Always on the Air

...But it was mainly an intimation that behind the voice that bespoke the pain of the blitzed in London and the Mc-Carthyized in America, there was a secret man with secret problems we were not invited to fathom...

...I think Kendrick is on strong ground in deploring the insufficient television time for current issues, but on weaker ground in his condemnation of how that time is used...

...More important, I doubt that Murrow would share Kendrick's view that television's coverage of Vietnam battle scenes "undoubtedly trivialized the war by making it part of the ordinarily superficial treatment of news, sandwiched between commercials...

...Least of all could we penetrate what drove him so mercilessly from within, causing him to work at more projects than he could thoughtfully manage and enabling him to find relaxation only in the utter exhaustion he seemed to cultivate...

...the correspondent offered to analyze the significance of Israel's 10th anniversary for the 7:45 p.m...

...In the measured cadence and inflection that made every remark a broadcast, Murrow told his secretary, "Send Jerusalem a signal that I decline the offer with thanks...

...Most of us remained behind the barrier of deliberate speech, the smile that flickered during conversation, the moods of towering gloom...

...Nor do I believe this is because the author accepted the commission from Mrs...

...When he died of a brain tumor in 1965, two days after his 57th birthday, Murrow was director of the United States Information Agency, where he had gone to serve President Kennedy and remained to become disillusioned under President Johnson...

...It took strong talk to shake America from the complacency of the '50s...

...So, Ed Murrow was both too famous and too little known for easy biography...

...Reviewed by DANIEL SCHORR cbs News, Washington Everyone who associated with him has a favorite Murrow anecdote or two...

...radio program, Edward R. Murrow and the News...

...Kendrick's bitter closing line is, "Ed Murrow was dead...

...It is undeniably true that since the heyday of See It Now in the 1950s, the role of news documentaries has, under the pressure of mounting costs and frantic competition for ratings, steadily diminished in terms of regularly scheduled time...

...For one thing, Murrow was not above making his compromises with the marketplace...

...And there was Janet Brewster Murrow, his serene and self-reliant wife, the mother of their only son, an anchor to windward for a storm-tossed man...

...For Prime Time is more about issues than motivations, more about Murrow and his times than Murrow and his self...

...There was his tiny, iron-willed mother who overshadowed an easygoing father, spanked her son and taught him principles...

...Oh, yes, in our working relationships, over drinks, or over the poker table (where he lost with rash and puzzling consistency), we saw more than the public saw...

...Jacqueline Kennedy), but rather because he is a down-to-earth journalist, more comfortable with facts than emotions...

...For Kendrick, Murrow's life adds up to an argument against commercial television: After Murrow's losing battles with cbs management, "The competition of ideas . . . has to a large extent been abandoned" and "the Murrow-Friendly window on the real world has been shrunk to a peephole...

...And I fear that my colleague has to some extent confused Murrow's viewpoint with his own...

...I'm free of hatred, not too much ashamed of my life, convinced that individuals are not very important, convinced that I've done this job as honestly as I am able, done it in a way which you who are responsible for this life of mine need not be ashamed of...

...The "lower Murrow" program called Person to Person originated not only in his desire "to let Jesse [Zousmer] and Johnny [Aaron] pick up some change," as Kendrick quotes him as saying, but also, as he once told me, in his feeling that it gave him some leverage to do better things...

...The Beverly Hillbillies lived on...

...I recall sitting in his office one day in 1958 while he scanned a cable from the cbs stringer in Jerusalem...

...Or that the television technique of portraying social problems instead of just talking about them turned the viewer into a voyeur and gave him "a sensory experience rather than balanced judgment...

...is London" and, as Murrow wrote to his future wife, "gave me the only sense of values I have...

...In the turblent '60s, events can convey much of their own meaning...

...Janet Murrow (for this widow-biographer relationship was happily without the turbulence that developed between William Manchester and Mrs...

...That's how he was-frank about his championship of the underdog, scornful of the noninvolvement that masquerades as abstract objectivity...

...There was his paralytic speech teacher in college, Ida Lou Anderson, who shaped that unparalleled voice, taught him the dramatic pause made famous in "This...

...His colleagues admired him to the point of idolatry...

...Say that his analysis would undoubtedly be 99 per cent Israeli propaganda...

...Or, again: "If the end comes it won't be too bad...

...Thus, in a letter from wartime London to his parents he writes: "As this thing goes on and as America becomes more hysterical, you may read and hear some pretty hard things about your overgrown baby, for I propose to report this thing, not to preach about it...

...And this reflects the approach...

...This diligent and devoted book, therefore, is not the place to look for answers to the riddles of Murrow's complex personality...

...Some of us imitated him...

...And it took some courage for Alexander Kendrick to attempt the task, especially since he works for the network that was the scene not only of Murrow's triumphs, but of his traumas about freedom of expression and the struggle for air time...

...But because he was unwilling or unable to drop his onstage presence, we never really knew what made him tick...

...But the book offers little insight into the fabric of Murrow's family life, or his associations with women in general...

...by 1965, "controversy, with its pros and cons, had given way to compatibility...

...But I believe that Kendrick, in his own aversion to television, has used Murrow as the instrument for a more sweeping indictment than Murrow himself would have made...

...In fact, Kendrick makes little effort in Prime Time to probe what lay behind the chainsmoking tension...

...Kendrick records that Murrow seemed to be thinking of a return to cbs and had made suggestions for television programs?on poverty, and on the Supreme Court's civil liberties decision in the Gideon case...

...Say that I shall do this analysis myself . . . and that it will be 100 per cent Israeli propaganda...

...But if, as Kendrick says, "qualitative improvement of television no longer lay intrinsically within the commercial broadcasting system," what would Ed Murrow have done back at cbs...

...For example, while it emerges from these pages that three women played singular parts in shaping Murrow's life and career, there is more documentation than illumination of his relationship with them...

...If television today talks less and shows more, I doubt that Murrow would quarrel with that...

...Although the reader is presented with a wealth of correspondence, the trouble is that Murrow writing to loved ones, like Murrow speaking, remains self-aware, on-stage...

...And the central issue, caustically suggested by the book's title, is the same one suggested by Murrow's one-time producer, Fred W. Friendly, in his Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control: man against the system, news against entertainment, ideas against profits?the unequal struggle of the creative personality in the television wasteland...