Murrow's Boys

A Look At Some Legendary Newsmen

(CBS)  When Edward R. Murrow was transferred to London as the European Bureau Chief for CBS News in 1937, his first order of business was to assemble the best news staff that he could find.

This was the genesis of "Murrow's Boys." Their voices were the ones that people heard on radio when they wanted to know the latest details from around the world, from the time just before World War II until after the Korean War.

In an interview with the magazine of Washington State University, Bob Edwards, author of "Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism," explained that "Murrow's Boys" were hired because Murrow "needed people to cover the war. They had no overseas staff, except for Murrow himself and William L. Shirer, a very fine newspaper and wire service reporter. So they started with those two, but they needed many more, for it was, after all, a world war. Murrow hired people on the basis of their smarts and their contacts. He didn't care how they sounded, if their voices were pretty or whatever."

Pretty voices or not, Murrow did a pretty good job, as evidenced by this partial list of his boys:

Eric Sevareid: Murrow picked Sevareid for his original news-gathering team because he was impressed with his work for the New York Herald Tribune's Paris office. It was while he was working for Murrow that Sevareid got a major scoop: news of the French surrender to German troops in 1940. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Sevareid moved on from his tenure under Murrow to carry on the tradition of news analysis in his position as national correspondent for The CBS Evening News from 1964 until 1977, when he retired. He died on July 10, 1992.

William L. Shirer: His name may be most familiar as the author of the landmark historical work "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," first published in 1960. But before he wrote that book, Shirer was well known for his CBS broadcasts from Berlin, where he stayed for the first year of World War II. After he left, he published the "Berlin Diary" that he had had to smuggle out of the country. He died on Dec. 28, 1993.

Charles Collingwood: Broadcasting with Murrow, Collingwood became known for his intellectual spontaneity on air. Along with Sevareid and Murrow himself, Collingwood successfully made the move to television after producing landmark radio news reports with his team. His experiences as a correspondent spanned the gamut from the beaches of Normandy to the jungles of Vietnam. He died on Oct. 3, 1985.

Ed Bliss Hired by Murrow in 1946, Bliss worked for Murrow as a writer and editor. Later, Bliss also would work closely with Walter Cronkite; he was Cronkite's news editor when the CBS Evening News became television's first 30-minute nightly news program in 1963. Bliss, who was the author of the widely used textbook "Writing for Broadcast Journalism" (1971), founded the broadcast journalism program at American University. He died in 2002.

Richard C. Hottelet As a correspondent for United Press at the start of World War II, Hottelet spent nearly four months in a German jail after being arrested on suspicions that he was a spy. He was released in exchange for a German prisoner in the U.S. in 1941. Murrow hired him three years later. On June 6, 1944, he aired the first eyewitness account of the seaborne invasion of Normandy on D-Day, having flown in a bomber that attacked Utah Beach six minutes before H-Hour. He also covered the Battle of the Bulge. Hottelet remained with CBS News for 41 years. He continues to write and to lecture, and last March accepted a two-year appointment as a GW Welling Presidential Fellow at George Washington University in Washington.

Larry LeSueur covered the German blitz of London for CBS and in 1944, he made the first radio report of the liberation of Paris. He also wrote about his experience covering the Russian front in a book titled "Twelve Months That Changed the World." He died on Feb. 5, 2003.

Robert Trout was a major voice on CBS radio during World War II. He earned the nickname "Iron Man of Radio" primarily because of his ability to ad lib. In 1946, with Murrow as his boss, they launched a 15-minute daily news program called "Robert Trout with the News Till Now." Some sources credit Trout with coining the term "fireside chat" for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's radio broadcasts during the Depression and World War II. But Trout himself always said it came from a CBS executive named Harry Butcher.

Howard K. Smith might be remembered by a lot of people as a commentator and co-anchor on ABC. But he was an important figure in the history of CBS News, too. Smith started his career at CBS News in 1941, when he replaced William L. Shirer as Berlin correspondent. As a reporter, he bore witness to history many times; he covered the Nuremberg Trials and served as the moderator of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. Smith left CBS in 1961 after a disagreement with William Paley over a line in a news report. His career at ABC lasted until 1979. Smith died on Feb. 15, 2002.

Fred W. Friendly was a major influence in the development of television news and documentaries. First in partnership with Murrow, then as president of CBS News, and finally as the producer of a series of documentaries on the fundamental freedoms of the Constitution, he consistently informed the American public and helped frame a generation of broadcast journalists. During World War II, he served with the information and education section in the U.S. Army. In 1948, he met Murrow and they began to collaborate, first on the best-selling "I Can Hear It Now" album for Columbia Records an oral history of the years 1932 to 1945, then on a CBS Radio network series, "Hear It Now." They took the format to television with "See It Now." The program's initial prime-time broadcast on Nov. 18, 1951, was the first coast-to-coast TV hookup. The award-winning series, which ran seven years, included Murrow's classic examination of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt. Friendly died in March 1998.


©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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