<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The late David Brinkley was not one of my go to sources for information in my formative years.\u00a0 My father watched Walter Cronkite each night when WLUC-TV 6 was a CBS network affiliate (and the only channel we received).\u00a0 Even when cable TV entered the picture, our household relied on Uncle Walter for both the evening news and bulletins whenever important events happened to interrupt the normal daily broadcasts (heralded by, \u201cThis is a Special Report from CBS News\u201d).\u00a0 As stated in Part 1 of <\/span>David Brinkley<\/span><\/i>, I found his memoirs a vault of information about the early days of radio and television broadcasting.\u00a0 By the time Brinkley\u2019s book hit the 1950s, the history buff in me found even more fascinating stories about life in America just before I was born and during the time when I was too young to really take much notice.\u00a0 As usual, Brinkley\u2019s wry sense of humor added color to a world that was still largely broadcasting in black and white.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When I was teaching a unit on Dendrology, or the study of trees, one of my favorite experiments used with seventh graders was called \u2018Apple Pie Chemistry\u2019.\u00a0 Using my mother\u2019s old recipe (christened \u2018Grandma Irene\u2019s Crumbly Apple Pie\u2019 in the instructions), teams of three to four students were provided all the materials needed to make a dish that wasn\u2019t really a pie in the traditional sense, but you get the picture.\u00a0 There were two separate steps:\u00a0 Peel, slice, and spice the apples with sugar and cinnamon, and then make the topping.\u00a0 Half the fun of the whole experiment was having groups ask, \u201cWhat if we mixed all of the ingredients together before we read the directions?\u00a0 Can we separate them and start again?\u201d\u00a0 In my mother\u2019s recipe, one of the ingredients used in the topping was listed as \u2018oleo\u2019.\u00a0 None of my students had a clue what this was.\u00a0 When shown a stick of \u2018margarine\u2019, I explained that \u2018oleo\u2019 was just another name for it.\u00a0 David Brinkley provided more information about this mysterious \u2018oleo – margerine\u2019 stuff.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0According to Brinkley, he was the host of what he described as a \u2018stultifying\u2019 radio show on NBC back in the 1950s.\u00a0 <\/span>America United<\/span><\/i> brought in four representatives, one each representing the point of view of labor, business, agriculture, and government.\u00a0 To Brinkley, he was moderating a terrible show that only succeeded in making each participant dig in their heels while trying to prove that their point of view was \u2018the right one.\u2019\u00a0 The show was so bad that even Brinkley\u2019s wife would not tune in.\u00a0 It certainly didn\u2019t provide any proof that Americans were <\/span>United <\/span><\/i>in anything<\/span>.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>The one example he cited was the battle over \u2018oleomargarine\u2019, a word combining what I previously thought were simply different names for the same item.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As Brinkley explained, when oleomargarine was first marketed, it was white like lard.\u00a0 The dairy lobby worked feverishly to prevent manufacturers from dying it yellow, reasoning that the city slickers who knew nothing about farming would think it was the same as butter.\u00a0 Manufacturers had compensated by selling each brick of oleomargarine with a packet of powdered dye that, with a considerable amount of time and effort, could be mixed with the lard colored brick (a process that usually left orange streaks in the final product).\u00a0 The government representative on the show about this hot button topic was a congressman from Wisconsin who stated, \u201cIt\u2019s fake butter is what it is,\u201d and he sputtered angrily about \u2018margarine fraud\u2019 being perpetrated on the non-farming public.\u00a0 It is hard to imagine that this issue consumed the lawmakers in Washington for over a month with Congress finally ruling that factories could indeed color oleomargarine yellow.\u00a0 As Brinkley puts it, \u201cAnother threat to the survival of democratic government was met and surmounted, even though I obviously was too thick headed to see how the color of margarine was any of the government\u2019s business.\u00a0 I still don\u2019t.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The other topic with a Wisconsin connection that I knew little about was the sad tale of Senator Joseph McCarthy.\u00a0 I have seen film clips of the outrageous hearings he conducted about the whole \u2018Red Menace\u2019 affair.\u00a0 As to why McCarthy thought there were communists hiding under every rock, I was not aware.\u00a0 Again, Brinkley filled me in how and why this whole sad episode began and ended.