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Murrow: His Life and Times (Communications and Media Studies)

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Few figures stand so prominantly in 20th century folklore as does Edward R. Murrow, who spoke with such force and gravity over the radio and televison airwaves as did his colleague Walter Lippmann in the medium of print. His is a singular and absorbing story, cutting such a swath through the annals of the last century's history as to guarantee himself a place in the patheon of journalistic greats. That said, this is a wonderful biography of a man so uniquely gifted as to stand alone as an icon. This is indeed a work of prodigious scope and historical proportions, one covering the rise of this man in the streets and towers of London during the dark days of the war in Europe, who with his colleague William Shirer (later author of the best selling book, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"), pioneered the use of trans-Atlantic radio broadcasts as a method of communicating real-time coverage of current events. In so doing, he brought home the poignant message of how close the war was drawing to Americans. In this sense, then, his biography closely parallels the historical epoch of both war-time and post-war America.

He was the virtual prototype of the international newsman, urbane, well-spoken, and yet brutally honest and beyond reproach. He conveyed a sense of integrity that became a model for eeryone who followed, from the early days of colleagues like Eric Sevareid, Harry Reasoner, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite to the well-polished and quite cosmopolitan Peter Jennings. He beacame a power unto himself, gaining unrivaled credibility and relevance with the American people, with a somewhat dour and hyper-serious demeanor, almost a paradoy of himself as he related the latest in the world news. This work concentrates on his incredible gifts as well as on his initial work during the second world war exposing the truth and horrors underlying fascism. In the process, he gained widespread credibility not only for himself, but also for the so-called fourth estate and privilege for journalists at large. later he founded a team incorporating the best of the wartime correspondents , including Willaim Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, as well as many others.

Yet after the war he received both greater fame as well as a kind of denouement, in the sense that in order to rise and maintain his poosition at the top of the new world of television-based journalism, he had to deal with moral cretins and the contamination of corporate money politics. Eventually this led to a break between Murrow and CBS, although in the process he forged bonds with such new notables as Fred Friendly that led to the famous series "See It Now". Even in the midst of all this very public history, Murrow was at the same time a very private, shy, and melancholy man, who was given a very rich personal life he managed to keep far from the foibles of the cameras. This work by Ms. Sperber is a seminal work, one that takes a loving and fascinating look at a complex, memorable, and highly moral man who managed to make his way through the temptations of the 20th century while keeping his dignity and integrity along his rather remarkable way. Enjoy!

By the time most of us baby boomers were old enough to watch more substantive television fare than Felix the Cat, Edward R. Murrow was an aging icon without portfolio. He did not have the regular exposure of a Douglas Edwards, Chet Huntley, or David Brinkley. He would on occasion do spectacular work-as elementary school students we would discuss his "Harvest of Shame" documentary on the sufferings of migrant farm workers. But it was from our parents and older relatives that we inherited something of a sense of his importance in an earlier time, in the same fashion that they might speak of a Bob Taft or an Adlai Stevenson.

What we could not know in 1959, what biographer A.M. Sperber makes abundantly clear, is that we were watching the shell of a driven man who had exhausted his incredible stores of emotional energy to international cooperation, then to radio coverage of the horrors of World War II, and on to shape the formation of the CBS new department during the explosion of the television era and the age of McCarthy. Sperber traces the rise and decline of this charismatic, almost manic, entrepreneur from the most unlikely of origins, that of a lumberjack named Egbert who quickly realized the liabilities of his given name in the male work camps of Washington State.

