The Economist December 1st 2007 - Online Public Access Catalog

Milo RadulovichNov 29th 2007From The Economist print editionMilo Radulovich, avenging victim of the red scare, died on November 19th, aged 81APIF A single date marked the beginning of the end for the red scare whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy in post-war America, it was October20th 1953. That was the day a whole television programme called “See It Now” was devoted to “The Case Against Lieut Milo RadulovichA0589839”.Mr Radulovich was in most ways unexceptional. The son of an immigrant carworker in Detroit, he had become an air cadet at the age of 17 andthen a member of the army air forces, in which he trained as a meteorologist. In 1952, after eight years' service, he was discharged, but remainedin the air-force reserve. He got married, had two children, took two jobs and enrolled at the University of Michigan. A year later, though, he washanded a letter telling him he was being expelled from the air force. His “close and continuing association with his father and his sister”, helearned, had made him a security risk.Mr Radulovich was not himself accused of being a communist, but his father was another matter. A Montenegrin Serb by birth, he liked to followevents in the land of his birth, and one of the Serbo-Croat newspapers to which he subscribed reflected the heterodox communism of Yugoslavia,the southern Slav union into which Serbia and Montenegro had been swept up. Mr Radulovich's sister was even more suspect. She was a leftist,and had been photographed picketing a Detroit hotel that had denied entry to Paul Robeson, a black singer and actor of international renown, whocampaigned for civil rights and was openly sympathetic to communism. Thus was Mr Radulovich damned.Not by everyone, it should be said. Determined to fight his corner but unable at first to find a lawyer prepared to take his case, he eventually foundone who persuaded him to tell his tale to the Detroit News. A front-page story prompted a second lawyer to come forward—both gave theirservices free—and another Detroit News article caught the attention of Edward Murrow, the host of “See It Now”, a CBS news and documentaryprogramme broadcast to the nation from New York.Fanfare for the common manMurrow and his producer, Fred Friendly, had been wanting to make a programme about the red scare's witch-hunts for some time. Friendly quicklyrealised that in Mr Radulovich's story they had the perfect “little picture” to illustrate the big picture of McCarthyism, which, they believed,threatened not just academics, Hollywood entertainers and New York intellectuals but all Americans, even an unpretentious Midwesterner like MrRadulovich.CBS was less enthusiastic. Its bosses did not want to antagonise Alcoa, the company that both sponsored “See It Now” and sold quantities ofaluminium to the air force. The programme was eventually broadcast, but Murrow and Friendly had themselves to pay the $1,500 needed for anadvertisement in the New York Times: their employers were in a funk.The viewers' response, though, exceeded all expectations. Letters poured in by the thousand and almost all were indignant at the treatment of MrRadulovich. A month later he was cleared of all charges and reinstated by the air force. Three months after that, Murrow and Friendly tackled thebig picture in a “See It Now” devoted to McCarthy himself. That programme, widely said to have opened America's eyes to the senator's dishonestyand bullying, could not have been made, said Friendly, but for the success of the earlier programme. By April 1954 McCarthy was beinginvestigated in Senate hearings and by December he had been censured by the full Senate. He went into decline, drank ever more heavily and diedin 1957.Though exonerated, Mr Radulovich still found his life affected by the episode. His father soon died, his marriage broke up, he never got his degreeand he was shunned by employers. But eventually he secured a job as a meteorologist in California. Years later, in 2005, he was hired to advisethe makers of “Good Night, and Good Luck”, the movie about Murrow's efforts to expose McCarthyism in the face of charges that he was acommunist.Thereafter Mr Radulovich found himself in demand as a speaker on civil liberties. Though McCarthy's campaign was long dead, a new enemy,terrorism, was stalking the public imagination, and terms like racial profiling and sneak-and-peek searches had entered the language to describepractices that the red-scare demagogue might well have approved of.The 2001 Patriot Act had given government agencies the right to examine citizens' library and bookshop records, bringing back memories of oldRadulovich's supposedly incriminating reading habits. And President George Bush's plans to try “enemy combatants” in military tribunals, with theirlower standards than civilian courts, were bringing back memories of the air-force hearing that had condemned the young Mr Radulovich. In thatproceeding the air force's lawyer had brandished a sealed envelope supposedly containing evidence, though its contents were never to be seen bythe accused or his defenders.Mr Radulovich's great meteorological interest was the interaction of wind and fire—a fitting concern for one who could never escape the scorchinghe had suffered in an era of super-heated scare-mongering.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.