to raise "points of order" at all, and even more so that they were not promptly identified as not being "points of order" and the floor reallocated from him.

There was a Republican majority in the Senate during the hearings (and for a few months after them), which is why there is a Republican chair. Surely, more than half the questions from senators must have come from Republicans, but there is not a single one in the movie. There are questions from the subcommittee's chief counsel (that is, a Republican appointee), from McCarthy and from Welch, and from three Democratic senators (in order of seniority, John McClelland from Arkansas, Stuart Symington from Missouri, Henry "Scoop" Jackson from Washington). Symington comes across with the most senatorial gravitas. (Symington was the first Secretary of the Air Force in fellow Missourian Harry Truman's administration, and sought the 1960 Democratic nomination for president, refusing to speak to segregated audiences.) Symington and Jackson try to pin McCarthy down, but he was like a squid spewing a scum of obfuscations. Robert Kennedy is frequently on display sitting behind Democratic senators John McClelland and Stuart Symington.

Despite the inartistic live-tv photography and the lack of contextualizaion, I have found the movie fascinating both on movie screens and back on the small screen (from the DVD.) The 1978 de Antonio audio interview material is not very interesting, and it is annoying that there is not subtitling of the movie. De Antonio was not watching the movie while making a commentary track, so the lack of fit is not his fault. Nor are the often stupid questions of Warren Green. I consider de Antonio's claim that the television cameras are the hero laughable, and the movie shows that even edited, uncontextualized footage raises many questions (such as "What happened to the Republican questioners?")

By 1978, De Antonio saw McCarthy as something of a tragic figure, brought down for taking on too Establishment targets and over-reaching (the hubris of believing any nonsense he cooked up would sell) and some McCarthyite tactics used against him. When cornered, a bully looks more pathetic than dangerous and may attract some of the sympathy that gravitates to underdogs, just as in "Downfall," one might start to feel sorry for Hitler with the massive forces of the Red Army moving in on him, even as he splutters about bringing down the country that has failed him with him... or the entirely spurious Nixon hitting the bottle and making the absurd martyr-spiel in "Secret Honor." (I resist the temptation in both instances, but recognize the lure of sympathizing with the underdog, any underdog, forgetting what it did as top dog...)



© 2006, Stephen O. Murray



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD