edward r. murrow - citeseerx.ist.psu.edu

162

Edward R. Murrow(24 or 25 April 1908 – 27 April 1965)

Braden Hall

BOOKS: American Field Service Fellowships for FrenchUniversities (New York: Institute of Interna-tional Education, 1933);

Cultural Cooperation with Latin America (New York:Institute of International Education, 1933);

Fellowship Administration (New York: Institute ofInternational Education, 1933);

The Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced GermanScholars: Report as of February 1, 1935 (NewYork: Emergency Committee in Aid of Dis-placed German Scholars, 1935);

This Is London, edited by Elmer Davis (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1941);

An Island and Its People: A Radio Address by Edward R.Murrow (Honolulu: Hawaiian Pineapple Com-pany, 1942);

Testimony of Mr. Edward R. Murrow, European Represen-tative of the Columbia Broadcasting System beforethe Committee on Foreign Affairs, 78th Cong., 1stSess., Wednesday, June 16, 1943 (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943);

A New Dimension for Education (Lewisburg, Pa.: Buck-nell University, 1962);

In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow,1938–1961, edited by Edward Bliss Jr. (NewYork: Knopf, 1967).

RECORDINGS: I Can Hear It Now 1933–1945, readby Murrow, Columbia Records, 1948;

I Can Hear It Now 1945–1949, read by Murrow,Columbia Records, 1949;

I Can Hear It Now 1919–1932, read by Murrow,Columbia Records, 1950;

The Second World War: I Can Hear It Now, read by Mur-row, Columbia Records, 1965;

This Is Edward R. Murrow, Apr. 30, 1965: An Anthologyof the Work of Broadcasting’s Most DistinguishedReporter, CBS, 1965;

A Reporter Remembers, Volume 1: The War Years,Columbia Masterworks, 1966;

A Reporter Remembers, Volume 2: 1948–1961, Colum-bia Masterworks, 1969;

The Ideological Struggle: A Conversation with Edward R.Murrow on Propaganda Warfare, Forum Associ-ates, 1969;

Edward R. Murrow—Reporting Live, Bantam Audio,1986.

OTHER: Talks: A Quarterly Digest of Addresses of Diver-sified Interest Broadcast over the Columbia Network,

Edward R. Murrow (Library of Congress)

163

DLB 364 Edward R. Murrow

edited by Murrow (New York: Columbia Broad-casting System, 1937);

Ernestine Carter, ed., Bloody but Unbowed: Pictures ofBritain under Fire, preface by Murrow (NewYork: Scribners, 1941); republished as GrimGlory: Pictures of Britain under Fire (London:Lund, Humphries, 1941);

“Spring Comes to England,” in Representative Ameri-can Speeches: 1940–1941, edited by A. CraigBaird (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1941), pp.157–162;

“A Report to America,” in In Honor of a Man and anIdeal . . . Three Talks on Freedom, by Murrow, Archi-bald MacLeish, and William S. Paley (New York:Columbia Broadcasting System, 1941);

“Orchestrated Hell,” in Representative AmericanSpeeches: 1943–1944, edited by Baird (NewYork: H. W. Wilson, 1944), pp. 37–45;

“Farewell to England,” in Representative AmericanSpeeches: 1945–1946, edited by Baird (NewYork: H. W. Wilson, 1946), pp. 33–38;

“Jan Masaryk,” in Representative American Speeches:1947–1948, edited by Baird (New York: H. W.Wilson, 1948), pp. 220–226;

Edward P. Morgan, ed., This I Believe: The Living Phi-losophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men andWomen, foreword by Murrow (New York: Simon& Schuster, 1952);

See It Now, edited by Murrow and Fred W. Friendly(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955);

Irving G. Williams, The Rise of the Vice Presidency,introduction by Murrow (Washington, D.C.:Public Affairs Press, 1956);

Stephen King-Hall, Defense in the Nuclear Age, intro-duction by Murrow (Nyack, N.Y.: FellowshipPublications, 1959);

Hyman G. Rickover, Education and Freedom, forewordby Murrow (New York: Dutton, 1959);

“Television and Politics,” in “Dons or Crooners?”: ThreeLectures Given in Guildhall London in October 1959on the Subject of Communication in the Modern World,by Murrow, Edward Appleton, and Eric Ashby(London: Granada TV, 1959), pp. 45–81.

SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS—UNCOLLECTED: “My Most Important Decision,”

Cosmopolitan (March 1942);“You and Televison,” by Murrow and Lyman Bryson,

Hollywood Quarterly, 4 (Winter 1949): 178–181;“A-Bomb Mission to Moscow,” Collier’s, 128 (27 Octo-

ber 1951).

Edward R. Murrow was the premier radiobroadcaster of the European phase of World War II.

He assembled a group of correspondents who cov-ered every facet of the war. Later, he became thevoice of opposition in the face of McCarthyism inthe 1950s. David Halberstam describes Murrow as

The right man in the right place in the right era.An innately elegant man in an innately inelegantprofession. A rare figure, as good as his legend. . . .He was shy and often withdrawn in personal conver-sation, but totally controlled and brilliant as a com-municator. His voice was steeped in civility,intelligence, and compassion. He was a man who,much as Lindbergh did, spanned the oceans andshortened distance and heightened time. He helpedmake radio respectable as a serious journalistic pro-fession, and more than a decade later, simply bygoing over to television, had a good deal to do withmaking that journalistically legitimate too. He was,in a way, more an educator than a journalist. Hisown career and the technological revolution he waspart of helped mark America’s transformation froma post-Depression isolationist nation to a majorinternational superpower. His very voice bridged theocean, brought Europe (and thus potentially threat-ening alien powers) closer, and made its presencemore immediate and more complicated. He helpededucate the nation in the process of entering thelarger world. He also helped inaugurate an era inwhich the very speed of communication became aform of power.

By the end of Murrow’s relatively short life—he diedat fifty-seven—he had received nine Emmys, fourPeabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, and thePresidential Medal of Freedom. He had been namedan Honorary Knight Commander of the Order ofthe British Empire and had received similar honorsfrom Belgium, France, and Sweden.

Egbert Roscoe Murrow was born on 24 or 25April—equally authoritative sources differ—1908 inPolecat Creek, near Greensboro in Guilford County,North Carolina, to Quaker farmers Roscoe andEthel Lamb Murrow. He was the last of their fourchildren, all of whom were sons. The firstborn,Roscoe Jr., lived for only a month; the other sur-viving sons were Lacey and Dewey, who were fourand two years older than Egbert, respectively. Thefarm had no electricity, telephone, or indoorplumbing, and the only heat was supplied by a fire-place that was also used for cooking. When Murrowwas five, the family moved to the logging town ofBlanchard, Washington, thirty miles from the Cana-dian border, at the suggestion of relatives who wereliving there. Murrow’s father took a job as a hiredhand on a farm. After a year, the family moved backto Polecat Creek but spent only a few months therebefore returning to Blanchard. Murrow’s father

164

Edward R. Murrow DLB 364

worked in a sawmill and then as a locomotive engi-neer on a timber-hauling railroad.

Murrow attended elementary school inBlanchard from age six to fourteen and high schoolin nearby Edison, where he was a member of thedebate team. The debate coach, Ruth Lawson,taught him to overcome his stage fright by thinkingof his audience not as a roomful of critics but as peo-ple hungry for the information that he was there tosupply. During vacations from school Murrowworked as a lumberjack; at this time he began callinghimself Edward instead of Egbert to avoid ridiculefrom the other men. According to Bob Edwards,“For the rest of his life, Ed Murrow recounted thestories and retold the jokes he’d heard from mill-hands and lumberjacks. He also sang their songs,especially after several rounds of refreshments withfellow journalists.” In his final two years of highschool Murrow drove the school’s only bus. He was amember of the baseball, basketball, and ice-skatingteams, as well as the glee club and the school orches-tra; he sang in school operettas; and he was electedclass president, student-body president, and mostpopular student.

In 1925 Murrow’s father quit his job afterknocking out a foreman who had been abusing him.He quickly found another position as a locomotiveengineer in Beaver, Washington, on the other side ofthe Olympic Peninsula, and the family moved there.

Murrow worked as a lumberjack for a yearbefore enrolling at what was then Washington StateCollege (today Washington State University) in Pull-man in 1926; he had wanted to study law at the Uni-versity of Virginia, but the family could not afford tosend him there. He worked his way through schoolwith jobs as a theater stagehand and a lumberjack,but still participated in student politics, sports,debates, and the Army Reserve Officer TrainingCorps (ROTC) program. During his freshman yearhe changed his major from business administrationto speech. On the recommendation of a fellow stu-dent he took an Intermediate Public Speakingcourse taught by twenty-six-year-old Ida Lou Ander-son, who suffered from a double curvature of thespine caused by childhood polio. She became Mur-row’s mentor and friend and remained so until herdeath in 1941. He also produced his own show onthe campus radio station.

