Before fiber-optic cable and satellite dishes served up a buffet of triple-digit narrowcasting, before videocassette recorders and camcorders put the means of replay and production in the hands of the people, before even the ruthless network troika of NBC, CBS, and ABC acquired dominion over prime-time programming, American television was a different kind of creature comfort. At the halfway mark of the twentieth century, the seedling medium had not yet blossomed into a garden of color, cable, and World Wide Web-bing. Their TV did not look like our TV.

Condemned to a mere handful of channel selections, paleo-televiewers adjusted rooftop antennae to receive clear reception and trudged vast distances across carpeting to rotate dials manually. Drab two-tone images in black and white, fuzzy and flippy, beamed forth from a pitifully small screen. The sets were serious pieces of furniture, mammoth in girth, encased in walnut or mahogany, molded to dominate a living room and displace the upright radio from the family hearth. Once common parlance, even the video lingua franca of the day has all but lapsed into anachronism: “snow,” “ghosts,” “vertical rollover,” “horizontal tear,” “airplane flutter,” “rabbit ears,” “test patterns,” “vacuum tubes,” “Please stand by, we are experiencing technical difficulties,” and—that bracing red alert, perhaps a portent of things to come—this is a test of the emergency broadcasting system.

The half-forgotten phrases and extinct folkways recall the tender years of a millennial force. The shows were mainly live, the programming scarce, and the viewers still somewhat spellbound before a miraculous new communications technology. In the early 1950s, as war raged in Korea and McCarthyism roiled at home, television first mounted its full-scale incursion into American culture. Growing up in parallel waves, the Cold War and the cool medium negotiated a cultural pact that demanded adjustments on both sides of the dial. The terms of the contract were updated almost on a yearly basis, but eventually one partner gained the upper hand and resolved a vexing point of contention. Of the incalculable ways that television transformed American life—in family and friendships, leisure and literacy, consumer habits and common memories—the expansion of freedom of expression and the embrace of human difference must be counted among its most salutary legacies. During the Cold War, through television, America became a more open and tolerant place.

The conventional wisdom claims otherwise. Not just an aesthetic blight, television is cast as coconspirator in the conformities and repressions of Cold War America. Purveyor of sedative pabulum, facilitator of the blacklist, handmaiden to McCarthyism, the small screen abetted moral cowardice, retarded intellectual growth, and smothered resistance. The dark times and the dumb medium deserved each other.

So dismal a reputation reflects more than critical payback from highbrow tastemakers and wounded liberals. The acute videophobia expresses the resentment of partisans of the sacred word at the rise of the sordid image. Before the primacy of television, democracy in America had always been linked to writing and literacy. For the Enlightened thinkers of the Revolutionary War era, pamphlets and books were invested with an almost divine aura. Comprehended in silence and pondered in tranquility, the founding documents presupposed a well-read, rational citizenry. The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the U.S. Constitution were binding contracts, typeset and permanent, set down in black and white, the secular scripture for a modern demos. “Litera scripta manet,” cautioned the epigrammatic Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, “the written word remains,” and who as author, publisher, and founder of the U.S. Postal Service was as good as his word. It is the motto engraved above the entranceway of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., an agency still more scrupulous about the collection and preservation of pieces of paper than film reels or video cassettes.

Like radio and motion pictures, television rebuked that literate faith. Instantly accessible and immediately apprehensible, it transmitted an alphabet of meaning that required only the senses of sight and sound, not the tedious diligence of book learning. Broadcasting moving images into the home, giving pictures to the radio signals, the hybrid medium grew to be exponentially more powerful and penetrating than its parents. The greatest leap forward in the graphic revolution, television radiated through the life of the present and the memory of the past with a force that dwarfed the impact of the other media. Soon print itself came to seem the hieroglyphics of a lost civilization. The rise of video was concurrent with a frigid season in the Cold War, a temporal bond that suggests a codependent relationship. Orbiting around television, a cluster of transformations in American culture comes into focus. Economic prosperity and national security, the twin obsessions of the generation forged by the Great Depression and the Second World War, began to share space with freedom of expression and civil rights, the obsessions of the next generations. As prosperity became an expectation not a dream, as the dread of social insecurity faded amid the cornucopia of postwar affluence, the nexus of American culture folded ever inward—to information and expression, to media access and on-screen visibility. Collaborator and catalyst, television acted as a featured player in the action.

