Eventually America learned that the Wisconsin Republican’s famous list was a fabrication, that he was a liar and a demagogue as well as an alcoholic—and that his authoritarian appeals to fear were worse than useless in defending our security. But by then, McCarthyism’s self-serving and fundamentally unpatriotic promoters had inflicted grave damage on the body politic and international prestige of the United States.

Today, McCarthy’s heirs are more slick and glib than he ever was, yet their fundamental methods are the same. When Elizabeth Cheney, William Kristol and their media friends slander Justice Department attorneys as the “Al Qaeda 7” and malign the “Department of Jihad,” they are engaging in the smear tactics that became synonymous with McCarthy. What is different now is the cynical hypocrisy of the new McCarthyites, who know that the flimsy accusations they level against Democrats in the Obama administration could just as easily be turned on Republicans who served President Bush.

Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kristol have charged that certain lawyers in the Justice Department represented alleged terrorists held at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp—and that by so doing, those attorneys rendered themselves unfit for government service. “Whose values do they share?” asks an ominous advertisement aired by their front group, known as Keep America Safe. They mean to insinuate that the values of those Justice Department attorneys, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are somehow closer to the jihadism of Al Qaeda than to those shared by most Americans.

The values that most of us share include honesty and fairness—and this sleazy campaign violates both. If every lawyer who represents someone accused of terrorism is by definition a terrorist sympathizer, then our entire system of justice is in doubt, since it requires counsel for everyone accused of a crime. More specifically, if the lawyers who have counseled terror suspects are by definition untrustworthy, then the dark cloud of suspicion extends well beyond the current roster of the Justice Department—and into the heart of the Republican Party.

As Scott Horton points out in Harper’s magazine, the McCarthyite list would have to include Michael Chertoff, who headed the Justice Department’s criminal division before President Bush nominated him as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Among Mr. Chertoff’s clients in private practice was a New Jersey doctor named Magdy el-Amir, identified as a conduit for money-laundering to Al Qaeda and other jihadist outfits. He became a Chertoff client when the State of New Jersey sued him to recoup illicit money from a health maintenance organization he controlled, which had sent more than $5 million by wire transfers to bank accounts “where the beneficial owner is unknown.” In other words, a very dubious character who had been under surveillance by the F.B.I. for years.

There was never any reason to believe that by representing Mr. el-Amir (who was recently arrested in a prescription drug racket), Mr. Chertoff somehow disqualified himself from government service. But similar phony questions could be raised about Michael Mukasey, the former Bush attorney general whose law firm provides pro bono representation to Guantánamo detainees. Or Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor of 9/11, whose firm has also represented detainees because, like all prisoners, they are entitled to counsel.

If this seems confusing, here’s a simple principle to keep in mind: Representing someone in an American court does not mean agreeing with that person’s actions or ideology. Here’s another: Guilt by association is an unworthy tactic that ought to raise suspicions about those who use it rather than those against whom it is used.

The career of McCarthy and the specter of McCarthyism ended only when a handful of decent Republicans—notably including Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush—joined in a Senate resolution of censure against him and his tactics. Perhaps we have witnessed such a moment of truth this week, when 19 prominent Republican attorneys, including Kenneth Starr and several former Bush Justice and Defense Department appointees, denounced the Keep America Safe smears as shameful, unjust and destructive.

Conservatives can effectively discredit this disgraceful campaign—and it is their responsibility to do so.

jconason@observer.com

More from Joe Conason:

The G.O.P.'s Mixed Message

The Republican Rift

Holder Was Right

It was a thoroughly respectful salute – until it was Eugene McCarthy’s turn. Or, as he was labeled in the slideshow, “Joseph McCarthy.”

Despite sharing a last name, Eugene Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Raymond McCarthy were very different men.

Just to clear things up: Gene McCarthy was a Democratic Senator from Minnesota who was good friends with poet Robert Lowell and whose 1968 presidential campaign channeled frustration with the Vietnam War and forced Lyndon Johnson to abandon his re-election hopes. Gene McCarthy died in December 2005 at the age of 89.

Joe McCarthy was the infamous red-baiting Republican Senator from Wisconsin who served as Roy Cohn’s mentor and who died at the age of 48 in 1957.

Mr. Kaplan had formally requested a reconsideration of that potentially business-killing decision this past February—a request the S.L.A. has since denied.

In court papers, Mr. Kaplan and his attorney have argued that the proprietors “never defrauded nor made misrepresentations” to the S.L.A.—despite what some critics in the neighborhood have alleged.

The S.L.A. denied Mr. Kaplan’s renewal last December because “the method of operation and hours of operation currently in effect … are in contradiction with the method of operation and hours of operation originally filed with and approved by” state regulators.

