Dictionary of Literary Biography: Jane Austen`s Popular and Critical

Edward R. Murrow
(24 or 25 April 1908 – 27 April 1965)
Braden Hall
BOOKS: American Field Service Fellowships for French
Universities (New York: Institute of International Education, 1933);
Cultural Cooperation with Latin America (New York:
Institute of International Education, 1933);
Fellowship Administration (New York: Institute of
International Education, 1933);
The Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German
Scholars: Report as of February 1, 1935 (New
York: Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced 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 Company, 1942);
Testimony of Mr. Edward R. Murrow, European Representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System before
the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 78th Cong., 1st
Sess., Wednesday, June 16, 1943 (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943);
A New Dimension for Education (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University, 1962);
In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow,
1938–1961, edited by Edward Bliss Jr. (New
York: Knopf, 1967).
Edward R. Murrow (Library of Congress)
RECORDINGS: I Can Hear It Now 1933–1945, read
by 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 Murrow, Columbia Records, 1965;
This Is Edward R. Murrow, Apr. 30, 1965: An Anthology
of the Work of Broadcasting’s Most Distinguished
Reporter, CBS, 1965;
A Reporter Remembers, Volume 1: The War Years,
Columbia Masterworks, 1966;
A Reporter Remembers, Volume 2: 1948–1961, Columbia Masterworks, 1969;
The Ideological Struggle: A Conversation with Edward R.
Murrow on Propaganda Warfare, Forum Associates, 1969;
Edward R. Murrow—Reporting Live, Bantam Audio,
1986.
OTHER: Talks: A Quarterly Digest of Addresses of Diversified Interest Broadcast over the Columbia Network,
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Edward R. Murrow
He assembled a group of correspondents who covered every facet of the war. Later, he became the
voice of opposition in the face of McCarthyism in
the 1950s. David Halberstam describes Murrow as
edited by Murrow (New York: Columbia Broadcasting System, 1937);
Ernestine Carter, ed., Bloody but Unbowed: Pictures of
Britain under Fire, preface by Murrow (New
York: Scribners, 1941); republished as Grim
Glory: Pictures of Britain under Fire (London:
Lund, Humphries, 1941);
“Spring Comes to England,” in Representative American Speeches: 1940–1941, edited by A. Craig
Baird (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1941), pp.
157–162;
“A Report to America,” in In Honor of a Man and an
Ideal . . . Three Talks on Freedom, by Murrow, Archibald MacLeish, and William S. Paley (New York:
Columbia Broadcasting System, 1941);
“Orchestrated Hell,” in Representative American
Speeches: 1943–1944, edited by Baird (New
York: H. W. Wilson, 1944), pp. 37–45;
“Farewell to England,” in Representative American
Speeches: 1945–1946, edited by Baird (New
York: 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 Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and
Women, 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, introduction by Murrow (Nyack, N.Y.: Fellowship
Publications, 1959);
Hyman G. Rickover, Education and Freedom, foreword
by Murrow (New York: Dutton, 1959);
“Television and Politics,” in “Dons or Crooners?”: Three
Lectures Given in Guildhall London in October 1959
on the Subject of Communication in the Modern World,
by Murrow, Edward Appleton, and Eric Ashby
(London: Granada TV, 1959), pp. 45–81.
The right man in the right place in the right era.
An innately elegant man in an innately inelegant
profession. A rare figure, as good as his legend. . . .
He was shy and often withdrawn in personal conversation, but totally controlled and brilliant as a communicator. His voice was steeped in civility,
intelligence, and compassion. He was a man who,
much as Lindbergh did, spanned the oceans and
shortened distance and heightened time. He helped
make radio respectable as a serious journalistic profession, and more than a decade later, simply by
going over to television, had a good deal to do with
making that journalistically legitimate too. He was,
in a way, more an educator than a journalist. His
own career and the technological revolution he was
part of helped mark America’s transformation from
a post-Depression isolationist nation to a major
international superpower. His very voice bridged the
ocean, brought Europe (and thus potentially threatening alien powers) closer, and made its presence
more immediate and more complicated. He helped
educate the nation in the process of entering the
larger world. He also helped inaugurate an era in
which the very speed of communication became a
form of power.
By the end of Murrow’s relatively short life—he died
at fifty-seven—he had received nine Emmys, four
Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had been named
an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of
the British Empire and had received similar honors
from Belgium, France, and Sweden.
Egbert Roscoe Murrow was born on 24 or 25
April—equally authoritative sources differ—1908 in
Polecat Creek, near Greensboro in Guilford County,
North Carolina, to Quaker farmers Roscoe and
Ethel Lamb Murrow. He was the last of their four
children, all of whom were sons. The firstborn,
Roscoe Jr., lived for only a month; the other surviving sons were Lacey and Dewey, who were four
and two years older than Egbert, respectively. The
farm had no electricity, telephone, or indoor
plumbing, and the only heat was supplied by a fireplace that was also used for cooking. When Murrow
was five, the family moved to the logging town of
Blanchard, Washington, thirty miles from the Canadian border, at the suggestion of relatives who were
living there. Murrow’s father took a job as a hired
hand on a farm. After a year, the family moved back
to Polecat Creek but spent only a few months there
before returning to Blanchard. Murrow’s father
SELECTED PERIODIC AL PUBLIC ATIONS—
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 October 1951).
Edward R. Murrow was the premier radio
broadcaster of the European phase of World War II.
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and fun.” He was elected to another term before
graduating from Washington State in June 1930 and
moved to New York to manage the organization’s
national office; he received a stipend of $25 a week
for living expenses. In July he sailed for Europe to
attend the international student congress in Brussels, Belgium; he was accompanied by two other delegates, one of whom was the future U.S. Supreme
Court justice Lewis F. Powell. Before going on to
Brussels, they spent two weeks in England; Murrow
found the climate, cuisine, and people of the country unpleasant. After the conference, Murrow and
Powell spent a week in Paris and took a cruise down
the Rhine. The 1930 U.S. convention of the NSFA
was held at the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta, in the
heart of the segregated South; Murrow used various
strategems to ensure that black delegates were
included.
The NSFA offered Murrow his first opportunity
to host a national radio show: University of the Air, a
monthly program on the Columbia Broadcasting
System (CBS) radio network. Murrow arranged
interviews with world figures such as the mathematician and physicist Albert Einstein, the Indian writer
Rabindranath Tagore, Indian independence leader
Mohandas K. Gandhi, German president Paul von
Hindenburg, and British prime minister Ramsay
MacDonald.
When his term as president of the NSFA ended
in 1932, Murrow became assistant director of the
Institute of International Education (IIE). After
Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933,
many German scholars and professors were dismissed from their jobs. The IIE established the
Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German
Scholars with Murrow as the first assistant secretary.
The committee assisted 335 scholars in moving from
Europe to the United States. Among them were the
novelist Thomas Mann, the philosopher Herbert
Marcuse, and the physicist James Franck.
On 12 March 1934 Murrow married Janet
Huntington Brewster, who came from a prominent
New England family. They had met on a train to New
Orleans going to attend an NSFA conference in
1932.
Murrow’s duties included arranging educational broadcasts for the IIE on the CBS radio network. At that time most CBS broadcasts consisted of
lectures and speeches by celebrities; Murrow’s work
was noticed by CBS founder and chairman William
S. Paley and news director Paul W. White, and in the
fall of 1935 they hired him as Director of Talks to
Coordinate Broadcasts on Current Issues. He made
his first newscast on Christmas Eve 1936 when he vol-
worked in a sawmill and then as a locomotive engineer on a timber-hauling railroad.