Murrow was elected president of the NationalStudent Federation of America (NSFA) at its 1929convention at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Cali-fornia, after giving a speech urging college studentsto become more interested in national and worldaffairs and less involved with “fraternities, football,

and fun.” He was elected to another term beforegraduating from Washington State in June 1930 andmoved to New York to manage the organization’snational office; he received a stipend of $25 a weekfor living expenses. In July he sailed for Europe toattend the international student congress in Brus-sels, Belgium; he was accompanied by two other del-egates, one of whom was the future U.S. SupremeCourt justice Lewis F. Powell. Before going on toBrussels, they spent two weeks in England; Murrowfound the climate, cuisine, and people of the coun-try unpleasant. After the conference, Murrow andPowell spent a week in Paris and took a cruise downthe Rhine. The 1930 U.S. convention of the NSFAwas held at the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta, in theheart of the segregated South; Murrow used variousstrategems to ensure that black delegates wereincluded.

The NSFA offered Murrow his first opportunityto host a national radio show: University of the Air, amonthly program on the Columbia BroadcastingSystem (CBS) radio network. Murrow arrangedinterviews with world figures such as the mathemati-cian and physicist Albert Einstein, the Indian writerRabindranath Tagore, Indian independence leaderMohandas K. Gandhi, German president Paul vonHindenburg, and British prime minister RamsayMacDonald.

When his term as president of the NSFA endedin 1932, Murrow became assistant director of theInstitute of International Education (IIE). AfterAdolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933,many German scholars and professors were dis-missed from their jobs. The IIE established theEmergency Committee in Aid of Displaced GermanScholars with Murrow as the first assistant secretary.The committee assisted 335 scholars in moving fromEurope to the United States. Among them were thenovelist Thomas Mann, the philosopher HerbertMarcuse, and the physicist James Franck.

On 12 March 1934 Murrow married JanetHuntington Brewster, who came from a prominentNew England family. They had met on a train to NewOrleans going to attend an NSFA conference in1932.

Murrow’s duties included arranging educa-tional broadcasts for the IIE on the CBS radio net-work. At that time most CBS broadcasts consisted oflectures and speeches by celebrities; Murrow’s workwas noticed by CBS founder and chairman WilliamS. Paley and news director Paul W. White, and in thefall of 1935 they hired him as Director of Talks toCoordinate Broadcasts on Current Issues. He madehis first newscast on Christmas Eve 1936 when he vol-

165


unteered to substitute at the last minute for veteranannouncer Robert Trout, who had drunk too muchat the CBS Christmas party.

In March 1937 Murrow was given the positionof European Director of Talks. The network’s Euro-pean operation was headquartered in a small admin-istrative center in London; Murrow’s staff consistedof a secretary and an office boy. On 13 September1937 Murrow hired William L. Shirer, an Americanreporter living in Berlin who had recently lost his jobwhen the Hearst corporation closed its UniversalService news agency, to arrange for speakers on theContinent. Murrow and Shirer were managers; nei-ther man was supposed to do any on-air work. Mur-row had Shirer relocate to Vienna, Austria.

The Austrian Nazi Party took power on 11March 1938. The next day, German troops marchedinto Austria. Murrow was in Warsaw, Poland, tryingto schedule a broadcast of a children’s chorale.Shirer was an eyewitness to the events in Vienna, buthe could not deliver an accurate account of themunder the eye of the Nazi censors. Murrow circum-vented the problem by sending Shirer to London,

while Murrow took Shirer’s place in Vienna. At 6:30P.M. on 12 March, Shirer used leased British Broad-casting Corporation (BBC) facilities to deliver thefirst uncensored report of Austria’s capitulation toGermany.

Shirer’s report, however, was not the first to air:Max Jordan of the National Broadcasting Company(NBC) had delivered a censored eyewitness accountfrom the studios of Austrian state radio. In NewYork, Paley decided that CBS could score a triumphover its rival network with a program on 13 Marchconsisting of live reports from London, Paris, Berlin,Rome, and Vienna of reactions to Austria’s loss ofindependence; the broadcast would be hosted fromCBS headquarters in New York by Trout. Such a feathad never been attempted. Murrow was given lessthan eight hours to employ correspondents and findtransmission facilities in the various capitals. Hedecided that he would broadcast from London andShirer from Vienna. Calling on the contacts he hadmade during his years of traveling across Europe toassemble cultural broadcasts, he engaged the news-paper reporters Ed Mowrer in Paris, Pierre Huss in

Murrow interviewing Colonel Joe W. Kelly, a B-26 pilot with whom he flew on several missions overGermany, and an unidentified officer (Edward R. Murrow Collection, Digital Collections and Archives,

Tufts University)

166


Berlin, and Frank Gervasi in Rome. The correspon-dents had to write their scripts and have themapproved quickly by the censors in the various coun-tries, and each report had to begin and end withoutrunning over into the broadcast from the next city;the commentators would not be able to hear oneanother, so the clocks at each facility had to be pre-cisely on time. If any of the European transmitterslost its signal to New York because of an equipmentmalfunction or atmospheric conditions, CBS wouldhave “dead air”—a cardinal sin in broadcast-ing—with no way to fill it.

On 13 March Anschluss (union) between Ger-many and Austria was declared, and Hitler wasreported to be on his way to Vienna. At 8:00 P.M.New York time, Trout announced that the regularlyscheduled musical program would not be heard sothat CBS could present a half-hour report of com-ments from European capitals on the Germanannexation of Austria. Despite all the possibilitiesfor error, the broadcast was accomplished without ahitch. The only difficulty occurred in Rome beforethe program began: Gervasi was unable to procurethe equipment he needed and tried unsuccessfullyto arrange a telephone hookup to a transmitter inGeneva. Finally, in desperation, he phoned hisreport to Shirer in London, and Shirer read it onthe air.

In Vienna, Murrow made the first major broad-cast of his career. He told his listeners:

From the air, Vienna didn’t look much differentthan it has before, but, nevertheless, it’s changed.The crowds are courteous as they’ve always been,but many people are in a holiday mood; they lift theright arm a little higher here than in Berlin and the“Heil Hitler” is said a little more loudly. There isn’t agreat deal of hilarity but at the same time theredoesn’t seem to be much feeling of tension. Youngstorm troopers are riding about the streets, ridingabout in trucks and vehicles of all sorts, singing andtossing oranges out to the crowd. Nearly every prin-cipal building has its armed guard, including theone from which I am speaking. . . . There’s a certainair of expectancy about the city, everyone waitingand wondering where and at what time Herr Hitlerwill arrive.

Murrow had no journalistic training, but he pos-sessed a deep and resonant voice and a delivery thatwas honed by his experience in debating and publicspeaking. CBS reporter Howard K. Smith told Mur-row biographer Joseph Persico: “Ed didn’t know howto write like a newsman, which freed him to writewith his own fresh eye and ear. I went through thefiles of his first broadcasts and they were just notes

on paper. The man was ad-libbing transatlanticbroadcasts!” Bob Edwards points out that “Murrow,Shirer, and company had just devised and executedwhat became the routine format for the presenta-tion of news. It not only had multiple points of ori-gin, it also had included both reporting and analysisof breaking news, and was both a journalistic and atechnological breakthrough for broadcasting. Nolonger would radio news consist of announcersassigned to cover carefully preplanned events as ifthey were parades or mere curiosities. From thispoint on, network staff journalists would providetimely reporting and analysis of important breakingnews.” CBS ordered another roundup for the nextnight, and several more were broadcast over thenext several days.

