Voice from Cairo

The voice was unprofessional, big, with a flat, tolling quality that frequently gave professionals the creeps. No listener remembered its like--least of all originating from censor-shrouded Cairo, that graveyard for radio correspondents.

The big voice belongs to a mousy little man: the Chicago Sun's 130-lb., 42-year-old Chester Morrison, a pinch hitter who joined CBS's world-news roundup (6:45 p.m., E.W.T.) last month and has been delivering home runs ever since.

Artfully sidestepping the censors, Morrison rumbled his warnings of the grim consequences of Allied defeat in the desert, begged for American men and American equipment, dramatized the vague Libyan-Egyptian front within an inch of his listeners' lives. Announced he in a first broadcast: "I'm going up to the desert where other people are fighting my battle--Englishmen and Indians and South Africans and New Zealanders. Let us know when you're coming, Americans. We'll bake a cake."

Former newspaper colleagues in Boston (where he was city editor of the Transcript when it folded), New York and Chicago, are amazed at the gumption of meek little Morrison's broadcasts. When they knew him (not too well) he was the sort of self-effacing guy who worked hard, came and went methodically, rarely displayed his fine talents as a conversationalist. The cable editors of the Chicago Sun are amazed at his subtle outwitting of the Cairo censors. But at CBS it is Chester Morrison's voice itself that is considered most amazing. Says News Director Paul White: "That voice sounds like the voice of doom."

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