EDWARD R. MURROW

Through every indignity, TV journalists hold tight to the mythic figure of Edward R. Murrow — “the spiritual leader,” in Jim Lehrer’s phrase, “of everyone in serious broadcast journalism.” Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson’s The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism (Houghton Mifflin, $ 27.95, 445 pages) is yet another attempt to burnish the legend. The third Murrow biography in a decade, at least the fifth since its subject’s death in 1965, it concentrates on Murrow’s relationship with the team of journalists he recruited to cover Europe for CBS News during the Second World War, and tells the tale well. By the end of the book, though, the pull of sentiment proves too great and the moral of the story is uncorked.

Most of Murrow’s correspondents moved from radio to TV after the war, Cloud and Olson write: “Commercial television at once trivialized and corrupted what they did. Then it tired of them and tossed them aside. . . . It is discouraging . . . that CBS tilted the balance so quickly and now so completely away from a commitment to news and public affairs and toward lowest-common-denominator programming.”

There it is, straight up: the creation myth of TV news, an idyll brought low, a profundity trivialized, a purity defiled by the dollar. In this telling, as in all previous, Murrow looms as the exemplar of a vanished Golden Age, a long ago Eden of TV and radio news, where “standards” were higher and everybody knew it, and profits were lower and nobody cared. Murrow remains the paragon: objective in his judgments, unsullied by commerce, immune to the lures of squalid showbiz, unstinting in his commitment to the principled presentation of the news. All correspondents and anchors have learned to invoke his name, for like most mythic figures carved from the recent past, Murrow is meant to stand as a rebuke to the Fallen present. He is offered as final proof that “serious broadcast journalism” need not be an oxymoron.

Do I exaggerate? So deep is Dan Rather’s devotion that he even gets his suits made at Murrow’s old tailor in Savile Row. “To this little boy,” Rather once wrote, “Murrow was a hero right out of the adventure books. Risking his life for the truth [emphasis, amazingly, in the original]. His work heightened my sense, even then, that being a reporter was a kind of vocation: demanding sacrifice, needing courage, requiring honor.” Here, in a brief three sentences, is almost everything that people find annoying about contemporary journalism. Rather, of course, personifies the sanctimony, the self-flattery, the missionary zeal, and the Olympian remove America has learned to expect of its TV news stars. But so, alas, did Edward R. Murrow, even back in the Golden Age. When his friend and contemporary Howard K. Smith called Murrow “the most influential journalist of our time,” he was righter than he knew. The next time you see Gunga Dan Rather huffing through the Khyber Pass, with a camera crew in tow and a bathroom towel wrapped around his head, or Peter Jennings congratulating himself for having the guts to ” take on” the tobacco companies, or even Barbara Walters asking a stuttering movie star about his favorite tree, you know whom to credit.

Murrow foreshadowed it all, was father to it all. This is owing less to the man’s own professional weaknesses than to the nature of broadcast journalism itself. Broadcast journalists need to believe that their trade wasn’t always so silly and meretricious. Unfortunately for them, the real moral of Murrow’s life is that broadcast journalism was always silly and meretricious.

Disinterested observers will have some trouble fixing the Golden Age of broadcast news in chronological time. It doesn’t help to work backwards. Shortly after Charles Kuralt retired in 1994, he lamented the lost era, implying that it had closed not too long ago. “The bean counters are really in control now,” he said. “I decided to leave before they could invite me to leave.” (Thanks.) But several years earlier, in the late eighties, Dan Rather was lamenting the lost Golden Age also, the “tragic transformation from Murrow to mediocrity” that had recently been accomplished. To the early eighties then? No, for Walter Cronkite himself had announced that by then the “Murrow continuum” “had really come to a terminal point.” Cronkite may have placed the Golden Age in the years leading up to his retirement in 1981. He would have gotten an argument from Eric Sevareid, who in the mid-1970s said CBS News had “degenerated into show biz.”

