Edward R. Murrow
Based on Wikipedia: Edward R. Murrow
In a quiet bar off the Kärntnerstrasse in Vienna, March 1938, Edward R. Murrow suggested to his colleague William Shirer that they move to another location. When Shirer asked why, Murrow replied: "I was here last night about this time. A Jewish-looking fellow was standing at that bar. After a while he took an old-fashioned razor from his pocket and slashed his throat."
This was the world Murrow reported from. Not the sanitized summaries read by announcers in New York studios, but the raw, bleeding edge of history as it happened. He would become the most influential broadcast journalist America has ever produced, a man who literally invented how we consume news on radio and television. But what made Murrow extraordinary wasn't just his timing or his access—it was his willingness to bear witness to things that others looked away from, and then make millions of Americans see them too.
From Polecat Creek to the World Stage
The future voice of America was born Egbert Roscoe Murrow in 1908, in a log cabin without electricity or plumbing, near a place called Polecat Creek in North Carolina. His Quaker parents scraped together a few hundred dollars a year growing corn and hay. When he was six, the family moved clear across the country to homestead in Washington State, thirty miles from the Canadian border.
The name Egbert didn't last. By his teenage years he went by "Ed," and in his second year of college he officially changed it to Edward. Something about the original name clearly didn't fit the man he was becoming—the confident debater, the student body president, the young man who in 1929 stood before the National Student Federation of America and gave a speech urging college students to care about world affairs.
That speech got him elected president of the federation. It also revealed something essential about Murrow: he believed Americans needed to pay attention to what was happening beyond their borders, and he intended to make them do it.
The Invention of Broadcast News
When Murrow joined the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1935, CBS didn't really have news. They had one announcer, Bob Trout, and Murrow's job was to convince important people to come on the radio and talk about issues. He wasn't supposed to be on air himself.
But the former speech major from Washington State was fascinated by how Trout communicated through the microphone, and Trout taught him the craft. Two years later, CBS sent Murrow to London to run their European operations—still not as a reporter, but as an arranger of broadcasts, a booker of talent.
Then Hitler annexed Austria.
In March 1938, Murrow was in Poland setting up a broadcast of children's choruses when word came from Shirer in Vienna: Nazi Germany had just absorbed Austria in what the Germans called the Anschluss. Shirer couldn't get the story out—Austrian state radio was now in Nazi hands—so Murrow sent him to London while chartering the only available plane to Vienna himself.
What happened next changed everything. CBS New York asked Murrow and Shirer to put together something unprecedented: a live roundup of reaction from correspondents across Europe, all in a single broadcast. On March 13, 1938, Bob Trout hosted from New York while reporters in London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington contributed via shortwave radio—technology so primitive that the participants couldn't necessarily hear each other.
At 2:30 in the morning Vienna time, Murrow delivered the first on-scene news report of his career: "This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna.... It's now nearly 2:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived."
It was revolutionary. Before this moment, Americans learned about overseas events from newspaper articles printed hours or days after the fact, or from newsreels shown before movies. Now they could hear events as they unfolded, narrated by someone standing in the middle of history. That broadcast became the template for World News Roundup, which still airs on CBS Radio today—the oldest news program in broadcasting.
London Burning
When war came in September 1939, Murrow stayed in London. And when the German bombing campaign known as the Blitz began in 1940, he gave Americans something they had never experienced: the sound of a city under siege.
"This is London."
That became his signature opening, delivered with a particular emphasis on "this"—a subtle hint of pause before the rest of the phrase, suggested by his old college speech teacher, Ida Lou Anderson. Previous CBS correspondents had opened with the clunkier "Hello, America. This is London calling." Murrow's version was intimate, immediate, almost conversational. You weren't being addressed by an announcer. You were being spoken to by someone who was there.
His broadcasts from rooftops during the Blitz—filed live as bombs fell and anti-aircraft guns fired—electrified American audiences. Radio news had previously meant an announcer reading wire service reports in a studio. Murrow made listeners feel the war.
His closing line came from the British themselves. With German bombs falling every night, Londoners who might not see each other the next morning began ending conversations with "good night, and good luck." Princess Elizabeth used the phrase in a radio address at the end of 1940. Murrow adopted it, Anderson insisted he keep it, and another piece of broadcast history was born.
The Murrow Boys
Murrow didn't just report the war. He built the team that reported it.
Starting with Shirer in 1937, Murrow recruited what Harrison Salisbury later called "the finest news staff anybody had ever put together in Europe." They were known for their intellect and their ability to make listeners see what they were describing: Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, Richard C. Hottelet, Bill Downs, and others. Collectively, they became known as the "Murrow Boys"—despite one of them, Mary Marvin Breckinridge, being a woman.