The controversial nightspot has been closing at midnight ever since in the hopes of appeasing the liquor board. Mr. Kaplan also paid a $10,000 fine and closed down for a full seven days in order to settle the matter with the S.L.A.

“The Authority then uses these same pleadings, which were resolved by the settlement offer and accepted by the Authority, as a basis for the non-renewal,” according to the lawsuit, which asks the court to annul the S.L.A.’s ruling as "arbitrary and capricious."

6:01 p.m.

6 pounds, 9 ounces

Holy Name Hospital

Color them overjoyed: Painters Genevieve and Joseph McCarthy (he is also a graphic designer at Koch Entertainment), both 33, have a new little blank canvas, prompting them to move from artsy Williamsburg to ( yikes) Bergenfield, N.J. Ms. McCarthy already misses “the deli on the corner” in Brooklyn, but she is enjoying the extra space, not to mention her husband of two years’ active participation in the parenting process. “He does about half the feeding, half the rocking to sleep,” she said. “We don’t have any rules. We share every responsibility.” Ah, moderns! Porcelain-skinned little Olivia’s middle name was inspired by a storm during her birth, but she’s a mostly serene baby who enjoys cooing to her mother’s favorite music to work by: Mozart and Beethoven. Of course, Ms. McCarthy is eager to paint her firstborn’s portrait. “I just have to figure out which photo to use,” she said. “I have way too many.”

George Clooney. "He's my type."

Then this week we watched two George Clooney movies. First Syriana, about which I blogged below. I think its ideas are appalling in their simplicity and uselessness. Of course my wife loved it.

Two nights ago we watched Good Night and Good Luck. I could just see my wife loving it. After it was over, she said, "It wasn't slick. It was naive in a good way. It got people to care about something they would never care about usually. George Clooney has got all this power in Hollywood now and he's using it for good things."

I really disliked the movie. It was naive and heroic about corporate life. Its manner was pedestrian and earnest. I said to her, "Why is Murrow such a hero? He isn't. The guy was mainstream, and yes a force for good generally. But when he went after Joe McCarthy it was 1954, and McCarthy was already a laughingstock. The only good thing about the movie is they didn't cast McCarthy, they used real footage. He looks like Satan and he's crazy. Other people had already taken the big risks before Murrow."

My wife got upset. She said, "You're like that gospel according to Judas but the other way: You are taking something that's good and heroic and spinning it to be bad and obvious."

I went to two encyclopedias to prove my point. They were inconclusive.

While I am sure I'm right, I don't know that I can win this fight. This morning I heard my wife talking about me on the phone: "He doesn't understand, every woman is in love with George Clooney."

Later, I had to drive with her somewhere. I said, "O.K. In two words, What is George Clooney's type?"

"Not you."

I had to wheedle a while before she came out with: "Low key, cool, straightforward and handsome. And a little bit simple."

I'm counting that last adjective as a victory.

To the Editor:

I really liked Ron Rosenbaum’s Rosanne Cash piece [“I Got Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac Album and Barely Survived,” The Edgy Enthusiast, April 10]. It is quite wonderful that father and daughter could be so far from each other’s stance theologically and still have so much love between them—a lesson for all of us these days.

The pantheistic apocalyptic stuff is also present in mystical Judaism, as I’m sure you know: the notion of the yetzer tov and yetzerhara.

I have always followed Mr. Rosenbaum’s writing, especially what he has written about Bob Dylan. This piece makes me want to run out and get Black Cadillac right away.

Martin Grossman

Portland, Ore.

To the Editor:

I believe Rosanne is saying that her love changes—sometimes she loves like a brother, then perhaps like a son, etc. It eventually cycles back to and through each different type of love. Each type of love is not forever, because it evolves and changes, yet because it will again return, it is never done.

That’s my take, and I’m running with it. As with Dylan or any great literature or art, the meaning and interpretation is up to the beholder. So whatever works for you ….

Nice article, Mr. Rosenbaum. She’ll never marry you though, so move on!

Arthur Berriman

Barrington, R.I.

To the Editor:

Maybe Lucretius couldn’t have come up with it, but, as it happens, Dylan surely could.

José Iujvidin

Buenos Aires, Argentina

A Hate Supreme

To the Editor:

I agree with Joe Conason that Antonin Scalia does not have the judicial temperament to be on the Supreme Court [“So Who Put the Temper in Judicial Temperament?”, April 3]. The classic example is still Bush v. Gore: Justice Scalia intervened in an area of states’ rights where the court clearly had no jurisdiction. Justice is supposed to be blind, but Justice Scalia has demonstrated time and time again that he believes the court exists solely to promote his right-wing political agenda.

