People throughout the ages have struggled to gain freedom. Our forefathers and foremothers fought for independence. In our own times we Americans have struggled to define what it means to be an American. Sometimes we have stood proud, beacons of hope for not only the nation, but for the world.

And other times, we failed, and had to be saved by a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. Edward R. Murrow was the voice crying out in the wilderness during the Red Scare of the 1940's and 1950's.

The Red Scare was created by numerous demagogues, but the focus and the head of the Red Scare movement was to be found in the person of Senator Joseph McCarthy, also known as Tail Gunner Joe, and the Junior Senator from Wisconsin.

McCarthy was a WWII veteran who before and after his service was involved in politics. He eventually won the election as U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. And shortly after gaining his seat began to announce that the U.S. government was filled with Communists and Communist sympathizers. His ever vigorous calls for investigations and congressional committee meetings scared a lot of ordinary Americans into believing that what he said was true.

Some few people in government may have had Communist sympathies, and perhaps even a few had once been or were then members of the Communist Party of America. We may never know the exact numbers of such people, but government agencies were as adept at screening people back then as they seem to be now, and such people who may have been in the government were little or no threat to our nation.

Just the same, McCarthy made the Red Scare into a national campaign against people he said were Communists. He would often wave pieces of paper he said were lists of known Communists in the government, and people had no reason to doubt him. However, my friend Bill who now lives in Galena was in the high school band at a McCarthy rally and after the rousing anti-Communist speech McCarthy made, he noticed the Jr. Senator from Wisconsin tossed the "Known Communists" list into a garbage can.

Bill retrieved it, curious if anyone he knew might be on the list and discovered that the lists were nothing more than pages torn out of the local phone book. When he showed the papers to his dad, it took only a few days before the entire town knew the truth about Tail Gunner Joe. That truth slowly spread elsewhere.

But the focal point of opposition to these accusations and condemnations without proof would be found in Edward R. Murrow, a journalist at CBS, which in those days had arguably the finest network news and journalism department in the United States.

Some of the members of the staff were Democrats, and others were Republicans. Party ideology seemed to matter little when they reported on stories. Truth, not ideolgy, drove the news department.

Murrow had covered the Blitz in London all through the early days of WWII. He was live on the air nightly as the bombs fell over London, giving what would now be called "color commentary" on the cruelness of destruction and death he saw there. America was not yet involved in WWII, so listeners tuned in every night to hear of the terrible pounding England was taking as it stood virtually alone against the Nazi war machine.

Murrow often talked about how this bastion of freedom and democracy stood against the powerful forces of tyrrany. He became a staunch voice against fascism, which some Americans were claiming was the best form of government. There were many Fascist leagues (also callede Bundeleagues) in America at the time. And of course Joe Kennedy Sr. was touting Germany as being better than Great Britain, even while he was ambassador to England. Countering these fascist organizations were various Communist political groups.

Most Americans were quite naive about Fascism and Communism, and so people joined these groups only to find out later that the real political agendas were often hidden. Also, it needs to be said that England and later the U.S. became allies with Communist Russia under Joseph Stalin. Naively, President Roosevelt, suffering from the later symptoms of the diseases that would eventually take his life, believed he could trust Stalin.

News reports from Russia spoke in glowing terms about the Red Army and often took on the form of personal interest stories about the Russian People, their customs and struggles against Fascism and the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler. I remember reading one story about how the Russian Cossacks used butter to water-proof their boots, and another how the Russians had never heard the popular song of the time, The Volga Boatman.

There was a lot of sympathy for the Russians because they had been attacked by Hitler, and had suffered terribly. they tenaciously fought back, gaining ground in heroic if often bloody mass-counter attacks. There was much good seen in our Soviet ally as together we fought the Nazis.

Of course all of this would change after the war's end, when the Soviet Union, and thus the Russian People, became our new enemies. We had defeated the Nazis together and now fought an ideological, and sometimes actual, war against each other.

Murrow was there for it all. He was no Communist sympathizer. He believed is social justice and fairness, and he most strongly believed in the ideals of what America was supposed to stand for. He was a pragmistist, a realist, and he saw things for what they were. He noticed, however, a rising crescendo of anger and fear about how the Soviets had infiltrated many important branches of the U.S. goverment. This cry of "pink" or "red" was used by some politicians at the time for obvious personal gain at the expense of truth. Included in the ranks of politicians who used dubious or even illegal means to smear their opponents was Richard M. Nixon, who used the "Red Scare" tactics against his opponent, Helen Gahagan Dougls,

In 1950 Richard M. Nixon needed a way to defeat the popular Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat in California. Douglas, the wife of hollywood actor Melvyn Douglas, was a member of the U.S. House, as was Nixon. With her Hollywood ties, she became an easy target for Nixon's anti-Communist tirades.

Left-leaning Democratic Senator Claude Pepper had been defeated after lies were popularized about him when a blatantly false pamphlet called "The Red Record of Claude Pepper" was sent around. So Nixon had a pamphlet of his own called "The Pink Lady" drawn up to make his opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas into an instant Communist. She was not a Communist, but in those times an accusation was all one needed to make the label stick like glue. Nixon won the election, at a cost of truth and fairness that would set the later tone of his political life.

