Customer Reviews

Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Film and Culture)

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The author should take a bow. He has written a wonderfully balanced, anecdotal-rich account of the simultaneous evolution of the Cold War, TV and political culture in the Age of McCarthy (which is, in all too many ways, an age we are still in.) That the junior senator from the cheeshead state was a craven opportunist is as well known now as it was even then, but what he exploited via the new electronic medium was the pervasive fear that subversion lurked behind every vacuum tube as well as behind every State Department desk.

Cold War, Cool Medium is a terrific and compulsively readable study of McCarthyism in the context of the early history of television. Doherty astutely establishes the way televison worked in its formative days. Then he shows how its weaknesses aided in the rise of McCarthy and how both its strengths and weaknesses aided in his fall. Superb and easiy to read history.

I purchased this book as part of my research to a follow-up book, Don't Weep for Me, America: How Democracy in America Became the Prince (While We Slept). I wanted to see if the Cold War was the same big fraud as today's War on Terror. Thanks to author, Thomas Doherty, I learned that not only was McCarthy THE chief propagandist for the "red scare", but that television was almost invented for the purspose of providing its platform. The blacklist that author Doherty details in his excellent chapter, "The Gestalt of the Blacklist" is an incredible story that a reasonable person would have trouble understanding could happen in a true constitutional republic. But it did happen. And today, the level of crime committed by the state, through planned and systematic propaganda has reached its...zenith...

In his 2003 book, "Cold War, Cool Medium," author Thomas Doherty brings together all of the most interesting media stories of the early Cold War. From HUAC to The Defenders, it is all here and written in an extremely engaging and frequently amusing style. My favorite stories concern the actor from "The Goldbergs" who became the victim of the Red Channels crowd, the history of "I Led 3 Lives" and the analysis of the movies "The Next Voice You Hear" and "Red Planet Mars." Mr. Doherty does an expert job of explaining these two films that share the gimmick of God communicating through the airwaves. There are a lot of books that deal with Cold War media, but this is one of the best, if not THE best. If you are a student looking for a great resource or someone who simply enjoys reading great writing about this era, I cannot recommend this book more strongly.