"The reviews in London that fall were equally flattering. ... "
"At least two reviews, one in the New Statesman, a second in the Observer, mentioned something that kindled my pride in my profession. They pointed out that America had produced between the wars a unique group of foreign correspondents to whom not only the Americans but the British owed a debt of gratitude. ... "
"F. A. Voight, himself once a British foreign correspondent, wrote similarly in the Observer. “England,” he said, “owes much to these men and women.” I took it as a British tribute to so many of us: John Gunther, Vincent Sheean, Dorothy Thompson, Sigrid Schulz, Walter Duranty, H. R. Knickerbocker, Ed Murrow, the Mowrer brothers, and others."
"There was a curious experience with President Roosevelt. Knopf had sent him one of the first copies of Berlin Diary off the press. One day a few weeks later I received it back. It had been signed by the president. ... A letter from Stephen Early, FDR’s press secretary, tried to clear the matter up. Perhaps I was naive. He said the president had “requested” him to send it back to me.
"Of the hundreds of books the President has received in the more than eight years he has been in the White House, this one is the first, to the best of my knowledge, that he has ever asked to have returned to its author.
"This still left me wondering. Then Steve explained.
"It is returned to you for your signature, at least, and if the signature includes an inscription, I think the object of sending this book to you will have been happily achieved.
"I did not return the book. It had been slightly damaged in the mail. I sent another copy, inscribed to the president, which Alfred Knopf lugged down to Washington and personally delivered to the White House. By now Alfred was very happy about Berlin Diary. In a second letter to me, Early described Alfred’s arrival.
"Alfred Knopf came in yesterday and brought a first edition of your Berlin Diary, inscribed by you. The President was delighted—perfectly satisfied with the exchange but a bit sorry that the copy I had sent you had arrived in a slightly damaged condition.
"Knopf gave me a very enthusiastic report on the sales of Berlin Diary.
"I hope you make a million!""
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"One of the most eloquent tributes to the book came from Ed Murrow. ... There was no bombing to report that evening. He was going to devote his part of the broadcast, he said, to talking about Berlin Diary. Ed was very moving: about the book, about me, about our friendship, about the way we had worked together in Europe."
" ... We were so emotionally drained, each of us, by what Ed said that after he had finished speaking we sat there on the side of the road a long time, unable to move or to speak. We could not find words for what we felt."
CBS brought him another contract, with considerable raise, and the book sold well, but he was left only eight percent of his earning after taxes.
" ... And until recently, apparently, one best-seller would have guaranteed setting you free. Sinclair Lewis had told me once that he himself had become financially independent with his first big success, Main Street, on which he paid, he said, if I remember rightly, 6 percent income tax.
"I told Hemingway and the Authors Guild, which I had just become eligible to join and which had also urged me to be a guinea pig, that I would not go to court, or even publicly protest what I thought privately was an outrageous treatment of an author by our federal and state governments. It would be unseemly with a war on. Our country had already been drawn into it in December 1941, six months after the diary was published, by Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on us. Millions of Americans were going to be drafted to fight and risk their lives—practically without pay. It was not the time to squabble with the government over taxes."
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"I was also pleased, I have to concede, to be invited to address a dinner at the Waldorf honoring the great German writer Thomas Mann on his seventieth birthday. (He had befriended me and more than any other author had kept encouraging me to write.) And I was flattered to be asked to speak at various banquets to honor General de Gaulle, Mahatma Gandhi, and others, or to say a few words on behalf of some cause or institution."
"Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, recruited me into the Council on Foreign Relations. It was a much smaller organization than it is now, and only gradually did I become aware that it was a growing force in shaping American foreign policy and influencing the men who made policy—indeed in picking some of these men. To me the council offered a number of opportunities, above all the chance to dine and talk off the record with visiting foreign statesmen—they became more numerous after the establishment in New York of the U.N. Once or twice a week there was a meeting with a visiting prime minister or foreign minister or other such dignitary. To have sought them out in their native lands would have taken much time and trouble.
"The council also gave one an inside view of what was going on in Washington. Secretaries of state and their assistants and ambassadors came to speak to us."
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" ... Every report we made of a bombing or a battle had to be transmitted live. To use a recording for background to show you the true sound and fury of modern Blitzkrieg was verboten. This idiotic rule tied our hands. ... But all too often when your time came to broadcast there would be a brief lull. No bombs. No sound. Just a rare silence."
