Clooney Can't Handle the TruthHis new film on the McCarthy hearings
is apparently filled with the traditional vision of McCarthy as a nut who saw communists under ever bed.
But the film’s director, George Clooney, and his co-writer, Grant Heslov, have completely bought into the official Hollywood version of the McCarthy era. It’s hardly surprising, but it’s quite false. Not by the wildest caprice of imagination was “a nation terrorized” by McCarthy. A few screenwriters, actors, and directors with a strong sense of their own entitlement to keep on writing, acting, and directing were denied that opportunity. Some diplomats, military men, and other government officials also lost their jobs. Some were not hired.
Most of those who were seriously affected had been and in some cases still were communists or communist sympathizers — which in those days meant agents or would-be agents of Josef Stalin or his heirs, foreign dictators whose massive military might was geared for war against America, whose proxies were or had recently been killing American soldiers in Korea and who were responsible for what at the time were the greatest mass murders in history.
