Edward R. Murrow: Victor and Victim

...In the past few months, I have read most of the existing histories of broadcasting...

...It is downhill all the way after what Kendrick calls "CBS's finest hour," the Murrow program on Joe McCarthy in 1954...

...Then I asked them why they thought a majority of Wisconsin voters would have felt that way, expecting that they would say the voters supported McCarthy's "exposures" of Communists in government...

...But Kendrick's book will be remembered, I think, more for what it tells about broadcasting than for what it tells about Murrow...

...It probably means simply that the world has changed, and will change more...

...Kendrick makes no great point of this...

...Kendrick said that Murrow himself did not feel that the program was responsible for McCarthy's "downfall," but the reader is left with the impression that Kendrick thinks it was...

...It will be many years before another Murrow biography is needed...

...Murrow was a radio newsman in a period when that news medium reached heights television may never reach as a news medium...

...Kendrick's history, covering the formative years of television, is in my opinion the best, as well as the most dramatic, record of that important development...

...Reviewed by Edwin R. Bayley This monumental biography of Ed Murrow by Alexander Kendrick is both a fitting tribute to the greatest figure in American broadcasting and a devastating commentary on the American system of broadcasting...

...Murrow commented on each situation...

...There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities...

...many "over thirties" have criticized student activists for this...

...Perhaps it is part of the present generation's contempt for the ideals or problems of an older generation...

...We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result...

...I told the students of the Harris poll taken in Wisconsin two years after McCarthy's death, which indicated that McCarthy probably would have been re-elected had he lived...

...In later discussions, it turned out that many of the students felt themselves persecuted, because of their life styles or long hair, by the draft or by the bureaucracies of government or the university, but the idea that one could be intimidated by the charge of being "soft on Communism" seemed incredible to them...

...But television ultimately rejected Murrow and his values...

...There is no question that these words had a powerful impact...

...But not one student thought of either of these things, and when I told them the answer I had expected, they gasped in disbelief...

...He does not intend this book primarily as criticism of the networks, but it is the accumulation of detail—the many little departures from principle, the compromises with advertisers or Government figures—that adds up to make the case...

...They laughed in the wrong places...

...McCarthy struck them as comical rather than sinister, as did the sight of a McCarthy victim blubbering his avowals of anti-Communism while the Senator contemptuously ignored his protestations...

...It is an heroic story but a sad one, for when one finishes this long account of Murrow's journalistic triumphs during and after World War II, one realizes that he failed...

...Murrow's style and his standards of television have left a mark on the trade, submerged as news may be in the output of the networks...

...I planned to tell them the Harris poll had reported that it was McCarthy's defiance of authority, "telling off the big shots," that endeared him to Wisconsin voters, rather than concern with Communism itself...

...In Kendrick's words: "That evening marked the first time on American television that McCarthy's citations had ever been refuted by the recital of the true facts in each case...

...Some thought I was being humorous...

...He looms so large because he stands in a swamp...

...Murrow's comments at the end of the program are worth reading again: "We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our own history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular...

...If there is hope that television may some day be more than just superficial entertainment, it lies in the example he provided...

...He fought hard as he tried to carry over into the field of television news the standards and traditions of radio reporting...

...He was more the victim of the quiz shows than of the witchhunters...

...That exposing "Communists in government" could win a political following never occurred to them...

...In the story of this fight lies the history of American television to this day...

...This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent...

...It was Murrow's dedication to the idea that broadcasting had a responsibility to be educational and informative that embroiled him in a running fight with CBS executives...

...That program consisted of a series of filmed news clips of McCarthy in action, challenging President Eisenhower at Milwaukee, badgering General Zwicker, sneering at Reed Harris of the Voice of America, and making an anti-Stevenson speech in 1952...

...Kendrick, a CBS colleague and admirer of Murrow for twenty years, has given us a thorough, sympathetic account of his friend's upbringing, his ideals, and his career...

...I recently had the opportunity to view the Murrow program on McCarthy again, and to discuss it with a group of students at the University of California...

...Viewing the film was an emotional experience for me, but what was most interesting was the students' reaction to this event of fifteen years ago...

...What defeated him was partly the continuing persecution by supporters of the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, but more significantly the cowardice and greed of commercial broadcasters...

...Perhaps their reaction reflects a lack of knowledge of recent history...