Edward Roscoe Murrow (born Egbert Roscoe Murrow; April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent.
He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe for the news division of CBS. During the war he recruited and worked closely with a team of war correspondents who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.
A pioneer of radio and television news broadcasting, Murrow produced a series of reports on his television program See It Now which helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fellow journalists Eric Sevareid, Ed Bliss, Bill Downs, and Alexander Kendrick considered, as does Dan Rather, Murrow one of journalism's greatest figures. Murrow's life has been dramatized in several films, including Good Night, and Good Luck, which takes its name from the signature sign-off phrase Murrow used to end many of his wartime broadcasts.
Murrow was born Egbert Roscoe Murrow at Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, in Guilford County, North Carolina, to Roscoe Conklin Murrow and Ethel F. (née Lamb) Murrow. His parents were Quakers. He was the youngest of four brothers and was a "mixture of Scottish, Irish, English and German" descent. The firstborn, Roscoe Jr., lived only a few hours. His other two brothers, Lacey Van Buren and Dewey Joshua, were four and two years old respectively when Murrow was born. His home was a log cabin without electricity or plumbing, on a farm bringing in only a few hundred dollars a year from corn and hay.
When Murrow was six years old, his family moved across the country to Skagit County in western Washington, to homestead near Blanchard, 30 miles (50 km) south of the Canada–United States border. He attended high school in nearby Edison, and was president of the student body in his senior year and excelled on the debate team. He sang bass in the glee club, and was also a member of the basketball team which won the Skagit County championship.
After graduation from high school in 1926, Murrow enrolled at Washington State College (now Washington State University) across the state in Pullman, and eventually majored in speech. A member of Kappa Sigma fraternity, he was also active in college politics. By his teen years, Murrow went by the nickname "Ed" and during his second year of college, he changed his name from Egbert to Edward. In 1929, while attending the annual convention of the National Student Federation of America, Murrow gave a speech urging college students to become more interested in national and world affairs; this led to his election as president of the federation. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1930, he moved back east to New York.
Murrow was assistant director of the Institute of International Education from 1932 to 1935 and served as assistant secretary of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, which helped prominent German scholars who had been dismissed from academic positions. He married Janet Huntington Brewster at her Middletown, Connecticut house on October 27, 1934. Their son, Charles Casey Murrow, was born in the west of London on November 6, 1945.
Murrow joined CBS as director of talks and education in 1935 and remained with the network for his entire career. CBS did not have news staff when Murrow joined, save for announcer Bob Trout. Murrow's job was to line up newsmakers who would appear on the network to talk about the issues of the day. But the onetime Washington State speech major was intrigued by Trout's on-air delivery, and Trout gave Murrow tips on how to communicate effectively on radio.
Murrow went to London in 1937 to serve as the director of CBS's European operations. The position did not involve on-air reporting; his job was persuading European figures to broadcast over the CBS network, which was in direct competition with NBC's two radio networks. During this time, he made frequent trips around Europe. In 1937, Murrow hired journalist William L. Shirer, and assigned him to a similar post on the continent. This marked the beginning of the "Murrow Boys" team of war reporters.
Murrow gained his first glimpse of fame during the March 1938 Anschluss, in which Adolf Hitler engineered the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. While Murrow was in Poland arranging a broadcast of children's choruses, he got word from Shirer of the annexation—and the fact that Shirer could not get the story out through Austrian state radio facilities. Murrow immediately sent Shirer to London. Shirer wrote in his diary:
Shirer flew from Vienna to Berlin, then Amsterdam, and finally to London, where he delivered an uncensored eyewitness account of the Anschluss. Murrow then chartered the only transportation available, a 23-passenger plane, to fly from Warsaw to Vienna so he could take over from Shirer.
At the request of CBS management in New York, Murrow and Shirer put together a European News Roundup of reaction to the Anschluss, which brought correspondents from various European cities together for a single broadcast. On March 13, 1938, the special was broadcast, hosted by Bob Trout in New York, including Shirer in London (with Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson), reporter Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News in Paris, reporter Pierre J. Huss of the International News Service in Berlin, and Senator Lewis B. Schwellenbach in Washington, D.C. Reporter Frank Gervasi, in Rome, was unable to find a transmitter to broadcast reaction from the Italian capital but phoned his script to Shirer in London, who read it on the air. Murrow reported live from Vienna, in the first on-the-scene news report of his career: "This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna.... It's now nearly 2:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived."
The broadcast was considered revolutionary at the time. Featuring multipoint, live reports transmitted by shortwave in the days before modern technology (and without each of the parties necessarily being able to hear one another), it came off almost flawlessly. The special became the basis for World News Roundup.
On March 19, Shirer returned from London, and Murrow met his plane at Vienna's Aspern airport. Returning to Shirer's apartment, they encountered SS troops looting the Vienna mansion of the Rothschild family. "We found a quiet bar off the Kärntnerstrasse for a talk," Shirer wrote.
In September 1938, Murrow and Shirer were regular participants in CBS's coverage of the crisis over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, which Hitler coveted for Germany and eventually won in the Munich Agreement. Their incisive reporting heightened the American appetite for radio news, with listeners regularly waiting for Murrow's shortwave broadcasts, introduced by analyst H. V. Kaltenborn in New York saying, "Calling Ed Murrow ... come in Ed Murrow."
During the following year, leading up to the outbreak of World War II, Murrow continued to be based in London. William Shirer's reporting from Berlin brought him national acclaim and a commentator's position with CBS News upon his return to the United States in December 1940. Shirer would describe his Berlin experiences in his best-selling 1941 book Berlin Diary. When the war broke out in September 1939, Murrow stayed in London, and later provided live radio broadcasts during the height of the Blitz in London After Dark. These live, shortwave broadcasts relayed on CBS electrified radio audiences as news programming never had: previous war coverage had mostly been provided by newspaper reports, along with newsreels seen in movie theaters; earlier radio news programs had simply featured an announcer in a studio reading wire service reports.
Murrow's reports, especially during the Blitz, began with what became his signature opening, "This is London," delivered with vocal emphasis on the word this, followed by the hint of a pause before the rest of the phrase. His former speech teacher, Ida Lou Anderson, suggested the opening as a more concise alternative to the one he had inherited from his predecessor at CBS Europe, César Saerchinger: "Hello, America. This is London calling." Murrow's phrase became synonymous with the newscaster and his network.