Whatever you think about the POTUS or the press, watch ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ live | Opinion
Whatever you think about our current president or our current press corps, there is something for you in ”Good Night, and Good Luck,” the George Clooney and Grant Heslov play about Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joe McCarthy that CNN is broadcasting live from New York’s Winter Garden Theatre at 6 p.m. Central on Saturday.
This is its penultimate performance, and the first time any Broadway show has been broadcast live. So why should you watch? This play is really a meditation on truth. It’s about how easily it can elude us, and what it takes to catch up with it again.
When Clooney and Heslov wrote the screenplay for the 2005 movie that this play is based on, what they had in mind was what shameless cheerleaders most of the media had been for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Sen. Barack Obama opposed the invasion, and Donald Trump later claimed that he had, too, though fact-checkers have found no evidence of that. Clooney, who plays Murrow, did not support the war, and was labeled a traitor.
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion, I was just moving back to D.C. from Italy, where most people I knew felt just as I did, that going in seemed like picking the wrong fight for reasons that you could tell weren’t the real reasons because they kept changing. So it was a shock to see so many friends in Washington, on the left as well as the right, so all-in and unquestioning. “There just aren’t that many bad guys,” one prominent journalist told me, so the whole thing would be over almost before it began. Many others cited Colin Powell’s seal of approval, as if the fact that he hadn’t bucked his bosses settled the argument. Maybe if I had been here the whole time, I would have felt that same way.
But this was a war that never made any sense: Not only did the rationale keep shifting, but Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, and we actually did know at the time that there were no WMDs, based on public reports from the UN inspectors. None of that mattered, though, because propaganda overpowered the public. That is also what “Good Night, and Good Luck” is about.
Official narrative on Iraq
There were reporters who did not agree with the official narrative on Iraq, and they fought hard to make the facts known, but theirs was not the preferred storyline, and here’s a truth: it takes more than bravery and hard work to turn a country’s head around.
Today, I think most of us agree that the war was a tragic mistake, just like we agree that Murrow and the CBS that unfortunately no longer exists really were heroes to go after Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the height of the anti-communist hysteria he used to wreck so many lives for so little reason.
Murrow, who as a radio reporter in London had reported on the Blitz during World War II, didn’t know that his team could weaken McCarthy’s spell. The risks they took were enormous, and not all of them came out OK. As Murrow said, the whole panic was based on lies 99% of the time but was wrong 100% of the time in negating our civil liberties.
What Murrow did know for sure was that in taking McCarthy on with facts, he’d be accused of working for the Soviets, too, and he was. “Anyone who criticizes or opposes Senator McCarthy’s methods must be a Communist,” Murrow says in response to the attack.
I can’t keep from noticing that this is happening today, when anyone who questions Donald Trump is a lunatic leftist, no matter what his actual politics or the facts of the situation. Anyone this administration wants to deport is a terrorist, even though no court has seen the evidence, just like no one ever saw McCarthy’s.
Roy Cohn connects McCarthy and Trump
The direct connection between McCarthy and Trump, of course, is Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings and later became a lawyer for and mentor to Trump.
There are so many moments in this play that resonate, but none more so than when Murrow says that McCarthy’s actions “have caused alarm and dismay among our allies abroad and given comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully.” Just as now, we’re ultimately to blame.
I’ve never seen a straight play with an audience that was quite so — participatory — not only breaking into frequent applause, but commenting on the action and talking back to the characters. The woman sitting in front of me on Friday kept heckling McCarthy and telling Murrow, “Good job!” Clearly, this was group catharsis and all about Trump.
But again, if you admire the president, don’t assume this isn’t for you, because that’s not necessarily true. If you are a critic of today’s press, I think you’ll appreciate the questions Murrow himself asks about where mass media is headed.
I’ve heard plenty of laments that there are no more Edward R. Murrows, and it takes nothing away from him to say that there couldn’t be, because no one today has anything close to that kind of reach.
No one could have that kind of moral authority because there is no one the whole country watches.
Even Murrow had to do dumb interviews
Yes, this show shines Murrow’s halo, and he didn’t slay McCarthy on his own. But “Good Night and Good Luck” also shows Murrow as human, and as a human who might very well have failed. We see him at serious odds with his bosses, barely pulling off what he and his team did accomplish, and having to do kiss-kiss celebrity stories along with the history-changing ones to keep corporate happy.
In one piece he’d clearly rather not have done, he forces a smile while Liberace tells him with a wink how much he loves the young ladies. Back then, TV was still figuring out what it was going to be, so you could be fierce with a major force one minute and encourage a star to lie to you the next. But if that Liberace interview happened today, social media would declare that Edward R. Murrow was no Edward R. Murrow, either.
Murrow mostly used McCarthy’s own words against him, and the footage of him that the play uses is frightening. But the same medium that was used to bring McCarthy down lifted Trump up.
“He’s charismatic, there’s no taking that away from him; he’s a television star,” Clooney said in conversation with the Broadway actress Patti LuPone. But we’ll get through Trumpism, too, he believes, because the president is a demagogue, “and it goes away when they go away. We’ll eventually find our better angels. We have every other time, and I think we will again.”
Maybe the guy playing Murrow has to say that, but I’m going with it. And relying heavily on theatre to get me through until then.
This story was originally published June 5, 2025 at 7:08 AM with the headline "Whatever you think about the POTUS or the press, watch ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ live | Opinion."
