'Good Night, and Good Luck' (CNN, 7 June 2025) – Part 1

 

[On Saturday, 7 June 2025, Cable News Network, the multinational news organization generally known as CNN, broadcast a live performance of the Broadway play about a period in the life and career of renowned newsman Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck, by actor, producer, and director George Clooney and Grant Heslov, a writer and producer.  

[The broadcast was the first time that a Broadway play had been performed live on television while it was still on stage in New York.  (In June 2016, BroadwayHD produced a live stream of the Roundabout Theater Company’s production of She Loves Me from Studio 54, earning the on-demand digital streaming media company a Guinness World Record for the first live stream of a Broadway show.  It wasn’t televised, however.)  It was also the first time CNN had presented a play of any kind, whether Broadway, Off-Broadway, or regional, or, indeed, any kind of scripted, dramatic performance, including films (other than documentaries).

[(Broadway plays, both musicals and straight dramas and comedies, have been recorded for broadcast, mostly on the Public Broadcasting Service’s outlets such as Great Performances and the now-discontinued American Playhouse and the WNET [PBS’s outlet in New York City] series Theater Close-Up.  See reports on Rick On Theater for “The Originalist (PBS)” [17 July 2017], “One Man, Two Guvnors (PBS)” [21 January 2021], and N/A [9 September 2026].  Other networks and streaming services have aired recorded plays over the years as well, such as Come From Away [2017-22] on Apple TV+ [10 September 2021] or Waitress [2016-20/2021] on Max [14 February 2025].

[(Live play performances were a staple of television’s early days, when everything was live, including scripts written expressly for TV such as Requiem for a Heavyweight by Rod Serling [1956; remade as a theatrical film in 1962 by Columbia Pictures] and Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet [1955; stage play: Broadway, 1957; film: Paramount Pictures, 1960], and have occurred even in recent decades.  The last live telecast of a performance of a Broadway play, as far as I know, was Annie Live! on NBC on 2 December 2021 [see “Annie Live! (NBC, 2 December 2021)” on ROT, 7 February 2022].

[(None of these productions, however, was shown while the play was still in performance on Broadway—and none was broadcast worldwide.  I discuss this practice in my report on Rogers and Hammerstein’s live Cinderella in “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” [25 April 2013].

[(While there have been no official announcements of broadcasting another Broadway play live on CNN, both the network and industry figures have expressed a strong interest in repeating the format.  The success of the GNGL broadcast has led to suggestions within the theater community that Broadway should consider live television broadcasts to reach wider audiences, and executives at CNN noted that the network is actively looking for more “innovative, experimental ways to move the needle,” though it wasn’t certain the next event would be another Broadway show.

[The GNGL broadcast, entitled Good Night, and Good Luck Live: CNN Special Event, was a one-off event; no repeats were scheduled.  The live performance of the show, however, was streamed on Max, the American on-demand subscription streaming service owned by Warner Bros. (current owner of CNN and distributor of the 2005 GNGL film), at the same time as the CNN broadcast, but no further showings were available.  (nb: The network was acquired by Paramount Skydance, now owner of CBS, in September 2026.)

[The TV broadcast was a live telecast of the penultimate performance of the Broadway show, not a specially mounted performance for TV.  Though CNN is normally a commercial station, the performance was shown without ads, in accord with Broadway practice.  (There were two shows on 7 June, a matinee at 2 p.m. and the evening performance, the latter of which was the one televised.)  That was a first for a Broadway production: the live broadcast on national television of a regular performance of a Broadway play as it was being performed at its home theater, the Winter Garden.

[The performance was broadcast with 21 cameras placed around the theater and a crew of 250 people (in addition to the regular Broadway stage crew) to capture the show for the home audience.  The viewers in the Winter Garden Theatre during the broadcast were ordinary ticketholders, according to reports, who’d purchased tickets to see the show.  The theater was open to the public as it would have been for any other performance.

[The stage play Good Night, and Good Luck, both a political play and a backstage drama, was adapted from Clooney and Heslov’s screenplay for the 2005 film of the same name and started previews on 12 March 2025.   It opened on 3 April and ended its limited engagement on 8 June (22 previews and 77 regular performances), the day after the telecast and the day of the ceremony for the 78th Tony Awards.  Good Night, and Good Luck was nominated for five Tony Awards (but didn’t win any), including Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for Clooney, who received a Special Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway Debut Performer/Playwright.

[The 1 hour-40 minute, intermissionless, one-act play is set in 1954, when on Tuesday, 9 March, at 10:30-11 p.m. (See It Now’s regular timeslot in those years), newsman Edward R. Murrow, in a live “Report on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy,” attacked the junior senator from Wisconsin’s anti-communist crusade on the reporter’s television show,  a newsmagazine and documentary series on the Columbia Broadcasting System.  (The filmed response appearance of McCarthy [1908-57; U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57] for See It Now, which is featured in the play, was on 6 April entitled “Address by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.”)

[The GNGL stage production was directed by David Cromer, a 2017 Drama Desk- and 2018 Tony-winner for direction of The Band’s Visit (2017).  (The TV director for CNN was Micah Bickham.)  The scenic design was by Scott Pask, the costume design by Brenda Abbandandolo, the lighting design by Heather Gilbert, the sound design by Daniel Kluger, and the projection design by David Bengali. 

[The play starred the then-64-year-old Clooney (b. 1961), who played CBS executive Fred Friendly in the movie, as Murrow (1908-65), who was 46 at the time.  (Murrow was portrayed in the movie by David Strathairn [b. 1949], who earned an Oscar nomination).  It was Clooney’s first stage role since 1986 and his Broadway début (see “George Clooney speaks about his Broadway debut in ‘Good Night, And Good Luck’” in “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 2" (30 March 2025) on this blog; details about Clooney’s stage début are included in that post). 

[GNGL may have been a major point in Clooney’s stage career, but it wasn’t his maiden live TV performance.  On 25 September 1997, he appeared as Dr. Ross in “Ambush,” the first episode of season four of NBC’s ER.  On Clooney and Anthony Edwards’s (Dr. Greene) suggestion, the episode was aired live.  On 9 April 2000, the actor produced (and appeared as Col. Jack Grady in) a live television remake of the 1964 Sydney Lumet movie Fail Safe on CBS (the network at the center of Good Night, and Good Luck).

[The other cast members included Carter Hudson as Joseph Wershba, a reporter and writer for See It Now; Ilana Glazer as Shirley Wershba, a reporter and producer on See It Now; Glenn Fleshler as Fred Friendly, creator, with Murrow, of See It Now; Paul Gross as William F. Paley, CEO of CBS; Clark Gregg as Don Hollenbeck, CBS newscaster and commentator, and associate of Murrow and Friendly; Mac Brandt as Colonel Anderson, a fictional Air Force spokesman who tries to influence See It Now’s coverage; Will Dagger as Don Hewitt, first director of See It Now; and Christopher Denham as John Aaron, member of the production team of See It Now. Senator McCarthy was seen, as in the movie, only in archival video footage.

[For TV, CNN scheduled Good Night, and Good Luck: Pre-Show at 6:30-7 in front of the Winter Garden, with CNN’s chief investigative correspondent Pamela Brown interviewing special guests of the broadcast.  At the bottom of the screen during the introduction, CNN ran a chyron with the identities of the guests, as well as a count-down clock with the time till the curtain and the names and credits, ostensibly excerpted from the show’s Playbill, of the cast, crew, and creative staff of the Broadway production of Good Night, and Good Luck.

