Edward R. Murrow Quotes

Joe McCarthy and his Senate hearings were like witch-hunts.

I didn't agree with what Joe McCarthy was trying to do, but I sure did admire his methods.

No bolder seditionist ever moved amongst us as Senator Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.

McCarthy emerged in the person of Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

As is well known, 'McCarthyism' was an alleged focus of political evil in the 1950s: Accusations of Communist taint, without factual basis; bogus lists of supposed Communists who never existed; failure in the end to produce even one provable Communist or Soviet agent, despite his myriad charges of subversion.

Nobody from the CIA is going to account for their loyalty to [Senator Joseph] McCarthy.

No one took H.U.A.C. [House Un-American Activities Committee] seriously until it was too late.

The station will prepare a list of the 25 most dangerous Communists and pro-Communists and attempt to gather data re these targets which could be used for character assassination..... More pictures of comparisons of living conditions of the top Commies and the peons will be of special value.

President Eisenhower is a communist dupe!

The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.

That's why we had Louis C.K. portray the harder line Communist, to accuse [Dalton] Trumbo of being a hypocrite.

Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule.

I was living in a terrible time when people were being accused of being communists, and they attacked the movie industry, especially the writers. People couldn't work if they were on the blacklist. The studios banned them. It was the most onerous period in movie history. I don't think we have ever had a period so dark as that.

There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.

The witch-hunting McCarthy era found Hollywood's view of the press growing bleaker along with the decade's view of everything else.

Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society launched an anti-Communist crusade that won the support of millions of Americans in the 1950s.

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.

The Liberty League was laughed out of existence by New Yorker cartoonists, who depicted its members looking out over Fifth Avenue and snorting that doomsday was here and Josef Stalin lurked in the bushes.

It is subversive to set up inquisitions like this, state or national, into the thoughts and consciences of Americans.... It is subversive for commissions like this to spread hysteria and intimidation throughout the land that Americans are afraid to sign petitions, afraid to read progressive magazines, afraid to make out checks for liberal causes, afraid to join organizations, afraid to speak their mind on public issues. Americans dare not be free citizens! This is the destruction of democracy.

In the immortal words of Dean Acheson, I will not turn my back on Joe McCarthy.

If communism in Hollywood is now mythical, it is only because this Committee conducted three investigations to bring it about. The industry itself did certainly not accomplish this.

[I never implied] that President Truman was disloyal or pro-Communist. He was blind to the Communist menace and used very bad judgement.

McCarthy was destroyed. He was of course sabotaged from within his own staff. The aliens who control our press and radio and the boob tubes spattered their slime over the country.