On Television

...One was that McCarthy didn't catch any Communists...

...Thus some of us are unhappy with the noted historians at Universal, who tend to invent characters like John Forsythe's reporter...

...Surely there were enough real-life villains around...

...it's just that Schine was more adept...

...The title gave no hint that in one of the more exciting confrontations in TV history, we would see legal ace Joseph Welch shooting down a highflying junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy...

...Secondly, he was a nasty fellow and his methods were bad...

...And with all its contrivances the three-hour NBC docu-drama didn't even have enough time to recount the major role OBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow played in the whole affair...

...I just hope the resemblance between Boyle and McCarthy isn't too effective, because the populace might decide to put him in office again...

...When the average viewer turned on his set, he probably expected a World War II dogfight flick, possibly even a spinoff of Baa Baa Black Sheep, an NBC series that recounts our effort against Japan in the Pacific with the same faithfulness Hogan's Heroes brought to our hilarious European Theater struggles...

...IN the old days "Tail Gunner Joe," or any other show critical of McCarthy, would have been dismissed as the work of Communists and their fellow travelers at Universal Television...

...New York (WABC-TV) a few days after "Tail Gunner Joe" was shown...

...For instance, as any young, thoughtful person learning about the period from this TV movie could see, John Forsythe, in the role of a journalist who was aware that lies were being spread around but refused to disclose the fact, was solely responsible for the rise of McCarthy-ism...

...These and similar occurrences made Schine's training experiences a major issue at the Army-McCarthy hearings, where it was said that McCarthy was trying to pull strings for his protege...

...TV commentators have grown more venturesome since the days when Cohn was terrorizing the media...

...That was the objective journalism of the time: Dispense the information, whether true or not...

...As for our aforementioned thoughtful young viewer, who betrayed his classmates by not watching How the West Was Won, he could not distinguish between true and false once the tube started fabricating, any more than he could learn about FDR's second and third Administrations by reading Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd novels...

...It brought back memories of marching in the same army as G. David Schine, an investigator for the McCarthy Committee who was drafted a week before I was in 1953...

...The same network revealed equal heroism last fall, airing a three-hour special most aptly entitled Violence in America...

...To prove his point, he noted that the drama portrayed him inaccurately: "The actor had too much hair...

...Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this was the best and most important "docu-drama," as they call these high-class made-for-TV movies nowadays, not about those apparently fascinating psychopathic killers and freaks like Charlie Manson...

...The docu-drama had only two things to say about McCarthyism...

...As Roy Cohn pointed out in his losing campaign to correct untruth, "there is still a Communist threat today...

...We were all very impressed with the way government limousines would pick him up and drive him off the base after a hard day's exercises...

...On Television TOYING WITH THE TRUTH by MARVIN KITMAN Aprize for the most deceitful title of the year should be awarded to NBC's Big Event show of February 6: "Tail Gunner Joe" was a misrepresentation worthy of its hidden subject...

...Roy Cohn, another of McCarthy's investigators, took the unusual step of lodging a protest in a rare telephone interview on Stanley Siegel's A.M...

...That's all right...

...Black-and-white photography would at least have provided some authenticity...

...If TV history repeats itself, as real-life history often does, face-pounding and bloodshed will appear on the screen as infrequently as McCarthy did during the previous decade...

...He said it was an unfair, one-sided representation of the facts...

...But he sure fooled me most of the night, giving a harrowingly real characterization of the Senator...

...In addition, the docu-drama was a nostalgia trip for me, as Happy-Days undoubtedly is for people who grew up in Milwaukee 20 years ago...

...This could have its tragic aspects...

...Still, better late than never, I always say...

...President Eisenhower—to name but one fictitious person—could have accomplished this in less time than it takes to play a round of golf...

...When I last looked in, the score was Arness 20, Indians 9...

...At any rate, one hopes it was the lack of time and not network affiliation that influenced the elimination of the high point in TV's own effort to stop McCarthy...