Murrow was given permission to hire a team ofcorrespondents to be placed throughout Europe tocover the impending war. The best known of thesecorrespondents were the eleven who have becomeknown as “Murrow’s Boys” or “the Murrow Boys,”even though one of them was a woman: Shirer,Smith, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, ThomasGrandin, Larry LeSueur, Cecil Brown, Winston Bur-dett, William Downs, Richard C. Hottelet, and MaryMarvin Breckinridge. They were not hired for theirpleasing radio voices—CBS directors in New Yorkwere often mortified by the way their correspon-dents sounded on the air—but for their writing abil-ity, knowledge, and contacts. United Press (UP)reporter Walter Cronkite almost became one of the“Boys”: in 1943 he accepted Murrow’s offer of a jobbut changed his mind when UP raised his pay; Mur-row did hire Cronkite five years after the war butnever really forgave him for the earlier rejection.Breckinridge’s inclusion in the group is a testamentto Murrow’s independence and disregard for tradi-tion: CBS believed that men had better radio voicesand access to a wider variety of situations; femaleswere only used when there was a need for a woman’sangle on a story. Breckinridge was based in Amster-dam but left CBS on 20 June 1940 to marry a diplo-mat stationed in Berlin. Murrow might have had twofemale correspondents, but the network replacedBetty Wason with Burdett after her initial reportsfrom Norway. Murrow’s wife, Janet, was the onlywoman besides Wason and Breckinridge to broad-cast on CBS during the war. She occasionallyreported on issues of interest to women such as foodshortages and rationing of clothing and interviewedfemale members of Parliament. She filled some ofthe many hours she was forced to spend apart fromMurrow by being active in the American Committeefor Evacuation of Children, which arranged to send

167


the children of influential parents to the UnitedStates for safety, and was the director in England ofBundles for Britain, which distributed food, cloth-ing, and money donated by Americans to aid theBritish.

On 22 September Murrow replaced the open-ing he had been using for his broadcasts—“Hello,America. This is London calling”—which he hadtaken over from his predecessor as CBS Europeandirector, Cesar Searchinger, with one that was sug-gested to him in a letter from his old public-speakingteacher Anderson: “This is London.” The phrasebecame indelibly identified with him.

Almost immediately after the Anschluss, Hitlerbegan demanding the “return” to Germany of theSudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia wheresome 3.5 million ethnic Germans lived; the area had,in fact, never belonged to Germany. Hitler steppedup his demands in September. Chamberlainbelieved that appeasing Hitler in the Sudeten mattercould prevent the outbreak of war. On 30 September1938 he and the leaders of France and Italyattempted to secure what Chamberlain called“peace in our time” by meeting with Hitler inMunich and signing a pact that allowed Germany toannex the Sudetenland; neither the Czech govern-ment nor that of its ally, the Soviet Union, had beenconsulted. NBC’s Jordan was in Munich and had dis-cussed the provisions of the agreement on the air,but Murrow, who was listening to Munich radio inLondon with an interpreter, was the first to reportthe actual signing to an American audience. Cover-ing the return of a triumphant Chamberlain tocheering crowds, Murrow commented, “Interna-tional experts in London agree that Herr Hitler hasscored one of the greatest diplomatic triumphs inmodern history.”

During the Sudeten crisis Murrow had partici-pated in 35 broadcasts and arranged 116. In Novem-ber he and his wife returned to the United States forthe first time in eighteen months. Murrow waspraised for his work in Europe; his reporting wasacclaimed as fresh and far-reaching and for bringingimmediacy and intensity to events occurring thou-sands of miles away from his audience. On Hallow-een, Orson Welles used Murrow’s innovativeroundup style of reporting to structure his radioadaptation of H. G. Wells’s novella The War of theWorlds on his Mercury Theatre on the Air: anannouncer broke into a fictional big-band show witha news bulletin, after which actors portraying report-ers in various locations gave updates on a Martianinvasion of Grovers Mills, New Jersey. One million

listeners who had ignored or tuned in after Welles’sdisclaimer at the beginning of the show believedthey were hearing an actual newscast and werethrown into a panic.

The Murrows returned to London in early1939. German troops invaded Poland on 1 Septem-ber; on 3 September, Britain declared war on Ger-many. Sevareid, newly hired by Murrow, reportedfrom Paris as France also declared war on Germany.On 8 September, Shirer announced in Berlin thatGerman troops were approaching Warsaw.

On 9 April 1940 Germany invaded Denmarkand Norway. On 10 May, Hitler launched simultane-ous attacks on the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Bel-gium, and France. Chamberlain resigned that sameday, and Winston Churchill became prime minister.On 27 May the evacuation of 335,000 British andFrench troops from the French coast at Dunkirkbegan. On 3 June, Murrow described the mood ofthe British people:

Dust jacket for Murrow’s 1941 collection of his broadcastsfrom England (www.amazon.com)

168


I saw more grave, solemn faces today than I haveever seen in London before. Fashionable tearoomswere almost deserted; the shops in Bond Street weredoing very little business; people read their news-papers as they walked slowly down the streets. . . . Isaw one woman standing in line waiting for a busbegin to cry, very quietly. She didn’t even bother towipe the tears away.

The following day, Murrow relayed Churchill’s rally-ing call to Britain after the forty thousand troops leftbehind at Dunkirk surrendered to the Germans:“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on thebeaches . . . we shall fight in the fields and in thestreets. We shall never surrender.” Murrow com-mented, “I have heard Mr. Churchill in the House ofCommons in intervals over the last ten years. Today,he was different. He spoke the language of Shake-speare with the direct urgency I have never heardbefore in that house.”

During the Battle of Britain—a three-monthaerial duel between Luftwaffe (German air force)bombers and fighter planes and Royal Air Force(RAF) fighters that began on 10 July 1940—Murrowworked almost twenty hours on most days. For thefirst several weeks the bombs were directed at mili-tary targets along the coasts in preparation for aplanned invasion of Britain; but London and othercities were blacked out at night as a precaution, andair-raid sirens sounded when bombers were heard inthe distance.

On 24 August, Murrow produced a broadcasttitled London after Dark in collaboration with theBBC. The program consisted of a series of livereports from nine correspondents scatteredthroughout the city. As Murrow opened the 24August broadcast from the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church on Trafalgar Square, air-raid sirenssounded in the background. He described a double-decker bus coming around the corner with “just afew lights on the top deck,” looking in the blackness“like a ship that’s passing in the night”; searchlightsreaching “straight up into the sky”; and the shelterbeneath St. Martin-in-the-Fields. As people walkedby, Murrow held the microphone to the pavement sothat his audience could hear their footsteps. Thesound of German bombers could be heard in thedistance as Murrow spoke. Next, Canadian Broad-casting Corporation (CBC) radio reporter RobertBowman interviewed the chef at the Savoy Hotel.Other correspondents described an antiaircraft bat-tery and an air-raid precautions station. From theHammersmith’s dance hall Sevareid reported:“There are 1,500 people in this place at themoment; it’s fifteen minutes before midnight, and

that’s the wartime closing hour for Saturday night.There was an air-raid alarm, as you know, fifteenminutes ago. The orchestra leader simplyannounced they’d go on playing as long as thecrowd wished to stay, and I don’t expect more thanhalf a dozen people have left.”

A few bombs fell on the East End of Londonthat night, but on 7 September the Blitz—the heavybombing of London and other cities in an attemptto demoralize the population—began. London washit for the next fifty-seven consecutive nights. Mur-row had a talent for highlighting small details aboutlife in London during the Blitz. Speaking of theblackouts, he noted that the glowing red tip of a cig-arette could help one to avoid colliding with otherson the sidewalk. In another broadcast he mentioneda new fashion trend: siren suits. Designed to bedonned quickly when the air-raid sirens went offduring the night, they were simple coveralls with asingle zipper. According to Murrow, tailor shopswere filled with them. In a broadcast on 10 Septem-ber, Murrow said, “We are told today that the Ger-mans believe Londoners, after a while, will rise upand demand a new government, one that will makepeace with Germany. It’s more probable that theywill rise up and murder a few German pilots whocome down by parachute.”

Friends and colleagues of Murrow were killedduring the Blitz. The CBS offices were destroyedfour times; Murrow was usually out on the streets,but once as he was about to try to get a few hours ofsleep at the office a bomb set the building on fire.On another occasion, Murrow and his wife were ontheir way home from dinner during an air raid whenthey passed a pub frequented by BBC staffers. Mur-row asked whether Janet would mind going on alonewhile he went in and had a few drinks and playeddarts; she said that she would mind, and they wenton home together. Minutes later, everyone in thepub and a few people outside were killed when theLuftwaffe scored a direct hit on the building. Mur-row always refused to enter an air-raid shelter; hebelieved that doing so would cause one to lose one’snerve.

On 21 September, having finally secured per-mission from the Ministry of Information for thedangerous undertaking, Murrow made his firstbroadcast from a London rooftop. All the sounds ofthe Blitz were magnified in the new location. Attimes, Murrow’s voice was drowned out by antiair-craft fire or the concussions of bombs a few blocksaway. He continued to broadcast from the rooftopseach night for the duration of the Blitz.

169


The nightly air raids ended on 3 November,but sporadic bombings continued thereafter. Underthose circumstances, Murrow told his listeners dur-ing his Christmas 1940 broadcast, wishing them a“Merry Christmas” seemed wrong. During the warLondoners had begun bidding each other farewellby saying “So long, and good luck,” and Murrowclosed the broadcast with that phrase. Later, he mod-ified it to “Good night, and good luck” and used it ashis sign-off for the rest of his career. It became soidentified with Murrow that it was used as the title ofa 2005 movie about him.