Egbert, now Edward, chopped wood only long enough to scratch and claw his way into Washington State College. A student with fingers in many campus pies, he joined an organization called the International Institute of Education in 1931. The IIE in the early 1930's was a form of college student exchange program, one of its sponsors being the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Columbia Broadcast System. When Murrow spoke at a West Coast gathering of IIE representatives, he earned himself election to the national office of the IIE in New York, a paid position there, and free air time on CBS radio. Murrow produced Sunday afternoon radio lectures and round table discussions, demonstrating a flair for attracting international speakers. As Murrow learned more about the plight of Jews in Germany from reporter [and later close friend] William Shirer, he used the machinery of the IIE in the United States to rescue as many Jewish intellectuals as possible and place them in American colleges. It was a tactic not universally appreciated, nor would his close cooperation with the Russians be forgotten by J. Edgar Hoover.

By the beginning of the Battle of Britain, Murrow was assigned full time by CBS to provide radio coverage of Hitler's assaults and to coordinate the company's European reporting network. It is impossible to capsulize here the horrors of those eighteen months for Murrow and for England generally, when every night brought a terror at least as awful as the World Trade Center bombing. Murrow created a network of European radio correspondents-many of whom would become household names in their own rights. He overcame industry biases against putting reporters on the air and using taped reports from the fields. But most of all, he revolutionized the very style of radio news into "factual storytelling" by his nightly accounts of German bombings that by happenstance occurred during the East Coast's prime time 7 P.M. radio news hour. Later, as the theater of war shifted east, Murrow was among the first western reporters to see first hand an operating extermination camp. He could not bring himself to talk about it over the air for several days.

Murrow returned to CBS in New York a conquering hero of sorts, the network's hottest property. Sperber does a good job in explaining why the postwar Murrow-CBS marriage was a stormy one. For one thing, the war years had reshaped Murrow into a cross between an Old Testament prophet and a posttraumatic stress sufferer. He would never be quite at home in an industry moving toward television, increased advertising dependence, and escapism. Secondly, Murrow was too much the prophet to claim objectivity. He would never be confused with, say, Bob Trout. Long before Woodward and Bernstein, Murrow crafted the art of investigative reporting for a presumably concerned nation, particularly through the medium of his weekly "See It Now" series, a rough and tumble forerunner of "60 Minutes." His most controversial television piece, his hour-long exposure of Joe McCarthy, was out and out editorializing, albeit accurate. In Murrow's mind, he was serving the common good. Others were not so sure. Thirdly, Murrow himself had a past that made him a potential network liability. When he produced his "Harvest of Shame" documentary, for example, hardly a paean for capitalism, those with long memories would recall his enthusiastic embrace of Russian intellectuals in the late 1930's with the IIE.

The great irony in the breakup of Murrow and CBS is that the deciding infidelity may possibly have been unintentional. In 1960, with quiz show scandals threatening the credibility of the television industry, CBS President Frank Stanton announced a policy to eliminate the appearance of deceit in any of his network's programming, not just quiz shows. When pressed as to the extent of this policy, the network cited other programming, including rather surprisingly Murrow's own "Person to Person" prime time home visits to celebrities. In one reading of this event, Stanton may have simply been protesting the pre-scripting of interview questions and the staged walk-through of the homes. Or, there may have been a subtler message. A young Harry Reasoner inquired of Murrow on air, in so many words, "why are you, the Jeremiah of the industry, wasting precious prime time with the innocuous drivel of fighters and starlets?"

Unlike Reasoner and Howard K. Smith, who felt no compunction about switching networks, Murrow lived and died CBS. Illness and ultimately death interrupted his stint as window dressing for the Kennedy administration in 1965. Perhaps his prodigious cigarette smoking had finally claimed him. More likely, it was the pressure of living so many lives in one frail human shell.

Sperber's biography of Edward R. Murrow was overwhelming at first glance. I found myself highlighting quotes and jotting down ideas throughout the entire book. I couldn't help but go through methodically, hoping to absorbed and remember all that was included. Sperber not only told the complete story of Murrow, but captured the essence of his craft. His journalistic integrity inspired me, and gives us all something to reach for, especially for journalists today.

...by which all subsequent (yes, including Joe Persico's) biographies of Edward R. Murrow are to be judged.