Reba Shimansky

Manhattan

Anti-Communist, But Not McCarthyite

To the Editor:

In his review of Tom Wicker’s book on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy [“Harmful Man, Harmful Myth: The Misplaced Liberal Concern,” March 27], Charles Peters holds that Mr. Wicker ignores what he calls “the myth of McCarthyism: the idea that all the charges made by McCarthy and his allies were false.” He goes on to note that “there were real spies—not only Alger Hiss … but Harry Dexter White … Lauchlin Currie … and David Greenglass …. ”

I don’t know whom Mr. Peters has in mind as McCarthy’s allies, but I would point out that the junior Senator from Wisconsin had absolutely nothing to do with exposing or investigating any of these figures. They were exposed by others, including members of the F.B.I. And second, there were more than a few liberal anti-communists—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. comes to mind—who were aware and highly vocal about the existence of Soviet spies in the U.S. during World War II, long before the Venona decrypts were revealed.

Matt Clark

Manhattan

Charles Peters responds:

I was one of those anti-communist liberals and, of course, am proud of the stand they took, but far too many of our brethren on the left were guilty of habitually minimizing the danger.

Mr. Wicker is a great reporter, so the picture he paints of McCarthy the man, and of the reality of McCarthyism, is both accurate and devastating. The only failing of Mr. Wicker’s book is that he doesn’t acknowledge—or even mention—what I call the myth of McCarthyism. The myth is that the charges made by McCarthy and other anti-communists were all phony, that there was no real internal threat. The myth led liberals to think the only thing they had to worry about at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. was any danger to civil liberties these agencies might present. This in turn led liberals to ignore their responsibility to make these agencies smarter and more effective. More about this later: now McCarthy the man.

McCarthy entered the world of work as a teenager with only a grade-school education. Energetic and engaging, he enjoyed success both as a chicken farmer and as manager of a Cash-Way store. When he reached 21, he decided that he needed more education and managed to talk his way into a public high school, even though it had no obligation to admit anyone over 19. Thanks to an experimental program that permitted a student to advance at his own pace, McCarthy completed the entire high-school program in nine months.

He then went to Marquette University, graduating from its law school in 1935. There, his academic career was undistinguished, except for his success at debating and poker, where he discovered the uses of bluffing.

He was nothing if not ambitious. One year out of law school, he ran for district attorney. Defeat did not discourage him. Indeed, it seemed to prompt him to raise his sights three years later: Why settle for D.A.? Why not run for judge?

And why not take on someone who seemed clearly more qualified? Judge Edgar Werner had been on the bench for 20 years after serving as both city attorney and district attorney.

Here, McCarthy discovered the uses of the misleading accusation. He charged the judge with enriching himself from the public treasury to the tune of $200,000. In 1939, this sounded like an immense sum. In reality, it represented Werner’s total earnings from 35 years of public service. But an outraged public elected McCarthy, who then became the youngest district judge in Wisconsin history.

With the coming of World War II, he joined the Marines in 1942. He was given a commission as first lieutenant, rose to captain, and was sent to the South Pacific as the intelligence officer of a dive-bomber squadron. He won fame as a poker player—Richard Nixon’s wartime career was distinguished by the same talent—and as a reliable source of distilled spirits for his comrades.

Although he was based on the ground, he talked himself into being allowed to sit in the tail-gunner’s seat on several missions, which he later parlayed into a nickname, “Tailgunner Joe.” He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by a Marine Corps anxious for the favor of a man who had become a U.S. Senator.

McCarthy’s trip to the Senate took two tries. He lost to Alexander Wiley in 1944, but came close enough to run again and win in the great Republican landslide of 1946. That campaign taught him the uses of Red-baiting. B. Carroll Reece, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the election that year a “fight basically between communism and Republicanism.”

After entering the Senate in 1947, McCarthy’s next three years went relatively unnoticed, except for his spirited defense of the Nazi troops accused of murdering American soldiers in the Malmédy Massacre—a stand that may have provided a hint of the Senator’s ideological proclivities.

By 1950, the nation’s fear of communism had grown much stronger. There had been the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, topped by the overthrow of a democratic regime in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade and the Berlin airlift, the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb, the Alger Hiss case and the communist victory in China. It wasn’t going to take much to fan the resulting anxiety into hysteria. Joe McCarthy did the fanning. In a speech in Wheeling, W.Va., in February, he declared, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [communists] still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

It didn’t matter that McCarthy failed to supply proof. People were ready to believe the worst, so that McCarthy quickly became the main spokesman and symbol of a fast-growing anti-Red movement. Bombarded with speaking invitations, he was on the fast track to political power.

