The TV News Career of Edward R. Murrow
PART TWO OF A TWO-PART PROFILE OF EDWARD R. MURROW
In 1946, the journalist Edward R. Murrow moved from London back to New York City, where a talent agent brought Murrow together with an ambitious producer named Fred Friendly.
If Egbert Roscoe Murrow was a gangly kid from Washington State who’d reinvented himself as the New York sophisticate Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly was an invention, too.
He’d been born in a lower-middle class Jewish family in Providence, Rhode Island as Ferdinand Wachenheimer. Both Murrow and Friendly were eager to be respected, and to share in the good life. Both were outsiders, both by temperament and experience. It’s part of what made them good journalists, ready to question authority.
But Fred Friendly was much more content than Murrow with the wealth of post-war America. Murrow, accustomed to the war-time shortages and camaraderie of London, saw post-war America as insulated and decadent.
The popularity of escapist entertainment in the United States seemed to Murrow a symptom of something wrong in the culture. He felt journalists should never waste their time on “safe” topics.
Murrow and Friendly began by making LP albums out of current events which CBS felt should be captured for history. They called the series “I Can Hear It Now.” It was a simple idea: take political speeches and historical events and relevant sounds — like an atom-smasher, or the sound of artillery fire — and weave them together with Murrow’s narration so the listener learned something and felt he was there on the scene.
The “I Can Hear It Now” records sold briskly, so Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow began doing a weekly radio show “Hear It Now.” But only from December of 1950 to mid-1951 — because it was a hit, and CBS executives wanted to move it to television, and call it “See It Now.”
The Chairman of CBS, William Paley, also invited Murrow to become a CBS Vice President. Reluctantly, Murrow accepted. Paley had a way of making management seem a fascinating challenge, and to Bill Paley, who was very good at it, it was. But it was about making money and protecting the corporate interests of CBS; Paley never worried about hurting people’s feelings. This was business, where you don’t worry about petty things like people’s feelings.
As Murrow grew closer to Fred Friendly and Bill Paley, he moved away from William Shirer, the man who’d helped make Murrow a star in 1938. Paley didn’t like Shirer much.
Shirer had a Sunday news program on CBS, and asked Vice President Murrow to help him find the show a sponsor. Murrow hated being beholden to corporations, and thought it was unhealthy for a working journalist to go hat in hand to corporate America. He didn’t do much to help Bill Shirer get a sponsor, and Shirer resented it. William Paley had set things up so that the pay of a news host was closely tied to how much the sponsor paid, so the lack of a corporate sponsor hurt Shirer’s income. Then in 1947, William Paley killed Bill Shirer’s news program, and Murrow didn’t try very hard to talk Paley out of it.
By 1949, William Shirer had left CBS with real bitterness. His feelings toward CBS and its star newsman Ed Murrow didn’t improve during the 1950’s, when Murrow became famous on TV and Shirer had little professional success. In the mid-1950’s, over 10,000 American families per day bought their first TV set, and many of them became faithful viewers of Ed Murrow. Finally, in 1960, Shirer published a major book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and was important again as an author. But he never really forgave Murrow for what had happened in Shirer’s last years at CBS.
Fred Friendly, on the other hand, was in the 1950’s forging a strong partnership with Ed Murrow. A restless man, driven by ambition, Fred Friendly thrilled by the potential of network television. He liked to say, “TV is the greatest teaching tool since the printing press.”
Ed Murrow was more diffident about television. He came alive when he was traveling and reporting a major story — but around the building at CBS he mostly kept to himself, which, at a workplace like CBS News, was a little dangerous. Television seemed static to Murrow — a host performing in a studio, sealed off from a rapidly changing world. And Murrow found it garish and odd that television news tried to bring together journalism, advertising and show business in a single package.
But whatever his misgivings about television, Ed Murrow gave no sign of them on the air.
In 1951, the first “See It Now” program began with a split screen, the Brooklyn Bridge on one side of the TV screen and the Golden Gate Bridge on the other, as Murrow said grandly: “For the first time in the history of man, we are able to look out at both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of this great country at the same time… no journalistic age was ever given a weapon for truth with quite the scope of this fledgling television.”
Murrow’s entry into television journalism made TV journalism respectable, just as he’d done for radio journalism 13 years before.
Yes, television was a potential “weapon for truth” — but it was also a cash cow. And for the networks, quiz shows like “The 64,000 Question” were the biggest cash cows of all, with low production costs and huge ratings. So most of the CBS brass would have preferred that CBS broadcast a quiz show, not “See it Now.”