What need would you have to read any other biography of Murrow after working your way through this tome? Encyclopaedaic in scope, monumental in thoroughness, and deadnaught in weight, this is the essence of the craft of biography.

Sperber is sorely missed.

Since its publication in 1986, no other biography on Edward R. Murrow has been written that can depose A.M. Sperber's magnificent work. "Murrow: His Life and Times" is, by far, the best biography written to date on America's first, and possibly last, great broadcasting journalist.

Sperber's book captures the essence of Murrow's life from a young intellectual to his rise from college campuses to directorship of the "Institute of International Education" and to Murrow's début at CBS where he broadcasted the bombing of London during World War II. It was during this period that Murrow demonstrated, so clearly, his finesse with the American audience as they listened to his broadcast of the traumatic events as they unfolded in World War II Europe.

Sperber's methodical research, numerous interviews, attention to detail, and her writing give the reader a close and personal look at the extraordinary triumphs and tragedies that made up Murrow's life. Readers are able to follow Murrow's footsteps and virtually see into his world, as he became the voice of World War II and the voice for America. Murrow's denunciation of Senator Joseph McCarthy's treatment of Americans during the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) hearings set into motion the senator's decline and closed a dark chapter in American politics -- all with his rational, yet forceful manner of speaking.

Sperber writes of Murrow's journalistic integrity and his struggles for openness and frankness in the media -- ideals that brought Murrow into constant conflict with CBS. The author also illustrates Murrow's battle with tobacco addiction - an addiction that would have devastating affects on Murrow's health. An entire life flawlessly researched and written in 705 captivating pages that will embrace readers today as it did when the book was first published 1986. After reading Sperber's book the reader will understand why CBS headquarters in New York City still displays a plaque in their lobby which contains the image of Murrow and the inscription: "He set standards of excellence that remain unsurpassed."

"Murrow: His Life and Times" should be required reading for students of communications and those working in media. There is no better chronicle of America's greatest broadcasting journalist. Readers will find this book hard to put down once they begin reading it. It is superb in every respect and the very best biography on Edward R. Murrow.

Thank Heaven that this book - long out of print, I had my copy nailed down - has now been re-issued, and thank Heaven for the current renaissance in interest in this magnificent journalist and iconic human being. Murrow's speech to camera at the end of the McCarthy expose ought, if there is any justice, to be committed to memory by every American in the same way that the Gettysburg address is now.

As for the book itself - well, I bought my first copy in the early 1980s, Murrow having been a childhood hero. It's bit, it's beautifully written, and is it enough to say that my original copy is falling apart? And that all my Christmas present problems are now solved?

There are other good biographies (I'm a Murrow fanatic, if this isn't clear already)and I wouldn't fault any of them; and the newly-reissued DVD set of the Murrow Years is also essential and full of the most wonderful surprises. I guess that Sperber wrote the ur-text, and so this is probably the place to start. But thank you to everyone who remembered that he should not be forgotten. Meet a true American hero.

Ann M. Sperber spent over a decade researching and writing this biography of Edward R. Murrow. Her research, which is meticulously documented throughout the book, took her to such diverse sources as dozens of interviews with Murrow's family, co-workers, and associates, published books and magazine articles, unpublished manuscripts, doctoral dissertations, office memos, letters and telegrams, government records, and transcripts of broadcasts. In putting together this monumental work, Ms. Sperber must have become one of the world's top Murrow experts. The book became a Pullitzer prize finalist, and I think that it could be said with confidence that a more complete work on Murrow could not be written today because many of the people who Sperber interviewed have since died.

This book does not merely tell a story about the life of Edward R. Murrow. It attempts--in my opinion quite successfully--to explain how and why things turned out as they did for Murrow. For instance, the book delves into such topics as the office politics of Murrow's workplaces, Murrow's persistent issues with his physical health and emotional well-being, and the ethical/philosophical questions that haunted Murrow through all phases of his career. The book demonstrates how some of the aspects of Murrow's personality (chiefly his affinity for risk, his inability to slow down, and his insatiable desire for quality in all he did) that helped him to become the magnificent newscaster we all love paradoxically led him, in the long run, into a spiral of decay from which he could not recover.

