By Tom Deignan

As Sean O’Driscoll reported in last week’s Irish Voice, George Clooney recently said that John F. Kennedy and witch-hunting senator Joe McCarthy — the villain in Clooney’s new movie Good Night and Good Luck — represent the best and worst of Irish America.

“They were both Irish senators who took very different paths in life. One was a disaster in the television age and one shined in it. Television, in some sense, exposed America and levelled it in some ways,” said Clooney, who also wrote and directed the film about journalist Edward R. Murrow’s heroic 1950s crusade to expose McCarthy.

“(Kennedy and McCarthy) should have been on an even level in the 1950s, but TV had a way of showing up McCarthy to America for everything that he lacked and Kennedy had.”

Clooney, himself usually the subject of drooling press coverage, went on to fawn all over the saintly JFK, saying that Kennedy was the historical figure he would most love to interview.

Perhaps, then, Clooney could have asked JFK about why McCarthy was one of the Kennedy family’s closest pals in the 1950s.

Even though the Kennedys were well-bred Democrats and McCarthy a farmboy Republican, the Irish Catholic bond between the families was very strong. Joe Kennedy donated money to McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy was even a member of McCarthy’s staff.

“The Kennedys were major backers of the senator’s anti-Red jihad,” writes Thomas Maier in his excellent 2003 family history The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings.

The sins of Joe McCarthy have been well documented, and have been for decades. The man, of course, was a menace and demagogue.

But Clooney’s recent comments painting JFK as an Irish angel and McCarthy as a devil is a serious simplification of history. All these years later, people like Clooney — who like to proclaim they are willing to expose dark secrets in America’s closets — are not willing to confront certain dark facts about Irish America. Kennedy — dashing, wealthy, well-spoken — may seem like the easy kind of Irishman to love.

But plenty of Irish Americans adored the gruff, reckless McCarthy. And until we acknowledge the reason why McCarthy was so appealing — to blue collar Irish Americans as well as lace curtain types such as Joe Kennedy — we run the risk of failing to see the warning signs when another McCarthy comes down the pipe.

A brand new book reminds us yet again that many Irish Catholics were enthusiastic supporters of McCarthy.

“Throughout his rise, many observers believed that McCarthy drew especially strong support from Catholics and particularly Irish Catholics. There is certainly strong evidence of this,” writes Timothy J. Meagher in an entry in his informative new book The Columbia Guide to Irish American History.

I’m reminded of a scene in Frank McCourt’s book Tis in which, as a teacher at a vocational high school on Staten Island, he uses McCarthy to illustrate unsavoury facts about an evil character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter.

McCourt, of course, was inundated with calls from angry Irish and Italian American parents.

Does this mean we should excuse McCarthy’s sins or forget that he inflicted significant damage on the America psyche? Of course not.

But it is ironic that George Clooney, of all people, would choose to see Irish American history in such black and white terms. (In fact, McCarthy’s film is shot in black and white.)

In Good Night and Good Luck, the heroic journalist Edward R. Murrow ditches the traditional objectivity of journalism and serves up of a heated critique of McCarthy, thus setting the stage for McCarthy’s downfall. Fair enough.

But these days, that’s pretty much what everyone does on TV. That, you could argue, is Murrow’s legacy.

In fact, what’s the name of that opinionated commentator who claims that today he is the only person willing to expose hypocrisy and evildoing? The one Clooney is always butting heads with?

Oh yeah, Bill O’Reilly.

Maybe that will make a good subject for Clooney’s next film.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)