On 15 April 1941 London was subjected to theheaviest bombing it had experienced up to that timeas two hundred planes attacked the city. Murrowcalled it “one of those nights where you wear yourbest clothes, because you’re never sure that whenyou come home you’ll have anything other than theclothes you are wearing.” He also relayed the newsthat CBS had lost its third office in the bombing andthat the blast that destroyed his workplace had

thrown him against the wall. A few days later, thefourth CBS office succumbed to another round ofheavy attacks.

Murrow’s reports were distinctive for theirrestraint and lack of hyperbole. He spoke in stark andprosaic terms. His goal was to explain things simplyfor ordinary people and allow them to draw their ownconclusions. He believed that a reporter should neversound excited or alarmed during a live broadcast, andno matter how harrowing the situation might be,Murrow’s voice always remained calm. Murrow was,however, frustrated by the requirement for strictobjectivity in news reporting. In his opinion the Brit-ish were clearly in the right and were fighting alonefor freedom against fascism. His solution was to allowthe British people to speak for themselves by incorpo-rating interviews with ordinary Britons into his broad-casts. Their stories showed Americans how the Britishviewed the war and what they were experiencing.

The cessation of the bombing of Britain put anend to the most important series of broadcasts of

Some of the CBS wartime staff in London in 1942: Murrow, an unidentified broadcast engineer, John Daly, and Robert Trout(Edward R. Murrow Collection, Digital Collections and Archives, Tufts University)

170


Murrow’s career. They made radio a popular newsmedium and established CBS as the premier broad-casting organization. By bringing vivid images of thewar into American homes, they influenced publicopinion in the United States away from isolationism.Murrow often referred in his broadcasts to Americanideals such as free speech, honesty, individual rights,and liberty and made it clear that these values wereunder assault every day in Britain. Through hisbroadcasts, Murrow won the sympathy of Americansfor the British and Allied cause. The programs werecollected in book form as This Is London in 1941.

Murrow returned to New York on 24 Novem-ber 1941 to find himself famous. He was honored on2 December at a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoriahotel titled “In Honor of a Man and an Ideal” atwhich he received two standing ovations from the1,100 guests and was thanked for his services by thesecretary of state, the British ambassador, the Lend-Lease administrator, and a personal representativeof President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The key-note speaker, poet and Librarian of Congress Archi-bald MacLeish, told Murrow that

you destroyed in the minds of many men andwomen in this country the superstition that what isdone beyond three thousand miles of water is notreally done at all; the ignorant superstition that vio-lence and lies and murder on another continent arenot violence and lies and murder here. . . . Some-times you said you spoke from a roof in Londonlooking at the London sky. Sometimes you said youspoke from underground beneath that city. But itwas not in London really that you spoke. It was inthe back kitchens and the front living rooms and themoving automobiles and the hotdog stands and theobservation cars of another country that your voicewas truly speaking. . . . You burned the city of Lon-don in our houses and we felt the flames thatburned it. You laid the dead of London at our doorsand we knew the dead were our dead—were allmen’s dead—were mankind’s dead—and ours.Without rhetoric, without dramatics, without moreemotion than needed be, you destroyed the super-stition of distance and of time.

In his response Murrow said that he knew that thework of many other correspondents was being hon-ored through him, and he expressed the belief thata positive outcome of the war would be the destruc-tion of the class system and the promotion ofwomen’s rights in Britain.

Murrow and his wife were invited to dinner atthe White House on 7 December; after the Japaneseattack on Pearl Harbor that day, they assumed thatthe dinner would be cancelled, but First Lady Elea-

nor Roosevelt told them, “We still have to eat.” Thepresident was too busy to attend but asked Murrowto stay after dinner. After 1:00 A.M. he was showninto the president’s study. Roosevelt gave him thefigures about the losses in lives, ships, and aircraft atPearl Harbor, which were far higher than had beenpublicly disclosed. The president had not said thathe was speaking off the record, and Murrow ago-nized about whether to report the information. Ulti-mately, he passed up what would have been one ofthe biggest scoops of his career and waited for theofficial announcement from the White House.

After a vacation and speaking tour, Murrowreturned to London in April 1942. By then the focusof American attention had swung away from Britainto the Pacific and North Africa. Murrow felt isolatedfrom events, but his superiors at CBS directed him toremain in the relative safety of London. He wasreduced to scheduling air time for his correspon-dents, who were scattered across the European andMediterranean theaters of operations, and relayinginformation from them in his own broadcasts. Hewas one of the first to alert the world to the existenceof the German concentration camps. On 13 Decem-ber 1942 he began his report, “One is almoststunned into silence by some of the informationreaching London. . . . What is happening is this: mil-lions of human beings, most of them Jews, are beinggathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.”He finished by calling the story one of “murder andmoral depravity unequaled in the history of theworld.”

The Murrows knew many of the aristocratic setin London and were friends with the Churchills. In1943 Murrow met Pamela Churchill, the wife of Win-ston Churchill’s son Randolph, who was serving inNorth Africa, and began an affair with her. Murrowwas given permission to accompany British forces inTunisia for a few weeks in March and April 1943. Hetook field notes on the fighting around the cities ofPichon and Fondouk and reworked them into aradio report.

Later in 1943, the British and American airforces began daily bombing runs over Germany inpreparation for a massive invasion of mainlandEurope. Murrow wanted to go along on one of themissions over Germany and report what he experi-enced on his broadcast. At the time, Allied bomberswere experiencing a high number of casualties, andCBS executives and military officials did not want torisk the possibility of Murrow being killed or cap-tured. Murrow, however, was insistent, and he finallyreceived permission to go on a raid. On 2 December1943 he rode in a British four-engine Lancaster

171


bomber named D for Dog—or D-Dog, as Murrowaffectionately referred to it—piloted by Jock Aber-crombie in a nighttime strike on Berlin. CBS did notallow the playing of recordings on news programs;therefore, Murrow took notes during the flight, andthe following day he reconstructed his experiencesin a seventeen-minute broadcast that became knownas “Orchestrated Hell.” He noted that as theyapproached Berlin, “The clouds below us were whiteand we were black. D-Dog seemed like a black bug ona white sheet.” The plane was caught in the beam ofa searchlight—Abercrombie said, “We’ve beenconed”—and went into an evasive maneuver thatthrew Murrow to his knees. Murrow described theincendiary bombs dropped by other planes in theformation as “going down like a fistful of white ricethrown on a piece of black velvet. . . . I looked downand the white fires had turned red. They were begin-ning to merge and spread just like butter does on ahot plate.” When D for Dog dropped its bombs,“there was a gentle, confident, upward thrust undermy feet . . . and D-Dog seemed lighter and easier to

handle.” As the German antiaircraft guns openedup, “a great orange blob of flak smacked up straightin front of us.” Three other correspondents hadflown on the mission, and two of them were shotdown; Lowell Bennett of International News Servicebecame a prisoner of war, and Norman Stockton ofAustralian Associated Newspapers was killed. Mur-row paid tribute to them near the end of his broad-cast. He also noted that two fliers he had noticed inthe briefing room before the mission—“the big,slow-smiling Canadian and the red-headed Englishboy with the two weeks’ old moustache”—had notreturned. He said that “Berlin was a kind of orches-trated hell, a terrible symphony of light and flame. . . .In about thirty-five minutes it was hit with about threetimes the amount of stuff that ever came down onLondon in a night-long blitz.” “Orchestrated Hell”earned Murrow his first Peabody Award for Broad-casting Excellence. A month after Murrow’s flight,Abercrombie was killed in action over Germany.Paley and White beseeched Murrow not to fly on anymore combat missions, but he went on twenty-four

Murrow and Eric Sevareid broadcasting the 1948 election returns (Edward R. Murrow Collection, DigitalCollections and Archives, Tufts University)

172


more. They included bombing runs, reconnaissancesorties, and parachute drops. In June 1944 Murrowalmost made the first live radio broadcast from anAllied bomber: he was in a B-17 Flying Fortress overoccupied France when instead of plugging in hisportable transmitter he mistakenly plugged in hisflight-suit heater.

