Milo Radulovich

DETROIT (AP) - Milo Radulovich, an Air Force Reserve lieutenant championed by CBS-TV newsman Edward R. Murrow when the military threatened to decommission him during a Cold War anti-communist crackdown, has died. He was 81.

Radulovich died Monday in Vallejo, California, after complications from a stroke, family members said. He was 81.

He served as a consultant on the 2005 film "Good Night, and Good Luck," based on Murrow's journalistic challenge to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The movie included the Radulovich case and the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings that led to the senator's downfall.

Radulovich was born in Detroit, joined the Air Force Reserves, worked as a meteorologist in Greenland, then enrolled at the University of Michigan on the GI Bill.

In 1953, the Air Force threatened to decommission him on grounds that he maintained a "close and continuing relationship" with his father and sister. The military said they were suspect because of the father's subscription to a Serbian newspaper and his sister's political activities.

Radulovich refused the military's demand that he denounce his father and sister.

"He was well aware of his historical importance," Al Fishman, husband of Radulovich's sister Margaret, told The Detroit News. "He put his finger in the dike when the flood of McCarthyism inundated the country."

"He was one of my heroes," Fishman told the Detroit Free Press.

Murrow's "See It Now" aired a segment, "The Case Against Lt. Milo Radulovich," in October 1953. The next month, the Air Force reversed its declaration that Radulovich was a security risk.
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