...It would have provided a more accurate context, however, had the movie noted that everyone was trying to pull strings in the winter of 1953, immediately following the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Aside from beating the subject to death, the documentary included the most gruesome sequences ever seen on the tube, making it difficult to determine whether NBC was coming out for or against violence...

...Indeed, I remember declaring at the reception center on my first day in service, "I will go to Korea with President Eisenhower—if I can come home with him...

...Usually, the medium just tagged along in those days, reporting as straight news whatever McCarthy had to offer in the way of names and numbers...

...It was also a courageous undertaking for NBC...

...Today we have something of the opposite problem, with too many viewers mistaking phoney dramatizations of past events for unbiased history...

...This was a heartening revelation, because I still sometimes worry that having been a member of the 1950s silent generation, people are talking about me when they say we were all guilty...

...The problem, as I dimly recall, was that people had certain civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, including the right to be a member of the Communist party, if that was their mishigas...

...In fact, I have here a list of 212 people who could have stopped McCarthy...

...nobody likes a person who doesn't deliver on his promises...

...The rise and decline of Joe McCarthy was so dramatic in its own right, and comprised such a multitude of intriguing incidents, many of them never used before on TV, that one wonders why producer George Eckstein and writer Lane Slate bothered to embellish or augment...

...Moreover, it was disconcerting?and a distortion of the '50s, which was a black-and-white decade—to have the movie filmed in color...

...McCarthy forgot about that, and so, apparently, did television...

...Yet what struck me most of all were the conclusions of TV's first semiserious attempt to place the McCarthy hysteria in perspective for the nation's perpetually young (viewers of all ages...

...Peter Boyle's McCarthy was probably inaccurate, too...

...Unfortunately, they probably did...

...In 1954, though, Murrow stood up to be counted one night with his CBS See It Now episode on McCarthy, and what he said made John Forsythe seem like a bachelor father: "This is no time for men who oppose Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's methods to keep silent...

...I respect Cohn on the matter of distorted facts: If there is anyone qualified to speak out on truth-twisting, I seem to recall, it is he...

...The Senator's appeal to voters, not to mention the issues he latched onto, have not died...

...Schine was assigned to a basic training company housed across the quadrangle from mine at Fort Dix...

...And did they think that adding the attractive narrator, a newsgirl who comes across like Barbara Walters as a teenybopper journalist, lent interest or weight to the story...

...So why concoct a John Forsythe...

...I am especially glad to report that the show had a positive educational impact...

...Anyway, "Tail Gunner Joe" was certainly more relevant than the history lesson ABC provided in the same time-slot: How the West Was Won, which won most of the audience in the contest with Big Event...

...Although I can personally swear that the limousine service was not the product of a screenwriter's liberal imagination, the veracity of this drama has become a topic of debate in the media...

...In next year's sequel to Roots, for example, white slavers would have to lash Kunte Kinte with their tongues...

...The television audience—not known for being overly knowledgeable about history to begin with?had no way of even suspecting that "Tail Gunner Joe" was actually a stirring story about Communism...

...It can't be done in two hours," Cohn said...

...We all did what we could...

...I myself was in conflict throughout the evening, occasionally switching to ABC to find out how James Arness was faring in the battle to annex our western territories...

...Tail Gunner Joe," an imperfect but nevertheless interesting character study of a leading 1950s American politician, seemed to miss the point about what was wrong with McCarthyism...

...A better name for the show would have been "Baa Baa Joe McCarthy...

...By putting on this three-hour recreation of our past, it ran the risk of plunging itself into the McCarthy controversy some 20 years too late...

...I would recommend that he take his masterful McCarthy act to every hamlet and whistlestop in the country, a la James Whitmore and Ed Flanders with their Harry Truman routines...

...You can take a whole week," replied Siegel...

...But for the minority who surmounted the hurdles of title and rival attractions, "Tail Gunner Joe" was an enriching experience...

...Siegel invited him to appear on the air and give his version of what actually transpired...

...Not that it matters much anymore, since advertisers are withdrawing their support of violent programming...