Beset from birth by the harsh elements of the Cold War, television came of age oppressed by a “witchhunt atmosphere” and “traumatized by phobias,” asserted Erik Barnouw, the indispensable historian of American broadcasting. “It would learn caution, and cowardice.” True enough—but it would also utter defiance and encourage resistance. The Cold War and the cool medium worked out an elastic arrangement, sometimes constricting but ultimately expanding the boundaries of free expression and relaxing the credentials for inclusion. Within a few short years, television had become the prized proscenium in American culture, and the stage was open to an array of unsettling opinions and unruly talent.

A Television Genealogy

As conventionally personified, the development of television reenacts the life stages of man: an embryonic term of gestation (1939 to 1945), infant steps (1946 to 1950), adolescent growing pains (1951 to 1960), mature adulthood (1961 to 1980), and then, after being grafted onto coaxial cables and computer networks for home delivery, mutation into an entirely new species (1981 and beyond). Like the illustrations in a worn biology textbook, where the amphibian crawls from the sea and shape-shifts through the millennia into mammal, slouched ape, upright Neanderthal, and finally to business-suited Dad, briefcase in hand, walking purposefully to work, television is forever aborning technologically into a crisper, sleeker, toned-up model. Of course, the Darwinian conceit presumes not only that television has attained a heightened stage of evolutionary development but that it is actually going somewhere. Alas, the final destination of television must remain an open question, but the history of the medium— what it once was and what it once meant—is more readily answered. By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, the viewer discovers a picture of Cold War America that belies the black-and-white clichés in cable syndication and current scholarship.

Unjaded as yet to the miracle of light and sound, Cold War Americans looked upon television not as a lesser order of moving imagery, but as a thrilling new household appliance. The monochromatic, washed-out images seen on surviving kinescopes fail to conjure the initial wonder at the magic show.1 Spectators weaned on high-definition screens gleaming with computer graphics and rumbling with digital sound are apt to find the pictures slow, static, and stunted. Upon first sight, however, the video vista was not a vast wasteland but a cool oasis beheld with eyes of delight and discovery. Well, not quite all eyes. “In my frayed estimation, television today is nothing more than agitated decalcomania rampant on the tavern wall and in the family living room,” humorist Fred Allen snarled in 1948. “For entertainment, television offers loquacious puppets, stout ladies bending over ovens assembling cucumber ragouts, blurred newsreels, assorted sporting events, antiquated B pictures, and a few entertaining shows.” Allen’s jaundiced perspective summarized elite opinion on the reviled “boob tube,” an attitude in his case fueled also by the flop sweat of an eminent radio star facing obsolescence. Admittedly, Allen’s cranky catalogue of scheduled programming rings true. Hollywood had yet to sell any A-picture attractions to its despised rival, and primitive items like The Adventures of Oky Doky, I Love to Eat, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, and Film Shorts typified the banal lineup during a paltry few hours of prime-time telecasting. Worth remembering too is the social venue for television spectatorship, as likely in 1948 to be watched in noisy taverns as in private homes.

By the middle of the next decade, television had become a living room fixture, ascendant not only over radio but motion pictures and, so it seemed, all of American culture. The seizure of media mastery occurred with dizzying speed. Envisioned and perfected for the 1939 World’s Fair, dormant commercially during the Second World War, television took off as soon as V-J Day sounded the starting gun for the postwar boom in consumer spending. To register the breakneck pace, metaphors of plague and pestilence flowed from the pens of wary journalists. Aerial antennae sprout like noxious weeds from apartment rooftops and suburban homes while video-born catchphrases spread like viruses through the vocabulary of children. A simple statistic suggests the scale of the invasion: in 1949 television was a luxurious indulgence in one out of ten American homes; in 1959, television was essential furniture in nine out of ten American homes.

As early as 1951, guilt-mongering advertisements warned parents that their children would “suffer in school and be shunned by their friends” if the family resisted buying a television set. The prospect of social ostracism was real enough. Soon it would be impossible to participate in schoolyard chatter or watercooler banter without the common reference point of the small screen. No longer an exotic new appliance but basic survival gear, television became an artery as vital to the pulse of American life as the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. More necessary: forced to choose between fresh food and home entertainment, a solid majority of Cold War Americans opted to jettison the ice box for that other box.

Though not yet granted the prerogatives it would take as due recognition of its supreme status—unrestricted entry into every nook and cranny of mortal existence—television in the early years of the Cold War was already changing the way the nation did business. In 1954, NBC President Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the reigning visionary of network programming, declared that television would soon become “the shining center of the home,” transmitted in color, recorded on magnetic tape, “with world wide news service, symphony orchestras and opera companies, with telementaries of still undreamed magnitude, with entertainment that in part becomes highly literate, that serves every segment of our population with programming that is valuable and rewarding.” If Weaver’s forecast of a highbrow prime-time lineup was mere wishful thinking, his vision of the shining centrality of ever higher-tech television in American culture was a dead-on prophecy.