In the 1950 and 1952 elections, McCarthy displayed his muscle at the polls. In 1950, he played a major role in the defeat of Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland. Tydings, having survived an attempt by F.D.R. to purge him in 1938, was thought to be ballot-proof, making McCarthy’s success especially impressive. Four other Democrats went down to defeat under attack by McCarthy and other right-wingers. The victims included the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Scott Lucas. In 1952, McCarthy helped bring down Lucas’ successor as majority leader, Ernest McFarland of Arizona. He also played a major role in the defeat of one of his most troublesome enemies, the liberal Senator Bill Benton of Connecticut. But the strongest evidence of his power came when he forced Dwight Eisenhower to delete implied criticism of McCarthy from a speech that Ike was to give in Wisconsin.

But 1952 may have been the year that, if the tide didn’t turn against McCarthy, it stopped flowing so powerfully in his favor. Where, in 1950, he had missed beating only one Senator he’d targeted, in 1952 his candidates lost in five races.

Still, his power remained impressive. The Republicans bought national television and radio time for his “Alger, I mean Adlai” attack on Stevenson. And the guest list at his 1953 wedding included Vice President Richard Nixon, White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, C.I.A. director Allen Dulles and Senator John F. Kennedy.

But his White House friends turned on him when he attacked Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and General Ralph Zwicker on the absurd charge that they had approved the promotion to major of a Trotskyite dentist. The attack was apparently triggered by the Army’s refusal to give an officer’s commission to G. David Schine, in whom McCarthy’s reptilian aide, Roy Cohn, had a “special interest.” It led to a televised hearing during which McCarthy came across as a distinctly unsavory human being, eliciting Joseph Welch’s famous rejoinder: “Have you no decency, sir?”

McCarthy’s increasing addiction to alcohol, now up to a bottle a day, proceeded to propel him on a downward path that brought about his censure by the Senate in 1954 and his death in 1957.

There’s no question that McCarthy and the larger movement that came to be called McCarthyism did immense harm. Innocent people lost their jobs. Talented actors found themselves blacklisted for more than a decade, with few people bothering to ask what difference it makes whether an actor is a communist or not.

I’m sure some young people in Hollywood and Greenwich Village became communists because it seemed hip enough that it might help them get laid. Similar thoughts passed through my mind as I bought my first copy of The Daily Worker at a Sheridan Square newsstand in 1945. And many other liberals were sympathetic to communism for more elevated reasons.

Liberals have always had a soft spot for McCarthy’s victims and have not only understood the harm he did, but have written books and made movies about it.

What they have not understood is the harm done by the myth of McCarthyism: the idea that all the charges made by McCarthy and his allies were false.

There were real spies—not only Alger Hiss at State but Harry Dexter White at Treasury, Lauchlin Currie at the White House and David Greenglass at Los Alamos, who’d been recruited by another Soviet agent, Julius Rosenberg. We know these spies were real because of the Venona intercepts, the encrypted Soviet intelligence messages decoded by our government in the late 1940’s, but not made public until 1995.

Tom Wicker is a good enough reporter to acknowledge the intercepts, but the fact that he does so only in the footnotes minimizes their importance. He also cites a Soviet report that 40 of their top American agents had been neutralized by 1950 and argues that whatever real danger of Soviet spying might have existed earlier, it “was all but over” by the time McCarthy made his Wheeling speech.

But there were other important Soviet agents who were still on the loose. Of the 344 Americans whose codenames were revealed by Venona, less than half could be identified by their real names. Of the 200 who couldn’t be nailed, we know at least two were important atomic spies, one had been a top officer in the O.S.S., one had been a captain in the Navy, and one was enough of an insider to have met privately with Roosevelt and Churchill. Did these people continue to spy?

We may never know the answer, but we do know that Russia continued to spy. Instead of ideologically committed agents, Russia employed spies who worked for money: Eddy Howard, the Walker family, Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames come to mind.

One reason Soviet spies continued to enjoy success was ineptitude at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and a big reason for this ineptitude was a failure of criticism. Liberals only criticized these agencies when civil liberties were at risk; conservatives only criticized them when they failed to serve right-wing agendas. The result is that both organizations continued to fail too often all the way to 9/11 and Iraq. Maybe conservatives will never wake up to the problem, but that’s no reason why liberals can’t work as zealously for a smarter, more effective F.B.I. and C.I.A. as they do for the protection of our civil liberties from abuse.

Charles Peters, founder and former editor in chief of The Washington Monthly, is the author of Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing “We Want Willkie!” Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World (PublicAffairs).

As the movie concerns events inside CBS leading up to the airing of an April 1954 TV program in which Edward R. Murrow attacked Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (he of McCarthyism), it may be a hard slog for people under the age of 60. Though it’s an entertaining film, Americans know little of their political history.

Their ignorance makes it easier for the movie to impose upon its viewers. They will see it as a recounting of the brave acts of a small band of newspersons who brought down the villain McCarthy when everyone else was too scared to speak out. In fact, McCarthy’s political eclipse began years before with an act of defiance, and a brave one indeed, by a fellow Republican, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.