"I did not have this particular problem in Berlin since the Nazi authorities forbade me to even mention that an air attack was in progress, as it sometimes was during my late night broadcasts. Once when the sound of exploding British bombs and the response of the flak guns nearby penetrated through to my mike in the studio and emerged loud and clear in New York, causing the anchorman there, Elmer Davis, to remark that by the sound of it Berlin was being heavily bombed as I spoke, German engineers on orders from the Propaganda Ministry installed a lip microphone that picked up no sounds at all beyond a foot from your mouth.
"But I had plenty of opportunity to broadcast the sound and fury of modern combat at the front, in Poland, in September 1939, after the Germans attacked, and in the west when spring came the following year. Early in the German drive through Belgium and France in May there was a great tank battle just west of Dinant as German armor broke over the Meuse River, a major Allied defense line. Some two thousand German and French tanks were locked in what was the greatest tank battle ever fought up to that time. The sound, the fury, was indescribable in words, but a recording would give you some idea of it. Foreign correspondents were not allowed to get near the place. At any rate it would have been impossible to get a telephone line up to the blazing scene, which moved back and forth in the dust and smoke. German army combat correspondents made recordings of the battle. The German army offered them to me. I urged CBS in New York to make an exception of their idiotic rule in this case. It was refused."
"As soon as the war was over—after all the lost opportunities!—the American networks junked the rule against using recordings. ... "
" ... For example, transmission often was surer if we broadcast from Europe in daylight when it was also daylight at home rather than when it was night in Europe and day in America, as it was during most of our regular live broadcasts. Murrow and I had begged CBS in New York to allow us to record earlier to take advantage of this situation. Then if our live broadcasts didn’t get through they could use the earlier recording. It seemed so reasonable. But not to the CBS brass at Madison Avenue."
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" ... I was unduly impressed by the unanimous vote—54 to 0—in the U.N. Assembly the day before to press forward for general disarmament, including the abolition of the atom bomb and the establishment of an on-the-scene inspection to see that no one cheated. At that time, of course, only the U.S.A. had the bomb and it was willing to give up its monopoly and put the bomb under the control of the U.N. If that had happened, we might not face such a grim nuclear future as we do today."
"The atom bomb provoked in our land much silly—and dangerous—talk about war with Russia. This came not only from ordinary people, who probably did not have the facts, but from top people in government, including a former president, who presumably had them. The latter, especially, were becoming gung-ho on going to war with Russia, though the sounds of battle and bombing from the war with Germany and Japan had scarcely died down. Indeed, former President Herbert Hoover would return from a quick visit to Germany and propose to President Truman that the Allied agreement at Potsdam for the treatment of defeated Germany be scrapped and that German heavy industry, which had helped Adolf Hitler come within an ace of winning the war, be revived. We would need a restored Germany, I heard him say in private, to help us cope with the Russians. Others wanted to give more help to revive prostrate Japan, for the same reason."
" ... I remember a dinner given by Hamilton Fish Armstrong to honor two Supreme Court justices, Robert H. Jackson and Felix Frankfurter. A number of prominent men were there, including Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Lord Inverchapel (Clark-Kerr), the new British ambassador in Washington, who had just arrived from serving in Moscow, Henry Luce, the Time-Life-Fortune tycoon, and Myron Taylor, former head of U.S. Steel and until recently U.S. observer at the Vatican. Justice Jackson, just back from heading the U.S. prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, tried to explain what he had done in handling Nazi war criminals. Taylor said he himself opposed the whole idea of prosecuting the Nazi leaders. What we ought to be concentrating on, he said, was war with Russia. He became so rabid on the subject that John Gunther shouted across the table at him that his talk was “shocking.”"
"One veteran Associated Press reporter in Moscow, who had no illusions about the Bolsheviks, was depressed at all the talk of war with Russia. Eddy Gilmore, returning to his post after several months’ leave at home, reacted with a dispatch that expressed his bewilderment and concern—and Gilmore was one of the least emotional and most matter-of-fact of all the American correspondents in Europe.
"In Russia there is little or no talk of war. On the contrary, there is much talk of peace. There is no anti-American feeling as such in Moscow. There are articles of criticism of the United States… but I would be a very untruthful reporter if I did not say there is three to five times as much anti-Russian sentiment in the American press and on radio as there is here against our country. I’ve heard no one in Moscow express a desire for war with the U.S.…, which is more than I can say of what I heard in Washington."
