Posted on Sunday, December 02, 2007 - 1:57 pm:

Milo Radulovich

Nov 29th 2007
From The Economist print edition


Milo Radulovich, avenging victim of the red scare, died on November 19th, aged 81


IF A single date marked the beginning of the end for the red scare whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy in post-war America, it was October 20th 1953. That was the day a whole television programme called “See It Now” was devoted to “The Case Against Lieut Milo Radulovich A0589839”.

Mr Radulovich was in most ways unexceptional. The son of an immigrant carworker in Detroit, he had become an air cadet at the age of 17 and then a member of the army air forces, in which he trained as a meteorologist. In 1952, after eight years' service, he was discharged, but remained in the air-force reserve. He got married, had two children, took two jobs and enrolled at the University of Michigan. A year later, though, he was handed a letter telling him he was being expelled from the air force. His “close and continuing association with his father and his sister”, he learned, had made him a security risk.

Mr Radulovich was not himself accused of being a communist, but his father was another matter. A Montenegrin Serb by birth, he liked to follow events in the land of his birth, and one of the Serbo-Croat newspapers to which he subscribed reflected the heterodox communism of Yugoslavia, the southern Slav union into which Serbia and Montenegro had been swept up. Mr Radulovich's sister was even more suspect. She was a leftist, and had been photographed picketing a Detroit hotel that had denied entry to Paul Robeson, a black singer and actor of international renown, who campaigned for civil rights and was openly sympathetic to communism. [maybe the book cadillac? YAY Detroit!] Thus was Mr Radulovich damned.

Not by everyone, it should be said. Determined to fight his corner but unable at first to find a lawyer prepared to take his case, he eventually found one who persuaded him to tell his tale to the Detroit News. A front-page story prompted a second lawyer to come forward—both gave their services free—and another Detroit News article caught the attention of Edward Murrow, the host of “See It Now”, a CBS news and documentary programme broadcast to the nation from New York.



Fanfare for the common man
Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly, had been wanting to make a programme about the red scare's witch-hunts for some time. Friendly quickly realised that in Mr Radulovich's story they had the perfect “little picture” to illustrate the big picture of McCarthyism, which, they believed, threatened not just academics, Hollywood entertainers and New York intellectuals but all Americans, even an unpretentious Midwesterner like Mr Radulovich.

CBS was less enthusiastic. Its bosses did not want to antagonise Alcoa, the company that both sponsored “See It Now” and sold quantities of aluminium to the air force. The programme was eventually broadcast, but Murrow and Friendly had themselves to pay the $1,500 needed for an advertisement in the New York Times: their employers were in a funk.

The viewers' response, though, exceeded all expectations. Letters poured in by the thousand and almost all were indignant at the treatment of Mr Radulovich. A month later he was cleared of all charges and reinstated by the air force. ...

...

Mr Radulovich's great meteorological interest was the interaction of wind and fire—a fitting concern for one who could never escape the scorching he had suffered in an era of super-heated scare-mongering.