The Rise of Edward R. Murrow
PART ONE OF A TWO-PART PROFILE OF EDWARD R. MURROW
EDWARD R. MURROW, one of the great journalists in U.S. history, was born as Egbert Murrow in North Carolina in 1908. His parents, Roscoe and Ethel Murrow, were Quaker farmers who named their three sons Lacey, Dewey and Egbert. The Murrows lived in a log cabin, on Polecat Creek. They grew cotton, tobacco, corn, hay, and watermelons. It was a hard life; their farmland was poor.
Also, Ethel Murrow wasn’t well. Since the family got little medical care, it was never clear what was wrong with her. Hoping to improve her health, in 1914, Roscoe, Ethel and their sons left their log cabin, moved all the way across the country, and started fresh as homesteaders in the lumber town of Blanchard, Washington.
Ed Murrow looked back on his childhood with a lot of sadness. His mother had often been ailing and there were too many family rules. For a time, the Murrows lived in a tent on the farm of some cousins near the Pacific Ocean. When the tide came in, salt water surrounded the tent on three sides. They’d gather as a family to eat dinner, there wasn’t enough food and Roscoe and Ethel went without so their hungry sons could eat. Asking for a handout was unthinkable to the Murrows.
When Roscoe found a job with the railroad, the family left the tent behind, moved into a frame house, and had regular meals. Ethel became a community leader, someone people sought out in times of trouble. She always seemed to know what to do. But Ed felt he’d never been able to relax as a child, to play long games in the sun with other boys his age. He’d never learned to swim or felt at ease eating a big meal. He had what the family called “moody streaks,” and his parents made him feel these were his to get out of alone.
There were blessings in his childhood, too. In North Carolina, with his marvelous ear, Ed picked up an old-fashioned English that many rural people still spoke there. In Blanchard, Ethel made her sons read a chapter a night aloud from the King James Bible and again the old-fashioned phrasings, and the insistence on judging good and evil, left their mark.
And in his childhood, Ed learned how to talk to working-class people, what sorts of things they were interested in; how much you should explain, and where the story could stand by itself.
Still called Egbert when he started high school in Edison, Washington, he changed his name to ”Edward” and sprouted into a star — a Varsity basketball player, a standout on the debate team, a member of the Glee Club and Student Body President. His classmates predicted that in 40 years he’d be a professor at the University of Washington, and an expert in social reform.
Like many awkward young men, Ed Murrow used public speaking to bring him out of his shyness. A great change came over Murrow when he spoke to an audience. His mind and his voice worked well together, and he liked himself much better, especially if he’d given his audience something substantial to think about.
By 1926, when he graduated high school, the town of Blanchard was sagging, its lumber business dying. There was no question that Ed would go away to college. At Washington State, he studied Drama, majored in Speech and caught the eye of several devoted professors, including Ida Lou Anderson, who kept in touch with him for decades.
Murrow got himself elected president of the National Student Federation of America and, from that post, made a speech urging his fellow students to closely follow national and international affairs. At an NSFA conference in New Orleans, Murrow met the Mount Holyoke College delegate, Janet Brewster, and fell wildly in love with her. When they married, he warned Janet about his bleak moods, and asked her to accept them. “Ed is a sufferer,” Janet would say.
In 1930, he left Washington State for New York City and thrived working for several small committees and obscure, high-minded groups, but his career didn’t take off until 1935 when he was hired by CBS as Director of Talks and Education. Murrow wasn’t going on the air himself in 1935; he was lining up newsmakers so THEY could go on the air. But Murrow made the most of it. He observed what worked on the radio, and what did not. If CBS Radio did not yet have news reporters, in Bob Trout they had a news announcer who could make news copy come alive, and Murrow listened closely to Trout.
In 1936, in a show of contempt for the Versailles Treaty, the Nazis sent troops into the Rhineland. Hitler wanted war, and in 1937, CBS sent Murrow to Europe as head of the European Division. That first year in Europe was fairly quiet for Murrow; he was not yet on the air himself. Technical difficulties weakened the CBS radio product and brought technicians, not journalists, to the fore. And in 1937, even journalists assumed the U.S. public didn’t want much foreign news. Americans turned on the radio for soap operas, a weather report or the college football scores.
Then on March 12, 1938 came the Anschluss. The Nazis marched into Austria and war seemed just a matter of time. CBS in New York called William Shirer, and asked him to set up a radio broadcast on the Anschluss from correspondents in various European capitals. Shirer was five years older than Murrow, had been reporting in Europe since Murrow was in high school, had lived in France, and knew it well. He’d been living in Germany since 1934, and had excellent contacts there. So William Shirer anchored this radio broadcast for CBS. He found newspaper reporters in Berlin, Paris and Rome, and Shirer asked Ed Murrow to report from Vienna. Shirer found shortwave transmitters to get the voices of all the reporters to New York. Somehow it all worked.
In a deeply resonant voice, Murrow reported from Vienna: “It was called a ‘bloodless conquest’ and in some ways it was, but I’d like to be able to forget the haunted look on the faces of those long lines of people outside the banks and travel offices. People trying to get away. I’d like to forget the tired, futile look of the Austrian Army officers, and the thud of hobnail boots and the crash of light tanks in the early morning on the Ringstrasse and the pitiful uncertainty and bewilderment of those forced to lift the right hand and shout ‘Heil Hitler!’ for the first time. I’d like to be able to forget the sound of the smashing glass as the Jewish shop streets were raided; the hoots and jeers aimed at those forced to scrub the sidewalk…”
That was the day Edward R. Murrow became a journalist. With his energy and guts, his somber view of history and of human nature, Murrow was the perfect journalist to report on Adolf Hitler and the cataclysm of a second world war. And when CBS listeners heard the various reports that day, Murrow was clearly the star. CBS executives liked the urgency of war news. It helped the network’s cachet, made CBS seem more relevant, important and patriotic. Ratings were good, and CBS executives ordered more.