Nowhere was the impact of television felt more keenly than in Hollywood, hometown of the precedent and soon-to-be subordinate moving-image medium. The arrival of television in 1946 coincided with classical Hollywood’s last great season, when a weekly audience of 90 million paying spectators flocked to ornate palaces and homey neighborhood theaters. In a few short years, what Hollywood called “free television” (the implication being that anything free could not be worth much) had metastasized to lethal levels. “TV Audience Now Equals Films” blared a frightful headline in the Hollywood Reporter in 1950. The forced boosterism of studio sloganeering (“Movies Are Better Than Ever!” protesteth the official motto) echoed like a whistle past the graveyard. Every week Hollywood tallied up the escalating ratings for television, gaped at the plummeting box office revenues, and noted the causal relation between small-screen highs and big-screen lows. The Friday Night Fights on The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (1948–1960) provided a weekly lesson in connecting the dots. On October 26, 1951, the epochal match between the aging former champion Joe Louis and the gritty challenger Rocky Marciano emptied theaters like a smoke bomb. Television “tossed Joe Louis right into our living room on his back,” marveled the television critic Dan Jenkins, a lifelong fan of the Brown Bomber. “If it had to happen, we’d much rather have read about it in the cold impersonal print of Saturday morning’s paper. But it did prove that TV has all the impact of one of Marciano’s punches.” Alarmed motion picture executives contemplated a future where the local Bijou crumbled under the nightly onslaught of living room exhibitions comprised of “big fights, maybe the World Series switched into night-time play, the big football games, or incidents of national interest.” Like Joe Louis, Hollywood played the slow, lumbering has-been, down for the count against the scrappy new kid, swift, lean, and hungry.

The turnabout in the media hierarchy foretold and facilitated other shifts. At the start of the new decade, with a suggestive synchronicity, the Cold War and the cool medium collided on the calendar. As simultaneous threats on the international and domestic fronts reached fever pitch, the publication of a thin volume called Red Channels took the fight onto a field that sooner or later all future American conflicts would enter.

Red and Other Menaces On the morning of June 25, 1950, North Korean military forces burst south through a line of latitude on the Korean Peninsula. The Korean War, a three- year conflict fought to a tense stalemate in a remote locale, was the bloody backdrop to a superpower rivalry that was never merely ideological. Korea would later be labeled “the forgotten war,” but between 1950–1953 Americans were reminded of it in the most tangible ways: newspaper headlines, radio bulletins, newsreels, television reports, and the delivery of 36,914 notices from the Department of Defense containing regrettable information.

A brutal chapter in the fierce struggle with communism, the Korean War was allegedly an international “police action” by the United Nations, but the United States manned the front lines in the order of battle. Lost to the West in 1949, the People’s Republic of China (“Red China” to all but her allies) was perceived as the puppetmaster pulling the North Korean strings while behind Red China was the guiding hand of the Soviet Union. From command central in the Kremlin, the Sino-Soviet alliance gained force and moved forward, a red tide infused with a yellow menace, poised to thrust the dagger of the Korean Peninsula into the heart of Japan and from there move south into Indochina, then west to India and Pakistan, and inexorably eastward across the Pacific. Taught by World War II propaganda films to appreciate the march of totalitarianism on a map, Americans didn’t need Hollywood to draw them the big picture. Just as black swastikas had once slithered outward from the heart of Germany to spread over Poland and France, red hammer and sickles bled into Eastern Europe and Asia and seemed poised to cover the world. Back on native ground, the arrest of the Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg confirmed the presence of a homegrown fifth column to the overseas menace. In 1949 the reputedly scientifically backward USSR, ahead of schedule and with shocking suddenness, had ended the U.S. monopoly on atomic weaponry. Top secret information had clearly changed hands, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon ensnared two of the principle transfer agents. An international cause celèbre and the most sensational spy case of the Cold War, the arrest, trial, and execution of the Rosenbergs sounded a steady backbeat to the clamor over communist subversion. Again, the lesson from the last war—that the ideological campaign for hearts and minds sustains the frontline combat—took hold for the current war. Punctually enough, the Rosenberg case, which began with the arrest of Julius on July 17, 1950, and crested with the execution of the couple on June 19, 1953, marked time with the outbreak and resolution of the Korean War, which ended with a formal truce signed on July 27, 1953.