Perhaps Sevareid was referring to the golden time as the glorious sixties and early 1970s, the period leading up to his own retirement. Alas, no. For in 1969 Alexander Kendrick, himself a Murrow Boy and author of the first gargantuan Murrow biography, announced that “the Murrow window on the real world had been shrunk to a peephole. . . . Controversy, with its pros and cons, had given way to compatibility. . . . Emotion replaced editorial perspective.” Fred Friendly, one-time president of CBS News, agreed, although Kendrick was apparently off by a few years. By Friendly’s account, CBS had wholly succumbed to worldly forces by 1966, the year, coincidentally, of his retirement.

And so the Golden Age recedes and recedes, until we reach its first autopsy, performed in 1958 (!) by Murrow himself. In a widely noted speech he declared TV news to be trivial and soporific, given over at last to ” decadence, escapism, and insulation.” No matter what day it is, the Golden Age of Television News always ended the day before yesterday.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this long tradition of breast-beating and bogus nostalgia, two generations’ worth, was begun by Murrow. By 1958 his own career at CBS was winding down, and a final snap at the hand that fed him would have seemed almost obligatory. He had come to the network 20 years earlier, hired as “director of talks” for CBS in Europe. He was 27; he told the company he was 32. He had majored in speech and drama at Washington State but claimed to have majored in international relations and political science at the (slightly) more prestigious University of Washington. In applying for the position he even awarded himself an M.A. from Stanford. A year earlier he had lost a job because of his resume-padding, but he neglected to mention that, too.

Whatever his early prevarications, they were ever after swallowed up by his achievements in Europe, which were considerable. Foreign radio coverage at the time was similar to C-SPAN today. As director of talks, Murrow was to schedule live, unedited broadcasts of speeches and other events and assemble roundtables with newsy guests. But as war approached he began to do much more. He began to report the news, live: Munich, Sudetenland, the Anschluss. With CBS’s mounting enthusiasm, he hired his Boys to extend the network’s reach. They were mostly young and hungry wire-service reporters, among them several who would be elevated into the carefully tended pantheon of broadcast journalism: William Shirer, Charles Coilingwood, Howard K. Smith, and Eric Sevareid.

The young men Murrow assembled were, like him, tireless and possessed with enormous physical courage. They were pushed to their utmost by the circumstances of war. Although as reporters they were often scooped by the competition, the mythology remembers them as masters of language, the written and spoken word. This is in keeping with the vanity of today’s broadcast journalism, whose practitioners will tell you their “craft” requires “good writing” above all. Not surprisingly, the quality of Murrow’s writing, and that of his Boys, swung widely — from the tersely eloquent to the deep purple to the banal. Murrow himself favored the plain style of most good newspaper reporters: an Ernie Pyle of the airwaves. On the page it can wear thin. Here is Murrow reporting the Blitz:

“The antiaircraft barrage has been fierce but sometimes there have been periods of twenty minutes when London has been silent. Then the big red buses would start up and move on till the guns started working again. That silence is almost hard to bear . . . . You know the sound will return — you wait, and then it starts again. That waiting is bad.”

Murrow himself understood the limitations of his writing. “It ain’t no false modesty,” he once told an interviewer, “to say that I don’t know enough to write a book. I can write the language of speech, but that’s totally different. When I write a book review or a preface to somebody else’s book, Janet [his wife] has to go through it and scatter the commas.” To really gauge the power of Murrow’s war reporting, the basis of his lifelong reputation, you have to hear it. War brought out Murrow’s greatest gifts, but they were not a journalist’s gifts so much as those of an actor and showman. ” He understood the value of silence — of no words — better than any of us,” his colleague Larry LeSueur said not long ago. His famous radio signon — ” This [pause] is London” — was shaped according to the advice of his college drama coach, who continued to send him pointers throughout the war. His great live broadcasts, particularly those during the Blitz when he spoke from rooftops and street corners as the bombs fell around him, draw their authority not from his words or even from his skills of observation, the traditional tools of a journalist. When you hear Murrow’s most memorable work you’re hearing the voice of a man in mortal danger. It’s hard to forget that voice.

