George Clooney is one of Hollywood’s most successful actors, whose name on the credits of any film guarantees financial success, but for any actor the Broadway stage offers a terror that can be found nowhere else.
The actor has begun a stage run of Good Night, and Good Luck at the Winter Garden Theatre, near Times Square, a play recalling how CBS journalist Edward R Murrow took on senator Joe McCarthy over his charges of communist infiltration in the 1950s.
“It’s fear. It’s abject fear. That’s what I have, the wave of emotion,” Clooney told Eyewitness News. “Yeah, I’m terrified, but I mean that’s not such a bad thing to be; it’s kind of good thing in life to constantly be doing stuff that you don’t feel comfortable with and you don’t feel confident in.”
Few men in life have become a noun, but McCarthy did when “McCarthyite” entered the lexicon after he claimed in 1950 in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 “known communists” inside the US state department.
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Usually he had little or no evidence, but facts did not matter. Always, his charge came at a great cost to the individual targeted, especially those who sought to defend themselves against unprovable charges of disloyalty.
Clooney has been close to the story of Murrow for more than 20 years. He remortgaged his house in Los Angeles to make the film Good Night, and Good Luck in 2005; it went on to earn six Oscar nominations.
Today, the Collins English Dictionary defines a “McCarthyite” as someone “who makes unsubstantiated accusations of disloyalty or communist leanings”, but the phrase is returning into usage in the era of Donald Trump.
The play highlights Murrow’s belief that McCarthy was a stain on American society. “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty ... We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” the journalist said.
McCarthy’s power was founded on fear, with many terrified that they would be condemned and blacklisted if they spoke out. Even Dwight Eisenhower, who became US president in 1953, was reluctant to do so. Such feelings exist today in Trump’s America.
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
— Lawyer Joseph Nye Welch confronts US senator Joseph McCarthy
On March 9th, 1954, Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly, however, put out a half-hour CBS documentary, as part of their See It Now series, titled A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy, in which they used McCarthy’s own words to condemn him.
McCarthy soon after overreached, launching attacks upon Eisenhower and the United States Army, which led to a nationally televised, 36-day hearing at which McCarthy charged that one of the army’s lawyers had ties to a communist organisation.
His unsupported allegation prompted another military lawyer, Joseph Nye Welch, to condemn the Wisconsin Republican senator face-to-face: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Soon, everyone agreed that McCarthy had been wrong, but they had not done so before, not until Murrow – the man who had nightly brought the story of the Blitz in London in 1940 to the ears of a still neutral United States – had stood against him.
In 2005, Clooney’s film finished with a collage of images telling the changing story of television and its increasing trivialisation, finishing with a shot of Jerry Springer’s show with people throwing chairs and chanting the host’s name.
In 2025, however, the Broadway play goes further, using a clip of Elon Musk’s supposed “Nazi salute” – one that, on the night I attended, brought a gasp from the audience who had paid up to $800 (€730) to see the play – along with clips of the January 6th, 2021, insurrection and more.
The play and film begin and end with Murrow’s July 1958 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, in which he condemned television’s focus on entertainment and advertising dollars. “Look now, pay later,” he warned.
Murrow’s career was ultimately ended by the very trends he had highlighted; his See It Now programme had aired for the last time just weeks before, a victim of CBS’s demand for ratings and cheaply made quizshows.
Twenty years ago, Clooney was called a traitor for condemning George W Bush’s invasion of Iraqi as a “misbegotten war”, but he says now that his 2005 film was a rallying cry in support of an independent free press.
Today, the problem is worse, with Trump now back in the White House, and Clooney believing that Murrow’s “look now, pay later” warning must be heeded by a generation of Americans unprepared to challenge authoritarianism.
Speaking of Trump, Clooney says the US president is telling lies: “Don’t worry about facts, don’t worry about repercussions.” The Broadway play, he told Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, “feels more like it’s about truth, not just the press. Facts matter”.
Insisting that those who can speak out must do so, Clooney remembers Kentucky childhood dinners, where his father, Nick, a TV anchorman, would call out anyone if they belittled someone or made a bigoted remark. He would then always leave the table.
Back then, Clooney the boy often wished that his father – now in his 90s – would “just not hear”, so that dinner would not be interrupted. “The truth is, of course, he was right,” he told Dowd. “He and my Mom taught us, ‘You’ve got to do it when it’s uncomfortable’.”
