Freedom & Tyranny: Murrow, Snyder, Clooney (2 books, 1 play, 1 tv show)
I did not want to like Saturday night's live television broadcast of George Clooney's Broadway play, Good Night, and Good Luck, the first-ever of its kind. The whole idea felt like performative, Hollywood BS to me.
Boy was I wrong. The production was sharp, the performances strong, and the historical echoes not just relevant, but disturbingly timely.
Clooney first made Good Night, and Good Luck into a film in 2005, then adapted it for the stage, where it opened to rave reviews on Broadway this past March.
Clooney plays CBS News icon Edward R. Murrow, whose courageously bold attempt to expose Senator Joseph McCarthy — "the junior Senator from Wisconsin" — and his reckless crusade to root out Communists in 1950s America lands with unsettling relevance today. Murrow and his team at CBS, the same network currently being targeted by President Donald Trump, challenge McCarthy's lies and abuses, even as corporate sponsors urge them to back down.
The broadcast ends with a powerful, deeply unsettling video montage of news footage from the past 75 years — a stark reminder of what our country has endured, and how fragile our republic has become.
Clooney stands at a lectern in the foreground. As the montage ends and the spotlight settles back on him, the audience erupts in thunderous applause. But Clooney isn't smiling or celebrating. He looks down, away. Almost embarrassed. If you look closely, you can see the emotion in his eyes — how heavy the moment is for him, and how heavy it should be for all of us.
When the clapping fades, he asks theatergoers and the live broadcast audience: "What are you willing to do?"
It’s a gut-punch of a moment. And one every American ought to take seriously.
After the broadcast, I reached for my copies of Timothy Snyder's On Freedom (2024) and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) — books I return to when I need a clear reminder of what’s at stake in present day America. Snyder, a Yale historian and fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, has long warned about the cost of forgetting: forgetting what can happen when we stop paying attention, when we turn our backs on the past, or worse, when we no longer care about the future.
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
-Timothy Snyder, ON TYRANNY
Snyder is one of the most important voices of our time. And one I urge you to follow. His Substack newsletter, Thinking About..., is an excellent and deeply informative resource. Below is a poster you’re welcome to print, share, and paint the internet with. I hope you do.