But CBS had always been an entertainment company, and they put Ed Murrow in charge of war news — not Bill Shirer, who had a much stronger reporting background but was temperamental and whose voice sounded reedy on the air. CBS called Murrow’s program “World News Round-Up.” H.V. Kaltenborn in New York would start the program by saying: “Calling Ed Murrow, calling Ed Murrow!” — which was corny but caught the listeners’ attention — and then Murrow came on and was nearly perfect.
He wasn’t an announcer reading wire copy; he was a gifted writer and supremely gifted broadcaster, doing urgent live reports full of news but with some poetry in them. Murrow made an art out of radio journalism and made it respectable for print reporters to go on the radio. His voice was intelligent, literate, compassionate and strong. It was not just the timbre of the voice and the intonation; it was the delivery. Edward R. Murrow might be a driven man, tormented at times — but everything that came out of his mouth was a perfect, well-spoken sentence.
Murrow had his little catch phrases: “This is London.” And later: “Goodnight and Good Luck.” His old college professor Ida Lou Anderson got in touch with Murrow and said she admired his broadcasts — but instead of simply saying, “This is London,” why not pause after the word “This”? Murrow agreed, and after that it was “THIS… is London.” But he was never too much of a ham; Murrow always knew where to draw the line.
He was now, suddenly, a star, and when he returned to New York in early December 1941, reporters met Murrow’s ship at the dock, and hundreds of fans came down to the dock to gawk. Murrow was the guest of honor at a CBS banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. There were 1,100 guests there on December 2nd. Millions more heard a CBS radio broadcast from the banquet. Murrow sat between William Paley, the bright, hugely competitive head of CBS, and Archibald MacLeish, one of the great poets of the age.
President Roosevelt — another genius in the use of radio — couldn’t attend the banquet but sent Murrow a telegram full of praise. William Paley told Murrow that he admired him both professionally and personally. Murrow had made CBS more profitable, and had given the status-conscious Paley new social prestige.
Then Archibald MacLeish rose and noted that Murrow had broken down “the most obstinate of all superstitions — the superstition against which poetry and all the arts have fought for centuries, the superstition of time and distance.” MacLeish also gave Murrow this tribute: “You burned the city in our homes and we felt the flames that burned it.” Ed Murrow was 33 years old.
President Roosevelt sent word that he wanted to meet with Murrow, have a little dinner with him at the White House to discuss the situation in Europe. The dinner was arranged for five nights later, December 7th, but at the last moment, President Roosevelt had to postpone that dinner; the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
After so much hard luck as a boy, as a young man Murrow stumbled on the greatest news story of the century: the struggle of Western Civilization to defeat militant Fascism. And he had the good luck to be in a radio medium which was young and growing by leaps and bounds. In the war years, many Americans lived in places where the foreign coverage in local newspapers was lousy, and you didn’t see the papers until the next morning. Radio told you what had happened within hours, sometimes within minutes. In a nation where almost every family had a husband, a brother, a son in the service, people wanted war news fast.
All through the war, Ed and Janet Murrow lived in London. Ed walked around constantly, recklessly as German planes bombed the city. Then Murrow described it in radio reports that were somber and scathing. The British, who’d been besieging the U.S. Ambassador for help from America in the war against Hitler, loved Murrow’s wartime broadcasts. At some point, the British realized that Murrow was more important than the U.S. ambassador, because Murrow was speaking not just to high officials in the government but straight to the American people. Murrow was telling all of America what was happening in England and elsewhere in Europe — what the stakes were in this war against the Nazis.
Many Englishmen thought of successful Americans as brassy back-slappers. Murrow wasn’t like that at all. He was gracious, well-mannered, almost English in his reserve. Murrow accepted a few invitations to hunt with upper-class Brits.
He shot well, had excellent manners, but offered his hosts little of a personal nature. When someone told Murrow, “Conversation is a lost art,” he smiled and said: “How often I have wished it were.”
Murrow was asked to hire other bright young reporters for CBS Radio. And he did; he hired men like Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, and Eric Sevareid. Most of them were young and very good but none of them was ever as good as Murrow. When people said the voices of these young men weren’t ideal for radio, Murrow insisted that the radio audience wanted and deserved someone serious and intelligent, a man who knew what he was talking about. The timbre of the man’s voice should not matter. Murrow was a little embarrassed by how resonant his own voice was.
Ed Murrow told the reporters he hired not to be too formal on the air. ‘Imagine you’re talking to a good friend from back home,’ he’d say. ‘You’re standing at the bar, you’ve had a couple drinks and your good friend asks you what’s happening in Europe. Tell the CBS audience just what you’d say to that old friend — in just that language.’
At General Eisenhower’s headquarters, Murrow met a young man in army intelligence named David Schoenbrun and was impressed by how well Schoenbrun spoke French, and how deeply he understood the French. Murrow asked Schoenbrun what he planned to do after the war, and Schoenbrun said he’d probably go home and teach high school French. Murrow paused, then asked, “How would you like the biggest classroom in the world?”
Murrow’s last great piece of World War Two reporting was a haunting story on the Nazi death camps, in 1945. He stayed another year in London and then in 1946 returned to New York, where a talent agent brought Murrow together with an ambitious producer named Fred Friendly. Ed Murrow’s life was about to change radically again.
END OF PART ONE