The Murrow Boys: Pioneers in the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism

The Murrow Boys: Pioneers in the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud.

Hardcover: 445 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 1, 1996)
ISBN-10: 0395680840

From Publishers Weekly

In 1937, Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965) was dispatched to Europe by CBS Radio as its European representative. Although the job consisted of finding entertainment for the radio, world events would soon intervene. With Hitler beginning his rampage, Murrow fought isolationism at home and provincialism at CBS to form a legendary group of electronic journalists. William L. Shirer became Berlin correspondent, and Murrow, holding down London himself, hired the vain, insecure Eric Sevareid for Paris. Streetwise New Yorker Larry LeSueur, covered Dunkirk. There were also Charles Collingwood, Murrow's "Bonnie Prince Charlie," who loved the good life; Winston Burdett, onetime Communist later turned stool pigeon for a red-hunting Senate committee; and Howard K. Smith, Southern gentleman and Rhodes Scholar, who would take "the last train from Berlin" when the U.S. entered the war. With the end of the war, we see "the boys" as they evolve in a changing America, resisting television (they all, at first, hated it); McCarthyism (Sevareid, Murrow and, especially, Collingwood would be fearless); hubris (Shirer became so arrogant he was fired); and the CBS corporate structure (William S. Paley, corporate shark, would always win). Cloud, a former Washington bureau chief for Time, and his wife, Olson, former White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, have written a lively, colloquial history of broadcast journalism that is so exciting one's impulse is to read it in a single sitting. 

Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.




I found this book in a thrift shop and remembering Edward R Murrow's name and some others from when I was very young I took it home.  A number of years later I finally got around to reading it!

Murrow and "his boys" were leaders in reporting on the war when it had never been done before. Amazingly most all came home after it was all over only to find technology was moving on from Radio to Television. To say they weren't happy would be an understatement.

Only some that are my age and older would remember many of the names, but towards the end of the book Walter Cronkite  entered the picture.. more of us remember him.  But I do remember Edward R Murrow had a tv show called See It Now. 


Definitely a book of History that began before I was born... but didn't end  until I had a firm memory of some of the things they talked about.