Some level of perseverence is required to get through this book due to its length (705 pages, not counting the bibliography section) and the level of detail in which many of the topics are covered. Not all readers will necessarily care, for instance, about the pulmonary problems that plagued Murrow most of his adult life, after picking up a 60-some cigarette per day smoking habit in college. Some may find that the way that some events are related, such as the time that Murrow's wife, Janet, and a housekeeper were nearly electrocuted by a malfunctioning electric heater, are somewhat campy, as Sperber apparently gets pulled emotionally into the Murrow story at times. Nonetheless, it is almost guaranteed that there is something in this book for every Murrow fan. If you are looking for a truly authoritative book on Edward R. Murrow, this is the one to buy.

"Murrow: His Life and Times" is a superb biography about Edward R. Murrow. No one had a greater impact in defining and shaping broadcast journalism than Murrow, and in highlighting the responsibility of journalists, broadcasters, government and citizens in a democracy. Television, he observed in 1954, "can teach, it can illuminate...but it can only do so to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends...otherwise it is merely lights and wires in a box." Whether his brilliant and breathtaking radio coverage from London of World War II, or his confrontation with red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy, he was always principled, strong and courageous. Speaking of the anti-communist hysteria sweeping this country in the early fifties he would turn to Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves." As mass media races onto the Internet and enters a new digital era, the experiences and issues raised during Murrow's life become even more relevant. In the mid-fifties he warned, "the frontiers of knowledge have been pushed back, and the more that comes to be known, the less is understood...looking ahead to a time when human destinies are to be determined by the uses or abuses of new sources of almost unlimited physical power, one may ask if democracy will be able to develop the competence to deal with these complexities." He concluded, "If so, it must be through a broadening of education and the use of communications not yet realized, or perhaps even conceived." Murrow is a man for all times.

Edward R. Murrow was elusive. He was a pioneer radio and television broadcaster. His career arc did not include print journalism. His success was modern. Murrow, b. 1908, had a golden natured man for a father and a shrewd and enterprising woman for a mother. He ws the youngest of three sons. Black moods dogged his whole life. In the 1930's Murrow worked for a committee placing European scholars in American academic posts. He had contacts at CBS. At college, Washington State, he had been a speech major. At CBS, 1935, he became the Director of Talks. Murrow was also responsible for education and religion.

Radio was changing the world of politics. Overseas radio was primarily a novelty act. NBC had Alistair Cooke and so its coverage of the abdication crisis was better. Murrow was asked to take a job in London as the European director for CBS. William Shirer was offered the job of continental representative of CBS. When Germans invaded Austria, Murrow traveled to Vienna. His immensely successful career as a radio reporter, commentator, had begun. Murrow and Shirer used stamina and imagination to cover the developing crisis in Prague and elsewhere on the continent. Listeners were taken to Nuremburg to hear Hitler. At the end of September NBC and CBS radio braodcasts reported on Munich. Murrow sat with Jan Masaryk.

War finally came over Poland. CBS staff positions in the European capitals were filled. Murrow put in time everywhere. In the spring, blitzkrieg tactics caused the occupation of Belgium, the Netherlands. Norway fell. The Dunkirk evacuation took place. Churchill assumed office as Prime Minister. Commentators crowded into London. As neutrals CBS staff faced endless delays and red tape. A stringer, Vincent Sheean, became Murrow's boon companion. The reader is immersed with Murrow and company in rather delightful fashion in the events leading up to America's entry into World War II. A reader is able to sense in the author's careful descriptions the immediacy of war as brought to the radio listeners. Broadcasting brought facts and analysis to the audience in real time.