\u00a0 Brinkley\u2019s sister, Mary, worked in McCarthy\u2019s Washington office and he admits that they simply could not discuss the topic as it unfolded.\u00a0 Mary would tend to defend her boss and Brinkley found it better to just avoid the topic rather than sow the seeds of family disharmony.\u00a0 David said that when McCarthy died, Mary turned down multiple offers to write a book, but she was candid in providing him with more insight into that period.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The whole witch hunt can be traced back to a speech Senator McCarthy gave to the Wheeling, West Virginia Republican Women\u2019s Club in 1950.\u00a0 During his speech, McCarthy held up a piece of paper and announced, \u201cI have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five – a list of names that are known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department.\u201d\u00a0 After the Senator passed away, Brinkely asked, \u201cWhat did he have in his hand [during this speech]?\u201d\u00a0 Mary said, \u201cHe had a few scribbled notes to use in his speech.\u00a0 Nothing about Communists.\u00a0 Mostly about housing for war veterans.\u00a0 That was his big interest when he first came to Washington.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cDid he have two hundred and five names?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cNo.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhere did he get that number?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cHe made it up.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was true that McCarthy had made housing for returning WWII vets his pet project when elected.\u00a0 According to a respected newspaper columnist of the time, Joseph Alsop, \u201c[I] had known McCarthy first as the big, raw-boned pride and joy of the real estate lobby, which is where he found his friends when he first came to Washington. . . McCarthy adored attention and as a politician had tried to get it several different ways.\u201d\u00a0 When the headlines reported his Wheeling speech, McCarthy \u201cwas nearly insane with excitement.\u00a0 He clutched the newspapers and ran around his Senate office shouting, \u2018I\u2019ve got it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got it!\u201d \u00a0 As Brinkly surmised, \u201cHe though he had the issue he needed to make him into a great political figure and guarantee his Senate seat forever.\u201d\u00a0 McCarthy, not one to accept criticism, reacted to Alsop\u2019s opinions like a second grader on the playground.\u00a0 McCarthy called him \u201cAll Slop\u201d from that point on.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Brinkley\u2019s own view of McCarthy was summed up in a few brief lines:\u00a0 \u201cIn forty years of sustained effort [McCarthy] made his name stand for (1) a United States senator and (2) the Grand Champion American Liar.\u00a0 In Washington, a city already well supplied with your ordinary, everyday liars, nobody could lie like McCarthy.\u00a0 While he was deeply unimpressive in manner, appearance, and speech, he lied with an energy and determination so intense that some otherwise skeptical people were led to believe him.\u201d\u00a0 As for the anti-Communist hearings, \u201cIt was only one lie after another, and almost everyone in Washington knew it, including most of his colleagues in the Senate, but they were so afraid of him and of his noisy band of supporters that they had long since run for cover, protecing their precious seats. . . in fear of unpredictable and unwelcome reactions in their home states, in fear that a senator attacking [McCarthy] might lose his seat.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Once he found his cause, McCarthy started to build momentum when Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were tried and executed for espionage on Moscow\u2019s behalf.\u00a0 Once Klaus Fuchs was found to be sending details of the atomic bomb to Moscow (unlike the Rosenbergs, he escaped to East Germany), McCarthy used this kernel of truth to expand his campaign.\u00a0 With no further proof, he told his willing audience that the U.S. Government was crawling with Communists and launched into his new role as the sole protector of the American way.\u00a0 Only he could save us all\u00a0 from the Red Menace.\u00a0 Mary told David that McCarthy spent time every day in his office sipping whiskey while reading aloud the newspaper accounts of his \u2018work\u2019.\u00a0 When Brinkley states, \u201cFor a junior senator from a small town in Wisconsin, it was a heady time, and his exuberance swept him near to delirium and occasionally beyond.\u00a0 Slowly, slowly, American democracy worked.\u00a0 As layer after layer of McCarthy\u2019s lies were peeled away like an onion, revealing one outrage after another, his friends in the Senate began to see that they had been deceived, lied to, and McCarthy\u2019s support started to fade.