And what a voice — a smoky rumble, so grave and biblical it could make the funny papers sound like a threat to civilization. Murrow’s voice was essential to his success; as, say, Basil Rathbone’s voice was essential to his. Murrow demonstrated in its infancy that broadcast journalism, unlike print, was utterly dependent on the elements of show business for its effect. This is a truth that broadcast journalists always deny in theory, though they observe it in practice. And it was true even before the “tragic transformation from Murrow to mediocrity.”

Murrow’s work during World War II is still accepted as the nonpareil of broadcast journalism. It probably is. But its standing is curious even so, given the peculiarities that surrounded it — anomalies that could only shock those who idealize the standards of the Golden Age. Murrow broadcast under strict censorship, for one thing; as he spoke, a British information officer stood at his side, ready to tap the correspondent on the wrist the minute he got out of line. And beyond their CBS salaries, the Boys would receive direct payments from the sponsors of their broadcasts, huge corporate behemoths like Sinclair and Chesterfield (an oil company and a tobacco company!). The payments were viewed as an incentive for the correspondents to file more stories; today the purists would view them as symptoms of an unacceptable coziness with thine enemy, the sponsor. Charles Kuralt would have an aneurysm.

Before and during the war, CBS strictly forbade the use of taped material in its broadcasts. There were good commercial reasons for the ban, but the company also wanted to assure its listeners that they were getting the story straight, unmanipulated by technological wizardry. Murrow found the ban inconvenient and violated it often. Unknown to CBS, he sent a sound truck around London early in the Blitz to record the noises of the bombardment. He used the sounds as background, presumably for verisimilitude, when he wasn’t broadcasting from the scene himself — a forerunner of the “dramatic recreations” that have so alarmed critics of TV news in the 1990s.

It wasn’t long before Murrow and his Boys were caught up, quite happily, in another bete noire of today’s purists, the “star system.” The Boys became very famous very quickly. They hired agents and signed quickie book contracts. They made trips stateside, to be greeted at the dock by Movietone camera crews and interviewed in nightclubs by Walter Winchell. Lucrative speaking tours filled their brief sabbaticals. No one was so ripe for stardom as Murrow, whose great good looks were as arresting as his voice, and no one took to it with quite the same ardor. “He’s much too much the showman not to have fun in the part he’s playing,” a colleague said a few years after the war. “When he gets out of a plane, wearing a trench coat and a hat with the brim pulled down, he’s Ed Murrow, the big correspondent. Maybe one reason he enjoys acting like a newspaperman so much is that he never was a newspaperman. ”

Much of this stardom depended on the immediacy of radio itself, which Murrow skillfully exploited. He always spoke directly to the listener: “Last night you’ll remember I was telling you about . . .” But the stardom was goosed along by the vast public relations apparatus of CBS. Even by the mid- 1930s it was the best in the business, and it went to work for Murrow early. He was badly beaten by NBC on the story of the Anschluss, for example, but the company’s sales-promotion staff was having none of it. The flacks quickly got out a glossy and expensive brochure, “Vienna, March 1938,” which, as Scribner’s magazine later reported, “artfully arranged the calendar of news flashes so as to [convey] the impression without saying so that CBS had been omnipresent and omnipotent throughout.” The Headliner’s Club presented a medal to Murrow, too: “the first time,” a rival said, “a reporter ever got an award for not getting a story.” Sitting on the Headliner board at the time was Paul White, Murrow’s backer at CBS.

It’s interesting but probably fruitless to speculate how much of Murrow’s stature today is really the residue of CBS’s remorseless effort to make him a star. Most people, most broadcast journalists, recall Murrow for his television presence rather than his radio celebrity, in any case. He and the Boys came to TV reluctantly, deeming it an inferior medium to radio, but they came to it nonetheless. In fact, the differences between radio and television journalism were less pronounced than Murrow pretended. The value of both lay in technology, in the capacity to convey news at once, as it happened. The broadcast journalist could be on the air with the story while the newspaper publisher was still trying to get his printers out of bed. Then as now, however, journalists in the electronic media tended to be second-tier as gatherers of news. I Radio got the soundtrack, television got the pictures, but newsprint got the scoops. In his memoirs David Schoenbrun, one of Murrow’s Boys, told the story of a scoop he got in the fifties. Schoenbrun was CBS Paris bureau chief at the time, a giant of broadcast journalism. But his editor in New York refused to run the scoop, because, the editor said, he hadn’t seen it in the New York Times and so couldn’t confirm it. For Schoenbrun, the story illustrated the difference between print journalism and its simulacrum on TV.