Four years before, on June 1, 1950, Smith rose in the Senate to give a speech that has gone into the history books as the Declaration of Conscience. Looking McCarthy in the face, she said, “The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.” She went on to say something that present-day members of her party might do well to heed: “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”

It doesn’t matter that a movie took the credit and honor that will always belong to Smith and gave it to Murrow. He was in truth an outstanding journalist and would not have accepted a distinction that he had not earned. Movies, even those based on real events, cannot avoid being a form of fiction, and thus the moviemakers are entitled to do what they wish.

At the same time, whether or not the moviemakers intended it, they have glorified an industry and occupation which is in deep doo-doo. Bob Woodward has become the latest journalistic stink bomb to smell up Washington with the revelation that he has been concealing the fact that a government official had told him about Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. employment. Ms. Plame, you may recall, is the center of the leak case which sent ex– New York Times reporter Judith Miller to jail and resulted in Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s alter ego, being indicted for obstruction of justice. At this juncture, the last thing American journalism deserves is praise it is not entitled to.

The Woodward affair is a small, if odoriferous, incident exemplifying the conflicted interests, questionable relationships, doubtful practices and ethical confusions that characterize an industry more adept at self-celebration than self-analysis.

Apparently, Mr. Woodward—once one of the heroes of Watergate but long since become a kiss-ass to the powerful—came on this information while wearing his book-writer hat, not his reporter cape. The book writer, for good and sufficient commercial reasons, kept whatever it was he learned (and from whomever he learned it) a secret from his newspaper boss. Mr. Woodward has been quoted as saying he came by this nugget having lunch or something with an unnamed government figure and didn’t think it was too important. In the grand summation of things, it probably will not matter much, so there is little reason to dial up a full head of indignation—but it does give us a quick peek into the Washington world of crosshatched relationships and cozy understandings.

So the famous Bob Woodward joins the famous Judith Miller in having secret sources whom they don’t want to talk about and who gave them information which, years after the fact, they have yet to use in an article or a story. This might only raise an eyebrow or two if their information concerned kickbacks in government contracts, but this involves war. The topic in question is of the highest urgency. It not only involved war, but it involves what led to the war.

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush look like they’re going to choke when the lead-up to the war is discussed; the Veep with the crooked smile calls mention of the subject “revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety.”

The news business doesn’t call mention of it anything: Generally, it ignores the subject while occasionally taking careful pokes at it. Journalism and journalists are more at ease talking about leaks of classified information. Who leaked Valerie Plame’s secret status and why? Should reporters be forced to tell? They like those topics.

The answers to these questions may be interesting, but what everybody keeps coming back to is: Did the administration mislead Congress and the public? Did it lie? Did it distort? Did it withhold information casting doubt on just how big a threat Saddam Hussein actually was?

The whole responsibility is thrown on the government. Democrats in Congress, suffering from warmaker’s remorse and being pounded by Republicans chanting “You voted for it!”, are claiming that they would not have done so if the administration had told them about the doubts and uncertainties concerning Saddam’s lethal capabilities. Likely story. They go whither the public-opinion polls blow.

Where is American journalism in this? The answer is that we were misled, too. Journalists misled? Isn’t their job to make their way through the miasma of misdirection and put their collective finger on what’s going on?

Instead, journalists and journalism are sounding like politicians who voted for the war then and are sorry now. They are giving off the identical-sounding boo-hoos that politicians make, and little is more unbecoming to a journalist than complaining that the government lied. That is what governments do.

If journalism is behaving like a complicitous politician, it has reason to do so. Without the newspapers and the television shows beating the war drums, the United States would not have invaded Iraq. With unquestioning jingoism, the mass media drummed up support for the war, propagating every untruth and every evil fairy tale to come out of the White House and Pentagon until the country was seething in frothy fear.

It wasn’t only Ms. Miller’s fabrications in The New York Times that manipulated public opinion into supporting this disastrous conflict. It was also the editors who put Ms. Miller’s stuff in their newspaper, and the other editors and executives in the other news organizations who did the same. The Times may have played the part of the Hearst press in the 1898 run-up to the Spanish-American War, but every TV network leaped and danced behind.

American journalism cannot plead itself out by claiming to be duped by government lies or manipulations or mistakes. Any person capable of thinking for himself or herself had no need of C.I.A. memos questioning the reliability of what passed for evidence of Saddam’s military might. No inside-poopery was required to know that he had no weapons of mass destruction worth anyone worrying about.

Many Americans, and many more foreigners without access to inside information, recognized that what Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell were saying was hooey. In this case, the more insider information, the more confidential sources, the more leaks, the more gullible American journalism became. (Though bear in mind the difference between lower-level whistleblowers, who often do have valuable information to give, and high-level confidential-source leakers peddling buncombe.)