Murrow could have helped his and Friendly’s career by schmoozing more with CBS executives — and reminding them of the vital public service of good television journalism. But Murrow hated to schmooze, and refused to do it.
In the absence of Murrow, Fred Friendly was not shy about speaking on Edward R. Murrow’s behalf, using as leverage Murrow’s great reputation, pushing repeatedly for more air time, a bigger budget. Friendly would say “Ed feels that…” or “Ed wants….” Friendly was convinced that news programs were the only “important” thing CBS was putting on the air. But others at CBS wondered if Murrow really felt as Fred Friendly said he did, why didn’t he speak for himself?
Friendly was determined to make CBS the gold standard for TV documentary. He set about it quite systematically, going to the Museum of Modern Art to look at all of their film, and then to the archives of Pathe News, looking at hours and hours of material, eagerly analyzing what worked, what didn’t — and why.
Friendly hunted down some of the best producers, technicians and cameramen in the business— tried to get CBS to hire them, and picked their brains about what they thought worked and didn’t work in TV news. Friendly decided the best documentary films were closely attuned to the strengths of the on-air host. Even the most “professional” host, trying to explain something he didn’t really understand, or reading a script he hadn’t written, grew slightly ill at ease. The discomfort might not be obvious on a radio show but it was clear to a TV audience in the host’s face and body language. If the host was uneasy, the TV audience turned away.
So Friendly carefully tailored his work, and the ways of Murrow’s crew, to the special strengths of Edward R. Murrow — the writing of Ed Murrow, and to Murrow’s knowledge and style and mannerisms, which meant an understated excellence, an interest in education.
Murrow was a curiously shy man for such a public figure and he needed time to educate himself and prepare himself psychically to take on a controversial new subject. But Friendly never doubted Ed Murrow’s guts; Murrow used to say “‘Difficulty’ is an excuse that history never accepts.”
If Murrow was a little staid in his approach, Friendly could add a little drama — but never too much. He had a great sense for just how much show-biz Murrow could tolerate in a news program and still feel in control. Together, Murrow and Fred Friendly took on many turbulent issues on “See It Now” or later “CBS Reports”: the civil rights movement; the plight of migrant workers; government secrecy; and the links between tobacco and lung cancer.
In 1953, Murrow started hosting a CBS TV-show called “Person to Person.” This was very light stuff, Beatrice Lillie showing viewers how she put on a fur coat, Michael Todd and Elizabeth Taylor kissing chastely for the camera, the Duchess of Windsor playing jacks. People close to Murrow saw he was embarrassed by this sort of celebrity-coddling. But Murrow knew that “Person to Person” put money in the bank for CBS, while Murrow prepared his next documentary.
The most famous Ed Murrow-Fred Friendly documentary was a March 1954 “See It Now” special on the red-baiting anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was Ed Murrow who got most of the credit — and blame — for the McCarthy show. But it was Fred Friendly as much as Murrow who decided it was finally time to take on Joseph McCarthy and expose his “anti-Communism” for the bullying, self-serving crusade that it was.
Fred Friendly knew how to engage people, to pull them along, make them see why something was more interesting or important than they’d realized. Friendly kept mentioning the McCarthy story to Murrow in 1952 and 1953, preparing the ground, and by 1954 Murrow was ready to take on Joseph McCarthy.
Hitting McCarthy was a real professional risk; ALCOA sponsored “See It Now” and ALCOA had hundreds of thousands of customers who liked Senator Joe McCarthy, who were glad someone was finally going after the Communists in the U.S. government. If ALCOA hated the show and publicly dropped “See It Now,” it might be very hard to find another corporate sponsor.
The decision about whether or not to run the documentary had to be made by Bill Paley. As CBS had thrived after the war, Paley had insulated himself from tough calls in the News Department, but this decision was his alone to make. Paley finally decreed that Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly could air their documentary on Joe McCarthy — but CBS wouldn’t spend a nickel to promote the program. Murrow and Friendly would have to pay for the ads out of their own pocket, and the ads couldn’t use the CBS logo.
The show aired and, when it ended, Ed Murrow was slumped in a chair, utterly drained. Everyone at CBS waited to see if ALCOA would drop “See it Now.” But the show was a hit; it touched a nerve with the American people and helped the reputation of the U.S. government. It also helped CBS, it helped ALCOA, and it helped Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly. The only person it didn’t help was Joe McCarthy.