But TV was kind to Murrow, as radio had been. The impression he made on the tube was indelible: the ever-present Camel with its curling smoke, and the squint, and the eyebrows that rose and lowered with ominous portent — these combined with the already famous voice to create an almost unbearable gravity. “No one’s brow furrows,” went a doggerel of the time, “like Edward R. Murrow’s.” As with radio, the essential gifts were cosmetic, pieces of showbiz. Among other innovations, Murrow pioneered the technique, favored today especially by Jennings and Tom Brokaw, of looking away, to the left and slightly below the camera, as he paused in reading his lines. The impression is one of a thoughtful fellow, caught in unhurried rumination. But of course, with Jennings and Brokaw, it is only an impression.

Murrow differed from his handsome successors in one important, and now quite endearing, respect. His presence on the screen was not particularly . . . cozy. His sign-off, at the end of each TV appearance, was “Good night, and good luck” — the suggestion being (as Reuven Frank noted) that you’re sure as hell gonna need it. Sometimes his face and voice together could convey an unmistakable contempt for whoever was stupid enough to be watching television at the moment. He once devoted an episode of his documentary show, See It Now, to a trip he had made to the front lines in Korea. He closed the show staring into the camera. The troops, he said “may need blood. Can you spare a pint?” There are many ways to read this line: imploring, cautionary, chummy. Murrow’s curled lip and cold eyes expressed something else: “Can you spare a pint, you soft, pampered, pasty-faced little wetsmacks?” The attitude worked in the fifties, apparently.

We were a different country then.

See It Now was one of two Murrow series on CBS TV, the other being a weekly half-hour celebrity interview called Person to Person. (In its quest to keep the legend alive, CBS not long ago issued a four-volume set of video cassettes, “Good Night and Good Luck,” that provides a useful overview of Murrow’s TV work.) See It Now was a “broadcast,” Person was a ” show.” Among broadcast journalists the distinction is crucial. Broadcasts are news, documentaries, chin-wags. You will never hear Dan Rather call the CBS Evening News a “show.” Shows are entertainment. Comedians, singers, dancers, actors . . . entertainers do shows.

Murrow did both. Legend tells us that Murrow was embarrassed by Person to Person, considering it beneath the dignity of a broadcast journalist to be joshing around with the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. But josh he did, and the surviving tapes show him enjoying himself. They also show him to be a genial but not terribly skilled interviewer, perhaps because, as was later revealed, most of the questions and answers were scripted. “What’s been your biggest thrill in show business, Frank?” he asked the great crooner. Murrow was father to Larry King, too.

Purists complain that the iron wall between news and entertainment has been breached in our present benighted era. But it looked pretty permeable in Murrow’s Golden Age, as well. The documentary halfhours of See It Now were often devoted to interviews; and it is not at all clear why Carl Sandburg, a guest on See It Now, should be considered highbrow and Fred Astaire, on Person to Person, should be low. Other broadcasts dealt with the issues familiar to viewers of the “newsmagazine” shows of today: education, race relations, nuclear power, war and peace. Here, too, Murrow knew to use the tricks of technology to make the broadcasts more seamless and — well, entertaining. Interviews conducted by other correspondents, for example, would be re-dubbed to make it appear that Murrow was the questioner. In the very first See It Now, Murrow showed footage of soldiers in Korea, digging trenches, building bunkers, even firing their weapons, with the clear implication that they were at the front. In fact they were nowhere near the enemy. Murrow’s correspondent, Robert Pierpont, objected to the dodge, to no avail.

