From Brick Dust to Bouquets

The respects of the President, the Secretary of State, the Lend-Lease Administrator, the Librarian of Congress and the British Ambassador were paid last week to a radio reporter. At a banquet given for him at the Waldorf-Astoria, some 1,100 persons of note twice rose to their feet in tribute to him. CBS's Edward R. (for Roscoe) Murrow, back from three years in grim London, was clearly given to understand that he had deserved well of the Republic.

To a man accustomed to hear from his home office three or four times a year that he had done a good job, this outpouring came as a surprise. But Ed Murrow knew that the work of many other radio correspondents was being honored through him. And he had seen too much blood and brick dust to overvalue bouquets.

Ed Murrow is a dark, lanky man with a luminous grin and a scholar's careful head. Thinking about Europe and thinking on his feet were two specialties with him before he became chief of CBS's news staff abroad in 1937. He had been President of the National Student Federation of America and assistant director of the Institute of International Education (with offices in Europe). A lack of newspaper experience turned out to be the least of his worries. Against stiff NBC competition--for NBC had been in the field for years and many Europeans thought it the official U.S. network--he and his friend Bill Shirer in Berlin ably handled the disintegrating events of 1938--Anschluss, Godesberg, Munich.

"We agreed then," Murrow says, "that in reporting the death of a civilization it would be impossible to under-dramatize." Once a bigshot in campus theatricals at Washington State College, Ed Murrow recognized that for listeners already gorged on emotional appeals nothing could be so dramatic as restraint. Last autumn's and winter's bombing tested that theory.

Murrow grew 20 Ib. leaner before the last Dornier droned home from the great raids on London. His offices were hit twice. He broadcast in a studio littered with sleeping people on mattresses ("Tis new experience," he cabled, "although probably not so new people sleeping by loudspeakers.").

Other newsmen did their jobs under similar conditions; Murrow's distinction was that he did more than his job. Twice every 24 hours, on the appointed second, almost never fluffing a word, in a voice that meant what it said, he not only reported the news but conveyed an actuality. U.S. listeners actually heard the people going by the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields on their way to shelters before a raid because Murrow laid his mike down on the sidewalk to pick up their unhurried footsteps. U.S. listeners sensed the strange silence between two raids on moonlit London because Murrow told them how loudly the liquid from two pierced cans of peaches dripped inside a smashed shop.

No bunk, no journalese, no sentimentality. Of the embattled English he remarked: "Often they are insular, but their determination must be recorded." When Dorothy Thompson was telling the British that the poets of the world were on their side, he spoke for the sweating people who doubted the poets' effectiveness. At a time when the official British were still egg-walking on the subject of the U.S., he reported the truth in plain words: "They want us in this war."

At last week's ornamental banquet, presided over by CBS's silver-haired Standby Elmer Davis, two debts were implicitly acknowledged. One acknowledgment came from the Administration to the men who had made the urgent plight of Britain palpable to millions. Said Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish to Ed Murrow: "You have destroyed . . . the superstition that what is done beyond 3,000 miles of water is not realty done at all."

The other debt was from the Columbia Broadcasting System itself. If any single radio job since radio began could unanswerably justify the business of broadcasting as now conducted, CBS's news coverage since 1938 might well be it. But the radio business as now conducted has been challenged by the Government's powerful Communications Commission. An observer at the banquet could note the glint of FCC Chairman James Fly's glasses down the table as CBS's earnest, boylike President William S. Paley, praising Murrow, promised to fight for freedom of the air "no matter whence, nor how subtly or how boldly comes the attack."

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