Word Celebrity Blog

Egbert Roscoe Murrow was born into a Quaker family of farmers, on April 24, 1908, in Polecat Creek, which is near Greensboro, North Carolina. When he was a young boy, his family moved to a small logging town (Blanchard, Washington) in the northwest. He worked at lumber companies during the summer months while in high school and for a year after graduation to save enough money to attend Washington state University. It was in high school that he started to use the name Edward.

His best subjects were speech, debate and ROTC. His insructors said that he was a natural leader. He served as Washington state University student body president, president of the National Student Federation, where he met his future wife, Janet Brewster, and was a top cadet in the University’s ROTC program. He spent two additional years serving as the president of the National Student Federation after graduating. He graduated from Washington State in 1930  with a bachelor of arts degree in speech.

Edward R. Murrow took an interest in European politics, which was uncommon for young Americans at the time. When he was 25, he worked for a tiny organization that attempted to relocate persecuted scholars from Germany to the United States. In 1933 the fear of Adolh Hitler was not great in the United States, so funds were limited and visas were very difficult to obtain. In spite of this, the 335 refugees were brought to the United States. Included in these were novelist Thomas Mann, theologian Martin Buber and philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

Murrow married the former Janet Brewster in 1934; their only child, Charles Casey, was born in London in 1945.

In 1935, he joined the Columbia Broadcasting System as Director of Talks and Education. He became the CBS European director in 1936 and was transferred to London in 1937. Edward R. Murrow sailed with his wife, Janet, to London where he was to take up the post of chief CBS radio correspondent in Europe. At that time, he had never written a news story in his life, and he had never made a scheduled radio broadcast. He was only 29 years old.

He assembled a group of young reporters whose names soon became household words in wartime America, among whom were William Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Bill Shael, and Howard K. Smith. The group, which came to be known collectively as “Murrow’s Boys,” reported the whole of World War II from the front lines with a courage and loyalty inspired by Murrow’s own fearlessness.

During the next three years, he would oversee the birth of foreign news broadcasting, and he would make his own clipped baritone voice one of the most recognized by his countrymen.

When the German acquisition of Austria took place in 1938, Murrow chartered a plane from his London headquarters and arrived in Vienna in time to broadcast the German Army's march into the city. From that moment on, he was “glued to the mike.”

 More important, Murrow, utilizing the new medium, would report from beleaguered London during the Blitz of 1940, dramatizing Britain's stand-alone defense against Adolf Hitler to an America that slowly rallied to England's cause. In so doing, he virtually invented modern broadcast journalism.

These three words - "This is London" - made Edward R. Murrow the most dashing American radio correspondent of World War II. From behind a CBS studio microphone and eventually from on the scene, he presented live word pictures of Londoners' life in underground subway station shelters while German bombers ignited the city above.

When CBS sent Edward R. Murrow to London, they gave him the title of European Director. When Murrow hired William Shirer, a wire-service reporter who’d lost his job, as CBS’s man on the Continent, Shirer was under the impression that he was leaving journalism. “Murrow will be a grand guy to work with,” he writes in his diary, less than six months before the Anschluss broadcast. “One disappointing thing about the job, though: Murrow and I are not supposed to do any talking on the radio ourselves.” By that time, Murrow was breaking that rule, but still, until the war began, he and Shirer were bookers, producers, good-will ambassadors, and technology logisticians more than they were reporters. They were making sure that nobody could fairly accuse CBS of ignoring world affairs.

In broadcasting from a London rooftop while German bombers were overhead, Murrow was among the first to use ambient sound in radio journalism, and he also called more vivid attention to the plight of Londoners, as well as to himself. He spoke to the listener as a friend. 

His casual form of broadcasting that Murrow's broadcasts notable. Listeners felt yhat he was speaking directly to them and not just reading something. His reports provided us with strong visual images:

"Tonight, as on every other night, the rooftop watchers are peering out across the fantastic forest of London's chimney pots. The anti-aircraft gunners stand ready."

