The "Original Sin" of "Good Night and Good Luck"

George Clooney and Jake Tapper confessing their “sins.” Image via CNN

Last month I had the extraordinary privilege of seeing “Good Night and Good Luck” on Broadway, starring George Clooney, thanks to the invitation of a friend with an extra ticket. This was not something I probably would have ever considered doing on my own volition. For one thing, I’m generally so uncultured and uncouth that the very concept of theater-going almost seems a bit alien, despite my physical proximity to Broadway, and despite scattered occasions in the past when I’ve wound up seeing a show for whatever reason, albeit not strictly by my own devices, and found the experience basically enjoyable. Furthermore, in the once-in-a-blue-moon chance that I could theoretically be motivated to seek out a Broadway show, there’s virtually no chance I would proactively choose a mawkish George Clooney production, especially one so clearly predicated on flattering the sensibilities of middle-aged cultural libs (like Clooney) who long for a middle-brow artistic catharsis amid their chronic Trump anxieties. I can’t naturally relate to the entertainment tastes of whatever you’d call this socio-economic cohort, whose members convince themselves they are doing something politically efficacious by watching CNN, purchasing (and not reading) the latest David Frum book denouncing Trump, or attending a George Clooney theatrical offering.

Nevertheless, an opportunity to see the show randomly became available, and so I indulged. Among my first observations was that the average age of the audience had to be something like 55 — not necessarily an indictment unto itself, and possibly just representative of theater-going demographics in general, but does roughly correlate with the demographic one would expect to see populating various “Resistance” functions from 2016-present, even if those functions have by now dwindled into limp facsimiles of themselves.

If you weren’t aware, “Good Night and Good Luck” was originally a 2005 movie also directed by George Clooney. I can recall having the DVD for some reason, back when I thought there was impressive social capital to be gained by accumulating a robust DVD collection. The impetus for the original movie was Clooney discovering an urgent moral imperative to sound the alarm about a resurgence of McCarthyist dangers under George W. Bush. Twenty years later, Clooney realized he could transplant the exact same material onto stage, and voilà, he’s got himself a trenchant parable for the Trump 2.0 era.

The movie and play romanticize the CBS anchorship of Edward R. Murrow, who clashed with Senator Joseph McCarthy upon producing skeptical reports about McCarthy’s claims of widespread communist infiltration. Murrow (played on Broadway by Clooney himself) is portrayed as having intrepidly stuck to the story, despite mounting pressure from corporate CBS bosses to back off. Retaliatory schemes were cooked up by shady McCarthy bagmen to implicate Murrow’s staff as communists, but Murrow carried on with stoicism and tenacity. In the end, Murrow is understood to have stayed true to his journalistic and moral convictions, even at the expense of seeing his TV show downsized. This is supposed to remind us of how vital such courage remains in the current political and media environment.

During the play I found myself bemusedly tracking when the audience chose to cheer or gasp. There’s a scene in which Don Hollenbeck, a Murrow associate, laments that it sure feels like all the reasonable people in America (circa 1953) have up and left for Europe. The actor had to take a beat, because the theater full of middle-aged libs burst out into rapturous applause. Of course, the applause was not for the wit of the writing, or the majesty of the delivery, but for the implicit present-day parallel — implied with the subtlety of a ton of bricks — that the audience specifically came to have validated. Any challenge to their assumptions or biases, or any allowance for moral or historical ambiguity, was not on the menu.

Clooney’s apparent belief that these timeless moral instructions are neatly recyclable from Bush to Trump 2.0, with no creative update required, would seem to suggest that the McCarthy parallel has become a handy default rebuttal to any disfavored (Republican) administration. While there are certainly some continuities to be discerned between the Bush and Trump governments, there are also plenty of departures to be explored by anyone motivated to do so. But in the Clooney-world of megadonor liberalism, no departure is significant enough that it can’t be flattened into the same old melodramatized McCarthy parallel.

Sure, there could potentially be some interesting material related to the McCarthy saga worth dramatizing, but with Clooney and the Broadway high-command, it’s inevitably reduced to a self-aggrandizing allegory about whatever politically rankles them at the moment, namely Republicans being in power. Whereas when the Democrats are in power, Clooney can safely content himself with outputs like “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

What perhaps stood out most about “Good Night and Good Luck” was the total absence of any interesting dramatic content. They try haphazardly to get us invested in Don Hollenbeck’s suicide, and the relationship between Murrow staffers Shirley and Joe, but it’s all too undercooked to have any real resonance. Everything is instead subordinated to the overriding theme of a hortatory political lecture; the show is bookended by a literal lecture from Clooney, standing alone at a podium, solemnly educating us about the importance of press freedom.