In 1944, Murrow tried to recruit Walter Cronkite to take over the Moscow bureau. Cronkite accepted, then changed his mind when his employer United Press made a better offer. It would take another decade before Cronkite joined CBS.
Murrow's influence extended beyond American journalism. Winston Churchill was so impressed that in 1943 he offered to make Murrow joint Director-General of the BBC, in charge of all programming. Murrow declined—though not before falling in love with Churchill's daughter-in-law Pamela. She wanted him to leave his wife Janet and marry her. He considered it. But after Janet gave birth to their only child, Casey, in late 1945, he ended the affair. Pamela would eventually marry Averell Harriman, another of her American lovers during the war.
Buchenwald
On April 12, 1945, Edward R. Murrow and Bill Shadel became the first reporters to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp.
What Murrow saw there—emaciated survivors, children with identification numbers tattooed on their arms, "bodies stacked up like cordwood" in the crematorium—would produce perhaps the most powerful broadcast of his career. He waited three days before filing his report, struggling to find words for what he had witnessed.
When he finally spoke, he was brutally direct:
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.
He wasn't apologizing. He was challenging his audience to face what humanity had done to itself.
Celebrity and Conflict
Murrow returned to America a celebrity. On December 2, 1941, CBS hosted a dinner in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Eleven hundred guests attended. President Franklin Roosevelt sent a telegram. Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, gave a speech that captured what Murrow had achieved:
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead, were mankind's dead. You have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3,000 miles of water is not really done at all.
Less than a week later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and America entered the war.
Murrow flew twenty-five combat missions over Europe, recording reports from bomber planes as they droned toward their targets. His college training in speech had given him something invaluable for radio: the ability to improvise vivid descriptions of what was happening around him in real time.
The McCarthy Moment
After the war, Murrow transitioned to television with a program called See It Now. It was here, in the early 1950s, that he would cement his reputation—and his legacy—with a series of reports on Senator Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy had built his political career on accusations of Communist infiltration in the American government, ruining careers and reputations with little evidence and considerable theatrics. Most journalists were afraid to challenge him directly. Murrow wasn't.
His See It Now broadcasts on McCarthy let the senator condemn himself, using his own words and footage to reveal the recklessness of his methods. The programs are widely credited with helping turn public opinion against McCarthy, contributing to his eventual censure by the Senate.
Fellow journalists considered these broadcasts the high point of Murrow's career—and of television journalism itself. Eric Sevareid, Ed Bliss, Bill Downs, Dan Rather, and Alexander Kendrick all regarded Murrow as one of the greatest figures in the history of their profession.
The Price of Conscience
Success brought complications. When Murrow reluctantly became a CBS vice president in 1945, his close relationships with the reporters he'd hired created resentment among younger colleagues. They formed something called the "Murrow Isn't God Club." When Murrow heard about it, he asked if he could join. The club disbanded.
More seriously, his relationship with William Shirer—the colleague he'd worked with since Vienna—ended bitterly in 1947. When Shirer's sponsor withdrew and CBS decided to replace him, Shirer believed he was being pushed out for his liberal political views. Murrow and others felt Shirer had been coasting on his reputation without doing the work to back it up. The two men never reconciled.
That dispute foreshadowed tensions to come. Murrow's boss and friend William Paley, the head of CBS, had supported him through the McCarthy broadcasts. But television was becoming an entertainment medium, and Murrow's serious journalism increasingly felt out of place. The man who had taught Americans to care about the world beyond their borders would eventually find himself squeezed out by the very medium he had helped create.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Edward R. Murrow died on April 27, 1965, two days after his fifty-seventh birthday. He had spent his final years as the director of the United States Information Agency under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, a government role that took him away from the journalism that had defined his life.
His legacy endures in ways both visible and invisible. The film Good Night, and Good Luck dramatized his confrontation with McCarthy. His methods—live reporting from the scene, the importance of bearing witness, the willingness to challenge power—became the template for broadcast journalism.
But perhaps his greatest legacy was simpler. He showed that a voice coming through a radio speaker or a face on a television screen could make people feel connected to events half a world away. He made distant suffering immediate and real. He taught Americans that what happens beyond three thousand miles of water is not only really done—it matters.
In that Vienna bar in 1938, watching a desperate man take his own life as the Nazis closed in, Murrow saw something that would shape everything he did afterward. The world was full of horrors that comfortable people preferred not to see. His job—his calling—was to make them look anyway.
And when he was done, there was only one way to end:
Good night, and good luck.