USC Center on Public Diplomacy

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Published: FEB 27, 2006 - 10:40AM PST

Worldcasting
CPD Fellow Alvin Snyder reports on issues in international broadcasting for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.

“GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK”
FEB 27, 2006 - 10:40AM PST
by Alvin Snyder

The flight purser came back to where Fred Friendly was seated to tell him that his friend Edward R. Murrow had died an hour earlier. The plane had just cleared the Irish coast on a flight from London to New York, and the news about Murrow had been radioed from Shannon control with instructions to tell Friendly. It was April 27, 1965. Friendly recalled in a Columbia Records album we later prepared about Murrow, that “the message was only confirmation of what Ed and his friends had expected for months.” Edward R. Murrow smoked three packs of unfiltered Camel cigarettes every day, and died at age 57 from cancer that spread from his lungs to his brain. I thought of Friendly’s remarks when I watched the movie Good Night, and Good Luck, which has been nominated for six Academy Awards. George Clooney, who directed the movie and plays the role of Fred Friendly, does not entirely capture the dynamism of the real Fred Friendly I knew, nor David Straithairn the Edward R. Murrow that no one could ever duplicate. I was not with Murrow and Friendly and their See it Now staff on March 9, 1954, when their program took on Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was ruining lives in his witch hunt for suspected Communists. I was in college, but had my sights on CBS News long before I graduated. And because I did wind up at CBS News - I was on staff from the late 1950s through the entire next decade - the movie resonates with me in certain ways. My wife and I identify with two CBS News staffers portrayed in the movie. See it Now producer and reporter Joe Wershba, played by Robert Downey Jr., and writer Shirley Wershba, played by Patricia Clarkson, had married but tried to keep it secret because CBS News policy at the time forbade married couples from working in the same company division. Anne Glassman, a production assistant at CBS News, and I, a writer and producer, married while we were both at CBS News in 1961, and, like Joe Wershba, I stayed on at the network because my salary was greater than Anne's, a situation more commonplace then than now in the business world. Friendly became President of CBS News in 1964, and every story had to be airtight accurate, with all the facts on the table and no secrets, the way it was when he and Murrow went after Senator McCarthy almost 10 years earlier. Friendly had a New Yorker magazine cartoon framed on the wall near his desk, that he would point to when necessary, depicting a young blond woman, together with a man marooned on an island with a single palm tree. She says “I’ll know. That’s who!” No con job from a reporter or producer was permitted by Friendly, who wanted nothing kept from him. As he paced the room like a bear, he would confront a producer after something went wrong on the news, pounding…... FULL TEXT