Murrow attended elementary school in
Blanchard from age six to fourteen and high school
in nearby Edison, where he was a member of the
debate team. The debate coach, Ruth Lawson,
taught him to overcome his stage fright by thinking
of his audience not as a roomful of critics but as people hungry for the information that he was there to
supply. During vacations from school Murrow
worked as a lumberjack; at this time he began calling
himself Edward instead of Egbert to avoid ridicule
from the other men. According to Bob Edwards,
“For the rest of his life, Ed Murrow recounted the
stories and retold the jokes he’d heard from millhands and lumberjacks. He also sang their songs,
especially after several rounds of refreshments with
fellow journalists.” In his final two years of high
school Murrow drove the school’s only bus. He was a
member of the baseball, basketball, and ice-skating
teams, as well as the glee club and the school orchestra; he sang in school operettas; and he was elected
class president, student-body president, and most
popular student.
In 1925 Murrow’s father quit his job after
knocking out a foreman who had been abusing him.
He quickly found another position as a locomotive
engineer in Beaver, Washington, on the other side of
the Olympic Peninsula, and the family moved there.
Murrow worked as a lumberjack for a year
before enrolling at what was then Washington State
College (today Washington State University) in Pullman in 1926; he had wanted to study law at the University of Virginia, but the family could not afford to
send him there. He worked his way through school
with jobs as a theater stagehand and a lumberjack,
but still participated in student politics, sports,
debates, and the Army Reserve Officer Training
Corps (ROTC) program. During his freshman year
he changed his major from business administration
to speech. On the recommendation of a fellow student he took an Intermediate Public Speaking
course taught by twenty-six-year-old Ida Lou Anderson, who suffered from a double curvature of the
spine caused by childhood polio. She became Murrow’s mentor and friend and remained so until her
death in 1941. He also produced his own show on
the campus radio station.
Murrow was elected president of the National
Student Federation of America (NSFA) at its 1929
convention at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, after giving a speech urging college students
to become more interested in national and world
affairs and less involved with “fraternities, football,
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Edward R. Murrow
Murrow interviewing Colonel Joe W. Kelly, a B-26 pilot with whom he flew on several missions over
Germany, and an unidentified officer (Edward R. Murrow Collection, Digital Collections and Archives,
Tufts University)
while Murrow took Shirer’s place in Vienna. At 6:30
P.M. on 12 March, Shirer used leased British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) facilities to deliver the
first uncensored report of Austria’s capitulation to
Germany.
Shirer’s report, however, was not the first to air:
Max Jordan of the National Broadcasting Company
(NBC) had delivered a censored eyewitness account
from the studios of Austrian state radio. In New
York, Paley decided that CBS could score a triumph
over its rival network with a program on 13 March
consisting of live reports from London, Paris, Berlin,
Rome, and Vienna of reactions to Austria’s loss of
independence; the broadcast would be hosted from
CBS headquarters in New York by Trout. Such a feat
had never been attempted. Murrow was given less
than eight hours to employ correspondents and find
transmission facilities in the various capitals. He
decided that he would broadcast from London and
Shirer from Vienna. Calling on the contacts he had
made during his years of traveling across Europe to
assemble cultural broadcasts, he engaged the newspaper reporters Ed Mowrer in Paris, Pierre Huss in
unteered to substitute at the last minute for veteran
announcer Robert Trout, who had drunk too much
at the CBS Christmas party.
In March 1937 Murrow was given the position
of European Director of Talks. The network’s European operation was headquartered in a small administrative center in London; Murrow’s staff consisted
of a secretary and an office boy. On 13 September
1937 Murrow hired William L. Shirer, an American
reporter living in Berlin who had recently lost his job
when the Hearst corporation closed its Universal
Service news agency, to arrange for speakers on the
Continent. Murrow and Shirer were managers; neither man was supposed to do any on-air work. Murrow had Shirer relocate to Vienna, Austria.
The Austrian Nazi Party took power on 11
March 1938. The next day, German troops marched
into Austria. Murrow was in Warsaw, Poland, trying
to schedule a broadcast of a children’s chorale.
Shirer was an eyewitness to the events in Vienna, but
he could not deliver an accurate account of them
under the eye of the Nazi censors. Murrow circumvented the problem by sending Shirer to London,
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on paper. The man was ad-libbing transatlantic
broadcasts!” Bob Edwards points out that “Murrow,
Shirer, and company had just devised and executed
what became the routine format for the presentation of news. It not only had multiple points of origin, it also had included both reporting and analysis
of breaking news, and was both a journalistic and a
technological breakthrough for broadcasting. No
longer would radio news consist of announcers
assigned to cover carefully preplanned events as if
they were parades or mere curiosities. From this
point on, network staff journalists would provide
timely reporting and analysis of important breaking
news.” CBS ordered another roundup for the next
night, and several more were broadcast over the
next several days.
Murrow was given permission to hire a team of
correspondents to be placed throughout Europe to
cover the impending war. The best known of these
correspondents were the eleven who have become
known as “Murrow’s Boys” or “the Murrow Boys,”
even though one of them was a woman: Shirer,
Smith, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Thomas
Grandin, Larry LeSueur, Cecil Brown, Winston Burdett, William Downs, Richard C. Hottelet, and Mary
Marvin Breckinridge. They were not hired for their
pleasing radio voices—CBS directors in New York
were often mortified by the way their correspondents sounded on the air—but for their writing ability, knowledge, and contacts. United Press (UP)
reporter Walter Cronkite almost became one of the
“Boys”: in 1943 he accepted Murrow’s offer of a job
but changed his mind when UP raised his pay; Murrow did hire Cronkite five years after the war but
never really forgave him for the earlier rejection.
Breckinridge’s inclusion in the group is a testament
to Murrow’s independence and disregard for tradition: CBS believed that men had better radio voices
and access to a wider variety of situations; females
were only used when there was a need for a woman’s
angle on a story. Breckinridge was based in Amsterdam but left CBS on 20 June 1940 to marry a diplomat stationed in Berlin. Murrow might have had two
female correspondents, but the network replaced
Betty Wason with Burdett after her initial reports
from Norway. Murrow’s wife, Janet, was the only
woman besides Wason and Breckinridge to broadcast on CBS during the war. She occasionally
reported on issues of interest to women such as food
shortages and rationing of clothing and interviewed
female members of Parliament. She filled some of
the many hours she was forced to spend apart from
Murrow by being active in the American Committee
for Evacuation of Children, which arranged to send
Berlin, and Frank Gervasi in Rome. The correspondents had to write their scripts and have them
approved quickly by the censors in the various countries, and each report had to begin and end without
running over into the broadcast from the next city;
the commentators would not be able to hear one
another, so the clocks at each facility had to be precisely on time. If any of the European transmitters
lost its signal to New York because of an equipment
malfunction or atmospheric conditions, CBS would
have “dead air”—a cardinal sin in broadcasting—with no way to fill it.
On 13 March Anschluss (union) between Germany and Austria was declared, and Hitler was
reported to be on his way to Vienna. At 8:00 P.M.
New York time, Trout announced that the regularly
scheduled musical program would not be heard so
that CBS could present a half-hour report of comments from European capitals on the German
annexation of Austria. Despite all the possibilities
for error, the broadcast was accomplished without a
hitch. The only difficulty occurred in Rome before
the program began: Gervasi was unable to procure
the equipment he needed and tried unsuccessfully
to arrange a telephone hookup to a transmitter in
Geneva. Finally, in desperation, he phoned his
report to Shirer in London, and Shirer read it on
the air.