On 6 June 1944—D-Day—the invasion ofEurope at Normandy, France, began. The radio net-works pooled their resources to cover the landings,and Murrow was given the responsibility of coordi-nating their efforts in London. At 3:33 A.M., EasternU.S. time, Murrow announced the Allied invasion tothe world. He read Supreme Commander GeneralDwight D. Eisenhower’s order of the day on air, justas it had been read to the troops. It ended with thewords “We will accept nothing less than a full victory.Good Luck.” Downs and LeSueur came ashore inthe initial landings, and Collingwood arrived in alater wave. They were unable to send reports back toMurrow, who, consequently, had little to reportthroughout the day. He even heard rumors thatLeSueur and Collingwood had been killed. Hotteletwas the only CBS reporter other than Murrow whowas heard on the air on D-Day or for two days there-after: he had been in a Ninth Air Force Marauderthat was bombing German gun positions beyond thebeach, and he returned to London to make hisreport with a slop bucket by his side in case of after-effects from the airsickness he had suffered. In theevening Murrow recalled for his listeners:

Early this morning we heard the bombers goingout. It was the sound of a giant factory in the sky. Itseemed to shake the old gray stone buildings of thisbruised and battered city beside the Thames. Thesound was heavier, more triumphant than everbefore. Those who knew what was coming couldimagine that they heard great guns and strains ofthe “Battle Hymn of the Republic” well above theroar of the motors.

Collingwood had gone ashore with a bulkynavy tape recorder and a soundman; the sounds ofbattle could be heard in the background of hisreport. The tape arrived in London on 8 June andaired that day; a second one, recorded on D-Dayplus one, was broadcast on 9 June and replayedmany times.

Murrow visited Paris during the month after its25 August 1944 liberation from German occupation.(Collingwood had written a story on the liberationon 21 August, assuming that censorship would holdit up until the actual liberation occurred; but it wascleared on 23 August and read on the air that same

day by Hottelet in London. LeSueur read the correc-tion on 24 August; he was also the first to report thetrue liberation, the facts of which differed in somerespects from those in Collingwood’s premature dis-patch.) Murrow had little respect for the Parisians:the war had demanded great sacrifices from the Brit-ish people; the Parisians, however, were still livingwell. Luxury items were readily available to thosewho could afford them.

On 17 September 1944 Murrow recorded areport while flying in a C-47 troop transport that wasdropping American paratroopers into Holland inOperation Market Garden. Murrow described thepreparations for the jump and the parachutes of theleading planes drifting to the ground. When it wastime for the nineteen paratroopers in his plane tojump, he paused to let listeners hear the sounds ofthe men checking their static lines a final time. Hecounted them off as they exited the plane andinformed his audience that they had landed in afield next to a windmill, close to a church. (Opera-tion Market Garden turned out to be a major disas-ter for the Allies.)

In November, Murrow arrived in New York tojoin Janet who had left earlier. Murrow was emotion-ally and physically exhausted from his work and per-sonal life. He and Janet spent the end of 1944 andearly 1945 on a ranch near San Antonio. When hereturned to England in March 1945 he decided toend the affair with Pamela because Janet was preg-nant.

In 1945 Murrow joined Collingwood in travel-ing with General George S. Patton’s Third Army. On12 April they were present at the liberation of theNazi death camp at Buchenwald. Murrow waiteduntil he was back in London on 15 April to broad-cast his observations. He warned his listeners thatthey should turn off the radio if they were eatinglunch or if they had no appetite to hear what theGermans had done. The things he described, suchas more than five hundred bodies of men and boysstacked up in the crematorium in two neat piles“like cordwood,” were horrific enough, but Murrowspared his listeners the most gruesome details.Toward the end of his account he said, “I pray you tobelieve what I have said about Buchenwald. I havereported what I saw and heard, but only part of it.For most of it I have no words. . . . If I’ve offendedyou by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’mnot in the least sorry.”

Murrow reported on the celebrations in Lon-don of V-E (Victory in Europe) Day on 8 May 1945.He then made a two-thousand-mile tour of Germany.He planned to travel to the Pacific theater of opera-

173


tions, but World War II ended when Japan surren-dered on 2 September 1945. The Murrows’ onlychild, Charles Casey Murrow, was born on 6 Novem-ber 1945. In February 1946 Murrow made his finalbroadcast from London; he paid tribute to hisadopted homeland, saying, “I am persuaded that themost important thing that happened in Britain wasthat this nation chose to win or lose this war underthe established rules of parliamentary procedure.”He turned over the position of chief European cor-respondent to Smith, after Shirer and Sevareidturned it down.

Murrow had many job offers after the war,including assistant secretary of state, manager of theCarnegie Foundation, and anchor of a nightly CBSnewscast to be sponsored by Campbell’s Soup. In theend, he accepted the position Paley offered him asvice president and director of news and publicaffairs. Trout became the host of the nightly newsshow, which was titled Robert Trout with the News tillNow. Murrow’s main motive in taking the job was hisdesire to keep the “Murrow Boys” together; other

news organizations, including Time Inc., were vyingfor their services. He returned to the United Statesin March 1946. The Murrow Boys remained with thenetwork: Shirer had his own Sunday-night programof news and analysis; Burdett was based in Rome,Hottelet in Moscow, Collingwood in Los Angeles,and LeSueur in Washington, D.C., and later at theUnited Nations (UN) in New York. Shirer left in1947 after his sponsor dropped his show because offalling ratings. Murrow hired new correspondentsAlexander Kendrick for the Vienna bureau, GeorgePolk for Cairo, and David Schoenbrun for Paris.Some New York staffers who resented the elite status ofthe Murrow Boys organized a “Murrow-Ain’t-GodClub”; when Murrow heard about it, he applied formembership.

Murrow soon discovered that he preferred beingin front of a microphone to sitting behind a desk, andhe resigned as vice president in the summer of 1947. InSeptember he replaced Trout on the nightly news pro-gram, which was retitled Edward R. Murrow with theNews. (Trout moved to NBC but returned to CBS in

Murrow with President Harry S. Truman, who contributed an essay titled “A Public Man” to Murrow’s radio program This I Believe. The series was broadcast from 1951 to 1955 (University of Maryland Library).

174


1952; in the 1970s he went to the American Broadcast-ing Company [ABC]). Murrow also hosted CBS Viewsthe Press and Background. As more shows were added tohis schedule, Murrow was forced to hire others toresearch and write parts of his broadcasts.

In 1948 Murrow narrated the record album ICan Hear It Now 1933–1945. His commentary relatedthe background of speeches by such figures asRoosevelt, Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and Presi-dent Harry S. Truman from the Great Depression tothe defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Therecord was a success and prompted two similaralbums in 1949 and 1950 covering the years 1945 to1949 and 1919 to 1932, respectively. The albumswere produced by Fred W. Friendly, who joined CBSin 1950 and went on to collaborate with Murrow onmany radio and television projects.

Murrow went to Europe in the spring of 1948to cover the Italian parliamentary elections, whichwere won by the Christian Democrats over a strongchallenge by a leftist coalition led by the CommunistParty. He returned in the summer to ride in one ofthe planes in the airlift that was bringing supplies toWest Berlin after the Soviet Union imposed a block-ade on the city. In April 1949 he was elected to theCBS board of directors.

The Korean War began with the invasion ofSouth Korea by Communist North Korea on 25 June1950. UN member nations sent troops to aid SouthKorea; the majority were from the United States.American general Douglas MacArthur, who had ledthe Allies against Japan during World War II, wasplaced in command of the UN forces. Murrow trav-eled to South Korea via Tokyo eleven days after thefighting broke out; before leaving, he hiredCronkite for the Washington, D.C., CBS bureau.Murrow was the first radio correspondent to fly on abombing mission in the war. Later, with several otherreporters, he flew to the front lines. After a nearcrash landing, they set off on foot as darkness fell.The marines had not been informed that correspon-dents were going to be on the front lines, and thegroup was taken into custody by a sentry andbrought to a captain. The captain, who recognizedMurrow’s voice, told the reporters that the unitexpected to be attacked at any time and that the sen-tries were under orders to shoot anything thatmoved. On 14 August, while he was in Tokyo on hisreturn to the United States, Murrow transmitted toCBS a critical analysis of the conduct of the war to beaired on that night’s newscast. The story was killed inNew York because it violated MacArthur’s directiveprohibiting any criticism of his or his subordinates’

command decisions. Murrow was furious andappealed the decision to Paley, but to no avail.

Murrow and Friendly capitalized on the suc-cess of their I Can Hear It Now albums by creating theradio program Hear It Now; the first episode wasbroadcast on 22 December 1950. The series wasunique for its time in that it was an audio version ofa magazine. Each one-hour episode featured storieson a variety of subjects, news analysis, and recordingsof important historical developments. The first pro-gram included comments from marines in SouthKorea with the sounds of artillery fire in the back-ground, Carl Sandburg reciting one of his poems,delegates making speeches at the UN, sports com-mentary by Red Barber, a theater review by play-wright Abe Burrows, and a movie review by BillLeonard. The series ended in June 1951.