[The pre-show guests included John Berman, a CNN news anchor, who provided a profile of Murrow; CNN Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter, who spoke about the state of journalism in the U.S. today and compared it to the atmosphere of the 1950s and Murrow’s concerns at the time; and Kara Swisher, a CNN Contributor who also hosts two podcasts: On with Kara Swisher, which features interviews with prominent figures in business, tech, media, and politics, and Pivot, co-hosted with Scott Galloway (public speaker, academic, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur) and offers commentary on current events in tech, business, and politics. 

[Swisher, who also returned later as a panelist on the post-show segment, discussed Murrow’s innovative reporting and broadcasting style and techniques from World War II through See It Now, emphasizing his use of live radio and television, which were pioneering practices in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.

[On video, Brown also spoke with members of the company during the half-hour pre-show, including Clooney; actor Glenn Fleshler, who played Fred Friendly (the role Clooney played in the film); stage director David Cromer; and scenic designer Scott Pask.  At the end of the pre-show, CNN political commentator and anchor of the network’s Anderson Cooper 360°, Anderson Cooper, began the introduction to the play’s 7 p.m. performance.

[At 9 p.m., after the performance, was a post-show program, Good Night, and Good Luck: Truth and Power hosted by Cooper.  (The post-show actually started a little before 9, as the time allotted for the performance was two hours and the play only runs 100 minutes.)  Truth and Power focused on the themes of journalism and accountability and included a discussion with a panel of journalists and experts as well as interviews with stage director Cromer and members of the cast.

[On 30 March 2025, I posted “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 2," a collection of articles and television segments focusing on Clooney and his imminent début on Broadway.  It includes the following pieces:

•   “George Clooney speaks about his Broadway debut in ‘Good Night, And Good Luck’” by Dave Carlin (CBS News New York [WCBS, Channel 2 in New York City], 7 February 2025)

•   “George Clooney shares thoughts on making his Broadway debut in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’” by Joelle Garguilo (Eyewitness News [WABC, Channel 7 in New York City], 7 February 2025)

•   “George Clooney makes Broadway debut, telling the story of pioneering journalist Edward R. Murrow” by Jon Wertheim (60 Minutes [CBS News], 23 March 2025).

[There are notes and commentary in these posted articles bearing on Clooney and Good Night, and Good Luck.  (Part 1 of the two-part “Film Stars Twinkle” covers the production of Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal [23 March-8 June 2025].)

[All quotations from the play and the accompanying pre- and post-shows are from my own transcription of the dialogue as I recorded it on DVR on 7 June 2025 as I watched the live CNN telecast.  Quotations from other sources are footnoted in my file copy and are available on request (by leaving a Comment on the post) with an e-mail address to which I can send the citation list.]

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK LIVE: CNN SPECIAL EVENT

[This performance report grew rather long, so I’ve broken it into three parts.  Below is Part 1; Parts 2 and 3 will follow on 27 and 30 September.]

After viewing the 6:30 Good Night, and Good Luck: Pre-Show on Saturday evening, 7 June, I proceeded to take in the live broadcast of the George Clooney-Grant Heslov docu-play derived from their 2005 filmscript of the same title.  This was a telecast of the second-to-last regular performance of the Broadway play, transmitted from the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway at West 50th Street, with an actual theater audience in the house.

Filmed or broadcast plays are seldom the same as a live performance seen in person.  Probably the first difference theater people will point out is that an in-person show is three-dimensional.  That applies both to the actors and to the stage environment—the stage space and then the set that’s built within it.  TV is two-dimensional, creating the illusion of depth and roundness.

Then, too, in-person theater is viewed by a large audience—the Winter Garden seats 1,526 theatergoers, the sixth largest Broadway house (of 41) in New York City—all sharing the same encounter at the same time.  This creates a communal experience that watching a telecast at home alone or with a few others doesn’t.

This theater community, made up mostly of strangers, will have an effect on our response to the play that is less pronounced when we watch on television even with a group made up of family and friends.  And this is even without considering the event nature of going out to the theater, waiting till the doors open, then hanging out in the lobby before the house doors are opened, finding our seats, and reading the program until the lights dim and the curtain goes up or the first actor makes an entrance.  This is part of the magic of theater that can’t be duplicated in our living rooms watching a small screen (or even a large one).

As I’ll mention as well, close-ups, a film and TV technique we don’t usually get in live theater, are another significant difference, as are the 20-odd cameras each revealing a small section of the stage with the TV director, Micah Bickham, deciding on what to fucus the audience’s attention (instead of the actors and the action drawing the spectators’ notice), therefore determining what part of the stage we look at, is another.

(In Broadway’s GNGL, there are, in point of fact, film-style close-ups, especially of Clooney, since many of the simulated TV broadcasts—as distinguished from the archival video clips of actual telecasts—are close-ups on the monitors while the live actors are seen in full on stage.  In a meta-theatrical touch—somewhat ironic, I think—these video projections are live feeds from cameras in the stage set—as differentiated from the CNN cameras for the live telecast.)

The camera’s eye is also narrowing.  In person, we can scan the whole stage—I sometimes like to check out what the actors out of focus are up to while someone else is speaking—but in movies and television, it’s the director who makes the decision about what the spectator sees.  This same phenomenon means that I also never got a good view of the GNGL set in its entirety.

As Robert Lloyd, a Los Angeles Times television critic—and who better to make this observation—notes that “there are obvious differences between a movie, where camera angles and editing drive the story[, and a play].

A stage play . . . offers a single view (differing, of course, depending on where one sits), within which you direct your attention as you will.  What illusions it offers are, as it were, stage magic.  It’s choreographed, like a dance, which actors must repeat night after night, putting feeling into lines they may speak to one another, but send out to the farthest corners of the theater.

Good Night, and Good Luck Live: CNN Special Event, as the TV broadcast was called, starts with a camera at house left, apparently from a box up above the auditorium in front of the proscenium, looking down at the audience as they settle in their seats.  (We can see that the boxes along the house-right wall are unoccupied except by lighting instruments.) The house lights are still up and one can see a bit of the stage at the left of the television screen with the curtain closed.

(A word about directions in theater for ROTters who aren’t theater folk—or who are used to the non-English equivalents; other languages have their own jargon: in a proscenium theater, which, like most of its Broadway kin, is what the Winter Garden, built in 1911, is, stage directions are given from the perspective of an actor on stage facing the audience. 

(A proscenium theater is a performance space featuring an arch that frames the stage, separating the audience, which faces the stage directly, from the performers. In other configurations, such as arena [in-the-round] or thrust [audience on three sides], actors and directors have to find alternative ways of describing movements around the playing area.

(So, “stage left” and “stage right” refer to the actors’ left and right when facing the audience.  “House left” and “house right,” by contrast, refer to the spectators’ perspective.  [Though ‘house’ can refer to the theater building, short for ‘playhouse,’ it’s commonly used to designate the part of the theater occupied by the audience, also known as the ‘auditorium.’]

(In the interest of completeness, the rear of the stage area, farthest from the audience, is called ‘upstage’ while the front, nearest the audience—at the proscenium arch—is ‘downstage.’  This is because old proscenium houses commonly had “raked stages” that were higher at the back and sloped down toward the audience—so the back was literally ‘up’ and the front was ‘down.’  [If you’re curious about how this can work—or not—when you’re actually trying to perform on it, read my anecdote “A Hatful of Rain and the Disasters that Almost Were” in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories” (6 December 2010).]

(The area the farthest downstage, just behind or in front of the proscenium arch, including in front of the main curtain, is designated “in one” [see below].)