Had Washington journalism dined out less, it might have known more. One of the abiding weaknesses of the news business is identifying with the people that a reporter is assigned to cover. To a distressing extent, status in the news business comes from the status of the person you cover. Watch the way White House reporters stride around with their ID tags flapping in the breeze. They are easy marks for the people with the real money and power. Editors and higher-up news executives should know better, but they don’t: They also live to be recognized by political grandees.

However it came about, American journalism must take some of the blame for this accursed war. Some of the blood is on the hands of the reporters and editors who sold this war. This is one time when they cannot defend themselves by telling us not to kill the messenger. In this tragedy, American journalism didn’t act as the messenger but as co-instigators, co-propagandists, co-warmongers. Instead of being the messenger, they were the message.

No occupation is more addicted to conferences on its ethics, to seminars of self-examination than journalism. Thus it would be fitting for the industry to begin to sponsor a few “truth and reconciliation” meetings à la South Africa, in which reporters and editors confess what they have done and ask forgiveness of the families of the dead, of the people with ruined lives, and of the thousands of men and women in uniform who were put through this hell for vainglory, pride and the ambition of others. Good night, and good luck.

As the movie concerns events inside CBS leading up to the airing of an April 1954 TV program in which Edward R. Murrow attacked Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (he of McCarthyism), it may be a hard slog for people under the age of 60. Though it’s an entertaining film, Americans know little of their political history.

Their ignorance makes it easier for the movie to impose upon its viewers. They will see it as a recounting of the brave acts of a small band of newspersons who brought down the villain McCarthy when everyone else was too scared to speak out. In fact, McCarthy’s political eclipse began years before with an act of defiance, and a brave one indeed, by a fellow Republican, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.

Four years before, on June 1, 1950, Smith rose in the Senate to give a speech that has gone into the history books as the Declaration of Conscience. Looking McCarthy in the face, she said, “The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.” She went on to say something that present-day members of her party might do well to heed: “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”

It doesn’t matter that a movie took the credit and honor that will always belong to Smith and gave it to Murrow. He was in truth an outstanding journalist and would not have accepted a distinction that he had not earned. Movies, even those based on real events, cannot avoid being a form of fiction, and thus the moviemakers are entitled to do what they wish.

At the same time, whether or not the moviemakers intended it, they have glorified an industry and occupation which is in deep doo-doo. Bob Woodward has become the latest journalistic stink bomb to smell up Washington with the revelation that he has been concealing the fact that a government official had told him about Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. employment. Ms. Plame, you may recall, is the center of the leak case which sent ex–New York Times reporter Judith Miller to jail and resulted in Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s alter ego, being indicted for obstruction of justice. At this juncture, the last thing American journalism deserves is praise it is not entitled to.

The Woodward affair is a small, if odoriferous, incident exemplifying the conflicted interests, questionable relationships, doubtful practices and ethical confusions that characterize an industry more adept at self-celebration than self-analysis.

Apparently, Mr. Woodward—once one of the heroes of Watergate but long since become a kiss-ass to the powerful—came on this information while wearing his book-writer hat, not his reporter cape. The book writer, for good and sufficient commercial reasons, kept whatever it was he learned (and from whomever he learned it) a secret from his newspaper boss. Mr. Woodward has been quoted as saying he came by this nugget having lunch or something with an unnamed government figure and didn’t think it was too important. In the grand summation of things, it probably will not matter much, so there is little reason to dial up a full head of indignation—but it does give us a quick peek into the Washington world of crosshatched relationships and cozy understandings.

So the famous Bob Woodward joins the famous Judith Miller in having secret sources whom they don’t want to talk about and who gave them information which, years after the fact, they have yet to use in an article or a story. This might only raise an eyebrow or two if their information concerned kickbacks in government contracts, but this involves war. The topic in question is of the highest urgency. It not only involved war, but it involves what led to the war.

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush look like they’re going to choke when the lead-up to the war is discussed; the Veep with the crooked smile calls mention of the subject “revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety.”

The news business doesn’t call mention of it anything: Generally, it ignores the subject while occasionally taking careful pokes at it. Journalism and journalists are more at ease talking about leaks of classified information. Who leaked Valerie Plame’s secret status and why? Should reporters be forced to tell? They like those topics.

The answers to these questions may be interesting, but what everybody keeps coming back to is: Did the administration mislead Congress and the public? Did it lie? Did it distort? Did it withhold information casting doubt on just how big a threat Saddam Hussein actually was?

The whole responsibility is thrown on the government. Democrats in Congress, suffering from warmaker’s remorse and being pounded by Republicans chanting “You voted for it!”, are claiming that they would not have done so if the administration had told them about the doubts and uncertainties concerning Saddam’s lethal capabilities. Likely story. They go whither the public-opinion polls blow.