London was under air attack. Janet Murrow busied herself with the evacuation of children to America. The BBC moved broadcasting underground. Murrow inhabited freely both the upper class and the London ghetto. Eventually daytime operations ceased. It was not known at the time, but it was an RAF victory. Night bombings continued. With the approval of the censors American audiences were permitted to hear the sounds of a raid. Murrow conveyed the impersonal nature of the new technology of killing. Home news editor at the BBC, R.T. Clark, became a mentor to Murrow. He was versed in the classics and military history. In the fall of 1940 Shirer left for home from Portugal. He and Murrow had built up radio news from nothing. Home leave, 1941, proved to be a case of culture shock for the Murrows. In America there were no shortages. Murrow was effective because he did more than his job. Through happenstance he met with FDR Pearl Harbor night. He sat on the scoop that the President was determined to go to war. In the spring of 1942 the Murrows returned to London.

Murrow, disappointingly, had to coordinate CBS staff reports at headquarters during the operation of Overlord, the Normandy Invasion. In the end he was cut up with rage seeing the camps, Buchenwald and others. The Nazis had done a more thorough job of brutalizing the people than he had deemed possible. After an eighteen months' stint as an executive, Murrow returned to broadcasting. He was bitter over the death of George Polk in Greece in 1948. Polk had modeled himself on Murrow. In 1950 he took an unequivocal stand against Joe McCarthy and lost his sponsor. Regional sponsorship was arranged. Owen Lattimore commended Murrow for keeping the record straight on his case.

Fred Friendly and Murrow were ready, in 1951, to convert I CAN HEAR IT NOW to television. ALCOA sponsored SEE IT NOW. It needed to brighten its image. At the beginning of 1953, after doing an historic piece, 'Christmas in Korea,' he was exhausted. His view of the US was changing. Murrow's attack on McCarthy on SEE IT NOW was considered an act of courage by most people. It resulted in FBI scrutiny, he became a watched man. After McCarthy's demise, employers and news broadcasters were still treading gently. By 1957 Murrow was a celebrity, but SEE IT NOW was cut and he and Friendly were given SMALL WORLD. After speaking in Chicago to an association of journalists about the need for independence in television news, Murrow lost clout at CBS. Informally he was demoted. Fred Friendly became the sole executive producer of CBS Reports. One of the programs in which Murrow participated notably was 'The Harvest of Shame.' Murrow was appointed to head USIA under Kennedy. He resigned in 1964 and died in 1965.

Modern pop history is in part a rewriting, and obscuring, of what really happened in midcentury America. Thus television programming recognized as garbage when it was aired is celebrated today in museums (for example, the Smithsonian saw fit to commemorate the Dukes of Hazzard.)

Thus the rather innocuous commentator Walter Cronkite is the grand old man, whereas Sperber's Murrow is known only to journalism wonks.

The shallowness of the broadcast, electronic media, which prized immediacy (the now) from its inception, is hard on any sort of historical accuracy in commemorating Murrow. Had Murrow lived at the time of Thomas Carlyle or Walter Bagehot he would have been, I think, more kindly treated: for the medium of the book is friendlier to the very idea of preservation of the memory of the author. The whole material point of broadcast, and the Internet, is extraction of content from modern denizens of grub Street, who dare not think of themselves as authors, let alone bourgeois subjects with social power over and above that of the corporation.

Murrow, with a certain naivety, thought to use radio and then TV to communicate a level of complexity to the ordinary man only seen in books. But even his allies saw that the medium is the message (not necessarily a benign fact, nor one to be celebrated, as McLuhan himself spelled out in The Mechanical Bride.)

Reading a book imparts a certain depth and respect for complexity in the reader. Half-listening to a lunatic like Sen "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy while doing the dishes is apt to impart oversimplified half truths, a fact which McCarthy was low enough to use. While first-order McCarthyism in the form of naive anti-Communism is on the wane, second-order McCarthyism, where signifiers such as "economic growth" and the fear of job loss replace the red Menace and are used by the cynical in precisely the same way McCarthy used "communists in the State department that lost China."