Viewed through the tunnel vision of television history, the tandem escalations of the Cold War coincide neatly with another red-letter date. On June 22, 1950, the editors of Counterattack, a four-page “newsletter of facts on communism,” issued a slim volume with weighty impact: Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, a listing of entertainers deemed to be Communist Party members or to have like-minded opinions and associations (“fellow travelers” in the argot of the day). The publication was the work product of three former FBI men organized as an outfit called American Business Consultants: Theodore C. Kirkpatrick, the public voice of the organization; John G. Keegan, the business brains; and Francis J. McNamara, the hands-on editor of Counterattack, the main source for Red Channels. Vincent Hartnett, another self-motivated anticommunist who later spearheaded a kindred outfit called AWARE, Inc., penned the introduction. By printing so many names between covers, Red Channels formalized the previously ad hoc practice of blacklisting in the broadcasting industry.

The introduction to Red Channels charged the Soviet Union with an “increasing domination of American broadcasting and television, preparatory to the day when . . . the Communist Party will assume control of this nation as the result of a final upheaval and civil war.” In classic Leninist fashion, a vanguard elite sought to harness the tools of mass communication to indoctrinate Americans with “Communist ideology and pro-Soviet interpretation of current events.” Admittedly, few entertainers were card-carrying communists, but all too many were useful idiots and reliable dupes. “Our so-called ‘intellectual’ classes—members of the arts, the sciences, and the professions—have furnished the Communist Party USA with the greatest number of these classi- fications,” the editors lamented. “Red Fascism has exploited scores of radio and TV stars at pro-Soviet rallies, meetings, and conferences.”

After the warm-up, Red Channels went about the business of enumeration, “an alphabetical index of names,” 151 in number, from Larry Adler (“harmonica player”) to Lesley Woods (“actress—radio”). The artists listed ranged from lockstep Communist Party hacks, to mainstream liberals, to bewildered innocents; the offenses encompassed everything from blunt avowals of party-line doctrine to innocuous expressions of progressive sentiment. It was one playbill on which actors did not want to see their names printed and their credits listed. Even as Red Channels showed its colors, a specter more haunting than even communism shadowed Cold War America. The atomic bomb and, after 1952, the hydrogen bomb augured an apocalyptic payoff to the superpower face-off. For the first time in human history, the prospect of species annihilation, not just military defeat or cities laid to waste, loomed as a decided possibility. The cultural fallout from the Bomb settled all over American culture, but a series of made-for-television events sent out particularly intense shock waves. On the morning of February 6, 1951, Los Angeles stations KTLA and KTTV transmitted the first live images of an atomic blast to a select but no doubt attentive local audience. Positioned atop Mount Wilson, some 250 miles from the atomic test site at the Las Vegas Proving Ground, the cameras caught “the flash of eerie white light” from the experimental detonation. In Las Vegas, KTLA reporter Gil Martin delivered play-by-play commentary and interviewed witnesses. The mushroom cloud was clearly visible from atop the hotels and casinos in the desert oasis.

The next year, progress in nuclear science coincided with advances in television technology. At precisely 12:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, on April 22, 1952, from the wastelands of Yucca Flat, Nevada, another demonstration of an atomic bomb explosion was telecast live, this time coast to coast. “The home audience heard the call of ‘bomb away’ and listened to the counting of the seconds and saw a flash that, for a few seconds, blackened TV screens with a dark penumbra around the central point of light that was the blast,” reported the trade magazine Broadcasting/Telecasting. Viewers squinted to discern a tiny white spot in a wall of pitch black, unaware that the white pinhole centered in the blackness resulted from an optical malfunction: the orthicon tube in the pickup camera had blacked out under the blinding light of the blast. Though the announcer gaped at the “beautiful, tremendous, and angry spectacle,” many viewers complained about poor audio quality and erratic reception distorted by geometric swirls and diagonal bars. With characteristic glibness, Variety panned the show under the headline “ABomb in TV Fluff Fizzles Fission Vision.” On March 17, 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Civil Defense Administration staged a more successful television special, again live from Yucca Flat. To simulate the impact of an atomic explosion on an average homestead, a fabricated two-household community dubbed “Doom Town” was constructed, with nuclear family mannequins occupying each abode, standing upright, not sitting around a television set. Pooling their resources, all the major networks telecast the preparations for countdown, the instant of the blast, and the aftermath. The special show was presented as an unsponsored public service program because, explained Washington Post television critic Sonia Stein, commercial advertisers “did not feel eager to associate their products with the horrors of war exemplified by atomic bombing.”