In Vienna, Murrow made the first major broadcast of his career. He told his listeners:
From the air, Vienna didn’t look much different
than 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 the
right arm a little higher here than in Berlin and the
“Heil Hitler” is said a little more loudly. There isn’t a
great deal of hilarity but at the same time there
doesn’t seem to be much feeling of tension. Young
storm troopers are riding about the streets, riding
about in trucks and vehicles of all sorts, singing and
tossing oranges out to the crowd. Nearly every principal building has its armed guard, including the
one from which I am speaking. . . . There’s a certain
air of expectancy about the city, everyone waiting
and wondering where and at what time Herr Hitler
will arrive.
Murrow had no journalistic training, but he possessed a deep and resonant voice and a delivery that
was honed by his experience in debating and public
speaking. CBS reporter Howard K. Smith told Murrow biographer Joseph Persico: “Ed didn’t know how
to write like a newsman, which freed him to write
with his own fresh eye and ear. I went through the
files of his first broadcasts and they were just notes
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Edward R. Murrow
the children of influential parents to the United
States for safety, and was the director in England of
Bundles for Britain, which distributed food, clothing, and money donated by Americans to aid the
British.
On 22 September Murrow replaced the opening he had been using for his broadcasts—“Hello,
America. This is London calling”—which he had
taken over from his predecessor as CBS European
director, Cesar Searchinger, with one that was suggested to him in a letter from his old public-speaking
teacher Anderson: “This is London.” The phrase
became indelibly identified with him.
Almost immediately after the Anschluss, Hitler
began demanding the “return” to Germany of the
Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia where
some 3.5 million ethnic Germans lived; the area had,
in fact, never belonged to Germany. Hitler stepped
up his demands in September. Chamberlain
believed that appeasing Hitler in the Sudeten matter
could prevent the outbreak of war. On 30 September
1938 he and the leaders of France and Italy
attempted to secure what Chamberlain called
“peace in our time” by meeting with Hitler in
Munich and signing a pact that allowed Germany to
annex the Sudetenland; neither the Czech government nor that of its ally, the Soviet Union, had been
consulted. NBC’s Jordan was in Munich and had discussed the provisions of the agreement on the air,
but Murrow, who was listening to Munich radio in
London with an interpreter, was the first to report
the actual signing to an American audience. Covering the return of a triumphant Chamberlain to
cheering crowds, Murrow commented, “International experts in London agree that Herr Hitler has
scored one of the greatest diplomatic triumphs in
modern history.”
During the Sudeten crisis Murrow had participated in 35 broadcasts and arranged 116. In November he and his wife returned to the United States for
the first time in eighteen months. Murrow was
praised for his work in Europe; his reporting was
acclaimed as fresh and far-reaching and for bringing
immediacy and intensity to events occurring thousands of miles away from his audience. On Halloween, Orson Welles used Murrow’s innovative
roundup style of reporting to structure his radio
adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novella The War of the
Worlds on his Mercury Theatre on the Air: an
announcer broke into a fictional big-band show with
a news bulletin, after which actors portraying reporters in various locations gave updates on a Martian
invasion of Grovers Mills, New Jersey. One million
Dust jacket for Murrow’s 1941 collection of his broadcasts
from England (www.amazon.com)
listeners who had ignored or tuned in after Welles’s
disclaimer at the beginning of the show believed
they were hearing an actual newscast and were
thrown into a panic.
The Murrows returned to London in early
1939. German troops invaded Poland on 1 September; on 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany. Sevareid, newly hired by Murrow, reported
from Paris as France also declared war on Germany.
On 8 September, Shirer announced in Berlin that
German troops were approaching Warsaw.
On 9 April 1940 Germany invaded Denmark
and Norway. On 10 May, Hitler launched simultaneous attacks on the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. Chamberlain resigned that same
day, and Winston Churchill became prime minister.
On 27 May the evacuation of 335,000 British and
French troops from the French coast at Dunkirk
began. On 3 June, Murrow described the mood of
the British people:
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that’s the wartime closing hour for Saturday night.
There was an air-raid alarm, as you know, fifteen
minutes ago. The orchestra leader simply
announced they’d go on playing as long as the
crowd wished to stay, and I don’t expect more than
half a dozen people have left.”
I saw more grave, solemn faces today than I have
ever seen in London before. Fashionable tearooms
were almost deserted; the shops in Bond Street were
doing very little business; people read their newspapers as they walked slowly down the streets. . . . I
saw one woman standing in line waiting for a bus
begin to cry, very quietly. She didn’t even bother to
wipe the tears away.
A few bombs fell on the East End of London
that night, but on 7 September the Blitz—the heavy
bombing of London and other cities in an attempt
to demoralize the population—began. London was
hit for the next fifty-seven consecutive nights. Murrow had a talent for highlighting small details about
life in London during the Blitz. Speaking of the
blackouts, he noted that the glowing red tip of a cigarette could help one to avoid colliding with others
on the sidewalk. In another broadcast he mentioned
a new fashion trend: siren suits. Designed to be
donned quickly when the air-raid sirens went off
during the night, they were simple coveralls with a
single zipper. According to Murrow, tailor shops
were filled with them. In a broadcast on 10 September, Murrow said, “We are told today that the Germans believe Londoners, after a while, will rise up
and demand a new government, one that will make
peace with Germany. It’s more probable that they
will rise up and murder a few German pilots who
come down by parachute.”
The following day, Murrow relayed Churchill’s rallying call to Britain after the forty thousand troops left
behind at Dunkirk surrendered to the Germans:
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the
beaches . . . we shall fight in the fields and in the
streets. We shall never surrender.” Murrow commented, “I have heard Mr. Churchill in the House of
Commons in intervals over the last ten years. Today,
he was different. He spoke the language of Shakespeare with the direct urgency I have never heard
before in that house.”
During the Battle of Britain—a three-month
aerial duel between Luftwaffe (German air force)
bombers and fighter planes and Royal Air Force
(RAF) fighters that began on 10 July 1940—Murrow
worked almost twenty hours on most days. For the
first several weeks the bombs were directed at military targets along the coasts in preparation for a
planned invasion of Britain; but London and other
cities were blacked out at night as a precaution, and
air-raid sirens sounded when bombers were heard in
the distance.
On 24 August, Murrow produced a broadcast
titled London after Dark in collaboration with the
BBC. The program consisted of a series of live
reports from nine correspondents scattered
throughout the city. As Murrow opened the 24
August broadcast from the steps of St. Martin-in-theFields Church on Trafalgar Square, air-raid sirens
sounded in the background. He described a doubledecker bus coming around the corner with “just a
few lights on the top deck,” looking in the blackness
“like a ship that’s passing in the night”; searchlights
reaching “straight up into the sky”; and the shelter
beneath St. Martin-in-the-Fields. As people walked
by, Murrow held the microphone to the pavement so
that his audience could hear their footsteps. The
sound of German bombers could be heard in the
distance as Murrow spoke. Next, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio reporter Robert
Bowman interviewed the chef at the Savoy Hotel.
Other correspondents described an antiaircraft battery and an air-raid precautions station. From the
Hammersmith’s dance hall Sevareid reported:
“There are 1,500 people in this place at the
moment; it’s fifteen minutes before midnight, and
Friends and colleagues of Murrow were killed
during the Blitz. The CBS offices were destroyed
four times; Murrow was usually out on the streets,
but once as he was about to try to get a few hours of
sleep at the office a bomb set the building on fire.