Murrow also helped to create a five-minuteprogram titled This I Believe—the phrase was a favor-ite of his mother’s—on which people read essaysthey had submitted on their philosophies of life.Some of the essayists were famous, such as formerpresident Herbert Hoover and the German novelistThomas Mann, while others were ordinary men andwomen. Murrow introduced and closed each pro-gram. The show initially aired on the PhiladelphiaCBS affiliate, WCAU, in 1951 and was ultimately car-ried by 192 stations and broadcast in six languagesby the Voice of America in Europe; the essays werealso published in a column syndicated in eighty-fivenewspapers. A selection of the essays appeared inbook form in 1952; Murrow wrote the foreword. Theradio series ran until 1955. It was revived, withoutMurrow, by Radio Luxembourg in 1956, by NationalPublic Radio in 2005, and by the CBC in 2007.

In the early 1950s radio began to lose popular-ity to television. Although Murrow was skeptical ofthe new medium, he and Friendly adapted Hear ItNow to television as See It Now. The show premieredon CBS on 18 November 1951 with a split screen jux-taposing live shots of the Brooklyn Bridge in NewYork City and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fran-cisco—an impressive feat in the early days of televi-sion. The half-hour Sunday-afternoon program washosted by Murrow, who told the audience that it rep-resented “an old team trying to learn a new trade.”He spoke from the control room, with monitors,control panels, technicians, and the director, DonHewitt (who went on to create the CBS program 60Minutes) visible in the background, and he pur-posely read from a script instead of using a tele-prompter. The first episode included footage ofsoldiers in Korea going about their daily routines.The program began on a “sustaining” (unspon-

175


sored) basis; but by the third episode it had pickedup a sponsor, the Aluminum Company of America(Alcoa), whose executives hoped that the prestige ofbeing associated with the show and Murrow wouldhelp them fend off antitrust charges. The programmoved to prime time on Sunday evenings and laterto Tuesdays. Murrow returned to Korea for a specialedition of See It Now titled “Christmas in Korea” thatwas broadcast on 28 December 1952.

On 2 October 1953, while continuing hisduties on the nightly radio news and on See It Now,Murrow launched a second weekly television pro-gram. Person to Person was a live interview show onwhich celebrities such as politicians, authors, scien-tists, movie stars, singers, and athletes conversedfrom their homes with Murrow, who sat in the CBSstudio smoking his trademark cigarette. They alsogave Murrow and the viewers guided tours of theirresidences. Each episode comprised two fifteen-minute segments, each featuring a different inter-viewee. The show was popular with viewers but wasattacked by television critics for its shallowness.Many of Murrow’s colleagues, including Friendly,also despised the show and did not understand whyMurrow participated in it. When pressed for anexplanation, Murrow said that doing Person to Personbought him the freedom to put on the controversialsegments of See It Now. Technically, the program wasan astounding achievement: each location visitedrequired several cameras, tons of equipment, and aportable transmitter. After the inaugural season,Murrow won an Emmy for Most Outstanding Person-ality for his role as host of the program.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s hysteriaover Communist infiltration was rampant in theUnited States; the period has been called that of the“Red Scare”; the “witch hunts,” after the trials ofwomen suspected of practicing witchcraft in Salem,Massachusetts, in 1692; and of “McCarthyism,” afterRepublican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin,who gained notoriety by repeatedly alleging, with lit-tle or no supporting evidence, that Communistsoccupied high positions in the federal governmentand the armed forces. Many of those who wereaccused of Communist sympathies became unem-ployable or were persecuted, sometimes to the pointof suicide. CBS, like many other corporations,required its employees to sign oaths pledging theirloyalty to the United States. Most of Murrow’s corre-spondents objected strongly to the loyalty oaths, butMurrow signed one himself and advised them to dolikewise; reluctantly, they complied. But Murrowstruck back at the Red Scare on See It Now. On 20October 1953 the program did a piece on Milo

Radulovich, who had been ordered to resign hiscommission as an air force lieutenant because hisfather and sister were suspected of disloyalty. The airforce reversed its decision. On 9 March 1954 theentire program was devoted to “A Report on SenatorJoseph McCarthy.” Because of the controversialnature of the show, Murrow and Friendly had to payfor a newspaper advertisement for it out of their ownpockets; CBS even refused to allow its logo to appearin the ad. Murrow and Friendly used excerpts fromMcCarthy’s speeches and his remarks as chairman ofSenate committee hearings to portray him as bully-ing, crude, irrational, and undemocratic. Murrowconcluded the broadcast by saying that

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will notbe driven by fear into an age of unreason if we digdeep in our history and doctrine and rememberthat we are not descended from fearful men, notfrom men who feared to write, to speak, to associate,and to defend causes which were, for the moment,unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our his-tory, but we cannot escape responsibility for theresult. There is no way for a citizen of the Republicto abdicate his responsibility. As a nation we havecome into our full inheritance at a tender age. We

Murrow in a CBS radio studio in 1957 (BroadcastingArchives at the University of Maryland)

176


proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defendersof freedom, wherever it continues to exist in theworld, but we cannot defend freedom abroad bydeserting it at home.

He pointed out that McCarthy could not succeedwithout support from a large portion of the Ameri-can public and quoted Cassius from act 1, scene 2 ofWilliam Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar (1599):“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But inourselves. . . .” McCarthy responded on a later epi-sode and came across as virtually insane.

The effects of the original broadcast and ofMcCarthy’s reply were immediate. The public’s infat-uation with McCarthyism rapidly diminished, andletters, telegrams, and phone calls, running fifteento one in support of Murrow, poured into CBS. See-ing him on the street, motorists and truck driversshouted “Good show, Ed,” and he received standingovations when he went into restaurants. The enor-mous success of the broadcast, however, had theunintended result of bringing Murrow’s autonomyat the network to the attention of his superiors,including Paley, who complained to Murrow that thecontroversies engendered by See It Now were givinghim a “stomachache.” Murrow replied that stomach-aches were part of the job, and he complained inturn about the network offering equal time, withoutconsulting Murrow, for rebuttals by subjects whobelieved that they had been defamed by the pro-gram. Over the next few years, CBS reduced Mur-row’s authority. In September 1955, after Alcoawithdrew its sponsorship, See It Now was expanded toan hour in length but went from a weekly programto a series of specials broadcast on an irregular basis;the final episode, “Watch on the Ruhr,” dealing withpostwar Germany, appeared on 7 July 1958. Duringits run the show had received four Emmys for BestNews or Public Service Program and had been nom-inated three other times; it had also won the highlyprestigious Peabody and George Polk Awards.

On 15 October 1958 Murrow gave a speech at aChicago meeting of the Radio and Television NewsDirectors Association in which he attacked the televi-sion industry’s emphasis on entertainment anddowngrading of news and public affairs. The speechfurthered his estrangement from Paley.

From 12 October 1958 to 12 June 1960 Mur-row served as moderator of the CBS program, SmallWorld. Each episode comprised a discussion amongthree eminent figures in widely separated locations.

In 1959 Murrow was replaced by his protégéCollingwood as host of Person to Person; the showlasted one more year before it was cancelled. See It

Now was succeeded by CBS Reports, a series of docu-mentary specials. Murrow was an occasional guest onthe program; his last appearance was on the 25November 1960 episode, “Harvest of Shame,” on theplight of migrant agricultural workers in the UnitedStates. His final nightly radio newscast aired on 22January 1961. A few days later, he accepted PresidentJohn F. Kennedy’s offer of the directorship of theUnited States Information Agency (USIA).

The USIA was established to promote a favor-able international image of the United States; one ofMurrow’s first acts as director was an unsuccessfulattempt to persuade the BBC not to broadcast hisown “Harvest of Shame” exposé. By 1961 the agencywas also involved in the making of foreign policy andin covert operations in collaboration with the Cen-tral Intelligence Agency. Though Murrow sat in onmeetings of the cabinet and the National SecurityCouncil, he was not part of the Kennedy inner circleand sometimes found himself defending policiesand actions of which he had had no advance knowl-edge, such as the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion ofCuba. He ordered news reports on the USIA’s over-seas radio network, the Voice of America, to becrisper and more concise. He increased the numberof USIA projects in Africa and Latin America.

In the fall of 1963 Murrow, who for years hadsmoked four packs of cigarettes a day, was diagnosedwith lung cancer. His left lung was removed in Octo-ber. Murrow tendered his resignation to PresidentLyndon B. Johnson, who had succeeded the assassi-nated Kennedy, when he returned to work at theUSIA in December. The resignation took effect inmid January 1964. Murrow was awarded the Presi-dential Medal of Freedom in September 1964. InNovember, surgeons at New York hospital removed atumor near his brain. In March 1965 Queen Eliza-beth II named him a Knight Commander of theOrder of the British Empire. Murrow died at hiscountry home, the 280-acre Glen Arden Farm inPawling, New York, on 27 April 1965. His ashes werescattered at the farm.

