The
Murrow boys: Pioneers in the front lines of broadcast journalism
Stanley
Cloud and Lynne Olson
Mariner
Books. 1997.
Before World War II, CBS
newsmen in Europe were supposed mainly to schedule broadcasts of concerts;
radio news at that time consisted of unctuous commentary from New York. In March 1938, when Adolf Hitler was muscling
Austria into a gunshot marriage with Germany, newsman William Shirer had to
abandon Vienna in order to broadcast a children’s choir in Ljubljana.
When Hitler threatened Austria and Czechoslovakia,
the CBS bureau chief in London, Edward Murrow, took it upon himself to
broadcast news bulletins, which proved to be more popular than the CBS brass in
New York had anticipated. He ransacked Europe
for American correspondents; although the execs judged a reporter mainly by his
deep voice, Murrow sought correspondents who read voraciously and spoke several
languages, like Shirer and Eric Sevareid.
“Murrow and I are not supposed to do any talking on the radio ourselves,”
Shirer confided to his diary in 1937. “New York wants us to hire newspaper
correspondents for that. We just arrange
broadcasts. Since I know as much about
Europe as most newspaper correspondents, and a bit more than the younger ones,
who lack languages and background, I don’t get the point.”
Soon enough, New York let them broadcast. The results, chronicled in this evocative account,
were history.
CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood never let
anything get in the way of a good story.
In France after the Normandy invasion, a broken front tooth caused him
to whistle as he spoke. Before
broadcasting again, he would have to undergo the dentist’s drill in England. But the liberation of Paris was nigh, and he
wanted to be the first to report it. So
he recorded a fictitious account of the liberation and forwarded it to London,
with instructions to release it when the Americans had marched into the City of
Light. Of course, CBS aired the recording upon receipt, which made front-page
news across the US – and later made for red faces all around.
Sometimes the Murrow boys made for white faces all
around – white with shock at their daredevil stunts. Eric Sevareid was flying to China in a C-46,
aka “the flying coffin,” when the corporal next to him remarked: “Know what?
Left engine’s gone out.” That left one engine, and the staff was soon
hurling suitcases out the door in order to lighten the load on the labored
motor. It didn’t work, and there was
nothing to do but jump. Luckily,
Sevareid remembered to yank the ring on his parachute. They landed in head-hunter country, but
evidently the hosts weren’t hungry. The
rescue took two weeks and a 120-mile stroll.
Amidst the risks was a lesson or two about
reporting. Murrow stressed that accounts
of the war – even the hard-news stories – should garnish the facts with human
detail. Although he was the most scholarly of the Murrow boys, Shirer took the lesson to
heart. Here he is, in June 1940,
observing the French and the Nazis as they signed the armistice in the same
French forest, the same French railcar, in which Germany capitulated in 1918:
“Down the road, through the woods, I could see the
refugees, slowly, tiredly, filing by – on weary feet, on bicycles, on carts, a
few on trucks, an endless line. They
were exhausted and dazed, those walking were footsore, and they did not know
yet that an armistice had been signed and that the fighting would be over very
soon now.” But it wouldn’t. --Leon
Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com
Good
reading
William L. Shirer.
Berlin diary: The journal of a
foreign correspondent, 1934-1941.
Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002.