On another occasion, Murrow and his wife were on
their way home from dinner during an air raid when
they passed a pub frequented by BBC staffers. Murrow asked whether Janet would mind going on alone
while he went in and had a few drinks and played
darts; she said that she would mind, and they went
on home together. Minutes later, everyone in the
pub and a few people outside were killed when the
Luftwaffe scored a direct hit on the building. Murrow always refused to enter an air-raid shelter; he
believed that doing so would cause one to lose one’s
nerve.
On 21 September, having finally secured permission from the Ministry of Information for the
dangerous undertaking, Murrow made his first
broadcast from a London rooftop. All the sounds of
the Blitz were magnified in the new location. At
times, Murrow’s voice was drowned out by antiaircraft fire or the concussions of bombs a few blocks
away. He continued to broadcast from the rooftops
each night for the duration of the Blitz.
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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)
thrown him against the wall. A few days later, the
fourth CBS office succumbed to another round of
heavy attacks.
Murrow’s reports were distinctive for their
restraint and lack of hyperbole. He spoke in stark and
prosaic terms. His goal was to explain things simply
for ordinary people and allow them to draw their own
conclusions. He believed that a reporter should never
sound excited or alarmed during a live broadcast, and
no matter how harrowing the situation might be,
Murrow’s voice always remained calm. Murrow was,
however, frustrated by the requirement for strict
objectivity in news reporting. In his opinion the British were clearly in the right and were fighting alone
for freedom against fascism. His solution was to allow
the British people to speak for themselves by incorporating interviews with ordinary Britons into his broadcasts. Their stories showed Americans how the British
viewed the war and what they were experiencing.
The cessation of the bombing of Britain put an
end to the most important series of broadcasts of
The nightly air raids ended on 3 November,
but sporadic bombings continued thereafter. Under
those circumstances, Murrow told his listeners during his Christmas 1940 broadcast, wishing them a
“Merry Christmas” seemed wrong. During the war
Londoners had begun bidding each other farewell
by saying “So long, and good luck,” and Murrow
closed the broadcast with that phrase. Later, he modified it to “Good night, and good luck” and used it as
his sign-off for the rest of his career. It became so
identified with Murrow that it was used as the title of
a 2005 movie about him.
On 15 April 1941 London was subjected to the
heaviest bombing it had experienced up to that time
as two hundred planes attacked the city. Murrow
called it “one of those nights where you wear your
best clothes, because you’re never sure that when
you come home you’ll have anything other than the
clothes you are wearing.” He also relayed the news
that CBS had lost its third office in the bombing and
that the blast that destroyed his workplace had
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nor Roosevelt told them, “We still have to eat.” The
president was too busy to attend but asked Murrow
to stay after dinner. After 1:00 A.M. he was shown
into the president’s study. Roosevelt gave him the
figures about the losses in lives, ships, and aircraft at
Pearl Harbor, which were far higher than had been
publicly disclosed. The president had not said that
he was speaking off the record, and Murrow agonized about whether to report the information. Ultimately, he passed up what would have been one of
the biggest scoops of his career and waited for the
official announcement from the White House.
After a vacation and speaking tour, Murrow
returned to London in April 1942. By then the focus
of American attention had swung away from Britain
to the Pacific and North Africa. Murrow felt isolated
from events, but his superiors at CBS directed him to
remain in the relative safety of London. He was
reduced to scheduling air time for his correspondents, who were scattered across the European and
Mediterranean theaters of operations, and relaying
information from them in his own broadcasts. He
was one of the first to alert the world to the existence
of the German concentration camps. On 13 December 1942 he began his report, “One is almost
stunned into silence by some of the information
reaching London. . . . What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being
gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.”
He finished by calling the story one of “murder and
moral depravity unequaled in the history of the
world.”
The Murrows knew many of the aristocratic set
in London and were friends with the Churchills. In
1943 Murrow met Pamela Churchill, the wife of Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, who was serving in
North Africa, and began an affair with her. Murrow
was given permission to accompany British forces in
Tunisia for a few weeks in March and April 1943. He
took field notes on the fighting around the cities of
Pichon and Fondouk and reworked them into a
radio report.
Later in 1943, the British and American air
forces began daily bombing runs over Germany in
preparation for a massive invasion of mainland
Europe. Murrow wanted to go along on one of the
missions over Germany and report what he experienced on his broadcast. At the time, Allied bombers
were experiencing a high number of casualties, and
CBS executives and military officials did not want to
risk the possibility of Murrow being killed or captured. Murrow, however, was insistent, and he finally
received permission to go on a raid. On 2 December
1943 he rode in a British four-engine Lancaster
Murrow’s career. They made radio a popular news
medium and established CBS as the premier broadcasting organization. By bringing vivid images of the
war into American homes, they influenced public
opinion in the United States away from isolationism.
Murrow often referred in his broadcasts to American
ideals such as free speech, honesty, individual rights,
and liberty and made it clear that these values were
under assault every day in Britain. Through his
broadcasts, Murrow won the sympathy of Americans
for the British and Allied cause. The programs were
collected in book form as This Is London in 1941.
Murrow returned to New York on 24 November 1941 to find himself famous. He was honored on
2 December at a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria
hotel titled “In Honor of a Man and an Ideal” at
which he received two standing ovations from the
1,100 guests and was thanked for his services by the
secretary of state, the British ambassador, the LendLease administrator, and a personal representative
of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The keynote speaker, poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, told Murrow that
you destroyed in the minds of many men and
women in this country the superstition that what is
done beyond three thousand miles of water is not
really done at all; the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are
not violence and lies and murder here. . . . Sometimes you said you spoke from a roof in London
looking at the London sky. Sometimes you said you
spoke from underground beneath that city. But it
was not in London really that you spoke. It was in
the back kitchens and the front living rooms and the
moving automobiles and the hotdog stands and the
observation cars of another country that your voice
was truly speaking. . . . You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that
burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors
and we knew the dead were our dead—were all
men’s dead—were mankind’s dead—and ours.
Without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more
emotion than needed be, you destroyed the superstition of distance and of time.
In his response Murrow said that he knew that the
work of many other correspondents was being honored through him, and he expressed the belief that
a positive outcome of the war would be the destruction of the class system and the promotion of
women’s rights in Britain.
Murrow and his wife were invited to dinner at
the White House on 7 December; after the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor that day, they assumed that
the dinner would be cancelled, but First Lady Elea170
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Murrow and Eric Sevareid broadcasting the 1948 election returns (Edward R. Murrow Collection, Digital
Collections and Archives, Tufts University)
handle.” As the German antiaircraft guns opened
up, “a great orange blob of flak smacked up straight
in front of us.” Three other correspondents had
flown on the mission, and two of them were shot
down; Lowell Bennett of International News Service
became a prisoner of war, and Norman Stockton of
Australian Associated Newspapers was killed. Murrow paid tribute to them near the end of his broadcast. He also noted that two fliers he had noticed in
the briefing room before the mission—“the big,
slow-smiling Canadian and the red-headed English
boy with the two weeks’ old moustache”—had not
returned. He said that “Berlin was a kind of orchestrated hell, a terrible symphony of light and flame. . . .
In about thirty-five minutes it was hit with about three
times the amount of stuff that ever came down on
London in a night-long blitz.” “Orchestrated Hell”
earned Murrow his first Peabody Award for Broadcasting Excellence. A month after Murrow’s flight,
Abercrombie was killed in action over Germany.