Viewers watched trucks unloading U.S. Army troops to within 3,500 feet of ground zero. A long shot framed the detonation site, a tall slim tower, eerily illuminated by floodlights. Then the show began. “The tremendous atomic burst over Doom Town in Nevada sent TV screens across the nation into ‘wobbles,’ and a brief blackout at the instant of the blast,” observed a shaken reporter for the wire services. “But then the picture returned and tense watchers at their TV sets got their clearest look yet at what an atomic explosion is.” Seconds later, a narrow cloud “like a tall thin mushroom” billowed upward and then changed shape “into something approaching an irregular upside down ‘L.’” The newsmen near ground zero—Walter Cronkite for CBS and Morgan Beatty for NBC, at a site seven miles from the tower, and Chet Huntley for ABC, huddled with the GIs less than two miles away—spoke of ground tremors and dust in their eyes. For viewers who missed the live telecast, all the networks scheduled kinescope reruns later that night. Imagine, warned civil defense authorities, if “one of the homes belonged to you and your family was inside.”

Later that year, the detonation of the hydrogen bomb upped the ante by megatons. Though set off at 7:15 a.m. on November 1, 1952, on the island of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, the deed was not formally announced to the nation until the afternoon of Sunday, November 16, when AEC chairman Gordon Dean confirmed reports from loose-lipped sailors who had broken the news—and security—in letters home. To render the scale of the holocaust, newspapers played up the local angle, superimposing the H-bomb’s blast radius on aerial maps of hometown environs. No heartland was too remote to escape the apocalypse, no suburb promised safe haven from the radioactive thundercloud emanating from the blistering furnace at ground zero.

On that very same Sunday, the CBS news magazine See It Now, “a document for television” hosted by the famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, jumped on the late-breaking news to ruminate on the arrival of the thermonuclear age. Re- porting from Washington, correspondent Bill Downs commented that the occasion “seems to me to be more a day for searching the human soul perhaps than any kind of scientific celebration” and suggested that “perhaps the Atomic Energy Commission would have been wise to have made the announcement before today’s church services.” In grim, sulfuric tones, Downs reported that “we’ve now designed mankind’s most devastating weapon, a weapon that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Bikini tests and the rest of them look puny by comparison.” Groping for points of comparison, he explains that “the experts tell us that the difference between the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb is the difference between a 12-gauge shotgun and a 16-inch cannon.” He then recites a long list of cities around the globe—New York, Moscow, Peking—that would be utterly obliterated by a blast, though naturally the destruction would not be limited to ground zero. Murrow then quotes Albert Einstein’s prediction that “radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence the annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibility.” At the end of the show, the host apologizes not for the message but the medium. Regrettably, “so far there is no film available and there is not likely to be any available of the first hydrogen bomb.” Murrow failed to reckon with the photographic compulsions of the moving picture age.

On April 1, 1954, the H-bomb (“for Hydrogen,” explained a nowchastened Variety, “also for Hell”) made its screen debut when film of the blast was finally released to the newsreels and television. Projected on the motion picture screen, in crisp 35mm, the stark black-and-white cloud expanded spectacularly, ominously, roaring upward and outward, engulfing and obliterating an entire island from the face of the earth, a science fiction fantasy in a documentary format. “First Films . . . H-BOMB BLAST” blared the Universal- International Newsreel title card as the awed voice of narrator Ed Herlihy harkened “the second era—the thermonuclear era—of the atomic age.” Graphic illustrations helpfully brought home the magnitude of the explosion and the immediacy of the threat. “Now, for dramatic effect, we superimpose [the explosion] on the skyline of New York.” As the fireball from the “awful destructive power of the H-bomb” balloons out to scorch the horizon, Herlihy notes that “the heart of the metropolis would be instantaneously transformed into an inferno while shock waves devastated the rest of the city.”2 2. Unwilling to leave motion picture audiences with the aftertaste of annihilation before the unspooling of the featured attraction, the newsreel followed its terrifying tenminute report on the H-bomb with an upbeat “Hollywood Fashion Holiday,” wherein “starlets Mamie Van Doren, Ruth Hampsen and other lovelies model an eye-appealing array of summer styles, ranging from travel suits to swim wear, a lovely picture.” Yet because the theatrical newsreels were already being supplanted by news on television, the force of the H-bomb hit closest to home with the telecast of a 28-minute film entitled Operation Ivy, a joint venture of the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission. A creepy blend of civil defense stiffness and cinematic slickness, Operation Ivy tells the story of the first Hbomb explosion, a device nicknamed “Mike.” Awaiting detonation from aboard the deck of a U.S. Navy cruiser in the Marshall Islands, actor Reed Hadley, best known as the dauntless police captain on CBS’s Racket Squad (1951–1953), lights a pipe and promises viewers that “we’ll soon see the largest explosion ever set off on the face of the earth—that is, the largest that we know about.”