Murrow’s death brought an outpouring ofgrief in the United States and Britain. The day hedied, Sevareid, who had become an analyst on theCBS Evening News, said, “He was a shooting star, andwe will live in his afterglow a very long time.” TheBBC broadcast a half-hour special on Murrow, andPrime Minister Harold Wilson issued a lengthy com-mentary on Murrow’s impact on British history.

Edward R. Murrow is universally recognized asa legendary and seminal figure in broadcast journal-ism. Bob Edwards sums up his achievements:

177


On a single day in 1938 he pioneered the overseasreporting staff and the roundup news format whilereinventing himself, transforming a junior executiveinto a foreign correspondent. Then in 1951, hemoved television beyond its function as a headlineservice and established it as an original news source,not a medium that merely duplicated stories culledfrom newspapers. He also gave broadcast journalisma set of standards that matched those of the bestnewspapers in terms of what stories to cover andhow to cover them. From two platforms of showbusiness he carved out space for serious investiga-tion and discussion of public affairs. Although heknew how to entertain, as shown by the success ofPerson to Person, he was adamant about keepingentertainment out of broadcast journalism.

The Radio Television Digital News Association hon-ors outstanding work in electronic journalism withthe annual Edward R. Murrow Award; the U.S.Department of State administers the Edward R. Mur-row Program for Journalists, which invites risinginternational journalists to travel to the UnitedStates and examine journalistic principles and prac-tices; and the College of Communication at Mur-row’s alma mater, Washington State University, isnamed for him.

Biographies:Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward

R. Murrow (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969);R. Franklin Smith, Edward R. Murrow: The War Years

(Kalamazoo, Mich.: New Issues Press, 1978);A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York:

Freundlich, 1986);Joseph E. Persico, Edward R. Murrow: An American

Original (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988);Bob Edwards, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of

Broadcast Journalism (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley,2004).

References:Paul J. Achter, “TV, Technology, and McCarthyism:

Crafting the Democratic Renaissance in AnAge of Fear,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90(August 2004): 307–326;

Val Adams, “Praise Pours In on Murrow Show: C. B. S.Says Responses Are 15 To 1 in Favor of CriticalReport on McCarthy,” New York Times, 11 March1954, p. 19;

Wilfred Altman, “Edward R. Murrow,” ContemporaryReview, 199 (June 1961): 279;

Steve Michael Barkin, American Television News: TheMedia Marketplace and the Public Interest(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003);

James L. Baughman, “See It Now and Television’sGolden Age, 1951–1958,” Journal of PopularCulture, 15 (Fall 1981): 106–115;

Mark Bernstein, “Inventing Broadcast Journalism,”American History, 40, no. 2 (2005): 40–46;

Bernstein and Alex Lubertozzi, World War II on theAir: Edward R. Murrow and the Broadcasts ThatRiveted a Nation (Naperville, Ill.: SourcebooksMediaFusion, 2003);

Edward J. Bliss, “Remembering Edward R. Murrow,”Saturday Review, 2 (31 May 1975): 17–20;

“C.B.S. Pays $6,336 for M’Carthy Film; Ends Disputeover His Reply to Murrow by Covering Cost ofProduction,” New York Times, 16 May 1954, p.46;

Reese Cleghorn, “Of Murrow and McGill: Writingfor Eye and Ear,” Washington Journalism Review,12 (September 1990): 4;

Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, The Murrow Boys:Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996);

J. Cogley, “Murrow Show,” Commonweal, 59 (26 March1954): 618;

David H. Culbert, “‘This Is London’: Edward R. Mur-row, Radio News and American Aid to Britain,”Journal of Popular Culture, 10, no. 1 (1976):28–37;

Nicholas J. Cull, “‘The Man Who Invented Truth’:The Tenure of Edward R. Murrow as Directorof the United States Information Agency dur-ing the Kennedy Years,” Cold War History, 4, no.1 (2003): 23–48;

Wilson P. Dizard, “The Murrow Years,” in his Invent-ing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Infor-mation Agency (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner,2004), pp. 83–102;

Thomas Patrick Doherty, “Edward R. Murrow Slaysthe Dragon of Joseph McCarthy,” in his ColdWar, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, andAmerican Culture (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 2003), pp. 161–188;

Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the AmericanImagination from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R.Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (NewYork: Times Books, 1999), pp. 3, 13, 15, 33–35,161, 176–177, 187, 190–192, 197–198, 286;

J. Doyle, “Murrow, the Man, the Myth and theMcCarthy Fighter,” Look, 18 (24 August 1954):23–27;

Gary Edgerton, “The Murrow Legend as Metaphor:The Creation, Appropriation, and Usefulnessof Edward R. Murrow’s Life Story,” Journal ofAmerican Culture, 15, no. 1 (1992): 75–91;

178


“Edward R. Murrow, Broadcaster and Ex-Chief ofU.S.I.A., Dies; War Reporter From London andTV Commentator, 57, Succumbs to Cancer,”New York Times, 28 April 1965, pp. 1, 42;

“Edward R. Murrow—New USIA Chief: He Promisesto Tell the Truth, Even When Not Flattering tothe US,” Human Events, 18 (17 February 1961):109;

“Edward R. Murrow of CBS,” Newsweek, 41 (9 March1953): 40;

Edward R. Murrow Papers, 1927–1965: A Guide to theMicrofilm Edition (Sanford, N.C.: MicrofilmingCorporation of America, 1982);

“Edward R. Murrow, RIP,” National Review, 17 (18May 1965): 410;

Willard Edwards, “A New Look at Joe McCarthy,”Human Events, 33 (14 April 1973): 8;

Matthew C. Ehrlich, “Radio prototype: Edward R.Murrow and Fred Friendly’s Hear It Now,” Jour-nal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 51 (Sep-tember 2007): 438–456;

“E. R. Murrow: Image Maker,” America, 104 (11 Feb-ruary 1961): 614;

“Fond Farewell,” Newsweek, 45 (23 May 1955): 100;Fred W. Friendly, The Good Guys, the Bad Guys, and the

First Amendment: Free Speech vs. Fairness in Broad-casting (New York: Random House, 1976);

Margaret Gaskin, Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940(Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 2005), pp. viii, 5,18, 44, 57, 149, 384–385, 390, 400;

Gary Paul Gates, Air Time: The Inside Story of CBSNews (New York: Harper & Row, 1978);

D. G. Godfrey, “Ethics in Practice: Analysis ofEdward R. Murrow’s World War II RadioReporting,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 8, no.2 (1993): 103–118;

Jack Gould, “The Rise and Fall of Edward R. Mur-row,” in his Watching Television Come of Age: TheNew York Times Reviews, edited by Lewis L.Gould (Austin: University of Texas Press,2002), pp. 75–93;

Gould, “Television in Review: McCarthy Falters;Reply to Murrow Only Confirms Charges,” NewYork Times, 9 April 1954, p. 32;

Gould, “TV: Dismaying Start; Murrow’s UrgingB.B.C. to Ban Showing of ‘Harvest of Shame’ IsCriticized,” New York Times, 23 March 1961, p.67;

Gould, “TV: Exploitation—1968; Recruitment ofMigratory Workers for L.I. Harvests Results inNew Slavery,” New York Times, 6 February 1968,p. 87;

David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York:Knopf, 1979), pp. xii, 33, 35, 38–45, 88,

123–126, 132, 134–152, 154–157, 225, 230, 232,238–239, 241–243, 251, 253, 255, 371, 417, 421,432, 444, 509, 657, 659, 729;

P. Hamburger, “Television,” New Yorker, 27 (8 Decem-ber 1951): 147–149;

David H. Hosley, As Good as Any: Foreign Correspon-dence on American Radio, 1930–1940 (Westport,Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984);

Carl Jensen, “Edward R. Murrow,” in his Stories ThatChanged America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), pp.135–146;

Philip Kaplan and Jack Currie, “Night Raid on Ber-lin: Edward R. Murrow Flies with the RAF,”American History Illustrated, 28, no. 6 (1994):56–65;

Charles Kuralt, “Edward R. Murrow,” North CarolinaHistorical Review, 48, no. 2 (1971): 161–170;

Robert J. Landry, “Behind the Screens at CBS,” Sat-urday Review, 50 (1 April 1967): 30–31;

Landry, “Edward R. Murrow,” Scribner’s Magazine,104 (December 1938): 7–12, 50, 52;