Paley and White beseeched Murrow not to fly on any
more combat missions, but he went on twenty-four
bomber named D for Dog—or D-Dog, as Murrow
affectionately referred to it—piloted by Jock Abercrombie in a nighttime strike on Berlin. CBS did not
allow the playing of recordings on news programs;
therefore, Murrow took notes during the flight, and
the following day he reconstructed his experiences
in a seventeen-minute broadcast that became known
as “Orchestrated Hell.” He noted that as they
approached Berlin, “The clouds below us were white
and we were black. D-Dog seemed like a black bug on
a white sheet.” The plane was caught in the beam of
a searchlight—Abercrombie said, “We’ve been
coned”—and went into an evasive maneuver that
threw Murrow to his knees. Murrow described the
incendiary bombs dropped by other planes in the
formation as “going down like a fistful of white rice
thrown on a piece of black velvet. . . . I looked down
and the white fires had turned red. They were beginning to merge and spread just like butter does on a
hot plate.” When D for Dog dropped its bombs,
“there was a gentle, confident, upward thrust under
my feet . . . and D-Dog seemed lighter and easier to
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day by Hottelet in London. LeSueur read the correction on 24 August; he was also the first to report the
true liberation, the facts of which differed in some
respects from those in Collingwood’s premature dispatch.) Murrow had little respect for the Parisians:
the war had demanded great sacrifices from the British people; the Parisians, however, were still living
well. Luxury items were readily available to those
who could afford them.
On 17 September 1944 Murrow recorded a
report while flying in a C-47 troop transport that was
dropping American paratroopers into Holland in
Operation Market Garden. Murrow described the
preparations for the jump and the parachutes of the
leading planes drifting to the ground. When it was
time for the nineteen paratroopers in his plane to
jump, he paused to let listeners hear the sounds of
the men checking their static lines a final time. He
counted them off as they exited the plane and
informed his audience that they had landed in a
field next to a windmill, close to a church. (Operation Market Garden turned out to be a major disaster for the Allies.)
In November, Murrow arrived in New York to
join Janet who had left earlier. Murrow was emotionally and physically exhausted from his work and personal life. He and Janet spent the end of 1944 and
early 1945 on a ranch near San Antonio. When he
returned to England in March 1945 he decided to
end the affair with Pamela because Janet was pregnant.
In 1945 Murrow joined Collingwood in traveling with General George S. Patton’s Third Army. On
12 April they were present at the liberation of the
Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. Murrow waited
until he was back in London on 15 April to broadcast his observations. He warned his listeners that
they should turn off the radio if they were eating
lunch or if they had no appetite to hear what the
Germans had done. The things he described, such
as more than five hundred bodies of men and boys
stacked up in the crematorium in two neat piles
“like cordwood,” were horrific enough, but Murrow
spared his listeners the most gruesome details.
Toward the end of his account he said, “I pray you to
believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have
reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it.
For most of it I have no words. . . . If I’ve offended
you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m
not in the least sorry.”
Murrow reported on the celebrations in London 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-
more. They included bombing runs, reconnaissance
sorties, and parachute drops. In June 1944 Murrow
almost made the first live radio broadcast from an
Allied bomber: he was in a B-17 Flying Fortress over
occupied France when instead of plugging in his
portable transmitter he mistakenly plugged in his
flight-suit heater.
On 6 June 1944—D-Day—the invasion of
Europe at Normandy, France, began. The radio networks pooled their resources to cover the landings,
and Murrow was given the responsibility of coordinating their efforts in London. At 3:33 A.M., Eastern
U.S. time, Murrow announced the Allied invasion to
the world. He read Supreme Commander General
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s order of the day on air, just
as it had been read to the troops. It ended with the
words “We will accept nothing less than a full victory.
Good Luck.” Downs and LeSueur came ashore in
the initial landings, and Collingwood arrived in a
later wave. They were unable to send reports back to
Murrow, who, consequently, had little to report
throughout the day. He even heard rumors that
LeSueur and Collingwood had been killed. Hottelet
was the only CBS reporter other than Murrow who
was heard on the air on D-Day or for two days thereafter: he had been in a Ninth Air Force Marauder
that was bombing German gun positions beyond the
beach, and he returned to London to make his
report with a slop bucket by his side in case of aftereffects from the airsickness he had suffered. In the
evening Murrow recalled for his listeners:
Early this morning we heard the bombers going
out. It was the sound of a giant factory in the sky. It
seemed to shake the old gray stone buildings of this
bruised and battered city beside the Thames. The
sound was heavier, more triumphant than ever
before. Those who knew what was coming could
imagine that they heard great guns and strains of
the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” well above the
roar of the motors.
Collingwood had gone ashore with a bulky
navy tape recorder and a soundman; the sounds of
battle could be heard in the background of his
report. The tape arrived in London on 8 June and
aired that day; a second one, recorded on D-Day
plus one, was broadcast on 9 June and replayed
many times.
Murrow visited Paris during the month after its
25 August 1944 liberation from German occupation.
(Collingwood had written a story on the liberation
on 21 August, assuming that censorship would hold
it up until the actual liberation occurred; but it was
cleared on 23 August and read on the air that same
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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).
news organizations, including Time Inc., were vying
for their services. He returned to the United States
in March 1946. The Murrow Boys remained with the
network: Shirer had his own Sunday-night program
of news and analysis; Burdett was based in Rome,
Hottelet in Moscow, Collingwood in Los Angeles,
and LeSueur in Washington, D.C., and later at the
United Nations (UN) in New York. Shirer left in
1947 after his sponsor dropped his show because of
falling ratings. Murrow hired new correspondents
Alexander Kendrick for the Vienna bureau, George
Polk for Cairo, and David Schoenbrun for Paris.
Some New York staffers who resented the elite status of
the Murrow Boys organized a “Murrow-Ain’t-God
Club”; when Murrow heard about it, he applied for
membership.
Murrow soon discovered that he preferred being
in front of a microphone to sitting behind a desk, and
he resigned as vice president in the summer of 1947. In
September he replaced Trout on the nightly news program, which was retitled Edward R. Murrow with the
News. (Trout moved to NBC but returned to CBS in
tions, but World War II ended when Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945. The Murrows’ only
child, Charles Casey Murrow, was born on 6 November 1945. In February 1946 Murrow made his final
broadcast from London; he paid tribute to his
adopted homeland, saying, “I am persuaded that the
most important thing that happened in Britain was
that this nation chose to win or lose this war under
the established rules of parliamentary procedure.”
He turned over the position of chief European correspondent to Smith, after Shirer and Sevareid
turned it down.
Murrow had many job offers after the war,
including assistant secretary of state, manager of the
Carnegie Foundation, and anchor of a nightly CBS
newscast to be sponsored by Campbell’s Soup. In the
end, he accepted the position Paley offered him as
vice president and director of news and public
affairs. Trout became the host of the nightly news
show, which was titled Robert Trout with the News till
Now. Murrow’s main motive in taking the job was his
desire to keep the “Murrow Boys” together; other
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command decisions. Murrow was furious and
appealed the decision to Paley, but to no avail.
Murrow and Friendly capitalized on the success of their I Can Hear It Now albums by creating the
radio program Hear It Now; the first episode was
broadcast on 22 December 1950. The series was
unique for its time in that it was an audio version of
a magazine. Each one-hour episode featured stories
on a variety of subjects, news analysis, and recordings
of important historical developments. The first program included comments from marines in South
Korea with the sounds of artillery fire in the background, Carl Sandburg reciting one of his poems,
delegates making speeches at the UN, sports commentary by Red Barber, a theater review by playwright Abe Burrows, and a movie review by Bill
Leonard. The series ended in June 1951.