The view shifts to a different camera apparently in the front aisle at house left showing theatergoers from the front as the house lights come down and there’s the customary rustling as the spectators get ready for the play to start.

The hour-and-40-minute one-act starts with a jazz singer (Georgia Heers) at a recording session.  Initially, it’s dark with a dim light illuminating the closed curtain; we hear only a woman’s voice at first. 

(You can see already that the view through a camera has changed the way I’m seeing this performance as distinguished from the way I’d have seen it in person: I’d have been in the audience, not looking down at it from the side and then the front of the house.)

Then the lights behind the curtain, revealed to be a scrim, come up (the stage production’s lighting is designed by Heather Gilbert) and the singer appears in profile behind a large floor mic, dressed in a shiny (silk or satin, perhaps) lime-green gown and matching gloves.  She sings Victor Young and Edward Heyman’s 1952 ballad “When I Fall in Love.”  The program lists her as Ella—though I don’t believe anyone addresses her by name.

Ella’s a fictional character inspired by and evocative of jazz singers of the 1950s, especially Ella Fitzgerald (1917-96), whose voice played a significant role in defining the musicscape of the era.  Ella’s performances, interspersed throughout the play, contribute to setting the atmosphere and serve as emotional anchors throughout the play. 

She and the musicians don’t interact with the dramatic characters of the play, but they serve as a kind of commentary on and counterpoint to the central narrative.  It’s not quite background music because the dialogue and action are suspended during these interludes, and there is some banter among the musical performers. 

The songs do occasionally reflect what’s just occurred on stage or is about to occur.  After a plenary meeting about the McCarthy broadcast, for instance, Ella opens her third number with “There may be trouble ahead” (“Let’s Face the Music and Dance”; 1936; Irving Berlin [1888-1989]).  And when it’s revealed that the reading matter of one HUAC target has been scrutinized, Ella sings Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got My Eyes on You” (1939) evocatively.

The interludes, however, don’t usually further the documentary drama’s narrative, and they also slow down the play which is already short of strong dramatic energy.  Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post even asserts that the musical interludes sap what little fire he found in the play (“this attractive but empty show”) as it is and David Gordon of TheaterMania estimates that “without them, the running time would be around 80 minutes.

Ella’s first appearance is solo, behind the scrim in a spotlight—in the rest of their scenes, the musical combo appears in a small set in the stage-left quadrant of the second-level in the newsroom complex and seems to be engaging in a recording session—and when she finishes her number, she “disappears” as her light blacks out from her head down like a zipper being closed. 

(A scrim in theater is a curtain made of open-weave fabric that appears opaque when lit from the front, but semitransparent when the front lighting goes out and lights come up on the scene behind it, allowing the audience to see through it.)

A spot light comes up on Edward R. Murrow, in the person of George Clooney, down stage “in one,” wearing a tux and with a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, in a position center stage behind a lectern.  In the telecast, Clooney’s shown in medium close-up from the waist up (another difference from an in-person viewing).

The lighting is slightly dim, and as it brightens, Murrow surveys the room in front of him.  He starts speaking when the lights are up fully: “This just might do nobody any good.  At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and you all may be accused of giving hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts.”

He’s obviously addressing a group of some kind (for which the in-house audience stands in), though the occasion isn’t identified.  Except for the ending of the play, which is a continuation of this moment, all of Murrow’s other speeches are taken from television broadcasts, so this one stands out.

(This monologue turns out to be a version, slightly altered for Good Night, and Good Luck, of a historical speech Murrow gave to the Radio-Television News Directors Association [RTNDA; now the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA)] as the keynote address at the 1958 RTNDA convention in Chicago.   Known as the “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech, it was delivered on 15 October 1958, 4½ years after See It Now’s “Report on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy” aired and a year-and-a-half after McCarthy died.

(Some of the changes in the speech are almost certainly deliberate, to make it more universal—such as where Clooney’s Murrow says “media” instead of the original “television”—and to leave out digressions, but other instances seem more like just the way actor Clooney memorized the speech. 

(In a 2 June 2025 interview on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, Clooney acknowledged, “We gave away a thousand tickets to students [on] two different nights, and they all know these speeches.  I screw them up sometimes and they let you know.  I’ll say one word wrong and you’ll hear, ‘Nope!’”

(The linked online version of the speech purports to be the verbatim text, but the site, which is the webpage of the successor organization to the one to which Murrow addressed his remarks in 1958, doesn’t state what the source was—a contemporaneous recording that was later transcribed or a typescript supplied by Murrow’s office.  In any case, the quotations from this speech used in this report are from the play’s text as delivered from the stage, irrespective of the text of the speech as posted on rtdna.org.)

Murrow had used the speech to critique the state of television news of his day, warning against its potential to prioritize entertainment and superficiality over serious journalism and public enlightenment.  He feared that without a commitment to responsible and informative broadcasting, television could become “merely wires and lights in a box.”  

Clooney and Heslov use the speech, to which Murrow returns at the end of the play, to bookend the narrative of Murrow’s confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the climate of fear and censorship during the McCarthy era.  (Some of the changes are clearly meant to emphasize the parallels with today’s media issues, at least as Clooney and Heslov see them.)  It sets up the debate the play enacts.

Though, as Jon Wertheim (b. 1970), a correspondent for 60 Minutes since 2017, comments in his 23 March 2025 interview of the actor for the CBS News program, “Clooney and Heslov conceived of the story of ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ in the early 2000s, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq.”  (Operation Iraqi Freedom began on 19 March 2003.  It ended on 15 December 2011 when combat operations in Iraq ceased.)  “I just thought it was a good time to talk about when the press held government to account,” explained Clooney on 60 Minutes. 

When the collaborators decided to revise the screenplay into a stage drama, that translated into “Trump throwing Washington into a tumult,” noted the New York Times.  “You take a narrative, you make it up, don’t worry about facts, don’t worry about repercussions,” said Clooney, so the play “feels more like it’s about truth, not just the press.  Facts matter.” 

Nonetheless, there are a great number of invocations of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the First Amendment in the commentary before and after the CNN performance, and not a few interviewees cite the citizenry’s responsibility “to speak out” whenever these rights are being infringed—by blatantly McCarthyist tactics, I might add. 

As Clooney, himself, put it in the Wertheim interview: “When the other three estates fail, when the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches fail us, the fourth estate”—the press—"has to succeed.  Has to succeed . . . .”

It’s interesting, I must say, that a film script written 20 years before the play’s début and 10 years before Trump entered politics, could still encapsulate the timbre of today’s times with respect to journalism so perfectly.  In 2005, Clooney and Heslov couldn’t have predicted a Trump administration, and when the play was announced in mid-March 2024, Trumps re-election (5 November 2024; took office: 20 January 2025) hadn’t happened yet.

Of course, there’s a connection between McCarthy and Trump that could account for similarities of tactics and behavior, making the eras of the two men comparable: both were advised and heavily influenced by Roy Cohn (1927-86; lawyer and prosecutor; McCarthy’s chief counsel, 1951-54; attorney to Donald Trump, 1973-86).  Trump reportedly asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” in 2017 when he felt he needed a lawyer who would protect his interests and aggressively defend him, as Cohn was known to have done for his clients, often employing unethical tactics.

This is, as it happens, emblematic of the main reason I was disappointed in this highly praised play—but I’ll get to that later.

