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On New Year's Day Mutual Broadcasting System put on a thumping show for its listeners. For a full hour it recalled, via recordings, the men & events that made 1939 a momentous year in history. Listeners heard the quivering voice of Tom Mooney, free at last in the California sun. They listened to a Cavalier officer's clipped story of his ship's disaster, thrilled to the drama of the Squalus rescue work. They heard a new Pope proclaimed. They heard three men launch a war. And, as conductor of this medley of events, they heard the cool, trenchant voice of Raymond Gram Swing, MBS's one-man brain trust on world affairs, U. S. radio's "find" of 1939. Some radio programs listed him under Dance Music, as "Raymond Gram, swing!" But last week Variety voted Raymond Gram Swing the leading "attention-getter" among news analysts and commentators in 1939. In U. S. homes great & humble millions cock respectful ears when Raymond Gram Swing comes on, five nights a week. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter is a Swing fan. So are Nicholas Murray Butler, British Ambassador Lord Lothian, Tallulah Bankhead. In England he is credited with being heard by an incredible 30.7% of the adult population whenever he comes on (fortnightly since war began).

The success formula of this most widely heard man in the English-speaking world is essentially simple. "We are in the worst period of history the world has known," he says, "and the job is to keep explaining why, why, why without being a Jeremiah." So Swing tells what's what simply, calmly, right, with no flash-flashes, no calamitous crescendos, no special hallmark of his own except a level, almost hushed "Good night."

Raymond Gram Swing is 52, a tall, stooped, tweedy, horn-rimmed man with unruly brown hair. The Gram came from his wife, Betty Gram, once a militant suffragette and still an ardent feminist. He pitched into U. S. journalism in 1906, at 19. In 1913 he became the Chicago Daily News's man in Berlin.

Sent down to Turkey in 1915, Swing covered the Dardanelles attack. Later, crossing the Sea of Marmora on a Turkish freighter, the Nagara, he made a legend for himself. The freighter was overhauled by a British submarine. A Nagara officer frantically signaled Swing to do the talking. "Who are you?" demanded the sub commander, meaning "what ship?" Said the excited American landlubber: "I am Raymond Swing, of the Chicago Daily News." Kipling used it in his story of British subs in the war.

The 1939 war crisis was a backbreaker for Swing. On Aug. 21, when the Russo-German pact popped, he wrote a searching 2,000-word analysis of its meaning in an hour and a half, from then on until war was actually under way stayed on the job virtually around the clock. His calm, unflustered shot-calling over this period, when the rest of radio was scaring up disjointed bulletins one-a-minute, won him the main body of his now enormous following. It also won him a sponsor, White Owl cigars.

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