Originally Posted by cmac2012

What, and we weren't busy infiltrating the Soviet Union? I think we were way too unappreciative of the strength and appeal of our system. Communism is a flawed system, deeply flawed because it disempowers individual innitiative too much, way too much.

Some caution was useful, but McCarthy got caught up in being the center of attention and went about 27 orders of magnitude too far. The film showed the footage of McCarthy fabricating charges against Murrow because Murrow had the audacity to question the trashing of people's careers and lives based on hearsay and sealed "evidence." McCarthy's assumption that anyone who had an interest in understanding what made communists tick, even reading a Serbian newspaper in one case, was a menace and a communist was way over the top.

Sorry, I don't find his instincts at all correct. He was a self-righteous, vengeful man who loved the spotlight. Watch the movie. It's all recorded fact, except for the off camera moments which were well researched.

As for the Soviets infiltrating our nuclear research depts., what would we have done if the Soviets had 1,000 warheads pointed at us and were talking about using them, and we had none? Thank God Eisenhower had enough wisdom and humanity to keep a lid on all the joint chiefs who thought nuking Russia and China was a good idea.