"I have been walking tonight - there is a full moon, and the dirty-gray buildings appear white. The stars, the empty windows, are hidden. It's a beautiful and lonesome city where men and women and children are trying to snatch a few hours sleep underground."

During the war Murrow flew in more than twenty bombing missions over Berlin, and along with Bill Shadel was the first Allied correspondent to report the horrors from the Nazi death camps.

Bob Edwards quotes in entirety a couple of Murrow’s most famous radio broadcasts.

Here is a passage from the a bombing run from England to Berlin and back.--
"The clouds were gone and the sticks of incendiaries from the preceding waves made the place look like a badly laid out city with the streetlights on. The small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet. As Jock hauled the Dog up again, I was thrown to the other side of the cockpit, and there below were more incendiaries, glowing white and then turning red. The cookies — the four thousand pound high explosives were bursting below like great sunflowers gone mad. And then, as we started down again, still held in the lights, I remembered the Dog still had one of those cookies and a whole basket of incendiaries in its belly, and the lights still held us. And I was very frightened."

Here is a passage from the liberation of Buchenwald.--
"In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. D-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers; they will carry them until they die."

During the war, Edward R.Murrow never had to play the role of the dispassionate reporter. He was an important player in the Allied war effort, and, under the circumstances, that did not conflict with his journalistic role. His special significance was in making Americans see, through his broadcasts about the Blitz, that the European war was not something that was faraway or irrelevant.

He is known for taking his audience places they had never been and allowing them to experience things they could never imagine. In 1950, Murrow flew to the Far East to report on the Korean War. He presented weekly digests of news called “Hear It Now” which was based on an earlier project produced by Murrow and Fred Friendly called “I Can Hear It Now.” His reports included the news of the day, but also stories of the individuals caught up in the wave of events.

Murrow rose to television fame in 1951 with the news documentary “See It Now,” (1951-58) which he narrated and co-produced with Fred Friendly. This show became popular by taking the public into previously unfilmed areas.

Edward R.Murrow’s love of common America led him to seek out stories of ordinary people. He presented their stories in such a way that they often became powerful commentaries on political or social issues. "See It Now" consistently broke new ground in the field of television journalism.

In 1953, he made the decision to investigate the case of Milo Radulovich. Radulovich had been discharged from the Air Force on the grounds that his mother and sister were communist sympathizers. The television program outlined the elements of the case. "See It Now" cast a lot of doubt on the Air Force’s decision, and within a short time, Milo Radulovich had been reinstated. This one edition of "See It Now" marked a change in the face of American journalism.

Soon after the Milo Radulovich program was broadcast, they learned that Senator Joseph McCarthy was preparing an attack on Edward R.Murrow. As it happened, Murrow himself had been collecting material about McCarthy and his Senate Investigating Committee for several years, and he began assembling the program. The Broadcast was broadcast on March 9, 1954. It was composed almost entirely of Senator McCarthy’s own words and pictures, It was a damning picture of a fanatic. Senator McCarthy was given a chance to respond, but his rebuttal, in which he referred to Murrow as “the leader of the jackal pack,” only sealed his fate. The combination of the program’s timing and its persuasive power helped to break the Senator’s hold over the nation. However, the entire fiasco caused a rift between Murrow and the Network. CBS decided to discontinue "See It Now".

The “See It Now” program that focused on Senator Joseph McCarthy is viewed as a turning point in the “Red Scare” and earned Murrow a Peabody Award.

In “Person to Person,” launched in 1953, Murrow took Americans inside the homes of the great and famous. He also conducted “Small World” and “CBS Reports.”

His 1960 report on American migrant workers, Harvest of Shame, is also a landmark in documentary news.

Murrow won nine Emmy Awards for broadcast excellence during his career

By 1961 tensions had become irreparable between Murrow and CBS and he accepted an appointment from President Kennedy as the head of the United States Information Agency. He was only to have the job for three years before being diagnosed with lung cancer. In 1964 Murrow was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 1965 died on his farm in New York.