Tail Gunner Joe

It is a source of continual amazement to me that, if a person lives long enough, the opposite of Shakespeare's saying proves true. The bard said something like "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones." The opposite is all too often true. This appears to be the case with McCarthy. The longer he is dead, the more people forget about what a truly vile maggot he was. This movie does a reasonably good job of portraying McCarthy as he was and not as the new bunch of neo-conservatives want him to have been. His reckless disregard for the truth (often under the guise of looking for the truth) made him the functional equivalent of a twentieth century inquisitor. It also points out how Eisenhower stood by and did absolutely nothing to curb McCarthy. Of course, Eisenhower did virtually nothing for eight years, so this was nothing new...

"Tail Gunner Joe" was a three hour blockbuster for NBC on Feb 6 1977, detailing the rise and fall of Senator Joe McCarthy, played by the imposing Peter Boyle, then riding high on his multifaceted Creature in Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein." The left wing slant of the narrative shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but Boyle's inherent likability shines through, enabling the more unsavory traits of McCarthy's nature to slide by in somewhat engaging fashion. Even at this length it's never really boring, guest stars galore offering their version of events to reporter Heather Menzies, the first up being John Carradine's 'Wisconsin Farmer,' discussing Joe's background before going into politics: "they say he left his mark on this country, I don't know about that, but he certainly left his chickens!" Boyle was nominated for an Emmy for his performance, as was Patricia Neal, but only Burgess Meredith took home the trophy as Joseph Welch, the attorney for the US Army who tried to turn McCarthy's accusations back on him, saved for the climax. In actual fact, Welch had indeed hired a young lawyer, Fred Fisher, who truly was employed by a Communist front group, the National Lawyers Guild, so in hindsight 'Tail Gunner Joe' successfully called out Welch, though neither man lived long after these hearings. John Forsythe, Jean Stapleton, Ned Beatty, and Andrew Duggan's Dwight Eisenhower come off best, with Richard M. Dixon still typecast as Vice President Nixon!

A terrific piece showing the insanity that even a democracy can fall victim too, when the public's imagination and fear are stoked by outright lies and liars.

'Tail Gunner Joe' covers the story of Joseph McCarthy (called by President Truman, "that most lamentable mistake of the Almighty") and his skyrocket to national prominence with claims that the State Dept harbored known Communists. This, of course, during a time when America lived in dread fear of Communism and the term 'Commsymp' had been created as a means of destroying a person who couldn't be accurately labelled a 'Communist' so they were 'communist sympathizers' or commsymp's.

The horror of McCarthy's lust for power was beautifully captured in an exchange between McCarthy (Peter Boyle) and Army lawyer Welch (Burgess Meridith, who was himself labelled an enemy of America by McCarthy's gang back in the day), where Welch had hit McCarthy right between the eyes legally, and instead of trying to counter Welch, McCarthy instead names a random member of Welch's team and smears him as a communist. Knowing that just a person's name coming from McCarthy's mouth was a career death sentence, Welch gave his famous remark, "At long last senator - have you no shame?" McCarthy had destroyed a career just because someone made him feel uncomfortable.

It's a matter of some significance that McCarthy went into a career spiral himself not long after being brought down by Welch. Had McCarthy's beliefs and accusations been real, they would have been picked up by another person and brought to fruition - the proof that McCarthy was a liar and a political gangster is in the fact that not one of his list of "207 known names of communists" was ever brought to light, McCarthy never proved the existence of a single communist in the State Department, and he himself died of alcoholism 3 years after his fall from fame.

This TV movie from the late Seventies is one of Peter Boyle's finest performances. He captures everything about Senator McCarthy perfectly, especially the strange cadence of his speech. I must strongly disagree with those who would say that McCarthy has been "vindicated" by history: on the contrary, the evidence is even stronger now than at the time that the witch hunt in which he was engaged was very, very wrong, and completely against what makes America strong. We are who we are because we can dissent and discuss opposing views without fear of assassination, character or otherwise. Joe McCarthy engaged in the politics of fear, and this film makes that point very well. Yes, the film is slanted against McCarthy, but that is because he himself was so one-sided. Again, TAIL GUNNER JOE is well worth seeing, but it doesn't show on air or cable very often. It has not been issued on DVD, but let's hope that it is soon, so that its message cam be heard by any thinking person, and that Peter Boyle's performance can be savored.

The title says it all. "Tail Gunner Joe" was a tag given to the Senator which relied upon the ignorance of the public about World War II aircraft. The rear facing moving guns relied upon a latch that would prevent the rear gunner from shooting off the tail of the airplane by preventing the gun from firing when it pointed at the tail. When the Senator was practicing on the ground one day, he succeeded in shooting off the tail of the airplane. He couldn't have done that if the gun had been properly aligned. The gunnery officer responsible for that admitted, in public, before a camera, that he was responsible -- he had made the error, not the Senator. The fact that the film did not report that fact, shows how one-sided it is. This film was designed to do one thing, destroy the reputation of a complex person.

A much better program was the PBS special done on him. He was a hard working, intelligent, ambitious politician who overcame extraordinary disadvantages to rise to extraordinary heights. He made some mistakes, some serious mistakes, but shooting the tail off an airplane was not one of them.

The popularity of this film is due to the fact that the public likes simple stories, one=sided stories, so that they don't have to think.