Where is American journalism in this? The answer is that we were misled, too. Journalists misled? Isn’t their job to make their way through the miasma of misdirection and put their collective finger on what’s going on?

Instead, journalists and journalism are sounding like politicians who voted for the war then and are sorry now. They are giving off the identical-sounding boo-hoos that politicians make, and little is more unbecoming to a journalist than complaining that the government lied. That is what governments do.

If journalism is behaving like a complicitous politician, it has reason to do so. Without the newspapers and the television shows beating the war drums, the United States would not have invaded Iraq. With unquestioning jingoism, the mass media drummed up support for the war, propagating every untruth and every evil fairy tale to come out of the White House and Pentagon until the country was seething in frothy fear.

It wasn’t only Ms. Miller’s fabrications in The New York Times that manipulated public opinion into supporting this disastrous conflict. It was also the editors who put Ms. Miller’s stuff in their newspaper, and the other editors and executives in the other news organizations who did the same. The Times may have played the part of the Hearst press in the 1898 run-up to the Spanish-American War, but every TV network leaped and danced behind.

American journalism cannot plead itself out by claiming to be duped by government lies or manipulations or mistakes. Any person capable of thinking for himself or herself had no need of C.I.A. memos questioning the reliability of what passed for evidence of Saddam’s military might. No inside-poopery was required to know that he had no weapons of mass destruction worth anyone worrying about.

Many Americans, and many more foreigners without access to inside information, recognized that what Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell were saying was hooey. In this case, the more insider information, the more confidential sources, the more leaks, the more gullible American journalism became. (Though bear in mind the difference between lower-level whistleblowers, who often do have valuable information to give, and high-level confidential-source leakers peddling buncombe.)

Had Washington journalism dined out less, it might have known more. One of the abiding weaknesses of the news business is identifying with the people that a reporter is assigned to cover. To a distressing extent, status in the news business comes from the status of the person you cover. Watch the way White House reporters stride around with their ID tags flapping in the breeze. They are easy marks for the people with the real money and power. Editors and higher-up news executives should know better, but they don’t: They also live to be recognized by political grandees.

However it came about, American journalism must take some of the blame for this accursed war. Some of the blood is on the hands of the reporters and editors who sold this war. This is one time when they cannot defend themselves by telling us not to kill the messenger. In this tragedy, American journalism didn’t act as the messenger but as co-instigators, co-propagandists, co-warmongers. Instead of being the messenger, they were the message.

No occupation is more addicted to conferences on its ethics, to seminars of self-examination than journalism. Thus it would be fitting for the industry to begin to sponsor a few “truth and reconciliation” meetings à la South Africa, in which reporters and editors confess what they have done and ask forgiveness of the families of the dead, of the people with ruined lives, and of the thousands of men and women in uniform who were put through this hell for vainglory, pride and the ambition of others. Good night, and good luck.

“I’ve got to really, really get started. I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to sing,” she said in that frank, warm drawl that still bears traces of her native Atlanta. “But I’ve been traveling so much lately, I haven’t even had time to play Texas hold ’em!”

She released a loud peal of laughter that made the soft folds of her cheeks shake.

At 78 years old, Ms. Cook is enjoying a long, crowd-pleasing third act of a career that has unfolded much like a Broadway book. She has sung for the Queen of England and was most recently nominated for a Tony in 2002, for her 14-week Lincoln Center hit, Mostly Sondheim. In 2003, her album Count Your Blessings earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. She lost, cruelly, to Rod Stewart.

For Ms. Cook’s fans, the secret of her singing lies as much in her voice as in her uncanny ability to invest each note with history and personality—or, in a word, autobiography. Her elastic voice combines exquisite technique with a rare soul-baring honesty. The composer Stephen Sondheim has praised her as one of the foremost interpreters of theatrical music now living. An attendee of one of her recent master classes at Juilliard was even bolder, declaring, “I feel like when she performs, she performs naked.” Never mind that Ms. Cook’s still-supple soprano no longer reaches those glass-shattering high E’s. Singers are supposed to retire long before 65, but Ms. Cook’s singing has only become more daring.

“I think I sing, as far as communication goes, better now than I did 10 years ago. I just seem to have more courage,” she said. “I think, generally speaking, people do have more courage as they get older. Finally you get to the point where you say, ‘Look, this is it, folks—it’s not going to change much more than this. Take it or leave it.’

“You know, getting older has some real benefits,” she continued as her parakeets, blue-bellied George and yellow-winged Gilbert, twittered in the dining room. “There’s no way you can have the kind of perspective at 20 that you have at 50. There’s just no way—you’ve just got to live it.”