The success of the mission is something of a gamble, but after all “the uneasy state of the world puts everything on a gambling basis.” The virgin landscapes and the spacious serenity of the Pacific Ocean lend a suitably biblical backdrop for the entry of a satanic force into paradise. As ever, though, the thrill of spectatorship overrides all other considerations. Remote television cameras have been positioned to record the big event. “You have a grandstand seat here to one of the most momentous moments in the history of science,” enthuses Hadley, the proud master of ceremonies. “In less than a minute you will see the most powerful explosion ever witnessed by human eyes.” Gesturing screen left, Hadley points out that “the blast will come out of the horizon just about there. And this is the significance of the moment. This is the first full-scale test of a hydrogen device. If the reaction goes, we’re in the thermonuclear era.” He pauses thoughtfully. “For the sake of all of us, and for the sake of our country, I know that you join me in wishing this expedition well.” Time now to don goggles and turn away from the direction of the blast. Ominous soundtrack music builds to a crescendo during the countdown, and at zero hour a huge billowing fireball fills the screen. In the aftermath, an entire atoll has disappeared from the face of the earth. As in the newsreels, stateside reference points are superimposed on the blast radius. The fireball alone would engulf one quarter of the island of Manhattan. With the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C., as ground zero, a radius of three miles would experience “complete annihilation.”

On April 1, 1954, the networks telecast the H-bomb imagery again and again. CBS scooped the competition with a sampling of clips on The Morning Show, ABC showed the complete film twice (once in the morning, once in prime time), and NBC telecast it at 8:00 a.m., 7:00 p.m., and 11:15 p.m. Sold commercially at $28 a print and widely distributed in the secondary school system, Operation Ivy had a long half-life as an educational tool in science and civics classes, not to mention the nightmares of impressionable baby boomers. The next month, on May 18, 1954, ABC’s Motorola TV Hour turned the documentary reality into television melodrama in “Atomic Attack,” a live fantasy in prime time depicting the effects of a hydrogen bomb dropped on New York City. With Manhattan vaporized and her husband dead, a Westchester housewife must cope with social disorder in her neighborhood and radiation sickness in her family. Adding an element of unnerving verisimilitude, ABC newsman John Daly delivered actual civil defense instructions over the radio. A somber and stark projection, with no triumphalism and scant hope, “Atomic Attack” spooked viewers and critics alike. “A frightening reminder of what might be in store for us, [but] viewers must have asked themselves the purpose of such a show,” complained Variety. “It must have alarmed an already alarmed people. All it accomplished was to accent the terror ahead.” Hollywood also caught the Cold War shivers. A new breed of science fiction film emerged as transparent allegory for the fears of bombs and spies, annihilation from above and subversion on native ground. The lurking terrors surfaced in the blunt, third-person pronoun titling the accusatory Them! (1954). “A horror-horde of crawl-and-crush giants clawing out of the earth’s deep catacombs,” shrieked the ad copy. “Human in their cunning! Monstrous in their endless terror! Kill one—and two take their place!” McCarthy: Man, Ism, and Television