Murrow also helped to create a five-minute
program titled This I Believe—the phrase was a favorite of his mother’s—on which people read essays
they had submitted on their philosophies of life.
Some of the essayists were famous, such as former
president Herbert Hoover and the German novelist
Thomas Mann, while others were ordinary men and
women. Murrow introduced and closed each program. The show initially aired on the Philadelphia
CBS affiliate, WCAU, in 1951 and was ultimately carried by 192 stations and broadcast in six languages
by the Voice of America in Europe; the essays were
also published in a column syndicated in eighty-five
newspapers. A selection of the essays appeared in
book form in 1952; Murrow wrote the foreword. The
radio series ran until 1955. It was revived, without
Murrow, by Radio Luxembourg in 1956, by National
Public Radio in 2005, and by the CBC in 2007.
In the early 1950s radio began to lose popularity to television. Although Murrow was skeptical of
the new medium, he and Friendly adapted Hear It
Now to television as See It Now. The show premiered
on CBS on 18 November 1951 with a split screen juxtaposing live shots of the Brooklyn Bridge in New
York City and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—an impressive feat in the early days of television. The half-hour Sunday-afternoon program was
hosted by Murrow, who told the audience that it represented “an old team trying to learn a new trade.”
He spoke from the control room, with monitors,
control panels, technicians, and the director, Don
Hewitt (who went on to create the CBS program 60
Minutes) visible in the background, and he purposely read from a script instead of using a teleprompter. The first episode included footage of
soldiers in Korea going about their daily routines.
The program began on a “sustaining” (unspon-
1952; in the 1970s he went to the American Broadcasting Company [ABC]). Murrow also hosted CBS Views
the Press and Background. As more shows were added to
his schedule, Murrow was forced to hire others to
research and write parts of his broadcasts.
In 1948 Murrow narrated the record album I
Can Hear It Now 1933–1945. His commentary related
the background of speeches by such figures as
Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and President Harry S. Truman from the Great Depression to
the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. The
record was a success and prompted two similar
albums in 1949 and 1950 covering the years 1945 to
1949 and 1919 to 1932, respectively. The albums
were produced by Fred W. Friendly, who joined CBS
in 1950 and went on to collaborate with Murrow on
many radio and television projects.
Murrow went to Europe in the spring of 1948
to cover the Italian parliamentary elections, which
were won by the Christian Democrats over a strong
challenge by a leftist coalition led by the Communist
Party. He returned in the summer to ride in one of
the planes in the airlift that was bringing supplies to
West Berlin after the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on the city. In April 1949 he was elected to the
CBS board of directors.
The Korean War began with the invasion of
South Korea by Communist North Korea on 25 June
1950. UN member nations sent troops to aid South
Korea; the majority were from the United States.
American general Douglas MacArthur, who had led
the Allies against Japan during World War II, was
placed in command of the UN forces. Murrow traveled to South Korea via Tokyo eleven days after the
fighting broke out; before leaving, he hired
Cronkite for the Washington, D.C., CBS bureau.
Murrow was the first radio correspondent to fly on a
bombing mission in the war. Later, with several other
reporters, he flew to the front lines. After a near
crash landing, they set off on foot as darkness fell.
The marines had not been informed that correspondents were going to be on the front lines, and the
group was taken into custody by a sentry and
brought to a captain. The captain, who recognized
Murrow’s voice, told the reporters that the unit
expected to be attacked at any time and that the sentries were under orders to shoot anything that
moved. On 14 August, while he was in Tokyo on his
return to the United States, Murrow transmitted to
CBS a critical analysis of the conduct of the war to be
aired on that night’s newscast. The story was killed in
New York because it violated MacArthur’s directive
prohibiting any criticism of his or his subordinates’
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sored) basis; but by the third episode it had picked
up a sponsor, the Aluminum Company of America
(Alcoa), whose executives hoped that the prestige of
being associated with the show and Murrow would
help them fend off antitrust charges. The program
moved to prime time on Sunday evenings and later
to Tuesdays. Murrow returned to Korea for a special
edition of See It Now titled “Christmas in Korea” that
was broadcast on 28 December 1952.
On 2 October 1953, while continuing his
duties on the nightly radio news and on See It Now,
Murrow launched a second weekly television program. Person to Person was a live interview show on
which celebrities such as politicians, authors, scientists, movie stars, singers, and athletes conversed
from their homes with Murrow, who sat in the CBS
studio smoking his trademark cigarette. They also
gave Murrow and the viewers guided tours of their
residences. Each episode comprised two fifteenminute segments, each featuring a different interviewee. The show was popular with viewers but was
attacked by television critics for its shallowness.
Many of Murrow’s colleagues, including Friendly,
also despised the show and did not understand why
Murrow participated in it. When pressed for an
explanation, Murrow said that doing Person to Person
bought him the freedom to put on the controversial
segments of See It Now. Technically, the program was
an astounding achievement: each location visited
required several cameras, tons of equipment, and a
portable transmitter. After the inaugural season,
Murrow won an Emmy for Most Outstanding Personality for his role as host of the program.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s hysteria
over Communist infiltration was rampant in the
United States; the period has been called that of the
“Red Scare”; the “witch hunts,” after the trials of
women suspected of practicing witchcraft in Salem,
Massachusetts, in 1692; and of “McCarthyism,” after
Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin,
who gained notoriety by repeatedly alleging, with little or no supporting evidence, that Communists
occupied high positions in the federal government
and the armed forces. Many of those who were
accused of Communist sympathies became unemployable or were persecuted, sometimes to the point
of suicide. CBS, like many other corporations,
required its employees to sign oaths pledging their
loyalty to the United States. Most of Murrow’s correspondents objected strongly to the loyalty oaths, but
Murrow signed one himself and advised them to do
likewise; reluctantly, they complied. But Murrow
struck back at the Red Scare on See It Now. On 20
October 1953 the program did a piece on Milo
Murrow in a CBS radio studio in 1957 (Broadcasting
Archives at the University of Maryland)
Radulovich, who had been ordered to resign his
commission as an air force lieutenant because his
father and sister were suspected of disloyalty. The air
force reversed its decision. On 9 March 1954 the
entire program was devoted to “A Report on Senator
Joseph McCarthy.” Because of the controversial
nature of the show, Murrow and Friendly had to pay
for a newspaper advertisement for it out of their own
pockets; CBS even refused to allow its logo to appear
in the ad. Murrow and Friendly used excerpts from
McCarthy’s speeches and his remarks as chairman of
Senate committee hearings to portray him as bullying, crude, irrational, and undemocratic. Murrow
concluded the broadcast by saying that
We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not
be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig
deep in our history and doctrine and remember
that we are not descended from fearful men, not
from 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 history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the
result. There is no way for a citizen of the Republic
to abdicate his responsibility. As a nation we have
come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We
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Now was succeeded by CBS Reports, a series of documentary specials. Murrow was an occasional guest on
the program; his last appearance was on the 25
November 1960 episode, “Harvest of Shame,” on the
plight of migrant agricultural workers in the United
States. His final nightly radio newscast aired on 22
January 1961. A few days later, he accepted President
John F. Kennedy’s offer of the directorship of the
United States Information Agency (USIA).
proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders
of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the
world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by
deserting it at home.
He pointed out that McCarthy could not succeed
without support from a large portion of the American public and quoted Cassius from act 1, scene 2 of
William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar (1599):
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in
ourselves. . . .” McCarthy responded on a later episode and came across as virtually insane.
