TV REVIEWS : McCarthyism Dissected by One Who Fought Back

The entertainment industry’s nightmare years--the blacklisting era of Joe McCarthy, loyalty oaths and Red Channels--seem eerily topical as assaults on expression rumble onward. If communism is out of style, witch hunts never are.

“John Henry Faulk: The Man Who Beat the Blacklist” (at 9 tonight on Channels 28 and 15) is a primer in how the blacklist actually worked. Its centerpiece is a spellbinding interview conducted by Bill Moyers with the late Texas humorist, a blacklist victim who didn’t disappear or go to jail or to Europe.

He did lose his career, but he also fought the witch-hunters in court and won, a victory that spelled the end of Aware Inc. and its deadly Red Channels, a publication listing alleged Red sympathizers that was distributed to movie, radio and TV executives for summary action. CBS couldn’t take the heat from sponsors when folksy radio star Faulk was branded and fired him at the height of his fame in 1957.

Faulk talks about all this with a down-home candor and humor that suggests Mark Twain, Will Rogers and Jonathan Winters rolled into one. The program, hosted by Studs Terkel, is also a throwback to the television journalism of Edward R. Murrow, a pointed, riveting dissection by Faulk spreading the gospel of the First Amendment in language that makes the document seem new. Faulk also names “the garbage collectors,” as he calls them, who made us frightened of our own freedoms.

The interview was videotaped last year. Faulk died from cancer in April, and this program is the legacy of a patriot--a word that Terkel compels you to re-examine when he sums up Faulk’s life: “When John Henry Faulk died on April 9, 1990, Bill Moyers and I lost a friend, Texas lost an original, and America lost a patriot.”

The unlikely cherubic-faced Faulk didn’t wage his court battle alone. He discloses how Murrow put up $7,500 of his own money to help Faulk hire famed attorney Louis Nizer to clear his name. When Faulk said he couldn’t accept the gift, Murrow replied, “I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for America.”

The finding in New York Federal Court in 1962 resulted in an unprecedented libel award of $3.5 million to Faulk. An appeals court whittled it to $725,00; Aware Inc.’s key financial backer and defendant (a grocery chain king named Laurence A. Johnson) had died, and ultimately Faulk collected only $175,000, which went to pay back loans.

“There’s nothing like the relief of doing what you know is the right thing,” Faulk tells Moyers. The words sound almost quaint. How far we’ve come. As the late patriot also laments: “The meaning of McCarthyism is not taught in our schools.”