Propelled high on the atmosphere of external threat, internal insecurities, and nuclear tremors, the figure of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) swirled with cyclone force across newspaper headlines, newsreels, and television screens: McCarthy, the great ogre of Cold War America, who as noun and adjective earned his dictionary entry as part of the language. Of all the verbal bludgeons that propel politically driven debate—Fascism, communism, racism—only “McCarthyism” is indigenous and peculiar to American culture. No other surname coinage trips off the tongue so smoothly as a slashing epithet. Little wonder that today Joseph McCarthy seems more “-ism” than man. Given the titanic figure McCarthy cuts in popular memory, the brevity of his career and the speed of his demise comes as a surprise. The arc of Mc- Carthy’s political influence begins with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950 and concludes definitively with his televised immolation at the Army-McCarthy hearings in June 1954, a stretch of little more than four years as a first-string player. Throughout that interval, he was always a divisive and despised figure, on the defensive as often as on the attack. If he made the weak cringe, he also stiffened the backbone of politicians, journalists, and ordinary Americans who relished the battle and gave as good as they got. Born in 1908 in rural Grand Chute, Wisconsin, Joseph Raymond McCarthy came up the hard way and ever after wore his hardscrabble Irish-Catholic roots as a point of pride. Alert, ambitious, and gregarious, he worked his way through law school at Marquette University and by the age of thirty had won election to a circuit judgeship. In 1942, farsighted enough to know that a war record was the ticket to Washington in a postwar era, he resigned his judgeship and enlisted in the U.S. Marines. Elected to the Senate in 1946 under the self-bestowed moniker “Tail Gunner Joe,” he floundered at first on the national stage. Though not yet tagged with the condescending diminutive favored by his enemies, “the junior senator from Wisconsin” was then notable mainly, if barely, for his quixotic campaign to rehabilitate the Nazi soldiers who murdered American GIs at Malmédy, undertaken to court favor with his German-American constituency. On February 9, 1950, McCarthy stumbled into his moment of destiny. During a Lincoln Day dinner speech to a Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to possess a list of 205 known communists in the State Department, a number that proved flexible in the days ahead. The accusation caused a sensation. As the organs of mass communications and the publicity-hungry pol fed off each other, the once obscure senator rode the anticommunist wave to national prominence. Unfortunately, McCarthy’s careermaking talk was neither filmed by the newsreels nor telecast live, a lapse in public relations he was not to repeat.

Within weeks of entering the headlines, the senator also entered the American language. As a proper noun fitted with a suffix, McCarthy became the incarnation of a demonic zeitgeist, a shorthand term for the stifling of free debate and the denial of constitutional rights by the imputation of communist sympathies. Originally too the word was yoked to the manner of the man, a boorish and reckless bluster captured in newsreel clips and television appearances. A constant incantation throughout the Cold War, McCarthyism gained force not only from the dark charisma of the senator but the passions of the moment. In the 1950s, after all, communists, anticommunists, and antianticommunists were all deadly serious about communism.

As a matter of etymology at least, the roots of McCarthyism are readily traceable. The editorial cartoonist Herbert Block first used the senator’s surname as a term of abuse in the March 29, 1950, edition of the Washington Post, when he scrawled “McCarthyism” on a tar pot, the emblem of a smear. The coinage caught on immediately, as if the turbulent anticommunism forming with the new decade were an offshore weather system just waiting to be upgraded to hurricane status and christened. In a televised address on November 16, 1953, former President Harry S. Truman voiced a terse definition: [McCarthyism] is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of our historical devotion to fair play. It is the abandonment of the due process of law. It is the use of the Big Lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism and security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spread of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of our society. As if brushing aside a gnat, Truman stressed that he was not referring to the senator himself: “He is only important in that his name has taken on a dictionary meaning in the world.”

Also on television, McCarthy responded that Truman’s definition “was the same as the Daily Worker, word for word, comma for comma. Let them [that is, Truman and the Communist Party newspaper] define it if they care to.” The casual deployment of the plural pronoun to link the former president with the communist conspiracy exemplifies the ism, right from the mouth of the master.

Fitting though it is that the man who branded so many should himself become a brand name, McCarthy was hardly a solitary soldier in the domestic war against communism. All the Cold War forces subsumed under his name predated and postdated his tenure: President Truman imposed loyalty oaths on federal employees in March 1947, the FBI had been investigating political malcontents of all stripes since the 1920s, and the House Committee on Un- American Activities launched its first investigations into Hollywood subversion in 1947, well before McCarthy detected 205 communists in the State Department. Today, in the popular mind, McCarthy’s preeminent notoriety obscures important distinctions: between executive and legislative branch investigations, between agencies of the federal government and private pressure groups, between investigating and blacklisting, and, not least, between principled liberals and cynical communists.

The linkage of McCarthy with Hollywood and television warrants the most debunking. Though the word McCarthyism conjures images of persecuted screenwriters shouted down by gavel-wielding demagogues or blacklisted actors banned from the airwaves by craven network executives, it was not the McCarthy committee but the House Committee on Un-American Activities that subpoenaed Hollywood filmmakers; it was not the McCarthy committee but the McCarran committee that investigated subversive content in motion pictures and television; and it was not McCarthy but a confederation of private organizations and special interest groups that purged television of artists deemed “controversial personalities.” McCarthy’s focus was mainly intramural, aimed at government not media. The McCarthy committee (officially, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by McCarthy from 1953 to 1954) is most often confused with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (inevitably abbreviated as HUAC).3 Perversely, McCarthy is given too much credit for McCarthyism. The reason, then and now, is television. McCarthy ranks with a select cadre of prescient politicians—Estes Kefauver, Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower— who possessed a keen eye for the main chance of the new medium. In 1953, as McCarthy was blitzing the airwaves in news shows, press conferences, and televised hearings, he had to deny persistent rumors that he was considering hosting a television series. “Completely phoney,” he grinned. “There’s nothing to it. I wouldn’t have time for it and I have no TV plans.” Yet Mc- Carthy always had TV plans—not to play host, but to dominate news shows, to command network air time, and to star as the leading man in his own series of televised hearings.

