George Clooney Quotes
In doing the screenplay for 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' the most important thing for me was to constantly go back to wherever the opposition would argue. So I had to keep reading all the books and articles about why McCarthy is such a good guy.
Clooney, George. Interview. Cineaste, vol. 31, no. 1, 2005.
Reacting to the disarray of the federal government as a result of the activities of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy:
McCarthy was in many ways like Donald Trump. One was taht the press loved to cover his statements and accusations that were so absurd and sensational that they sold a lot of nespapers, magazines and obtained many TV / Radio viewers/listeners. As a result he got much more media coverage that he warranted in teh view of many, President Dwight Eisenhower, who generally would not even mention McCarthy's name was percieved by Adlai Stephenson and many others as weak and fearful of McCarthy, Tannenhous and some other historians believed that fear had nothing to do with it, but that Eisenhower not only chose this as a deliberate strategy, but one that was quite effective.
The organization thought that Franklin D. Roosevelt was surrounded by and influenced by communists, and was destroying America for capitalism, when in reality it was Roosevelt who saved capitalism in America by leading the country out of the Great Depression without any revolution or insurgency and maintaining the basic structure of capitalism. They were so fearful of communism that most Americans thought paranoid and unrealistic. When Roosevelt trounced Alf Landon in the 1936 Presidential election, the Liberty League collapsed.
After this, no other member of the Executive branch went before McCarthy again
Although the U. S. denied propaganda and dirty tricks efforts interfering in the internal affairs of South American Countries, this memo proves that there were some instances of just that.
Even the President was not spared during the McCarthy era. The red scare was so pervasive, that a lunatic fringe ultra right wing organization could call the President a “communist dupe” and be taken seriously be much of the media who were themselves intimidated and might be accused of being communists at any moment. It was a very low point in America’s history.
The Red Scare had already reached most conservatives and Truman and most others had not yet been affected by the fear of Communism that so many people had through the 1970s.
George Timothy Clooney is an American actor, film director, producer, screenwriter and philanthropist. He is the recipient of three Golden Globe Awards and two Academy Awards, one for acting in Syriana (2006) and the other for co-producing Argo (2012). In 2018, he was the recipient of the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award.
