Controversialist Book

The prologue to Murrow: His Life and Times begins with Murrow's famous 1958 speech at the Radio-Television News Directors Association. It's a speech that, if it was original at the time, has been the theme of journalism's insiders ever since. The same arguments still are made today, and it seems as though there are no solutions.

Amazing the difference between press rights then and now. Murrow and the other networks had to request permission to broadcast live reports from in the city during bombings. Because they had to borrow BBC radio facilities to transmit, and the BBC was run by the British government, the censors could easily enforce their bans.

We are told today that the Germans believe Londoners will rise up and demand a new government, one that will make peace with Germany. It's more likely that they'll rise up and murder a few German pilots who came down by parachute. The life of a parachutist would not be worth much in the East End of London tonight…

He was in the White House the day The Japanese bombed Hawaii. He stood on a rooftop in London as the bombs fell. He walked Buchenwald after it was freed but before it was emptied. He watched the Nazis and then the communists kill he friends in the intelligentsia. He was in Berlin when the wall went up. He was there when McCarthy fell. He ran the United States Information Agency as Kennedy ramps up the war in Vietnam.

He was a television pioneer who feared television, a friend to socialists but who feared communism, a government official who feared government. It takes a lot of pages to cover that kind of powerful personality, and Ann Sperber gives him over 700 in the hardback version. If you are interested in Murrow, or the history of television news, or the history of the United States, I think you will enjoy slogging through this tome.