We are all familiar with the McCarthyite witch-hunts behind the George Clooney film, Good Night and Good Luck. They are a salutary tale of how one evil man, Senator Joe McCarthy, set about the destruction of liberalism in the US in an insane search for wholly imaginary communist subversives, using the hilariously named House Un-American Activities Committee.
His hysterical campaign - amongst other things - ruined the careers of 10 innocent Hollywood screenwriters, and the lunacy was finally brought to an end by the one man who was brave enough to stand up to McCarthy: the broadcaster Ed Murrow.
I guess we could all pass an exam on that one - but what we'd be passing would not be a test of our knowledge of history but of liberal mythology.
For Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was a senator, not a member of the House of Representatives, and the HUAC was first formed in 1938, when he was still an unsuccessful lawyer. And he was right. There was a major communist conspiracy to overthrow the US government, with the Hollywood Ten being an extended part of that conspiracy. And the man really responsible for ending McCarthy's campaign wasn't a journalist, but President Eisenhower.
In 1943, a far-sighted soldier, Colonel Carter Clarke, head of army special branch, hearing reports of a possible separate peace between the USSR and Nazi Germany, ordered an analysis of Soviet diplomatic signals between the US and Moscow to check for such a possibility. Soviet codes depended on a complex ciphering system, involving a "one-time pad", which their authors thought impenetrable. However, US codebreakers managed finally to break it, and the resulting product was known as "Venona". It caused a sensation within American intelligence circles.
Far from diplomats sending coded traffic to the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in Moscow over any Nazi-USSR détente, they were actually sending vast amounts of intelligence material from trained field officers to General Pavel Finn, head of the KGB foreign desk. In 1944, one of the first telegrams to be broken revealed, terrifyingly, that Soviet spies had even penetrated Project Manhattan, the programme to make an atom bomb. By 1948, and just from the small proportion of Soviet material which cryptanalysts had been able to break, US intelligence had identified 349 US spies working for the Soviet Union.
They were everywhere. Harry White, the second most powerful figure in the US Treasury, architect of the Bretton Woods Agreement, and founder-member of the US delegation at the UN, was one. Lauchlin Currie, a trusted aide to President Roosevelt, was one. Maurice Halpern, head of project-research at the Office of Strategic Studies (forerunner to the CIA) was one. William Perle, running the main US jet-engine development project, was one.
Laurence Duggan, a top man at State and the main foreign policy adviser to the vice-president, was one. David Greenglass, Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg, all nuclear scientists at Los Alamos, were ones. Judith Coplon, senior FBI admin officer controlling the bureau's counter-espionage files, was one. And Gregory Silvermaster was both senior government economist and a spymaster running an entire network of communist agents at every level of government.
That was bad. Worse, how many more were there? For it was true. There really were reds under the beds - and not nice reds who thought we should all live in peace and harmony, but loyal servants of Stalin, eager to impose his state terrorism around the world. With them installed in the heart of US government and of defence, the Soviet Union had been confident enough to go on the global offensive. Post-1945, and Eastern European countries fell one by one to communist parties, communist insurgents began wars in Vietnam and Malaya, and by 1949 were victorious in China, the same year the Soviet Union detonated an exact copy of the US Fat Boy atom bomb.
The next year, North Korea attacked South Korea, nearly consuming it, and the US nuclear threat, which might have deterred that invasion, had been neutralised by the Los Alamos spies.
In other words, in essence, Joe McCarthy was right. He brought the appalling truth to the attention of the people of the US. However, he was also a drunken demagogue and a liar, and often and easily ran out of control. Nonetheless, utterly unlike Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs or the Hollywood Ten, he was, roughly, on the side of democracy. And in the end he was defeated by democratic means which he had himself defended - the institutions of the USA.
Three months before Ed Murrow had even begun his television criticism of McCarthy, President Eisenhower authorised the US army (which of course 10 years before, had first discovered the level of the internal communist threat) to start its own major criticisms of McCarthy and his campaign. But of course, "liberal" Hollywood today would never make a film in which Eisenhower and the US army are seen to defend democracy, so the hero of Goodnight has to belong to the golden media classes. Meanwhile, the knife in McCarthy's reputation is twisted by calling him an anti-Semite - though this disingenuously conceals the unhappy truth that the vast majority of Soviet agents in the US were Jewish.
Moreover, we know this. Had the Hollywood Ten been stooges of that infinitely less chic (and, as it happens, considerably less murderous) school of totalitarianism, fascism, liberal America at the time would have been shrilly demanding their eviction from Hollywood. And equally, they would not be martyrs of the silver screen today.