Murrow and Friendly grew personally closer by doing the McCarthy show, taking a big professional risk together. The show helped shift public opinion against Senator McCarthy, and soon the U.S. Senate censured McCarthy. “No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices,” said Murrow. He also offered McCarthy equal time on a later “See it Now” program to answer the charges.
But the documentary underscored a real change in the relationship between Murrow and William Paley. Paley in 1954 was a far wealthier and more confident man than he’d been in 1941, and the people he socialized with more conservative. He still admired Murrow, but he thought Murrow took too many risks, and he was determined not to let Ed Murrow hurt the profitability of CBS.
By 1954, Friendly was a man who felt, in some sense, that he had created Edward R. Murrow. After all, Friendly had mastered the television documentary form; he had largely assembled Murrow’s technical team. He had represented Murrow’s opinions to others at CBS, had fed Murrow ideas, had defended him within CBS and outside… and prodded him to do some of his most famous pieces.
Whereas Ed Murrow valued Fred Friendly, and liked him, but never doubted for a minute that Ed Murrow had created Edward R. Murrow. Murrow felt the biggest stories were international ones, about war and peace, and Friendly had hardly ever been overseas, had missed World War Two, the great story of his lifetime. Murrow had risked his life many times, going along on over 20 bombing missions over Berlin.
Murrow was also a little wary of Friendly’s gifts as a dramatist. He felt Friendly didn’t always know his facts and — even worse — sometimes didn’t care particularly, so long as the drama of the piece was there, and the audience felt they’d been given a good show.
Murrow and “Murrow’s Boys” had always made their reporting very personal, the reporter as a lone wolf, brave and sensitive, right in the heart of the action, reporting his own personal impressions back to a mass audience. Murrow respected good production values but the idea that any technical person — even Fred Friendly — was the essence of the production… Murrow just couldn’t buy that.
In 1958, CBS canceled “See It Now.” The network could make more money running an entertainment show. After the cancellation, Murrow made another of his occasional public speeches about television, and though he didn’t mention William Paley by name, Murrow was scathing about the shallow commercialism of those who ran the networks. After that speech, he and Bill Paley almost never spoke again.
In 1960, Murrow and Friendly created “Harvest of Shame,” their last great documentary. It was a show about migrant laborers in America, the unseen, unappreciated people who pick most of the fruits and vegetables that Americans eat.
In 1961, Murrow left CBS. The last years had been dispiriting ones, and he was exhausted and depressed by the relentless commercialism of network television.
Ten years after the McCarthy program, in March of 1964, Fred Friendly became President of CBS News. In August 1964, after Ed Murrow had left CBS, what President Lyndon Johnson called an “unprovoked attack” in the Gulf of Tonkin provided President Johnson a pretext to justify the U.S. going to war in Vietnam. CBS covered the President’s statements with little critical perspective.
Late that night, Ed Murrow angrily called up Fred Friendly about CBS coverage of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It was the middle of the night, most Americans were sound asleep, but Ed Murrow had lost his left lung to cancer, he was not sleeping well and he didn’t trust Lyndon Johnson. He felt sure that President Johnson was counting on Americans not knowing or caring enough about a little Asian country called Vietnam to hold the President back.
Murrow wanted the media to hold President Johnson strictly accountable for decisions about war and peace; to question him closely about why other options weren’t better ones. So Ed Murrow picked up the phone and called his old friend Fred Friendly at home and began berating the new President of CBS News for the way CBS had reported only President Johnson’s words, with nothing from the other side.
A groggy Fred Friendly tried to respond, to defend how CBS News had handled the story — but Murrow would not be interrupted, and urged Friendly to stick a tough young reporter like Dan Rather on the case, let him dig around and do a CBS special report on his findings. Friendly was impressed by his old friend’s passion, but annoyed by his scolding tone. Friendly felt that he’d always been more fearless than Ed Murrow.
Within a year, Edward R. Murrow was dead of lung cancer at 57. He died on a farm that he and Janet owned in Pawling, New York. His 60-cigarette-a-day habit had finally caught up with him. He left a legacy of brave and literate reporting that has challenged and inspired CBS News, and thousands of other journalists ever since.
When Murrow got the final cancer diagnosis, and the doctors told him how little time he had, Murrow reached out to William Shirer, and told Shirer he’d like to try to be friends again. Shirer came to visit Ed and Janet Murrow in Pawling, but when Murrow tried to discuss what had cost these two gifted men their friendship in 1949, Shirer wouldn’t bite. He steered the conversation to safer topics.