The effects of the original broadcast and of
McCarthy’s reply were immediate. The public’s infatuation with McCarthyism rapidly diminished, and
letters, telegrams, and phone calls, running fifteen
to one in support of Murrow, poured into CBS. Seeing him on the street, motorists and truck drivers
shouted “Good show, Ed,” and he received standing
ovations when he went into restaurants. The enormous success of the broadcast, however, had the
unintended result of bringing Murrow’s autonomy
at the network to the attention of his superiors,
including Paley, who complained to Murrow that the
controversies engendered by See It Now were giving
him a “stomachache.” Murrow replied that stomachaches were part of the job, and he complained in
turn about the network offering equal time, without
consulting Murrow, for rebuttals by subjects who
believed that they had been defamed by the program. Over the next few years, CBS reduced Murrow’s authority. In September 1955, after Alcoa
withdrew its sponsorship, See It Now was expanded to
an hour in length but went from a weekly program
to a series of specials broadcast on an irregular basis;
the final episode, “Watch on the Ruhr,” dealing with
postwar Germany, appeared on 7 July 1958. During
its run the show had received four Emmys for Best
News or Public Service Program and had been nominated three other times; it had also won the highly
prestigious Peabody and George Polk Awards.
On 15 October 1958 Murrow gave a speech at a
Chicago meeting of the Radio and Television News
Directors Association in which he attacked the television industry’s emphasis on entertainment and
downgrading of news and public affairs. The speech
furthered his estrangement from Paley.
From 12 October 1958 to 12 June 1960 Murrow served as moderator of the CBS program, Small
World. Each episode comprised a discussion among
three eminent figures in widely separated locations.
In 1959 Murrow was replaced by his protégé
Collingwood as host of Person to Person; the show
lasted one more year before it was cancelled. See It
The USIA was established to promote a favorable international image of the United States; one of
Murrow’s first acts as director was an unsuccessful
attempt to persuade the BBC not to broadcast his
own “Harvest of Shame” exposé. By 1961 the agency
was also involved in the making of foreign policy and
in covert operations in collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency. Though Murrow sat in on
meetings of the cabinet and the National Security
Council, he was not part of the Kennedy inner circle
and sometimes found himself defending policies
and actions of which he had had no advance knowledge, such as the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of
Cuba. He ordered news reports on the USIA’s overseas radio network, the Voice of America, to be
crisper and more concise. He increased the number
of USIA projects in Africa and Latin America.
In the fall of 1963 Murrow, who for years had
smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, was diagnosed
with lung cancer. His left lung was removed in October. Murrow tendered his resignation to President
Lyndon B. Johnson, who had succeeded the assassinated Kennedy, when he returned to work at the
USIA in December. The resignation took effect in
mid January 1964. Murrow was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in September 1964. In
November, surgeons at New York hospital removed a
tumor near his brain. In March 1965 Queen Elizabeth II named him a Knight Commander of the
Order of the British Empire. Murrow died at his
country home, the 280-acre Glen Arden Farm in
Pawling, New York, on 27 April 1965. His ashes were
scattered at the farm.
Murrow’s death brought an outpouring of
grief in the United States and Britain. The day he
died, Sevareid, who had become an analyst on the
CBS Evening News, said, “He was a shooting star, and
we will live in his afterglow a very long time.” The
BBC broadcast a half-hour special on Murrow, and
Prime Minister Harold Wilson issued a lengthy commentary on Murrow’s impact on British history.
Edward R. Murrow is universally recognized as
a legendary and seminal figure in broadcast journalism. Bob Edwards sums up his achievements:
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James L. Baughman, “See It Now and Television’s
Golden Age, 1951–1958,” Journal of Popular
Culture, 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 the
Air: Edward R. Murrow and the Broadcasts That
Riveted a Nation (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks
MediaFusion, 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 Dispute
over His Reply to Murrow by Covering Cost of
Production,” New York Times, 16 May 1954, p.
46;
Reese Cleghorn, “Of Murrow and McGill: Writing
for 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 March
1954): 618;
David H. Culbert, “‘This Is London’: Edward R. Murrow, 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 Director
of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy Years,” Cold War History, 4, no.
1 (2003): 23–48;
Wilson P. Dizard, “The Murrow Years,” in his Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner,
2004), pp. 83–102;
Thomas Patrick Doherty, “Edward R. Murrow Slays
the Dragon of Joseph McCarthy,” in his Cold
War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and
American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 161–188;
Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American
Imagination from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R.
Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New
York: 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 the
McCarthy Fighter,” Look, 18 (24 August 1954):
23–27;
Gary Edgerton, “The Murrow Legend as Metaphor:
The Creation, Appropriation, and Usefulness
of Edward R. Murrow’s Life Story,” Journal of
American Culture, 15, no. 1 (1992): 75–91;
On a single day in 1938 he pioneered the overseas
reporting staff and the roundup news format while
reinventing himself, transforming a junior executive
into a foreign correspondent. Then in 1951, he
moved television beyond its function as a headline
service and established it as an original news source,
not a medium that merely duplicated stories culled
from newspapers. He also gave broadcast journalism
a set of standards that matched those of the best
newspapers in terms of what stories to cover and
how to cover them. From two platforms of show
business he carved out space for serious investigation and discussion of public affairs. Although he
knew how to entertain, as shown by the success of
Person to Person, he was adamant about keeping
entertainment out of broadcast journalism.
The Radio Television Digital News Association honors outstanding work in electronic journalism with
the annual Edward R. Murrow Award; the U.S.
Department of State administers the Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists, which invites rising
international journalists to travel to the United
States and examine journalistic principles and practices; and the College of Communication at Murrow’s alma mater, Washington State University, is
named 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 An
Age 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 Critical
Report on McCarthy,” New York Times, 11 March
1954, p. 19;
Wilfred Altman, “Edward R. Murrow,” Contemporary
Review, 199 (June 1961): 279;
Steve Michael Barkin, American Television News: The
Media Marketplace and the Public Interest
(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003);
177
Edward R. Murrow
DLB 364
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 December 1951): 147–149;
David H. Hosley, As Good as Any: Foreign Correspondence on American Radio, 1930–1940 (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984);
Carl Jensen, “Edward R. Murrow,” in his Stories That
Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), pp.
135–146;
Philip Kaplan and Jack Currie, “Night Raid on Berlin: Edward R. Murrow Flies with the RAF,”
American History Illustrated, 28, no. 6 (1994):
56–65;
Charles Kuralt, “Edward R. Murrow,” North Carolina
Historical Review, 48, no. 2 (1971): 161–170;
Robert J. Landry, “Behind the Screens at CBS,” Saturday 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 Murrow Doctrine. Why the Life and Times of the
Broadcast Pioneer Still Matter,” New Yorker, 81
(23–30 January 2006): 38–43;
L. Z. Leslie, “Ethics as Communication Theory: Ed
Murrow’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,” Saturday
Evening Post, 230 (18 January 1958): 32–33,
78–80;
“McCarthy Aids Enemies, Edward Murrow Charges;
Newscaster Assails Wisconsin Senator, Offers
Him Program Time for Reply,” Los Angeles
Times, 10 March 1954, p. 8;
“McCarthy Completes His Filmed Reply to Murrow;
Senator Attacks Commentator in Answer Set
for Television Showing Tuesday Night,” Los
Angeles Times, 4 April 1954, p. 22;
“McCarthy Gets Right to Murrow TV Time,” New
York 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;
“Edward R. Murrow, Broadcaster and Ex-Chief of
U.S.I.A., Dies; War Reporter From London and
TV Commentator, 57, Succumbs to Cancer,”
New York Times, 28 April 1965, pp. 1, 42;
“Edward R. Murrow—New USIA Chief: He Promises
to Tell the Truth, Even When Not Flattering to
the US,” Human Events, 18 (17 February 1961):
109;
“Edward R. Murrow of CBS,” Newsweek, 41 (9 March
1953): 40;
Edward R. Murrow Papers, 1927–1965: A Guide to the
Microfilm Edition (Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming
Corporation of America, 1982);
“Edward R. Murrow, RIP,” National Review, 17 (18
May 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,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 51 (September 2007): 438–456;
“E. R. Murrow: Image Maker,” America, 104 (11 February 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 Broadcasting (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 CBS
News (New York: Harper & Row, 1978);
D. G. Godfrey, “Ethics in Practice: Analysis of
Edward R. Murrow’s World War II Radio
Reporting,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 8, no.
