A Voice in the Wilderness Murrow: His Life and Times by A.M. Sperber; Freundlich; 795 pages; $22.95

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

If broadcast journalism has a secular saint, a Puritan forebear, a drafter of the Constitution, he is beyond challenge Edward R. Murrow, a man whose prestige endures more than a quarter of a century after he ceased to be a major force in reporting and analyzing the news. Murrow made his reputation covering war and challenging demagoguery. He burnished it by losing battles to commercialism and belatedly denouncing his betrayers. He died young: he was 57 when he succumbed to the lung cancer brought on by a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit, a vice he could not kick even while actually on air reporting the dire effects of smoking. His early death only heightened his romantic aura. HBO's docudrama Murrow, which aired in January, all but shouted that when he died, TV journalism lost its morality, its courage and its soul.

The TV news networks contend, with some justice, that just the opposite has happened. News and information fill many more hours of the day than when Murrow was active, and more outlets are competing for stories. Lightweight cameras and satellites have enabled television to provide immediate hookups around the world. Broadcast journalism's collective impact on the civil rights movement, Viet Nam and Watergate more than matched Murrow's exposure of the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Moreover, Murrow's work for CBS was not without flaw. His intonations and gestures were often stagy, his language orotund, his judgments pious. He squandered a lot of time on cozy, sometimes rehearsed celebrity interviews for Person to Person. Far more than any of his heirs, he let his personality and politics become a part of the story, particularly during the McCarthy era.

Yet for today's TV reporters, Murrow remains the all but universally acknowledged beau ideal. His fearless and candid World War II reporting taught not only America but Britain that journalism must be more than propaganda. Indeed, the BBC asked him to direct its programming, an honor he reluctantly declined. Later Murrow helped establish, at considerable personal cost, the principle that TV journalism must be as free, as challenging and as crusading as its counterparts in print. And he did so, unlike virtually any of his contemporaries, without ever having worked for a newspaper or having been steeped in print's traditions. His career proved that broadcasting could train, and ennoble, its own.

There is need for a thorough, dispassionate biography of Murrow, one that could assess his precise contributions to American journalism--and to modern relations between the news media and Government during his stint as director of the U.S. Information Agency in the Kennedy Administration. Ann M. Sperber, a former book editor and freelance writer, has doggedly undertaken the task in Murrow: His Life and Times. Her volume is nothing if not inclusive: it mentions head colds and household accidents, and is replete with sometimes pointless anecdotes in which Murrow is at most a peripheral figure--half a page, for example, on how Correspondent David Schoenbrun's pregnant wife got out of bed at 7 a.m. to open the telegram offering him a job as CBS's Paris bureau chief. Perhaps Sperber felt obliged to empty her notebook simply to demonstrate that she conducted more than 150 interviews, involving essentially all the living principals in Murrow's life; perhaps she was influenced by the ethos of Murrow's medium and believed in the primacy of the sights-and-sounds vignette. In any case, her often misguided search for verisimilitude is no substitute for a knowing assessment of Murrow's place in journalism history, something that Sperber, who has virtually no major league reporting experience, is unable to provide.

On matters of fact, Sperber seems considerably more sound. She secured cooperation from Murrow's widow Janet and son Casey, and reflects the family point of view. Yet she does note, albeit very briefly, Murrow's hard drinking, bursts of temper and infidelities, especially his open wartime love affair with Pamela Churchill, the British Prime Minister's daughter-in-law--matters the docudrama deliberately overlooked. Using declassified FBI files, Sperber demonstrates abuses by that agency, the State Department and its Passport Bureau to harass Murrow and suggests their files were leaked to Alcoa, which then withdrew sponsorship of Murrow's trademark documentary series See It Now. Although generally a plodding stylist, Sperber delivers absorbing passages on Murrow's major confrontations--in Britain, with McCarthy, and finally with then CBS Chairman William Paley, who embraced Murrow for decades but ultimately took away his weekly prime-time outlet. Moreover, Sperber ably sketches much of the historical background.

Sperber is neither a subtle reader of Murrow's prose nor, despite her Fulbright-scholar background in political science, a decisive analyst of his ideology. She does evoke the shy, moody, sometimes preening yet fiercely loyal man who inspired such admiration and affection. Still, this should not be the conclusive Murrow biography.