Voice of Crisis

"The night attack has started, and I am with a fire brigade in a sandbag crow's nest on top of a tall building near the Thames." So somberly, portentously, Edward R. Murrow began an evening broadcast of the London blitz in the early days of World War II. To listeners in the U.S., his resonant, sepulchral voice came to convey the grim reality of war. Murrow followed Londoners on their way to air-raid shelters and caught their measured footsteps on his mike; he joined R.A.F. bomber pilots on their raids over Germany and described the nightmarish rainbow of flak and fire. "The fall of Britain," said a friend, "would have been as meaningful to him as the loss of a child. He internalizes world events. They flow through him like a stream."

Last week the famed wartime voice was stilled. Ed Murrow, at 57, died of cancer in his home in Pawling, N. Y. The reputation he built in London would have assured him a place in the history of journalism, but he returned from the war to become the leading TV newscaster of his time. For seven years at CBS, he and Fred Friendly, now president of CBS News, produced a provocative news special, See It Now, which courted controversy in notoriously timid medium. Their most famous program was a devastatingly understated attack on Senator Joe McCarthy in his heyday. Murrow also broadcast the news for 15 minutes every weekday night for 13 years, beginning each program with the solemn intonation: "This ... is ... the . . . news." Murrow hosted a lightweight but highly profitable program, Person to Person, in which he invaded two celebrities' homes each week to exchange idle but engaging chitchat. On the nation's TV sets, he could be seen siting before a picture tube of his own smoking incessantly while he commented on the guided tour that had been arranged in elaborate detail. Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Rocky Graziano, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Krishna Menon opened their homes to Murrow. And it was on this program that the dour newscaster was first observed to laugh over the air.

Charter Member. "Ed couldn't wait to grow up," his mother once said of him. Born on a tenant farm in North Carolina, Murrow moved with his family to the state of Washington, later attended Washington State College, where he majored in speech. After graduation, he went to work for educational organizations and in 1935 was hired by CBS. Sent to Europe to line up cultural programs, he was on an assignment in Warsaw when he got word of the Nazi Anschluss. Hastily chartering a plane to Vienna, he arrived in time to broadcast the Nazi takeover. After this triumph, CBS installed him as a permanent commentator in London.

During the war, Murrow hired a talented broadcasting staff: Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, William Shirer, Charles Collingwood. His generosity to the people who worked for him was legendary, and around the networks something akin to a Murrow cult was formed. Eventually one CBS man, who had had enough, organized a Murrow Ain't God Club, and Murrow himself applied for charter membership.

Straight Propaganda. For all his eminence on TV, Murrow fought a running battle with CBS brass for several years. A 28-man committee had been set up to approve all news programs, and in 1958 See It Now was dropped. Finally, Murrow gave a speech denouncing the whole industry tor purveying "decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world." A Democrat by leaning, the he left TV in 1961 to take the job of director of the U.S. Information Agency under President Kennedy.

As propaganda boss, Murrow proved an able administrator who insisted on playing every story straight for the rest of the world. Then, in 1964, he was forced to resign after a cancerous left lung was removed. Ever since he had gone into broadcasting Murrow had smoked from 60 to 70 cigarettes a day. "I doubt very much that I could spend half an hour without a cigarette with any comfort or ease," he once declared after narrating a program linking cigarettes to cancer.

Ed Murrow's solemn, dramatic style of news delivery has gone out of fashion in TV today. The newscasters of strive for a lighter touch in the manner of Huntley and Brinkley. But Murrow perfectly suited his anxious era. As he himself once explained: "The timing was right and the instrument powerful."

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