Murrow at morrow

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.