Ms. Cook has done well by her years, having absorbed enough aphoristic wisdom to make Oprah envious while retaining the jolly energy of someone half her age. An ample Mother Earth of a woman, there is nothing frail or wispy about her, nothing careful or uncertain. She wears the artist’s uniform of black on black, accented by bold turquoise or gold baubles. She sleeps five hours a night. She calls people “darlin’,” as if she were still rehearsing to play everyone’s favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein coquette, Ado Annie.

“You know, some days I feel like I could be 30; some days I feel like I’m 12. My knee doesn’t feel like it’s 12,” she added with a soprano’s tinkling laugh, “but I do.”

Ms. Cook arrived in New York City in 1948, 20 years old, as blonde-haired, button-nosed and determined as one of those dewy-eyed ingénues she would later play in musicals. Her mother thought they were only heading to New York for a two-week visit—but when two weeks came to an end, only her mother returned to Atlanta.

“I had gotten to the point where clearly I was talented. I didn’t know how talented I was, but I certainly realized it would be utterly foolish to not give it a good try,” Ms. Cook said. “I knew that this was where I belonged.”

But beneath Ms. Cook’s bravado there was also terror. Looking back, she still marvels that her doubt-ridden younger self—the self that couldn’t ask an operator to place a long-distance phone call without breaking into a clammy-handed sweat—had the brass and sass to pursue a career under the floodlights. “But I just did it,” she said. “If you’re really passionate about something, you find your way, because that’s all you think about 24 hours a day.”

Within three years, Ms. Cook landed her first big Broadway role, the romantic lead in a satirical, Joe McCarthy–inspired musical called Flahooley. The play fizzled after 40 performances—it was, after all, a Joe McCarthy–inspired musical—but it earned Ms. Cook enough critical attention that she soon found herself do-si-doing in the City Center revival of Oklahoma!, melting hearts as the lovelorn Hilda Miller in Plain and Fancy, and belting out high C’s (21 of them in one song alone!) as Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein’s exquisitely impossible Candide. “He was extraordinarily supportive of me,” she said of the legendary music macher. “He was an amazing personality, a very sexy man—oh my Lord!”

But it was her turn as the lovable spinster Marian the Librarian in Meredith Willson’s premier production of The Music Man in 1957 that immortalized her as the blue-eyed everygirl with the silver pipes.

Throughout the next decade, Ms. Cook continued to warble her way across the Great White Way. But during the late 1960’s, as Broadway’s golden age turned to copper and Ms. Cook neared 40, she hit a lost, dark period that she dubs “middlescence.” Divorce, a drinking problem and a struggle with obesity all collided with the curse of being middle-aged on Broadway. Her son, Adam, went to live with her ex-husband, David LeGrant. (They later reunited and are now quite close.) She stopped performing. By the early 1970’s, she had disappeared from Broadway.

“I remember thinking that I didn’t know where to aim myself,” she said. “I think I needed to stop working for a while, sit back and take stock of things. But it would have terrified me—the idea that I was just going to on purpose decide not to work for a while.” She paused. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I didn’t know how to get it together, somehow.”

But eventually, she did just that—slowly and reluctantly at first, perhaps more out of a desire to work than some protean urge to reinvent herself. The transformation began with a 1975 concert she gave at Carnegie Hall along with her late, great accompanist and music director, Wally Harper. It was a triumphant performance, a bravura return from nowhere that earned them a deal with CBS Records and the opportunity for follow-up gigs. For the next 30 years, until Harper died in October 2004, the two were among the most celebrated figures on the cabaret circuit.

In many ways, Ms. Cook found her voice during these decades, the emotional richness that has become her signature in later life. She owed part of this discovery to her partnership with Harper, part of it to her practice of carefully and consciously investing herself in each note of every song. But much of the credit goes to sheer hoary, humble age and experience.

“I don’t sing like I did 20 years ago—but there are other things I do now that I didn’t do 20 years ago, as far as singing goes,” she said. “I think my ability to communicate has gotten stronger, and probably five years from now will be stronger than it is now, because that’s the path I’m on. I don’t consider myself a finished product. It’s a work in progress.”

But Ms. Cook didn’t sound like a work in progress when she stood onstage at Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater on Dec. 1, trilling out the notes to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific showstopper, “A Wonderful Guy.” She was wrapping up a master class, showing the stiff, overtrained students how to transform themselves from “singing machines” into “real people.”

“I expect everyone of my crowd to make fun / Of my proud protestations of faith in romance,” she swooned as her new accompanist, Eric Stein, clanged out the melody. Her voice wasn’t as crystal as the youngsters’ had been, but as she waltzed and strutted about the stage, belting out the love-struck lyrics of a far younger woman, she captured some strange possibility of sound and language that none of her students had done. “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love,” she sang. And for a moment, she was both 78 and 21, wildly in love, unleashing the longing of youth and the wisdom of age—the whole drama of a life—across the quivering air.