2 (1993): 103–118;
Jack Gould, “The Rise and Fall of Edward R. Murrow,” in his Watching Television Come of Age: The
New 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,” New
York Times, 9 April 1954, p. 32;
Gould, “TV: Dismaying Start; Murrow’s Urging
B.B.C. to Ban Showing of ‘Harvest of Shame’ Is
Criticized,” New York Times, 23 March 1961, p.
67;
Gould, “TV: Exploitation—1968; Recruitment of
Migratory Workers for L.I. Harvests Results in
New 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,
178
DLB 364
Edward R. Murrow
Rosteck, See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television
Documentary 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: Edward
R. Murrow, 1938–1940,” Journal of Popular Culture, 15, no. 2 (1981): 97–105;
James Satter, “Edward R. Murrow: A Voice You
Could Trust,” in his Journalists Who Made History (Minneapolis: Oliver Press, 1998), pp.
113–127;
David Schoenbrun, On and Off the Air: An Informal
History of CBS News (New York: Dutton, 1989);
Raymond A. Schroth, The American Journey of Eric
Sevareid (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press
1995);
Philip M. Seib, Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward
R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006);
Gilbert Seldes, “Murrow, McCarthy and the Empty
Formula: Giving Equal Time for Reply,” Saturday Review, 37 (24 April 1954): 26–27;
Sally Bedell Smith, “The Chilling of Edward R. Murrow: Bill Paley Got a Stomachache; Dumping
His Best Newsman Was the Cure,” Quill, 79
(January–February 1991): 22–29;
Allene Talmey, “See Them Now: Ed Murrow and the
Man behind Him,” Vogue, 123 (1 February
1954): 144–145;
“Television in Controversy: The Debate and
Defense,” Newsweek, 43 (29 March 1954):
50–52;
“This Is Murrow,” Time, 70 (30 September 1957):
48–51;
Craig Thompson, “Columbia’s Ed Murrow: A Portrait; Some Notes on the Life and Works of an
Ace Correspondent,” New York Times, 18 April
1943, p. X9;
B. Thornton, “Published Reaction when Murrow
Battled McCarthy,” Journalism History, 29 (Fall
2003): 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 of
the TV Talk Show (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2002), pp. 19–33;
Timberg, “Who Speaks for CBS? How Edward R.
Murrow’s Last—and Uncredited—Documentary Turned Out to Be His Most Powerful and
Precipitated a Crisis at CBS News,” Television
Quarterly, 33 (Spring 2002): 24–33;
R. L. Tobin, “Ed Murrow in Peacetime,” Saturday
Review, 52 (26 April 1969): 67;
Jeff Murrow Merron, On TV: See It Now, Person to
Person, and the Making of a ‘Masscult Personality’
(Columbia, S.C.: Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication, 1988);
Sig Mickelson, The Decade That Shaped Television
News: CBS in the 1950s (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998);
Arthur Miller, “The Night Ed Murrow Struck Back,”
in Echoes down the Corridor: Collected Essays,
1947–1999, edited by Stephen R. Centola (New
York: Viking, 2000), pp. 190–199;
Joe Morgenstern, “See It Now,” Newsweek, 79 (17 January 1972): 83–84;
Michael D. Murray, “Persuasive Dimensions of See It
Now’s ‘Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,’” Today’s Speech, 23, no. 4 (1975): 13–20;
Murray, The Political Performers: CBS Broadcasts in the
Public Interest (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994);
Murray, “Television’s Desperate Moment: A Conversation with Fred W. Friendly,” Journalism History, 1, no. 3 (1974): 68–71;
“Murrow Time Offer for M’Carthy Alone,” New York
Times, 15 March 1954, p. 16;
“Murrow to USIA,” New Republic, 144 (13 February
1961): 5–6;
John E. O’Connor, “Edward R. Murrow’s Report on
Senator McCarthy: Image as Artifact,” Film &
History, 16 (September 1986): 55–72;
John O’Hara, “The Controversial Edward R. Murrow,” Human Events, 25 (28 May 1965): 11;
Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who
Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (New
York: 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 Demagogue,” Television Quarterly, 24 (Spring 1989):
5–22;
Michael W. Ranville, “The Case against Milo Radulovich,” Michigan History, 79, no. 1 (1995): 10–19;
Dan Rather, “Courage, Fear and the Television
Newsroom,” Television Quarterly, 27 (Winter
1994): 87–94;
“Remembering Murrow,” New York Times, 2 January
1972, p. D13;
E Merrill Root, “Edward R. Murrow: Uprooted,”
American Opinion, 5 (December 1962): 1–9;
Thomas Rosteck, “Irony, Argument, and Reportage
in Television Documentary: See It Now versus
Senator McCarthy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech,
75 (August 1989): 277–298;
179
Edward R. Murrow
DLB 364
Don Whitehead, “McCarthy Conflict Hits Boiling
Point; Opposing Roles in Seething Drama
Played by President and Senator,” Los Angeles
Times, 18 April 1954, p. 12;
Gary C. Woodward, “‘This Just Might Do Nobody
Any Good’: Edward R. Murrow and the News
Directors,” in his Persuasive Encounters: Case
Studies in Constructive Confrontation (New York:
Praeger, 1990), pp. 77–98.
“Truthful Image,” Economist, 202 (3 March 1962):
797–798;
“Voice of a Generation,” Newsweek, 65 (10 May
1965): 77–78;
Malvin Wald, “Shootout at the Beverly Hills Corral:
Edward R. Murrow versus Hollywood,” Journal
of Popular Film and Television, 19, no. 3 (1991):
138–140;
Geoffrey C. Ward, “Seeing Murrow Now,” American
Heritage, 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 Time
of His Time: A Pioneer of Broadcast Journalism, Who Dared to Uphold Freedom of
Thought, and Had the Courage to Be an
American in a Time of Fear,” Quill, 92 (September 2004): 10–16;
Wershba, “The Murrow I Knew,” Television Quarterly,
25 (Winter 1990): 67–70;
C. C. Wertenbaker, “Profiles,” New Yorker, 29 (26
December 1953): 28–45;
Papers:
The Edward R. Murrow Papers are in the Digital Collections and Archives of Tufts University in Medford,
Massachusetts. Some of Murrow’s awards and certificates are on display in the Edward R. Murrow Room
at the Fletcher School of Tufts University. The
Edward R. Murrow and Janet Brewster Murrow
Papers are held by the Mount Holyoke College
Archives and Special Collections in South Hadley,
Massachusetts. A collection of Murrow’s photographs is held by Washington State University in
Pullman.
180