See It Now was famous then, and now, for losing money — further evidence, it was said, of a commitment to news above all else. Only Murrow’s own high standards kept it on the air, according to Murrow. To those corporate “vice-presidents” who wanted him, glug, to show a profit, he talked tough, he said. “I say, ‘If that’s the way you want to do it, you’d better get yourselves another boy.'” CBS was happy to let this impression stand, probably because the show wasn’t losing all that much money, if any. Its sponsor, Alcoa, underwrote expenses up to $ 2,300 a week, which was usually sufficient to cover costs. CBS picked up any overage; not so great a burden, since Alcoa was also paying an additional $ 34,000 for the airtime. Murrow bragged often of his hostility to the “money men,” and especially his sponsors. But at the same time he was willing to film promotional documentaries for them, as he did for Alcoa. By 1953, his disdain for profit was earning him more than $ 200,000 a year, more than $ 300,000 by 1960.

Murrow’s most celebrated moment on television — the summit of his career — came in March 1954. This as the broadcast broadside against Joe McCarthy. The mythologists point to it as the blow that brought down the terrorist Tailgunner. The claim calls to mind Mark Twain’s remark about his military service in the Civil War: “I left the Confederate army in 1865. The South fell.”

The show was indeed masterfully done. It consisted almost entirely of clips of McCarthy himself — a compendium of every burp, grunt, stutter, nose probe, brutish aside, and maniacal giggle the senator had ever allowed to be captured on film. Murrow, it was said, allowed McCarthy to hang himself, but in truth McCarthy had been hanging himself quite efficiently in the several months before Murrow offered him more rope. By the time the show aired, a mutiny was underway on his own subcommittee to relieve McCarthy as chairman. Prominent Republicans had joined Democrats in publicly denouncing him, even, gingerly, his former comrade Vice President Richard Nixon. In the mainstream press, anti-McCarthy feeling was endemic. Among those routinely critical were Time magazine and Col. Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. If Col. McCormick and Henry Luce were denouncing a right-wing icon, you could feel pretty safe in firing away. “Ed didn’t want to get too far ahead of public opinion,” Fred Friendly said. And he didn’t.

It is revealing that Murrow is most honored today for broadcasts — 1960’s ” Harvest of Shame,” about migrant farm workers, is another — that were works of unbridled advocacy. He had always been as much advocate as reporter. In the late 1930s Murrow saw himself as a subtle propagandist for bringing America into the war. His advocacy was always artful. Cloud and Olson quote a CBS executive in the 1930s, advising a reporter to “disguise his own opinions by attributing them to others.” “Don’t be so personal,” the executive said. ” Use such phrases as ‘It is said . . .’ and ‘There are some who believe . . .'” This is how Murrow did it, he said, and it’s a trick still widely employed. Other times, Murrow’s advocacy was completely behind the scenes. In 1956, the newsman secretly rented a studio to coach Adlai Stevenson, then running against Dwight Eisenhower, in hopes of improving the candidate’s television performances.

The New Yorker once ran a profile of Murrow called “The World on His Back.” It was an image he carefully cultivated. In time he began to believe his own legend — not surprising, since he had done so much to concoct it. By 1958, when he delivered his famous denunciation of television’s preoccupation with revenue, he had fully evolved into a national scold, the last honest man in a world twisted by commerce. This is the image that has survived, the one so desperately invoked by the scolds of our own day. Murrow left journalism for good in 1961, to head up the United States Information Agency. All those cigarettes finally killed him in 1965, at the age of 57.

But his relationship with CBS effectively came to an end much earlier, in 1959. In the aftermath of the quiz-show scandals, the president of CBS, Frank Stanton, announced that the network would no longer tolerate any technological “hanky-panky” that might deceive its viewers. He said he had in mind, specifically, Murrow’s practice of scripting Person to Person interviews in advance. People who tuned in, Stanton said, needed to know that “what they see and hear on CBS is exactly what it purports to be.” And so the top “money man” censured Murrow publicly — for violating the high standards of broadcast journalism. Murrow never forgave him for it.

By Andrew Ferguson