Murrow's respect for complexity and willingness to try to communicate complex truths to the audience ultimately, as Sperber relates, had him gently retired from CBS and into directorship of the US Information Agency under Kennedy.

This book is an excellent read. It points up the fact that in many ways, the 1960s and 1970s were an infantile reaction to mere complexity and nuance. In this reaction, the popular mind was subtly persuaded to think of commentators, who did not pander to the worst in us, as stuffed shirts who "think they know more than the common lot." Thus even Cronkite was more acceptable because he hewed more closely to the policy that jelled under Murrow and that is described by Sperber, a policy in which departure from a vague centrist position was "opinion and not fact", but "facts" could include quite a lot of opinion...as long as it followed a centrist party line.

For example, as LA commentator Mike Davis points out in Ecology of Fear, wild fires are news only if they threaten upscale houses. This is now "fact": fires in ... SROs in downtown LA are no longer news, but fires near big ranches (probably referred to by their Yupped out owner with Yup irony as "mah spread") are news leaders. For the same reason that underpaid smoke jumpers die protecting "mah spread" (on the public dime, I might add), a fire in Malibu, or in Jackson Hole, is a "fact": a fire in LA or even Idaho Falls is a nonfact, and it shows "bias" and "opinion" to foreground this interpretive bias.

No opinion wants in logic to be an opinion. An ordinary man, expressing the "opinion" that the Chicago Cubs will take the pennant this year, is not shooting off opinions for theire own sake. Instead, our boy wants his "opinion" to become solid fact in the future.

Likewise, when Ed Murrow gave his famous anti-McCarthy broadcast, he was not, in good conscience, stating mere personal opinions for there own sake. His opinions wanted to be mere facts about Tail Gunner Joe, and Murrow's managers would have done well to state more clearly, not that the broadcaster not state "personal opinions", but instead that the broadcaster either state the opinions of the owners of the station, or else zip up, and restrict himself to such facts (such as the words coming off the wire service copy) that everyone, except the clinically insane, agrees to be facts.

Falsity and intellectual dishonesty is a toxic byproduct of media with longterm effects, and it can be stated fairly that Murrow may have been able to stop smoking if he had been able to come to a more honest contract with his employers. Instead, Paley and Stanton (despite the better angels of their nature) used the guy. During the 1940s and on radio, Ed Murrow's left-liberal views were simply less hazardous and more popular with viewers than they became in the 1950s, and Murrow was eased out as his entire perspective, and on-air persona, became less intelligible to a more suburban, less unionized viewership.

Of course, Paley and Stanton could not have done otherwise, and Frank Stanton much later (in a brouhaha over a late 1960s program) proved he had integrity. Perhaps the broadcast journalist should be an independent contractor who buys time from the airwaves under some sort of deal and says whatever he wants to say, making the listeners the ultimate arbiter of whether the guy is worth listening-to. But the problem with this pure market model is of course the bearer of bad news and the odd Cassandra who is confused with the content of the bad news, and whose value to society (in warning society of the ways in which it is in trouble) cannot be reflected in a market model at all. Nobody goes to the fair to buy a Nasty Story, or a detailed list of his own defects of character. The Catholic did not pay the priest to hear his confession.

No society can tolerate, under a pure market model, a Savonarola or Murrow at his most extreme, and legal professor Cass Sunstein (cf. Republic.COM) shows, gently, how a pure market model leads to "cascades" of opinions, where Internet users have gorged themselves sick on falsity (such as the centrality of the Second Amendment, or the wickedness of Clinton), and, bulimically, spread their fantasies. This of course is where government by the people, for the people and of the people comes into play, including a Constitutional role for the super-ego (aka "the Nanny State.")

In an era of pandering to malformed ids and egos that find their ego satisfaction in pure transfer of negative emotions to the Other, this is of course a non-starter, but this merely shows how far we've declined (from Ed Murrow to hate radio.)