Daniel J. Leab, “The Lives of Saints” and “See It Now:A Legend Reassessed,” in American History,American Television: Interpreting the Video Past,edited by John E. O’Connor (New York: Ungar,1983);

Nicholas Lemann, “The Wayward Press: The Mur-row Doctrine. Why the Life and Times of theBroadcast Pioneer Still Matter,” New Yorker, 81(23–30 January 2006): 38–43;

L. Z. Leslie, “Ethics as Communication Theory: EdMurrow’s Legacy,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics,3 (Fall 1988): 7–19;

Marya Mannes, “People vs. McCarthy,” Reporter, 10(27 April 1954): 25–28;

Pete Martin, “I Call on Edward R. Murrow,” SaturdayEvening Post, 230 (18 January 1958): 32–33,78–80;

“McCarthy Aids Enemies, Edward Murrow Charges;Newscaster Assails Wisconsin Senator, OffersHim Program Time for Reply,” Los AngelesTimes, 10 March 1954, p. 8;

“McCarthy Completes His Filmed Reply to Murrow;Senator Attacks Commentator in Answer Setfor Television Showing Tuesday Night,” LosAngeles Times, 4 April 1954, p. 22;

“McCarthy Gets Right to Murrow TV Time,” NewYork Times, 14 March 1954, p. 46;

J. W. McCarthy, “Inside Story of Person to Person,”Look, 19 (13 December 1955): 85–86;

M. McGrory, “Edward R. Murrow: Noblesse Oblige,”America, 112 (15 May 1965): 702;

179


Jeff Murrow Merron, On TV: See It Now, Person toPerson, and the Making of a ‘Masscult Personality’(Columbia, S.C.: Association for Education inJournalism and Mass Communication, 1988);

Sig Mickelson, The Decade That Shaped TelevisionNews: CBS in the 1950s (Westport, Conn.: Prae-ger, 1998);

Arthur Miller, “The Night Ed Murrow Struck Back,”in Echoes down the Corridor: Collected Essays,1947–1999, edited by Stephen R. Centola (NewYork: Viking, 2000), pp. 190–199;

Joe Morgenstern, “See It Now,” Newsweek, 79 (17 Jan-uary 1972): 83–84;

Michael D. Murray, “Persuasive Dimensions of See ItNow’s ‘Report on Senator Joseph R. McCar-thy,’” Today’s Speech, 23, no. 4 (1975): 13–20;

Murray, The Political Performers: CBS Broadcasts in thePublic Interest (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994);

Murray, “Television’s Desperate Moment: A Conver-sation with Fred W. Friendly,” Journalism His-tory, 1, no. 3 (1974): 68–71;

“Murrow Time Offer for M’Carthy Alone,” New YorkTimes, 15 March 1954, p. 16;

“Murrow to USIA,” New Republic, 144 (13 February1961): 5–6;

John E. O’Connor, “Edward R. Murrow’s Report onSenator McCarthy: Image as Artifact,” Film &History, 16 (September 1986): 55–72;

John O’Hara, “The Controversial Edward R. Mur-row,” Human Events, 25 (28 May 1965): 11;

Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans WhoStood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (NewYork: Random House, 2010), pp. xiv–xix, 13,30–53, 67, 71–94, 101–105, 120, 130, 133, 138,140–146, 159–162, 166, 178–179, 182, 184,195–196, 217, 228, 232, 244–247, 281, 288–289,306, 317–322, 326, 334, 354–356, 359–360,371–378, 386–390, 395;

Joseph E. Persico, “The Broadcaster and the Dema-gogue,” Television Quarterly, 24 (Spring 1989):5–22;

Michael W. Ranville, “The Case against Milo Radulo-vich,” Michigan History, 79, no. 1 (1995): 10–19;

Dan Rather, “Courage, Fear and the TelevisionNewsroom,” Television Quarterly, 27 (Winter1994): 87–94;

“Remembering Murrow,” New York Times, 2 January1972, p. D13;

E Merrill Root, “Edward R. Murrow: Uprooted,”American Opinion, 5 (December 1962): 1–9;

Thomas Rosteck, “Irony, Argument, and Reportagein Television Documentary: See It Now versusSenator McCarthy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech,75 (August 1989): 277–298;

Rosteck, See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: TelevisionDocumentary and the Politics of Representation(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,1994), pp. 2, 7, 20–24, 29–30, 48, 50–51, 55,59–187;

Lawrence S. Rudner, “Born to a New Craft: EdwardR. Murrow, 1938–1940,” Journal of Popular Cul-ture, 15, no. 2 (1981): 97–105;

James Satter, “Edward R. Murrow: A Voice YouCould Trust,” in his Journalists Who Made His-tory (Minneapolis: Oliver Press, 1998), pp.113–127;

David Schoenbrun, On and Off the Air: An InformalHistory of CBS News (New York: Dutton, 1989);

Raymond A. Schroth, The American Journey of EricSevareid (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press1995);

Philip M. Seib, Broadcasts from the Blitz: How EdwardR. Murrow Helped Lead America into War (Wash-ington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006);

Gilbert Seldes, “Murrow, McCarthy and the EmptyFormula: Giving Equal Time for Reply,” Satur-day Review, 37 (24 April 1954): 26–27;

Sally Bedell Smith, “The Chilling of Edward R. Mur-row: Bill Paley Got a Stomachache; DumpingHis Best Newsman Was the Cure,” Quill, 79(January–February 1991): 22–29;

Allene Talmey, “See Them Now: Ed Murrow and theMan behind Him,” Vogue, 123 (1 February1954): 144–145;

“Television in Controversy: The Debate andDefense,” Newsweek, 43 (29 March 1954):50–52;

“This Is Murrow,” Time, 70 (30 September 1957):48–51;

Craig Thompson, “Columbia’s Ed Murrow: A Por-trait; Some Notes on the Life and Works of anAce Correspondent,” New York Times, 18 April1943, p. X9;

B. Thornton, “Published Reaction when MurrowBattled McCarthy,” Journalism History, 29 (Fall2003): 133–147;

“This Is Murrow?” Newsweek, 57 (3 April 1961): 82;Bernard M. Timberg, “Founders at CBS: Murrow

and Godfrey,” in his Television Talk: A History ofthe TV Talk Show (Austin: University of TexasPress, 2002), pp. 19–33;

Timberg, “Who Speaks for CBS? How Edward R.Murrow’s Last—and Uncredited—Documen-tary Turned Out to Be His Most Powerful andPrecipitated a Crisis at CBS News,” TelevisionQuarterly, 33 (Spring 2002): 24–33;

R. L. Tobin, “Ed Murrow in Peacetime,” SaturdayReview, 52 (26 April 1969): 67;

180


“Truthful Image,” Economist, 202 (3 March 1962):797–798;

“Voice of a Generation,” Newsweek, 65 (10 May1965): 77–78;

Malvin Wald, “Shootout at the Beverly Hills Corral:Edward R. Murrow versus Hollywood,” Journalof Popular Film and Television, 19, no. 3 (1991):138–140;

Geoffrey C. Ward, “Seeing Murrow Now,” AmericanHeritage, 38 (February–March 1987): 16–17;

Edward Weeks, “Saving the World Every Week,”Atlantic Monthly, 219 (May 1967): 124–126;

Joseph Wershba, “Edward R. Murrow and the Timeof His Time: A Pioneer of Broadcast Journal-ism, Who Dared to Uphold Freedom ofThought, and Had the Courage to Be anAmerican in a Time of Fear,” Quill, 92 (Sep-tember 2004): 10–16;

Wershba, “The Murrow I Knew,” Television Quarterly,25 (Winter 1990): 67–70;

C. C. Wertenbaker, “Profiles,” New Yorker, 29 (26December 1953): 28–45;

Don Whitehead, “McCarthy Conflict Hits BoilingPoint; Opposing Roles in Seething DramaPlayed by President and Senator,” Los AngelesTimes, 18 April 1954, p. 12;

Gary C. Woodward, “‘This Just Might Do NobodyAny Good’: Edward R. Murrow and the NewsDirectors,” in his Persuasive Encounters: CaseStudies in Constructive Confrontation (New York:Praeger, 1990), pp. 77–98.

Papers:The Edward R. Murrow Papers are in the Digital Col-lections and Archives of Tufts University in Medford,Massachusetts. Some of Murrow’s awards and certifi-cates are on display in the Edward R. Murrow Roomat the Fletcher School of Tufts University. TheEdward R. Murrow and Janet Brewster MurrowPapers are held by the Mount Holyoke CollegeArchives and Special Collections in South Hadley,Massachusetts. A collection of Murrow’s photo-graphs is held by Washington State University inPullman.

edward r. murrow - citeseerx.ist.psu.edu

Documents