Edward R. Murrow: A Life

By Mark Betka

On a cool September evening somewhere in America in 1940, a family gathers around a vacuum-tube radio. As someone adjusts the tuning knob, a distinct and serious voice cuts through the airwaves: "This … is London." And so begins a riveting first-hand account of the infamous "London Blitz," the wholesale bombing of that city by the German air force in World War II. Behind the microphone, sitting atop a London rooftop thousands of miles from the United States, sits a young journalist, Edward R. Murrow. With this and other wartime broadcasts, Murrow would spearhead the use of radio-based reporting and almost single-handedly create the concept of "broadcast journalism."

Edward R. Murrow's reputation as one of America's most celebrated journalists endures long after his life was ended by lung cancer at the age of 57. Murrow would bring to American radio listeners — and later television viewers — compelling stories that would come alive through words and pictures; he would describe the horrors of war both on and off the battlefield; he would challenge a powerful member of the U.S. Congress in the midst of the "Red Scare" of the 1950s; and, near the end of his life, he would be called on by the president of the United States to lead the nation's effort to "tell America's story to the world."

From Polecat Creek to London

Born in 1908 in Polecat Creek, North Carolina, Murrow was raised in a family of farmers who were Quakers — a Christian religious denomination formally known as the Religious Society of Friends. When he was a boy, the family moved to Washington State, where he grew up and eventually attended Washington State College, where he majored in speech. He moved after graduation in 1930 to New York City to run the national office of the National Student Federation of America. In 1932, he became assistant director the Institute for International Education, a nonprofit group that organized student conferences around the world. He married Janet Huntington Brewster in 1934 and they had one son. In 1935, the Columbia Broadcasting Company (CBS) hired him as director of "talks and education."

In 1937, CBS decided to send Murrow to Europe to monitor the increasing tension on the European continent. As war loomed, Murrow saw the need to assemble a cadre of qualified reporters to cover the stories as they unfolded — a group forever known as "Murrow's Boys." When World War II broke out in 1939, Murrow and his "boys" were ready to report on the biggest story the world had known.

War: A First-Hand Account

The broadcasts Murrow made from those rooftops in London during the raging air battles would make his name and his voice well known back in America. Murrow brought journalism to new heights when he rode along with U.S. flyers on several bombing missions over Europe, risking his life to give American listeners a better sense of what the war was really like and how U.S. soldiers were fighting it. But it was from the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany where he painted his darkest picture, of the unspeakable horror of murder on an industrial scale:

There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. … Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as best as I could and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and boys lay there in two neat piles.

Years later, in a talk published by Nieman Reports, Murrow's friend and producer at CBS Fred W. Friendly, recalled the 24-minute account from the liberated Nazi camp: "Murrow … follows the Third Army into Buchenwald, sees what you know was seen there, was profoundly moved, depressed, angered. His anger was his greatest weapon, but he knew how to control it. … No adjectives, I don't think I ever heard him use an adjective. People piled up like cords of wood, 10 deep, and the smell. Without saying that he vomited, you knew that he had. … There was a quality in Murrow and intensity of purpose, a consciousness he was an American conscience."

Murrow and the Great TV Broadcasts

After the war, Murrow came back to the United States, working with Friendly in his radio program, "Hear It Now." In 1954, this program became the TV news and public affairs program "See It Now."

In one case Murrow used his program to highlight and dispute the U.S. Air Force's 1953 decision to dismiss from service an officer whose relatives were suspected of sympathies to Communist ideology or organizations. The Air Force would eventually reverse its decision. "See It Now," of course, also was the vehicle for Murrow's greatest confrontation, where he challenged Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Another Murrow program, "CBS Reports," aired "Harvest of Shame," a report critical of the treatment of migrant workers in the United States. These and other programs earned him several Emmys, the U.S. awards for outstanding TV achievements.

Call to Duty: Public Diplomacy and the "Last Three Feet"

After CBS, weary of controversy, cancelled "See It Now," Murrow grew increasingly disillusioned with the medium. He continued at CBS until 1961, when President John F. Kennedy appointed him head of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Since 1953, USIA, the U.S. government agency waging the "war of ideas" against the Soviet Union, had been charged with "telling America's story to the world" through educational exchanges, books and publications, radio broadcasts through the Voice of America, and libraries and information centers run by U.S. Embassies around the world.

Murrow's goal was to make the agency more results-oriented, and he worked hard trying to reinvigorate USIA, secure adequate funding from Congress, and transform its officers into "persuaders" as well as disseminators of information.

Murrow's tenure at the helm of USIA coincided with important events of the early 1960s: Soviet resumption of nuclear testing, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Kennedy assassination. Not long after Kennedy's death, Murrow, ill following cancer surgery, left USIA. He died in New York, on April 27, 1965.

Mark Betka is a staff writer in the Bureau of International Information Programs of the U.S. Department of State.

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