Two Who Played Key Roles in Helping to End the McCarthy Era

In 1953 Milo Radulovich, an Air Force reservist, was threatened with discharge from the Air Force Reserve because of allegations that he was a security risk.

What aggrieved him -- and eventually thousands of other Americans who learned of his plight -- was that his own loyalty was never questioned. He stood accused of politically incorrect ties -- namely, his "close and continuing association" with his Yugoslavian immigrant father, who subscribed to a Socialist newspaper from the old country, and his left-leaning activist sister, who had demonstrated against war and racial discrimination.
On Oct. 20, 1953, Edward R. Murrow (shown above) devoted an entire installment of his documentary show "See It Now" to Radulovich, who appears in a clip from the program in "Good Night, and Good Luck," the 2005 Oscar-nominated movie about the battles at CBS over whether Murrow should take on Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade.

That program, Murrow's producer Fred Friendly wrote in the foreword to Michael Ranville's 1997 book "To Strike at a King: The Turning Point in the McCarthy Witch-Hunts," "peeled back the wretched excess of communist witch-hunts" to reveal that one of its latest victims was no more and no less than a hardworking father of two who was studying on the GI Bill to become a meteorologist.

The show blew open the floodgates of public opinion -- for Radulovich (shown below in 1953 with his family) and against the hysteria of the era and its main instigator, McCarthy.
Five months later, Murrow went after McCarthy himself in a show that, according to Friendly, could never have succeeded had they not first aired "The Case Against Lt. Milo Radulovich." McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, never recovered from the attack, destroyed by his own words and the power of television entering its golden age.

"The downfall of Joe McCarthy began with the Radulovich story as told by Murrow and Friendly," National Public Radio commentator Daniel Schorr, a former colleague of Murrow's, told The Times on Tuesday.

By the time those stories caught Murrow's eye in early 1953, McCarthy's anti-communist campaign had been going on for three years. Murrow and Friendly had been waiting for the right moment to take him on. "See It Now" tackled major issues by focusing on one person caught in its storm, what Friendly called "the little picture."

When Murrow read about Radulovich, he approached his producer with an impish grin on his face. As he thrust a copy of the Detroit News article at Friendly, he said, "This could be the little picture for your McCarthy story."

Friendly agreed, and the two promoted it against the wishes of many CBS News executives, including Chairman William Paley.

The CBS reporter who was sent to Dexter to interview Radulovich was Joe Wershba, now 87 and living on Long Island. He remembered the young reservist as "the All-American boy . . . very pleasant, very articulate." When Friendly saw the film of the interview, he told Wershba, "I'm fired, Ed's fired, but we're going to turn out the greatest broadcast ever done on television!"

It was Murrow's most memorable hour.

"We believe that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, even though that iniquity be proved and in this case it was not," Murrow said on the program about Radulovich. "Whatever happens in this whole area of the relationship between the individual and the state, we will do ourselves. It cannot be blamed upon [Soviet Premier Georgi] Malenkov or Mao Tse-tung or even our allies. And it seems to us . . . that this is a subject that should be argued about endlessly."

The public reaction, Wershba said, "was phenomenal. We got 12,000 letters," the vast majority outraged about the injustice to Radulovich.

"It was the first viable blow struck against Joe McCarthy," Ranville said. "The historical significance is that this wasn't some college professor or someone from the ACLU. This was a common man who was frightened about being able to support his family. And he was not someone from Los Angeles, Chicago or New York, but Dexter, Mich., population 1,500."

A month after the broadcast, the Air Force cleared Radulovich and allowed him to keep his commission. Several months later, in 1954, the Senate censured McCarthy. He died three years later of alcohol-related illness at age 48.

Murrow, who with Friendly had paid out of his own pocket to advertise the show when the network wouldn't, ultimately suffered from the show's success. Paley was not eager for shows that offended advertisers, and "See It Now" went off the air in 1958. Disgusted by the growing commercialism of the medium, Murrow left journalism in 1961 and died of lung cancer in 1965 at age 57. Milo Radulovich died Monday, November 19, 2007 at age 81.