The telecast attracted a viewership of 7.34 million across various platforms, including 2 million U.S. TV-watchers and 1.7 million viewers abroad.  Good Night, and Good Luck was the number one program on cable television in the U.S. on 7 June.  155,000 theatergoers saw the show in person during its run at the 1,526-seat Winter Garden.

The performance that was broadcast was well received by the in-house audience.  There was boisterous applause at many moments during the performance, usually after one of Murrow’s fervent speeches.  Of course, the theater audience was aware that their attendance was part of a televised event, and they knew cameras were present for transmitting.  I wonder how much the response might have been generated, or at least enhanced because theatergoers were cognizant that they were being broadcast worldwide.

I got the sense, furthermore, that the audience wasn’t just responding to Clooney’s delivery—which was quite fine, by the way, especially his facial expressions (which got a lot of close-ups on the TV monitors)—and not even for the passion Murrow had put into them when he composed them, but for the socio-political points the monologues made with respect to today’s conditions in journalism and politics.

Broadway’s audiences have often been labeled largely “liberal,” and if they are, they certainly showed their colors on 7 June.  Of course, they got a lot of stimulus from the Clooney-Heslov-Murrow script.

This, ironically, is endemic to Good Night, and Good Luck.  (Confession: I haven’t seen the 2005 movie, so I can only assume the same characteristics that pertain to the play also were in the film as well.)  GNGL presents two debates intertwined, and Clooney and Heslov’s dramaturgy exemplifies the second one—perhaps unwittingly and perhaps deliberately.

The first debate is the McCarthy-Murrow confrontation, and that conclusion is foregone.  History has already declared McCarthy the villain of this Red Scare episode and Murrow the hero.  It’s a done deal: McCarthy Bad – Murrow Good.  -30-.

But the other question is still in contention: What should journalism be?  Just facts, with no opinion, or, as William Paley (1901-90; Paul Gross on stage) puts it to Murrow in the play, “news with a dash of commentary.”  Paley, who built the Columbia Broadcasting System and became its longtime president (president: 1928-46; chairman of the board: 1946-83), and Connie Chung (b. 1946), a former co-anchor of CBS Evening News; former CNN, NBC, ABC anchor; and a member of Anderson Cooper’s post-show panel hold the first view: facts without opinion.  Murrow and Abby Phillip (b. 1998), another panelist and anchor of CNN’s NewsNight, espouse the second position: news with attitude. 

As justification for Paley’s standpoint versus Murrow’s, Paley asks: “What happens when it isn’t Edward R. Murrow minding the store?”  I think we’ve seen the answer to that now. 

(Has anyone forgotten the volatile 2017 discussion of counselor to Donald Trump Kellyanne Conway’s invocation of “alternative facts” to explain away false statements by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer?  If that’s too far in the past, what about J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee in the fall of 2024, defending his false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets by asserting that he had to “create stories so that the American media actually pays attention”?  He continued to make these claims even after they were debunked by local officials, who stated there was no evidence to support them.

(On the other side of the political divide, when questions arose concerning Democratic President Joe Biden’s mental capacity either to be an effective candidate or to handle the presidency if reelected, his supporters and members of his White House and campaign staffs swore up and down that he was in complete control.  The media either parroted these testimonials or questioned them, always depending on where the reporters or commentators stood politically.

(Biden’s disastrous performance at the debate on 27 June 2024 put the lie to Biden’s professions and the testimony of his supporters.  It became clear that, whatever the state of the incumbent’s mental health, he was an ineffective and inadequate presidential candidate, though, except for the Trump supporters, few media outlets took any kind of stand. 

(As calls for Biden to end his candidacy increased, George Clooney, a staunch Biden supporter, published an op-ed column entitled “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee” in the New York Times of 11 July 2024, and the president dropped out of the race on 21 July.  It became clear that members of the White House and campaign press corps knew or should have known of Biden’s decline but never pressed it until it had become an open issue.

(In the 60 Minutes interview, Clooney made this Murrowesque statement with respect to his op-ed:

I was raised to tell the truth.  I had seen—the president up close for this fundraiser, and I was surprised. And so I feel as if there was—a lot of profiles in cowardice in my party through all of that.  And I was not proud of that.  And I also believed I had to tell the truth.

(George Clooney’s father, Nick Clooney [b. 1934], is a former anchorman and television host, who started his broadcast career in 1958.  But George Clooney isn’t Murrow—or Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley or MacNeil and Lehrer.  He doesn’t have the standing to be the model for national journalism.  In Paley’s analogy, there was—is—no one “minding the store.”)

Nonetheless, this debate is still ongoing, though it ebbs and flows as times and sentiments change and then change again.  The ’50s were still in the news-with-disinterest mode, with Douglas Edwards (1917-90) on CBS (1947-62) and Chet Huntley (1911-74) and David Brinkley (1920-2003) on the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC (1956-70). 

Viewers saw these professional journalists as trusted voices of clarity and integrity, and highly credible and neutral reporters.  Edwards’s successor, Walter Cronkite (1916-2009), anchorman for the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981 and the prime exemplar of this philosophy in the post-Murrow era, was dubbed “the most trusted man in America” in the 1960s and ’70s. 

In an exchange during the post-show discussion, Chung, whose career started in 1971 and flourished in the latter ’70s and the ’80s, asserted that when she was a field reporter, she found that “the Eastern liberal establishment press was alive and well,” but that reporters remained “unbiased and they were objective in their coverage because . . . we buried our partisanship.”

Cooper (b. 1967) wondered, “[C]an people really bury it?” remarking that “it comes out in different ways,” on which Bret Stephens (b. 1973), conservative New York Times opinion columnist, expanded, “Sure, your choice of stories, your choice of adjectives—who are the good guys, who are the bad guys.”

Today, we’re solidly ensconced in the era of commentary journalism, with whole networks existing to inculcate a point of view.  In addition, as panelist Kara Swisher (b. 1962), podcaster and CNN contributor, asserted, with the rise of “non-legacy” news outlets such as podcasts, video sharing platforms like YouTube, social media, and blogs and vlogs, consumers have a vast selection of outlets as news sources, most of which interweave commentary and opinion.

[This concludes “Good Night, and Good Luck (CNN, 7 June 2025) – Part 1.”  Please come back to Rick On Theater for Part 2 on Sunday, 27 September.]

The Letters Project, Part 1

 

[From 2016 to 2024, I worked on and off on a huge project.  I called it “The Letters Project” because it concerned the 1945 correspondence between my future mother and father from just after they met until just before their wedding almost exactly a year later.  It was the end of World War II.   

[The collection contains 182 pieces of correspondence, and on 18 February 2024, I wrote up the last two letters in the collection.  Now, ten years after I started the project, I’ve decided it’s finished.  I’ll be posting the result on Rick On Theater in installments, starting today. 

[On 23 March 2024, I posted a kind of preview of this series, “The Letters Project,” in which I wrote, “In one respect, I had two contrasting reactions simultaneously.  It was fascinating and strange at the same time.”  I think readers will now see what I meant.

[There are some surprises and revelations in the letters, often little items that illuminate a time and place that few of us here now were around to witness.  Some of that was history, of course, such as the deaths of President Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, for example, and the surrender of Germany.  Most of it, though, was just life in 1945.

[Near the end of that preview post, I also wrote, “These are the voices of my parents, after all, and I’m eavesdropping on them from [over] 80 years in their future.”  Remember that, readers, please.]

