George Clooney

When Walter Cronkite stepped out from behind the desk and said, this war in Vietnam is unwinnable, it's a tie at best.

That's when President Johnson said, if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country and decided not to run for reelection.

When Murrow took on McCarthy, that was a moment when he was the most trusted man in America.

And he said the emperor has no clothes.

That actually changed public opinion.

And you know, playing Murrow, the thing that was exciting to me

was in the play, which it was very different, the play.

It was much more urgent and much more about what we're dealing with today.

And at the very end of the play, as Murrow, I got to stand in front of an audience of 1,600 people every night and look them all, each one in the eye at the end,

and say, what are you prepared to do?

And we would have violent reactions from the audience.

People would be crying and people would be yelling, resist!

And people would be standing up and cheering and screaming.

And it really felt...

like everybody in that room needed a place to wash their hands and face and remind themselves, not by my words, but by Murrow's words, of who we are at our best, who we aspire to be, who we often fall short of, but who we also have accomplished.

We have been the people that defeated fascism and Nazism.

We did do that, and it wouldn't have happened without us.

At the exact same time, we were putting Asian Americans, Japanese Americans into camps.

We're a very complicated country, which has huge goals and aspires to many of them and falls way short of many of them.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.