Viewed through a television lens, however, the many images of Joseph Mc- Carthy send back such mixed signals that the historian may be tempted to twist the antenna or hit the set to bring in a clear picture. On one channel, the senator seems fierce and all-powerful, dominating programming and frightening the populace. Facing McCarthy and the forces he embodied, many Americans quivered with the fear that unfettered opinions had dire consequences, that agents of the state might disrupt their lives on the basis of a casual remark, a signed petition, or membership in a long-forgotten college discussion group. And if a one-way ticket to the Gulag was not in the offing, the prospect of public opprobrium, termination of employment, and the hassle of a lifetime was real enough.

In 1954, a young naval officer teaching at Princeton University wrote a fan letter to Edward R. Murrow. He closed his correspondence by pleading: “Please destroy my letter when you’re finished reading it. McCarthy could ruin me with one flick of his ugly wrist since I’m on active duty and a ‘professor’ at one of those ‘leftist dominated universities’!” Obviously the man felt vulnerable, but not too vulnerable to commit his name and letterhead to the U.S. Post Office and to entrust his fate to a broadcaster whom he had never met. The broadcaster, for his part, never complied with the panicky request. Whether through negligence or a sense that the young man was being a tad too melodramatic, the letter went unburnt, the officer unmolested. 3. The muddling of Senator McCarthy and HUAC may be a misconception too deeply implanted ever to be expunged. In 1997, even Variety, the show business bible, bungled the facts in a commemorative article on the Hollywood blacklist: “It’s been 50 years since the House Un-American Activities Committee began looking for communist sympathizers in all fields, but the committee, led by Sen. McCarthy, took a special interest in the high profile film industry.” Meanwhile, flipping over to another channel, television transmits a program featuring a bolder cast of characters. Telecast from Washington, D.C., and billed as “America’s oldest unrehearsed discussion program,” NBC’s American Forum of the Air (1950–1957) was a live news program whose format obliged politicians to answer questions from a studio audience. On December 6, 1953, the guest was Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The members of the audience are not cowering peasants struck dumb before a tyrannical liege, but upright citizens who behave pretty much the way Americans have always behaved in the presence of their elected representatives: respectful but skeptical, the questions polite but probing, sometimes downright hostile.

A pleasant young woman, the picture of ladylike deportment in Eisenhower America, raises her hand. “Senator McCarthy, do you believe a man is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?” she asks.

“Yes,” replies McCarthy.

“Then why do you call men spies, security risks, and communists before they have been proven such?” she demands. Taken aback, McCarthy mutters that the rules for a congressional inquiry are different from the rules for a criminal proceeding. Another questioner stands to remark that “there doesn’t seem to be any middle course” about the senator. “A lot of people like McCarthy, a lot of people hate McCarthy.” Gauging the vox populi, the man reports that when he goes to the movies and sees McCarthy in the newsreels, “sometimes you hear a lot of boos, sometimes you hear a lot of cheers.” Playing against type, an American Legion commander takes issue with Mc- Carthy’s recent request that Americans send telegrams to President Eisenhower to protest foreign aid to nations that trade with Red China. Isn’t this, he asks belligerently, putting the presidency “on the public auction block?” The animosity continues unabated. McCarthy gets entangled in testy exchanges with two women. Neither backs down, despite McCarthy’s rude interjections. “Pardon me for interrupting a lady,” snorts the senator.

Stuart Finley, the nervous moderator of the program, requests questions, not commentary, from the obstreperous studio audience. In a surreal flash forward, a young lawyer in the audience confronts McCarthy with the definition of McCarthyism lately offered by former President Truman. “[Truman] meant that you were a demagogue, that you were unfair, you were guilty of the Big Lie,” declares John Sirica, looking straight at McCarthy, just as he would stare down President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal twenty years later.

To tune in to the television of Cold War America is to see a portrait more textured and multicolored than the monochrome shades fogging the popular imagination. Dependent for sustenance on the very freedoms that McCarthyism restricted, the medium was preprogrammed for resistance. Of course, the commitment to free expression and open access was self-interested; television needed to fill the air time.