Ann Coulter Skewers 'Good Night, and Good Luck'

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been A Second-Rate Filmmaker?

By Ann Coulter
FrontPageMagazine.com
November 17, 2005

As noted here previously, George Clooney's movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," about pious parson Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, failed to produce one person unjustly accused by McCarthy. Since I described McCarthy as a great American patriot defamed by liberals in my 2003 book, "Treason," liberals have had two more years to produce a person – just one person – falsely accused by McCarthy. They still can't do it.

Meanwhile, I can prove that Murrow's good friend Lawrence Duggan was a Soviet spy responsible for having innocent people murdered. The brilliant and perceptive journalist Murrow was not only unaware of the hundreds of Soviet spies running loose in the U.S. government, he was also unaware that his own dear friend Duggan was a Soviet spy – his friend on whose behalf corpses littered the Swiss landscape.

Contrary to the image of the Black Night of Fascism (BNOF) under McCarthy leading to mass suicide with bodies constantly falling on the heads of pedestrians in Manhattan, Duggan was the only suicide. After being questioned by the FBI, Duggan leapt from a window. Of course, given the people he was doing business with, he may have been pushed.

After Duggan's death, Murrow, along with the rest of the howling establishment, angrily denounced the idea that Duggan could possibly have been disloyal to America.
Well, now we know the truth. Decrypted Soviet cables and mountains of documents from Soviet archives prove beyond doubt that Lawrence Duggan was one of Stalin's most important spies. "McCarthyism" didn't kill him; his guilt did.

During the height of the Soviet purges in the mid-'30s, as millions of innocents were being tortured, exiled and killed on Stalin's orders, Murrow's good pal Duggan was using his position at the State Department to pass important documents to the Soviets. The documents were so sensitive, Duggan had to return the originals to the State Department before the end of the day. Some were so important, they were sent directly to Stalin and Molotov.

On at least one occasion, Murrow's dear friend Duggan sat with his Soviet handler for an hour as the handler photographed 60 documents for the motherland. In other words, Duggan was the kind of disloyal, two-faced, back-stabbing weasel you rarely see outside of the entertainment industry. (He certainly was perceptive, that Murrow.)

All this time, people Duggan knew personally were being falsely accused and executed back in the Soviet Union. Duggan expressed concern about Stalin's purges with his Soviet handler, but he didn't stop spying. As Allen Weinstein describes it in "The Haunted Wood," Duggan was mostly concerned about being falsely accused by Stalin himself someday.

Because of Murrow's good buddy Duggan, innocent people were killed. Not just the millions murdered during the purges while Duggan was earning "employee of the month" awards from Stalin. At least one man was murdered solely to protect Duggan's identity as a Soviet spy.

Ignatz Reiss had been the head of Soviet secret police in Europe. As such, he was aware of Soviet agents in the United States, including Duggan. But unlike Duggan, Reiss was stunned by Stalin's bloody purges. In 1937, Reiss defected from the Soviet Union, threatening to expose Duggan if they came after him. It was his death warrant.

Two months later, Soviet secret police tracked Reiss to a restaurant in Switzerland. According to the official memo describing Reiss' murder, Soviet agents dragged Reiss out of the restaurant, shoved him in a car, shot him and dumped his body by the side of the road. (Or, in Soviet parlance, he was "debriefed.")

Soviet officials later happily informed Duggan's handler in America: "[Reiss] is liquidated, [but] not yet his wife ... Now the danger that [Duggan] will be exposed because of [Reiss] is considerably decreased." Despite all Clooney's double-sourced fact-checking, he missed the part about Murrow's good friend Duggan being an accomplice to murder.

To hear these liberals carry on, "McCarthyism" was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the universe. No one has ever been so persecuted or so heroic as Hollywood actors in the '50s.

At the exact same time as these crybabies were wailing about McCarthyism, there was much worse going on in the parts of the world so admired by the Hollywood left. It's not as if we have to go back to the Peloponnesian War to find greater suffering than that of Hollywood drama queens during the BNOF under McCarthyism.

I believe anyone would find it preferable to have been a "target" of McCarthy in the '50s than to have been an ordinary citizen living in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, the Ukraine or any nation infected by the Red Plague.

Thanks to McCarthy, and no thanks to Murrow, the worst horror to befall an American citizen in the '50s was the dire prospect of losing a movie credit – although, since then, I suppose having to watch a George Clooney movie would run a close second.

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Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).