LETTERS FROM THE FRONTS
January-December 1945

Introduction

[On 12, 15, and 18 June 2015, I posted transcriptions on Rick On Theater of some letters my father wrote to my mother in September and October 1962.  I called the three-part post “Home Alone” because the letters were from the time my dad was in Germany starting on his job as a Foreign Service Officer before my mom joined him.  Mom had saved Dad’s letters, but Dad hadn’t returned the favor—or they hadn’t survived the decades since.

[Now I’ve worked through another, older collection of letters—this time from both correspondents.  These are the letters my future parents exchanged in 1945, between their first meeting and their wedding a little over a year later.  The period covered by the correspondence included Dad’s deployment to Europe at the end of the war against Germany and the end of his army service.  I call the post “Letters from the Fronts” because, while Dad’s letters are mostly from the European combat zone, Mom’s are from the home front.

[The letters run from 8 January, a week after Mother and Dad met, to 2 December 1945, two days before Dad was released from military service.  Mom had graduated from college on 1 September 1944 and was working for the American Red Cross during the period of the correspondence.  She was 21 when she met her future husband; my father-to-be was just 26.

[Dad had entered active duty with the army on 19 March 1941 and embarked for Europe on 27 February 1945, arriving in France on 11 March.  On 22 August, he departed for the U.S., arriving on 7 September.  He was separated from the army on 4 December and returned home to New York City.

[Unlike in the case of the “Home Alone” letters, I haven’t merely transcribed these messages.  I’ve quoted selectively (though sometimes extensively) and summarized the rest of each letter, adding commentary and explanations as I felt it was necessary.  Rereading my folks’ letters from 80 years ago, I must confess that I found them really interesting, but I don't know if anyone else will find them so.

[Of course, I’ve read the letters more than once, the first time many years ago—I was probably in my early teens or younger.  For the past several years, though, I’ve wanted to compose a post for ROT based on the letters. 

[It’s not that I think they’re so remarkable—well, they are from a personal and family point of view, but I know that many wartime couples have similar collections of letters—but that I find my parents’ letters fascinating not just because of the affection expressed in them, but the little clues about the life and death going on around them: the home front in Mom’s letters to Dad and the battle front and its repercussions in Dad’s letters.  Needless to say, I’m biased; I guess we’ll see if anyone else finds the letters as engaging as I do.

[(A note here about my transcription of the letters and other correspondence: I’ll be summarizing parts of the letters, but I’ve tried to be true to my parents’ writing where I’ve transcribed their prose, even the idiosyncratic and incorrect bits, except where it interferes with comprehension.  This includes not only vocabulary, but spelling, grammar, and punctuation.  Where I think it’s necessary, I’ll insert comments or explanations. 

[(In some instances, things my folks told me or that I know from experience throw revealing light on something the correspondents have written, and I’ve provided that information peripherally.  As my future mother admonished my father—though she might have also been addressing me!—in an early letter, “Good Lord, don’t go looking for poor sentence structure, and rotten spelling!!!” 

[(I also haven’t intentionally omitted remarks my future parents made that today are embarrassing or politically incorrect.  Let’s keep in mind, shall we, that these letter-writers were pretty young and living in a different era. 

[(They also didn’t know that we’d be kibitzing on what they were saying to one another!  While Cecily Cardew—of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—may have declared that her diary, “a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions,” was “consequently meant for publication,” I somehow don’t think my parents ever figured their wartime letters would be consumed by the public from a perspective of eight decades in the future!)]

Background

My mother, the former Judith Carol Freedman (b. 7 April 1923) died on 26 May 2015 at the age of 92.  She’d been a widow since 6 February 1996, almost 20 years.  My father, Eugene Monroe K***** (b. 5 November 1918), died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at 77 and he’d been non compos mentis for a year or more before his death, so he had no idea that the previous 6 January had been his and my mother’s 50th wedding anniversary. 

(I posted a tribute to my mother, simply called “Mom,” on Rick On Theater on 1 November 2016, and one to my father, entitled “Dad,” on 20 June 2010, which was Father’s Day that year.) 

Dad was a World War II vet, a battery commander in Europe after D-Day, but in December 1944, he was a recently promoted artillery captain, CO of the Headquarters Battery of the 529th Field Artillery Battalion stationed at Camp Hood (later Fort Hood) in Killeen, Texas. 

(A battery in the artillery is the equivalent of a company in the infantry or a troop in the cavalry and air cavalry.  Camp Hood was 158 miles south of Dallas and 194 miles northeast of Houston.  The nearest big town was Waco, 65 miles northeast.

(During World War II, the army’s artillery units were divided into two corps: the Field Artillery Corps, Dad’s branch, armed with mobile artillery pieces used to support armies in the field, and the Coast Artillery Corps, which was responsible for coastal, harbor, and anti-aircraft defense of the United States.  In 1950, the Coast Artillery was merged with the Field Artillery, and in 1968, the Air Defense Artillery Branch was formed to conduct anti-aircraft warfare operations with rockets and missiles.) 

Like many stateside GI’s, Dad, a native New Yorker, came home on leave for the holidays.  He had celebrated his 26th birthday the previous 5 November.  (Two days later, Franklin D. Roosevelt [1882-1945; 32nd President of the United States: 1933-45] was elected U.S. president for the fourth and last time.  Dad once told me that the first ballot he cast after he turned 21—the minimum age for voting in those days—was for Roosevelt; that would have been on 8 November 1940, for FDR’s third term.)

Mom was also born in New York City but her family moved to Trenton, New Jersey, when she was little (see “Horsman Dolls,” posted on ROT on 14 February 2017).  Since graduating from college in September 1944, she was doing social work out of the Trenton Chapter of the American Red Cross with servicemen and -women who were far away from their homes.  

At one naval base in New Jersey, she met a young WAVE ensign named Clarice, known as Kris, who also came from New York.  Kris and my mom were only a month apart in age, and they became friends.  My mother-to-be had turned 21 on 7 April 1944. 

Kris was assigned to Skillman Airport in Ewing Township in West Trenton, Mercer County, with duty at the nearby General Motors Inland Fisher Guide Plant, which in 1941 converted from manufacturing auto body parts to making the Navy’s Avenger torpedo bomber as part of GM’s newly formed Eastern Aircraft Division.  Kris (b. 1923) died on 9 February 2017 at 93.  She had a U.S. Navy honor guard at her funeral. 

(The WAVES, which stood for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, were the women’s reserve of the U.S. Navy during World War II.  An ensign is the lowest-ranking naval officer, the equivalent of an army second lieutenant [pay grade: O-1].  The carrier-based Avengers were test-flown at Skillman Airport, later returned to civilian control and renamed Mercer County Airport and now Trenton-Mercer Airport.) 

Mom’s parents, Harry (1895-1967) and Valerie (1900-74) Freedman, were married on 1 January 1920, so they held a combination New Year’s Day/anniversary party every year.  It was mostly for my future grandparents’ friends, but Mother was encouraged to invite a friend of her own so she wouldn’t be the only young person in the house.

Mother invited Kris.  A few days before the party, Kris called her friend and explained that her big brother was home from the army and had nowhere to go on New Year’s Day and asked if she could bring him to the party. 

My mother and her parents gladly agreed and when Kris arrived at my grandparents’ house on Fisher Place in Trenton, she was accompanied by a nice-looking young man with blue eyes and wavy blond hair (although, being on active duty at the time, he probably had his hair cut pretty short). 

Do I have to say that Kris’s brother, Gene, was, in fact, my future father?  That party, Monday evening, 1 January 1945, my future grandparents’ 25th wedding anniversary, was when my parents met.