Just before Clooney’s final lecture, a screen descends, and we are treated to a stirring video montage of TV news clips from the past several decades, intended to illustrate how the televisual medium has been abused to manipulate and distract the American People — thereby dishonoring the legacy of Murrow (???). The sinister turn seems roughly dated to the 1990s, with clips of Jerry Springer and the OJ Simpson trial marking a grim pivot from the wholesome days of “I Love Lucy,” televised national triumphs like the Moon Landing, and televised national sorrows like the JFK Assassination. By the 21st Century, the montage dwells understandably enough on George W. Bush, 9/11, and WMDs — but then conspicuously skips over the entire presidency of Barack Obama, presumably implying that nothing occurred during this period that should make us leery of state propaganda and its transmission by media organs. Then comes a sizable helping of Trump-related spectacle — lots of scary Jan. 6 footage — followed by a cursory detour to Democratic operatives denying that Joe Biden was infirm. (See, Clooney is willing to hold his “own side” to account!) Although it was Democratic chieftains of the kind Clooney hobnobs with who resurrected the closest thing to a “McCarthyist” frenzy in recent times, by allying with security state agencies to flood the media with 24/7 allegations about how Russia had sinisterly infiltrated the US government circa 2016, no examples of this phenomenon made their way into the montage. The final footage is Elon Musk delivering an infamous Roman Salute (shrilly alleged to have been a Nazi Salute) on the eve of Trump’s 2025 inauguration, and the audience at my showing belted out a collective hiss/groan/gasp.

Clooney seems to pride himself on the tasteful subtlety of his political parallel, even though it couldn’t have been more un-subtle if an usher came out and bashed each audience member over the head with a solid-gold MAGA truncheon. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Clooney said of Trump’s omission from the play, “We don’t mention his name,” as though pleased that the audience will have to draw their own conclusions — like the conclusion hadn’t been formed long before they’d ever walked into the venue.

Tapper, a huge fan of “Good Night and Good Luck” and a huge fan of George Clooney, scored an exclusive sitdown with the megastar, along with an exclusive tour of the set at Winter Garden Theater. In the interview, Tapper mentioned the brief inclusion in Clooney’s final montage of the Democratic operatives claiming that Biden was in impeccable cognitive condition, which is now understood to be another example of official deceit. As such, he asked Clooney to reflect on his decision to write a fateful New York Times op-ed in July 2024 calling on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, based on how troubled Clooney had privately been after observing Biden’s faltering manner at a Hollywood mega-fundraiser several weeks before. “It was a civic duty,” Clooney told Tapper, because he saw “people on my side of the street not telling the truth.” Perhaps thanks in part to this ennobling self-conception, “Good Night and Good Luck” has been a huge commercial success, becoming “the highest-grossing play in the history of the United States” by its second week, as Tapper earnestly reported. CNN will even air a Special Presentation of the play next month.

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Given their chummy rapport and mutual appreciation, it stands to reason that Clooney was a source for Jake Tapper’s new book “Original Sin,” co-authored with Alex Thompson, which has taken the political and media world by storm. One chapter details Clooney’s encounter with Biden at the LA Fundraiser, more-or-less told from a first-person Clooney perspective, with the big revelation being that Biden could not recognize Clooney until prodded by an aide. Biden failing to properly greet an A-list celeb who was headlining a fundraiser for him became the cardinal moment at which Democratic “insiders,” typified by Clooney, finally agreed it was time to be “concerned” about Biden’s fitness to remain president until age 86.

I read “Original Sin,” and it’s not that there’s no useful information in the book. According to one person described as “familiar with the internal dynamic” of the Biden White House: “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.” Unnamed cabinet members report being flabbergasted that they were prevented from interacting with Biden for months at a time. Another person described as a “longtime Biden aide” rationalized Biden’s pursuit of re-election as such: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while… When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too.”

These are all worthwhile (sordid) anecdotes for the historical record. But overwhelmingly, the dismay and alarm chronicled in the book relates almost singularly to the political consequences for Democrats who, increasingly convinced of Biden’s infirmities, feared that they were on pace for a historic blowout by Trump. That’s the “Original Sin” referenced by the book title — not that Biden lacked the capacity for competent governance, but that his egoism and the insularity of his deluded inner-circle was paving the way for electoral defeat. Asked by an interviewer to define the nature of the “Original Sin” they were postulating, co-author Alex Thompson said: “From the Democratic perspective, the sin was Donald Trump winning.” And so the book is essentially written from the perspective of a chastened Democratic partisan who needs to hear some tough love about how the party failed to secure their partisan interests. “The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for reelection—followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” the book elaborates.