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was a mild-mannered Republican Senator from Vermont, Ralph Flanders, who finally introduced a resolution to curb McCarthy\u2019s witch hunt, but the Senate didn\u2019t confront him for the obvious lies he had spread.\u00a0 Instead, the Senate responded to Flander\u2019s resolution by forming a six-member committee to investigate his \u2018abuse of witnesses\u2019.\u00a0 Joseph Welsh, who would later play the presiding judge in the movie <\/span>Anatomy of a Murder, <\/span><\/i>served as the chief counsel in the Army – McCarthy hearings.\u00a0 He confronted McCarthy\u2019s minions and demanded a list of the 130 names they claimed were subversives working in defense plants.\u00a0 McCarthy dodged the request by telling Welsh that he should investigate a young man named Fred Fisher who had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, \u201cThe mouthpiece of the Communist Party.\u201d\u00a0 Welsh did but found nothing in Fisher\u2019s past relating to the McCarthy proceedings.\u00a0 They agreed in a private meeting between Welsh and McCarthy that Fisher would not be questioned.\u00a0 Still, McCarthy ruthlessly attacked Fisher by name in the open hearing. \u00a0 Welsh, chided the Senator for what he termed his \u2018reckless cruelty\u2019 asking McCarthy, \u201cHave you no sense of decency, Sir?\u00a0 At long last, have you left no sense of decency?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0These show hearings were conducted by McCarthy alone with a couple of aids and were not official Senate proceedings. They were calculated grandstand displays designed to fan the flames of his own agenda and stroke his own ego.\u00a0 Instead of condemning his actions, the Senate chose the softer, slap on the wrist motion to \u2018censure\u2019 him.\u00a0 As the committee assembled, the undeterred McCarthy stated in a speech, \u201cNow the Communists have extended their tentacles into the United States Senate to make these committee members their unwitting hand-maidens.\u201d\u00a0 North Carolina’s highly respected Judge and Senator Sam Ervin responded to this nonsense, saying, \u201cSenator McCarthy flees now to his customary refuge – his claim that he is the symbol of resistance to Communist subversion and any senator who fails to bow and scrape to him is doing the work of the Communist party.\u201d\u00a0 So ended Senator Joseph McCarthy\u2019s fifteen minutes of fame.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0McCarthy\u2019s influence and reign of terror faded into the history books.\u00a0 \u201cHaving never found even one Communist not already known, the whiskey got to him, and he died of cirrhosis of the liver,\u201d according to Brinkley.\u00a0 The toll this unprincipled witch hunt took on American society and those who were dragged into the deep water by this rip tide of anti-Communist terror mongering (extending into the Hollywood Blacklists and beyond) is lamentable.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0David Brinkley\u2019s opinions and commentaries were always short and to the point.\u00a0 His knack for relating historical events without the need for self-aggrandizement would set him apart from some of the talking heads one sees on the news today.\u00a0 As for his own credentials as a newsman, his book cover notes that his career spanned, \u201c11 presidents, 4 wars, 22 political conventions, 1 moon landing, 3 assassinations, 2,000 weeks of news and other stuff on television, and 18 years of growing up in North Carolina.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As a southerner reporting the struggles endemic to the fight for equal rights for African Americans, he was vilified as a turncoat (and worse).\u00a0 Many of the southern stations threatened to pull their stations from the NBC network because of Brinkley\u2019s reporting during the Civil Rights era (few, if any, did).\u00a0 To counter his \u2018northern reporting bias\u2019, many southern stations hired their own newscasters who went on right after <\/span>The Huntley-Brinkley Report<\/span><\/i> to explain all of the areas in which NBC had slanted their news to make things sound worse than they were.\u00a0 Long serving Senator Jesse Helms was one of these \u2018point-counter point\u2019 reporters before he ran for office.\u00a0 That Brinkley could report these racially charged events (and receive plenty of death threats) with a clear eye reminds us that the reporter\u2019s job is to report the news.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Those making news can only wish that the press would simply swallow one-sided explanations for their actions and parrot a single party line.\u00a0 One can only speculate what Brinkley would have to say about the current Washington pressroom wranglings.\u00a0 Good night, David.<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0\u00a0A Day in the Life<\/em> by The Beatles . . . hey, it mentions the news!