Red Scare Redux
This week, the Economist eulogized Lieutenant Milo Radulovich, who was expelled from the air force reserve at the height of the Red Scare because of "his close and continuing association with his father and sister." His father had subscribed to a newspaper the government did not like and his sister was photographed picketing a Detroit hotel that had refused admittance to a black singer.
News reporter Edward R. Morrow interviewed Radulovich on "See It Now," despite concerns by CBS that the program would alienate its sponsor and government contractor Alcoa. The broadcast paved the way for the unraveling, censure, and downfall of Senator Eugene McCarthy two years later.
Fifty-two years after his TV appearance with Murrow, Radulovich was hired to advise the makers of a movie about McCarthyism, which led to public demand for him to speak out on civil liberties. The Economist writes:
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 describe practices 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 old Radulovich's supposedly incriminating reading habits. And President George Bush's plans to try “enemy combatants” in military tribunals, with their lower standards than civilian courts, were bringing back memories of the air-force hearing that had condemned the young Mr Radulovich. In that proceeding the air force's lawyer had brandished a sealed envelope supposedly containing evidence, though its contents were never to be seen by the accused or his defenders.