That’s not the whole story, however.  My dad-to-be proceeded to get drunk at the party and fell asleep on a sofa in the living room of my grandparents’ home.  He refused to leave, he declared, until he got my mom in his Christmas stocking.  Well, that didn’t happen exactly, of course, but they got him to a bed in my grandparents’ house while my mother spent the night at her friend Natalie Cohen’s house. 

(I’m not certain who Natalie Cohen was—she comes up frequently in the letters—but it’s clear she and Mom were close at the time.  Next to Kris, with whom Mom remained close the rest of their lives, Natalie Cohen seems to have been Mom’s other best friend.)

According to the story of my parents’ meeting, my dad was extremely contrite the next morning—not to mention hung-over as well—and he returned to his parents’ home in New York.  I imagine the two spoke on the phone over the next days; I’m pretty sure Dad didn’t come back to Trenton and that Mom didn’t travel into the city, but they apparently spoke occasionally by phone until Dad left on Sunday, 7 January, to return to duty in Texas. 

Almost immediately, Dad began writing to the girl he’d just met—and Mom replied.  This began a year‑long correspondence that continued when Dad was sent overseas and even while he was fighting across western Europe, through France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany until V-E (Victory in Europe) Day (8 May 1945) and upon his return to the States after V-J (Victory over Japan) Day (15 August 1945). 

Dad came back to the States in the fall of 1945 to muster out of the army at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and he and Mom were married in Trenton on 6 January 1946.  (I arrived 11½ months later in Washington, D.C.) 

Now, I imagine there are lots of couples with a similar tale, but what I find remarkable, all these years later, is that not only Mom, back in the safety and comfort of Trenton, New Jersey, but Dad, in the hectic activity and chaos of combat, managed to keep the letters they’d received from each other. 

I don’t know exactly when, but sometime in the early years of my parents’ marriage, Dad took the two caches of letters and had them mounted and bound in two large, leather scrapbooks—one for Mom’s letters to him and the other for his letters to her.  (I don’t know this, but it’s fun to imagine that Dad presented Mom the bound letters on their first anniversary—the “paper” anniversary.)   

“Letters of Judith C. Freedman, January to December 1945” was gilt-debossed on the navy-blue leather cover of one and “Letters of Eugene M. K*****, January to December 1945” on the ruby-red cover of the other.

They kept the two volumes, housed in a fitted blue fabric-and-leather slipcase, in our home, taking the books with them whenever they moved, including their sojourn in Germany with the United States Information Agency (USIA) in the ’60s and back to Washington. 

(USIA was the federal agency responsible for “public diplomacy,” including propaganda, principally of a cultural nature; it was folded into the Department of State in 1999.  For more about this and that stay in Germany, see “An American Teen In Germany” on ROT, 9 and 12 March 2013, and “Home Alone,” referenced in the introduction.) 

Eventually, Mom brought the letters with her to the assisted-living residence in Bethesda, Maryland, which was her penultimate home, and when she died, among the first things I made certain to safeguard in my own apartment in New York (where I’d moved following my release from my own military service in 1974), was the two-volume set of bound letters. 

Dad apparently called Mom Sunday morning, 7 January, from New York.  Though it was 11:30 a.m., he woke her!  Nevertheless, she told him “a long distance call is always pleasant.”  (In those days, even a call just from New York City to Trenton, New Jersey, all of 67 miles away, was long distance!  The caller needed an operator to place the call—direct dialing and area codes hadn’t been invented yet.) 

Dad left from New York City’s Pennsylvania Station on a train to central Texas.  I gather he had to change trains in Washington, D.C., about four hours south by rail, and then he overnighted in St. Louis, Missouri, about a day’s ride further west.

8 January – 24 January 1945

The first letter in the collection is from my father, written on Monday, 8 January, a week after he and my mother had met.  He was at the “New Hotel Jefferson” (as declared on the letterhead of the stationery on which he wrote) in St. Louis—“Queen City of the Mississippi,” according to Dad’s inscription. 

The letter was little more than a shot at making contact, but it begins to demonstrate the transportation problems the country was having, especially in the civilian sector, during the war years.  Apparently there were some weather problems of which he complained, but he contemplated flying to Texas. 

Dad hadn’t waited to hear back from Mother: he wrote again from Texas on Thursday night, 11 January, and recounted his transportation woes.  He’d arrived in St. Louis at 12:30 on Monday afternoon to find that the city was in the midst of a snowstorm. 

Despite the weather, Dad reported, the airline confirmed that it was flying, so he “decided to take a chance” and flew out of St. Louis Monday night, arriving in Dallas at 3:00 the next morning.  (Commercial airline passenger service had only been inaugurated in the U.S. in 1926.) 

He still had to get to Camp Hood, just under 160 miles by road from Dallas, and he found that the only transportation available was “an interurban trolley” to Waco that didn’t leave until 5:30 a.m. 

(The Texas Electric Railway was a historic interurban railroad that operated from Dallas to Denison, Corsicana, and Waco.  It began operation in 1908 and became the largest interurban railway operator in the southern U.S. before its demise in 1948.)

Dad “wandered around for two-and-a-half hours in the deserted streets, feeling very frustrated.”  He “finally” arrived in Waco, still 65 miles from his post, at 8:30 “and was once more confronted by the lack of transportation problem.” 

Out of desperation, Dad called the military police station at the camp and learned that they had a car going out to Camp Hood, so, though “as a general rule,” he pointed out to Mom, “I have nothing to do with M.P.’s,” he caught a ride.  He made it to Camp Hood at noon on the 9th—“only a day and a half late.”  “Everybody was overjoyed to see me,” Dad reported, “so we had a party that night.”  I presume he was being a little facetious—that would have been my dad as I would come to know him.

In her 11 January reply to Dad’s first note, Mom asked “what sort of hot water” he’d gotten into for reporting to duty late, but in Dad’s answer on 14 January, he acknowledged, “Nothing at all seems to be forthcoming” for the delay.  He added, however, “If you’d have been in Washington”—where I gather he’d had to change trains for the trip west and was stranded for many hours in the city where, coincidentally, he and his new bride would be moving in a little over a year—“I’d still be AWOL, I fear”!

Dad signed the note “G”—for Gene. (My dad’s name was Eugene; his mother was a fan of the poetry of Eugene Field [1850-95], he told me once.)  Mom, incidentally, opened her response to Dad’s 8 January note: “Greetings to my favorite drunkard!”—confirming the family lore of the circumstances of my parents’ meeting. 

My future father addressed his second letter on the 11th to “Dearest Rusty,” a nickname for my mom he seems to have made up.  (Mom’s name was Judith; everyone called her Judy.)  No one ever called her Rusty before to my knowledge—at least no one’s ever copped to doing so—and as far back as I can remember, Dad didn’t continue to call her Rusty after they were married. 

(“Rusty” suggests that Mom had red hair—or reddish maybe.  But she was a brunette all of my cognizant lifetime (until it turned gray and then white).  I turned out to have red-brown hair and Mom’s sister had reddish hair—but not my mother.  I have no idea where the pet name came from—and I never asked either of my parents when I had the chance.  Later in the correspondence, in his letter of 22 July, below, Dad does explain the nickname.)

Now, my dad had a nickname in college (“Doc”) and only his old schoolmates used it—though we knew about it.  After Dad died and his obit appeared in his college alumni magazine, there were some old schoolmates who wrote to offer condolences and admitted they hadn’t known Dad’s real name! 

But Dad’s name for Mother was pretty certainly a private (and short-lived) pet name because in her next letter, dated 15 January, she signed herself, “Ever ‘Rusty’” and then added a little note with an arrow pointing to her “signature”: “I like that.”  Mom, in her turn, usually wrote to “Gene”—except, of course, that first letter.

