Edward Roscoe Murrow (1908-1965) was an American pioneer of radio and television as a broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He joined CBS as director of talks and education in 1935 and remained with the network his entire career. In 1937, Murrow hired journalist William L. Shirer and assigned him to a similar European post on the continent. This marked the beginning of the "Murrow Boys" team of war reporters.
Murrow flew twenty-five Allied combat missions in Europe during the war providing additional reports from the planes as they droned on over Europe. Murrow's skill at improvising vivid descriptions of what was going on around or below him, derived in part from his college training in speech, aided the effectiveness of his radio broadcasts. In 1945, Murrow and Bill Shadel were the first reporters at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. He met emaciated survivors and the "bodies stacked up like cordwood" in the crematorium. In his report three days later, Murrow (extract) said: I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words... If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry.
Many boomers will recall Murrow's second weekly television show, a series of live interviews entitled Person to Person. From 1953 until 1959, Murrow talked amiably, casually, and with no agenda, with celebrities and movers and shakers in their homes from a comfortable chair in his New York studio (with several packs of cigarettes handy, no doubt). The live playback transmission was literally wall-size. A revival of the series in 2012's two-episode broadcast was not successful. Few found the twenty-first-century guests that interesting in a land dominated by social media. Another was proposed in 2022.
Note: the image above is an interview with Senator Kennedy and his wife, Jackie.
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