The sole reference in the book to the fact that Biden, in his jarringly diminished cognitive state, nonetheless retained sole authority over the US nuclear codes, and could conceivably destroy humanity in a confused stupor, is an offhand reference to a Maureen Dowd column in which she chastises Jill Biden for implausibly praising Joe’s performance after the dismal June 2024 debate with Trump. Dowd, who as the authors note “had covered Biden for decades, and whom the family read religiously,” was not making any kind of substantive point in the relevant column about the nuclear risk implied by the Commander-in-Chief deteriorating so rapidly. Instead, her complaint was that Biden was being “selfish” by continuing to run for president, because in doing so he was “jeopardizing the democracy he says he wants to save” by increasing the likelihood of a second Trump presidency.

Clooney and these other Democratic titans seem to evince no misgivings whatsoever about Biden’s actual governing abilities. Even as the Democrats’ conventional wisdom, accelerated by the book, has begrudgingly come to acknowledge that Biden really screwed up by running for re-election, it’s still widely maintained that Biden’s decision-making powers were reliably in tact; the only problem was that he couldn’t communicate effectively. Any notion that his infirmities may have contributed to flawed governance, particularly in relation to the foreign crises that exploded during his tenure, has yet to occur to the Democratic bigwigs. Instead their grievance is only that Biden undermined the Democrats politically, and enabled the return of Trump. The implications of having an Executive Branch on ossified autopilot, with limited direction from the person who was actually elected to run the Executive Branch, does not count as a “sin” in this dogma. If Biden had remained enfeebled, but not quite feeble enough to combust on the debate stage, these Dem insiders would have been more than happy to keep him in office for as long as practicable. Sure, he might have lost the dexterity to deal with high-intensity situations like Ukraine or Israel, but as long as he could function with the bare-minimum effort required to ward off Trump, there would be no “sin” that need be forgiven.

However… if you can’t “communicate” lucidly, it’s probable that you also can’t think lucidly. And it’s consequently probable that you can’t govern with the lucidity needed to navigate major crises. In September 2019, I interviewed Biden at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, and he dissembled and mumbled his way through a (false) assertion that he’d actually opposed the Iraq War before it began, despite an enormous volume of evidence proving otherwise. At the time, his cognitive decline was already obvious — but it was also obvious that using whatever cognition he might have left, he’d want to obfuscate the issue for political reasons.

In August 2019, I wrote:

Pundits demonstrate their limited vocabulary and laziness when they characterize Joe Biden’s recent struggles in terms of ‘gaffes.’ Biden’s inability to formulate coherent sentences and recall basic facts are not ‘gaffes’ in the traditional clichéd sense, as any reasonable person observing his performance on the campaign trail could acknowledge. They are mounting evidence of cognitive decline.

By 2023 or 2024, Biden wasn’t literally senile — he would have still been able to signal certain policy preferences, and then let the staff execute as they pleased while he went off to snooze. But his worsening acuity can’t possibly be divorced from the governing choices that turned disastrous, most notably in the Middle East and Europe. Yet this is hardly even entertained by the Dem insiders — Clooney, Tapper, et al. — who now want to educate us about the hard lessons they’ve belatedly learned.

In one press interview to promote the “Original Sin” book, Tapper recounts:

I asked Clooney, “Why did you include those parts of Democrats lying about Biden along with Republicans lying about the 2020 election?” And he said two things. He said, “One, we need to speak truth to power no matter who is in power.” I asked him about the people who come to see a Broadway show who would make the argument you just mentioned — how can you talk about Biden when we have Trump doing this? And Clooney said, “How do you think we got Trump?”

Note how in Clooney’s worldview, “speaking truth to power” vis-a-vis Democrats only becomes necessary when Democrats are imperiling the prospects of Democrats to stay in power. Tapper’s book essentially channels that perspective into a thesis about the purported “sin” of Biden’s tenure — that Democrats were deprived of a viable opportunity to beat Trump. That’s also why Clooney includes the perfunctory Biden-denial clips in his little video montage. There’s no other sin that the middle-aged liberal demographic feels they must atone for, other than impeding their own electoral self-interests. So of course the new book and play, interconnected in telling this demographic all they feel they need to hear, are both cruising briskly to commercial blockbuster-dom.

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If you’re in the NYC area tomorrow, May 27, I’m participating in a debate about the first four months of the Trump 2.0 administration. Details here.