Apparently Dad called Trenton again on Saturday evening, 13 January (it seems that letters between New Jersey and Texas took only two days), but Mom was in New York City and missed the “long distant call.” 

Mom added that the call “came thru to the tune of a very ‘southern’ accent”—probably actually a southwestern accent, from a Texas long-distance operator.  (How many of you remember when you needed an operator to place a long-distance telephone call?  Hell, how many of you remember operators?) 

She was sorry to have missed Dad on Saturday, but happily he called again the next day, ending the weekend, Mom declared, “with a big bang!”  A visit back east to “dear old New Jersey” was hinted at, but, noted Dad on 14 January, “For reasons of security I can’t say anything.”

It seems Mom had had a Saturday evening out in New York with Kris and Natalie Cohen, on the 13th (when Dad had called), seeing a movie (possibly The Hairy Ape with William Bendix and Susan Hayward [United Artists, released in June 1944], based on the 1922 expressionistic play by Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953]) and having a “swanky” dinner at “the Sherry-Netherland’s officers club” (on 5th Avenue at 59th Street); Kris was a WAVE officer, you’ll remember.

(The Sherry-Netherland Officers’ Club was a space in the famous luxury hotel, turned over to the Officers’ Service Committee to operate, that offered military officers in the city of New York a place to go for lunch or dinner, drinks, a game of cards, or where they could meet other officers or friends and socialize at reasonable prices.  It opened in 1943 and remained in operation for the duration of the war and into the mid-’40s. 

(The OSC was a volunteer organization that offered assistance to visiting officers in New York City in finding a place to stay, eat, or have a drink and also to offer movie passes and theater tickets for their entertainment.)

Then Mom paid her first visit to Kris’s (and my dad’s) parents’ apartment on Lexington Avenue near 23rd Street, where the young women “giggled and gossiped for many hours” until they “dropped off to slumberland long after 3:00 A.M.”  Mom reported that the “family album” was trotted out and everyone uttered “ooo’s and ah’s” over the snapshots of Dad as "an adorable baby”!  (I have some of those photos—including the traditional naked-baby-on-the-rug shot.  It’s all right: I have one of my mother, too.)

(A word about my dad’s family’s home: the residence, in a small apartment building on the southwest corner of Lexington and 23rd, was above my future Grandpa Jack’s pharmacy on the street level.  The two premises had different entrances and house numbers: the residence was at #18 and the Peerless Drug Store was at #20, but it was the same structure.  The building no longer exists; a modern high rise sits on that corner now.)

I get the impression that this period wasn’t very active militarily at Camp Hood because Dad wrote on the 14th that he’d been assigned “quite a number of tasks,” but they seem to have been make-work jobs.  On the 16th, Dad wrote that he’d completed “the chores assigned me,” and he took to staying out of the way so as not to be on anyone’s “list of available workhorses.” 

He stayed out of battalion headquarters and spent his time at the dispensary—a common army term for the infirmary or the medical officer’s office—where he and the “Doc” had become buddies and would “drink fine coffee and discuss the topics of the day.”  It sounds a little “Sergeant Bilko” to me! 

(The Phil Silvers Show was a sitcom which ran on the CBS Television Network from 1955 to 1959.  It was colloquially known as Sergeant Bilko for its lead character, Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko of the United States Army, played by comedic actor Phil Silvers [1911-85].  The show centered on the soldiers of the post motor pool, who seemed to spend little time performing their duties.  Bilko, the NCO in charge, especially spent much of his time trying to get others to do his work for him.)

Evenings at Camp Hood seem to have been devoted to socializing.  Dad mentioned parties or dinner with comrades-in-arms and then drinks and dancing at “the club,” obviously the post officers’ club.  Most of the officer corps at Camp Hood seems to have been married and accompanied by their wives; Dad wrote on the 21st that he “generally makes up a group of five, but we don’t seem to suffer any ill-effects from the odd number.”  (Many of Dad’s photos I have of that period show his fellow officers and their wives.)

Commenting on Mom’s first meeting with her future in-laws, Dad affirmed that his parents were “pretty much fun” and, in reference to the family album, that “they’re . . . pretty doting.”  He was “afraid,” though, that “my going to war is going to be more trying for them than for me.” 

I bet there were a lot of GI’s with the same fear.  Soldiers stateside may not have known exactly what awaited them, though by 1945 there must have been many officers and NCO’s at places like Camp Hood who’d been rotated back to the States from battle fronts, just as in my day there were men at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where I started active duty in 1969, who’d seen combat in Vietnam. 

(Although I was a military intelligence officer, I was at Knox, home of the U.S. Army Armor Center and School at the time, for the armor officers’ basic course from December 1969 to February 1970.  For those not up on military taxonomy, armor is the branch of the army that uses tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopter gunships.  In that last category, the ’copters were piloted mostly by warrant officers. 

(Warrant officers are experts in specific fields—in this instance, combat helicopters—and were sometimes commissioned in the field and then sent back to the States for officers’ basic.  There were several newly commissioned former warrant officers in my class at Fort Knox—and they had stories to tell.)

The Allies had been fighting in North Africa since 1942, Italy since September 1943, and western Europe since 6 June 1944 (D-Day); fighting in the Pacific had been underway since Pearl Harbor was attacked on 7 December 1941. 

Men like my father surely had an idea that they were going into harm’s way, but their families, especially once the men had left U.S. territory for the war front, would be left to imagine what their sons and brothers and husbands were facing.  I imagine everyone knew at least one Gold Star family.  Getting any kind of mail out from a combat zone was problematic and must have only heightened the anxiety of the families back home. 

(I recall a family story about my grandfather on my mother’s side, who was a World War I vet—the grandfather whose anniversary was the reason for that New Year’s Day party at the beginning of this account.  In a time when long-distance communication was almost 30 years more primitive than it was in my dad’s army days, it was obviously harder to get information from the battle fronts to the families back home. 

(Grandpa Harry was wounded in combat and the army sent his parents in New York City a telegram: “Harry Freedman shot in buttocks,” it said—according to Freedman family lore.  Well, those great-grandparents weren’t newcomers to these shores—my mother’s family had been in America for several generations already—but the word ‘buttocks’ was apparently not familiar to them; or maybe it was the geography of France. 

(My grandmother—who, of course, didn’t know Harry yet, I don’t think—told me that his parents and sisters pored over a map of France—which is all they knew about his whereabouts—looking for a town called Buttocks!  My post “Horsman Dolls” includes some brief biographical details about Pop-Pop H.F.

(From what I’ve been able to piece together regarding my grandfather’s World War I service, he was an infantryman in Flanders, Belgium, and Cambrai, France, from 17 May to 26 December 1918.  According to his military records, he was “severely” wounded on 29 September, which corresponds either to the Fifth Battle of Ypres in Flanders, 28 September-2 October, or the Battle of St. Quentin Canal near Cambrai, France, 29 September-10 October.

(If the sequence of Private Freedman’s overseas service is the same as the notation in his record, it’s unlikely he would have received his wound in Flanders and then gotten sent to France, so I assume he served in Belgium first, then was sent to northern France, where he was wounded, probably on the first day of the Battle of St. Quentin Canal.)

Furthermore, security provisions, such as the ones my father alluded to in that 14 January letter, prevented soldiers, sailors, and airmen from telling their families what they were doing, or even where they were stationed in many cases or where they were going when they were reassigned.  (“Loose Lips Sink Ships” was the reminder on posters all over military posts, defense plants, and many streets and public places in the civilian quarter.) 