Other politicians, actors, people of conscience and ordinary citizens would be smeared with the Red label, lose their jobs, their livelihoods, and sometimes, even their lives. Suicides were frequent amongst those who were "blacklisted" by the House UnAmerican Committee (HUAC) of Congress.

On air, Murrow watched and often commented on these matters, and his big story came when he finally had enough evidense against McCarthy to bring down the entire house of cards the Red Scare proponents had built.

Murrow was fearless, but not reckless. He was a journalist of the highest calibre. He knew what McCarthy was doing smacked of fascism, and he wanted to find a way to save the public from the lies McCarthy raised, as well as from the hysteria his ignorant chages brought about. As one instance of how things were getting way out of hand, reports to the FBI increased from every-day people around the country about suspicious activities of neighbors who lived just down the street. Some of these reports went as far as to accuse innocent people of holding "Secret Red Cell meetings" in their homes.

People were arrested, detained and interrogated because of rumors and suspicions. Some movie stars were accused, hauled beofre the HUAC members and told that they had "incontrovertable facts" about their Red ties.

Some actors denied these accusations as cruel, senseless and baseless, but others went along and gave names of people they "suspected" of being secret Communists. At the time, actors such as Ronald Reagan were hailed as heroes of America for naming people they "knew or suspected" of Communist activities. People like Lucille Ball were ostracized for refusing to give names, although she got around the blacklisting by starting her own film company. Others were neither as fortunate nor as able to salvage their careers.

These namings of names of people only suspected of Comminist ties caused innocent people to be blacklisted, and drove some to suicide. It was a most Un-American activity that the House of Representatives has tried for more than 50 years to live down.

The worst thing was that if there were Communists in sensitive positins of the government, the HUAC committee failed to find them because it was following many false leads. Murrow sought a way to expose the Junior Senator from Wisconsin for who he really was. His most-celebrated broadcast occurred in March 1954 when he engaged Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in a program by using McCarthy's own words and pictures against him, inviting the audience to draw their own logical conclusions.

Many did, and saw right through the tactics being used. From that moment on, McCarthy was on a downward spiral that would see him dead from alcoholism within the next few years. He would be censored by the Senate and eventually his cause faded away.

In his defense against Murrow, McCarthy used the equal time offered by CBS to state his own case. His ranting and mindless bantering only helped to prove that he had no real basis for most of his charges, and that much of what he said was simply fabricated out of thin air. If there ever had been as many communists as he had once claimed (the number kept increasing as he gave speeches on the subject), the entire U.S. government would have been made up almost entirely of "known Communists."

Most people now see McCarthy as a demogogue, a man who tried to use lies to further his own career, and a fool. There are some who still champion his cause, just as there are still people who believe the world is flat.

Surprisingly, both JFK and Bobby Kennedy had worked on McCarthy's staff for a time. Reportedly both men thought quite highly of McCarthy. Although later they would chance that view, for most of the 1950's they admired Tail Gunner Joe, who had also once dated the Kennedy sisters Eunice and Pat.

Never forget that at this time in history the Democrats were amost as conservative as many conservatrives are today. Liberalism as a major part of the Democratic base was still in the future. Also Joseph P. Kennedy, father to JFK and RFK was a supporter and close personal friend of Joe McCarthy. Politics is indeed a strange being!

Source: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/progjfk2.htm

Another friend of McCarthy was Roy Cohn, an attorney and later a good friend of late Conservative William F. Buckley. Cohn was a homosexual, but kept it well hidden, for it was illegal to be a homosexual at that time. Also, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, was rumoured to be a homosexual, but due to the power of his office, also kept it well hidden. The truth would only come out much later.

I offer one quote from the Museum of Broadcast Communication web site that seems to sum up the career of Murrow. In his review of the now legendary McCarthy program, for instance, New York Times' TV critic Jack Gould reflected an ongoing canonization process when he wrote that "last week may be remembered as the week that broadcasting recaptured its soul."

For those of you who did not know of this fearful era of Joseph McCarthy, or for those who have forgotten about it, I would remind all of us that history often repeats itself. Fear is a powerful weapon that is often used to unite people behind decrees and policies most of us would normally never support.

I would also remind my readers that fear is no legitimate excuse that allows us to give up our civil rights and freedoms simply for security. The world is by its very nature an insecure place. We must never allow anyone to talk us out of our liberties and freedoms simply for the phantom illusion of security.

The founders of this nation expected us to be skeptical of things our government does. They saw the dangers of a blindly obedient society because in their own time they had seen what blind loyalty to a sovereign leader had cost them. A true patriot is one who asks questions and demands clear answers.

Remember also that the elected leaders of our nation are not America. You are. It is your responsibility to make this government work. If is does not work, don't look to Washington or the elected leaders to fix things. That, my good friends, is our responsibility and our duty.

To anyone who wants to know more about this era, I would first suggest the movie "Good Night, and Good Luck". After seeing that, there are many original videos online, as well as commentary by people whose lives were ruined by McCarthy's rampant and usually off-target investigations.