In the 21 January letter, Dad repeated, “I can’t say too much in violation of military security,” and then hinted that a change might be forthcoming. Then he made a broad hint about the potential trip east: “I have no intention of having you anticipate ‘fanciful things’ with no possibility of realization,” Dad wrote, implying that what he’d suggested earlier wasn’t “fanciful.”  “I don’t render opinions or pass on rumors,” he continued.  “This should give you something to work with—and very shortly, too.” 

Though I imagine that Dad’s family and my mother-to-be could guess the purpose of the implied move—his battalion was being sent into combat in Europe; if the battalion were going to the Pacific, they’d most likely be sent to the West Coast, not New York—but I notice he never actually writes the words.  In fact, aside from two remarks about his “going to war,” Dad never wrote directly about that prospect—until he was actually in it.  It must have been, however, the elephant in the room for everyone.

When Mother wrote on Friday, the 19th, a new topic came up.  Not new for Mom, but new in the correspondence; I presume she’d told Dad about all this during the New Year’s week when he was in New York.

After some chit-chat about her daily doings and her work at the “R.X.” (Mom’s abbreviation for “Red Cross”), Mom wrote about “another great temptation lying in my path.”  As you’ll recall, Mom was a Red Cross social worker on area military posts (that’s how she met Kris, after all) to help out GI’s, especially ones who were stationed far from their homes, who needed a sympathetic ear or help with “marital and financial problems.” 

She’d “been fighting like fury” to get a post overseas and had apparently been showering the “National” Red Cross with so many letters “they must have a single file for my letters alone.”  She’d been turned down repeatedly because they deemed her “too young” (Mom was probably barely 21 when she started applying; in a later letter, written on 13 June, she explained that the Red Cross had some kind of minimum age requirement for overseas assignments), and finally “gave up in despair.” 

Now she said her “chapter has received a wire [i.e., a telegram] . . . stating there’s a dire emergency & need for Home Service R.X. workers for overseas work.”  So Mom “couldn’t resist the temptation to start the nagging all over again.” 

What my mother had told me about her wartime plans before she met my father fills some of this in.  Mom started at Elmira College in upstate New York in the fall of 1941; she was on track to graduate in May 1945 if her college tenure had followed the traditional path. 

Mom, however, took summer courses at New York University in 1944 to attain credits to transfer to Elmira so she could graduate early, and she got her degree on 1 September 1944.  (According to the Elmira College Bulletins of 1943-44 and 1944-45, Mom majored in sociology-psychology—and graduated as a “Scholar of the Second Rank” with an 86-89% grade average.  I never knew either of those factoids.) 

Her goal was to join the Red Cross and go overseas as an ambulance driver in a combat zone.  Hence the cascade of letters about which she wrote Dad.  Now, Mom was just 21 in September 1944, barely out of her minority in those days (society didn’t recognize 18-year-olds as adults until several decades later—for instance, 18-year-olds couldn’t vote in federal elections until July 1971, when the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified) and her father simply forbade her to go abroad. 

As readers know, she was serving as a Red Cross social worker in the Trenton area at the time of this occurrence.  Ironically, had Mom gotten her original wish and gone overseas in 1944, she might never have met my dad since it was through Dad’s sister Kris that they were introduced, and Mom got to know Kris through her work on stateside military posts in the area of her Trenton home.

Curiously, my father supported Mom’s “ambitions and desires to go overseas.”  Dad expressed the same wish, which he wrote on 24 January he’d had “for years now.”  (Dad had enlisted in 1941, shortly after he graduated from college—he told me that word of the fall of France to the Germans came the day of graduation.)  

I can picture him writing letter after letter requesting assignment to the front, like Lieutenant Roberts in the 1948 play and 1955 movie Mister Roberts, until he makes his CO, Captain Morgan, angry.  I’m certain my father didn’t actually do that; it’s just the image I get from his letter to Mom. 

(Dad’s college commencement ceremony took place on 7 June 1940.  Germany had begun its invasion of France on 10 May and by the end of the month, had defeated most of the forces of France and its British allies.  The Wehrmacht didn’t occupy Paris, however, until 14 June, and the armistice between France and Germany didn’t take effect until 25 June.

(A brief note about the start of my father’s military service: it wasn’t quite straightforward.  He enlisted in the army in March 1941—but he had actually served in the navy for about five months before that.  I won’t go into his reasons for the branch transfer, as it’s called—the army and the navy are different branches of service—and I have no information on his naval service.  I have only one photo of Dad in his white swabby suit, annotated “Panama City, Oct. 1940”—but I don’t know if the location was Panama City, Panama, or Panama City, Florida, both of which were navy towns.)

Dad added that though he hoped Mom would “make it very shortly—but not before I get to see you at least once more.”  Then he continued, “That, incidentally, is the one mental drawback to my present proximity to going to war.  Why couldn’t it have happened either six months ago or six months hence.” 

Oddly, that would have meant, again, that he and Mom might not have met!  I don’t think he thought of that.  Or maybe he did—and would rather have never met Mom than face the possibility of not seeing her for God-knows-how-long.  (The war would end in September, but no one could have known that in January.  And we know that Dad survived combat intact and came home to marry Mom—but in January 1945 no one could have known that, either.) 

Also in his 24 January letter, Dad informed Mom that he was trying to counsel an NCO in the battery he used to command.  The sergeant, “an excellent soldier and a competent man,” was “undergoing great mental anguish” because his wife back home was pregnant with their first child and her doctor “anticipated trouble.”  The NCO had gotten “two conflicting telegrams” from the Red Cross and “the poor boy is completely in the dark about what has or is happening.” 

The sergeant sought Dad out, and my father was worried because the man was “very hot headed” and might “take matters into his own hands”—by which I think Dad meant he was afraid the guy might go AWOL—the result of which “would be catastrophic.”  (I suspect Dad was considering that AWOL during wartime could be construed as desertion, the penalty for which can be execution.) 

Dad had asked the Red Cross to try to get more detailed information, but any answer wouldn’t arrive before the next day (Dad was writing at night), and he hoped that he’d been able to calm the man down for the night at least.  At the end of this report, Dad quipped, in response to Mom’s remarks about her Red Cross work, “You see dear, you aren’t the only one serving as a confidant and ‘father confessor.’” 

(Unfortunately, Dad never wrote Mom about the outcome of the sergeant’s problem.  In 2½ weeks, Dad would arrive back in New York City preparatory to shipping out for Europe and the war at the end of February.  He may have told Mom on the phone what transpired—though she didn’t mention it in her next couple of letters—or told her when they saw one another in New York where he was briefly at liberty before confinement to his temporary post.  I presume, though, that the excitement of transferring to temporary quarters and then to the transport ship drove all other thoughts from both Dad’s and Mom’s minds.)

[That’s the beginning of a year’s exchange of letters, notes, cards, and the occasional telegram.  As you can see, my mother- and father-to-be wrote back and forth every few days—and that even remained essentially true when Dad was deployed to the European Theater of Operations and rolled across Western Europe from France into Germany with his artillery battalion.

[I haven’t worked out a schedule of postings for “Letters from the Fronts,” but since there will be about 20 installments, I won’t be posting them consecutively.  I’ll probably post an installment about once or twice a month. I’d estimate.  “The Letters Project, Part 2” will be posted on Monday, 5 October 2026.  (After each new installment is posted, I’ll go back to the previous one and insert a link to the new one.)]