It wasn't people of U.S., Shirer points out, who expected or feared or wished a war against Russia, and churches expressed the same view. It was some Washington politicians and so forth.
" ... Certain politicians were drumming up fear that our Communists, who couldn’t elect a dogcatcher in any state of the Union, were about to take over the Republic.
"I had not heard such idiotic talk since my early days in Nazi Germany."
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"Toward the end of the war the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had become almost extinct, was rescued from oblivion largely by John E. Rankin (D–Miss.). As the hysteria about Communism and Russia increased, the committee, which by its very nature had been something of a joke (who is to decide who and what is un-American and on what basis?), took on a new life and gathered so much power that few congressmen dared to oppose it or even criticize it. The press was equally craven.
"Though a man of almost unbelievable narrow-mindedness, Rankin provided me with many good quotes for my Sunday broadcasts and newspaper column. He had a marked talent for the utterly ridiculous. He described the Fair Employment Practices Commission as “the beginning of a Communistic dictatorship the like of which America never dreamed!” Communism, he said, “had hounded and persecuted the Saviour during his earthly ministry, inspired his crucifixion, derided him in his dying agony, then gambled for his garments at the foot of the cross.” Rankin once proposed a bill that would make schoolteachers liable for ten years’ imprisonment if they “convey the impression of sympathy with… Communist ideology.”
"It was Rankin who once asked the House Un-American Activities Committee’s chief counsel, one Ernie Adamson, about the chairman of the British Labour party, Harold Laski. Labour had been voted into power in England at the end of the war. Though Laski was a distinguished economist and academician from the University of London, the author of many books, a friend of two U.S. Supreme Court justices (Holmes and Frankfurter) and of many other prominent Americans, Rankin spoke as if he had never heard of him.
"“Who is Mr. Laski?” the congressman asked his counsel.
"Adamson: “Mr. Laski is, I believe, one of the leaders in England of the Communist movement.”
"Rankin: “Is he an American?”
"It was Mr. Adamson who wrote a strange letter to an American veterans’ group.
""I note that you refer to democracy several times. I wonder if you are sufficiently familiar with the history of the United States to be aware that this country was not organized as a democracy?"
"This must have confused our war veterans, who apparently believed that democracy was one of the things they had fought for."
Shirer quotes some unbelievable vitriol spewed by various, chiefly republican, politicians, including against President Truman, before telling what he felt.
"As I struggled through my first years back home, trying in my broadcasts and newspaper columns to make some kind of sense of what was going on, I began to wonder if my beloved country was turning into a lunatic bin. I had lived through the nightmare years in Nazi Germany. Were there to be nightmare years at home?"
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BOOK THREE
Ousted by CBS
The End of a Career in Broadcasting
1947
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Shirer was informed about being dropped by a sponsor; his agent, MCA, was assured there were sponsors galore waiting in the wings. But when he talked with Ed Murrow, who'd been a friend for years before and through WWII, he began to get the surprise.
"I had not taken the change of climate as seriously perhaps as I should. I had been through it all before—in my years in Nazi Germany.
"Recently, I had begun to notice a growing criticism of my broadcasts from the right. The archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, did not like some of the things I was saying on the air. His criticism was shared by other conservatives. Even the vice-president of the ad agency that handled the shaving-cream company account began to hint that I was “too liberal.” He himself was rising in Connecticut Republican party circles."
"On the following Sunday, March 23, I said at the end of my talk: “Next Sunday I will make my last broadcast on this program. I have been informed by the sponsor and by the Columbia Broadcasting System of that decision.” After much wrangling over the phone, Ed had finally approved that statement. At first he had tried to make me agree not to say a word about disappearing from CBS on Sunday afternoons. I had insisted on at least mentioning it.
"I had scarcely signed off with those words at 6 P.M. that Sunday afternoon when the storm broke."
Calls poured in and protests went on, by audiences and by fellow authors et al.
"Dorothy Parker, whom I did not at that time know personally, but whose caustic wit in her short stories and reviews I had long admired, certainly outdid herself. Her telegram of protest was signed by several dozen well-known writers and actors, including Gregory Peck, John Gunther, Vincent Sheean, Lewis Gannett, Ring Lardner, Arthur Miller, Edward G. Robinson, Judy Holliday, José Ferrer, and Margaret Webster.
"They were joined in separate protests by a number of others. Robert E. Sherwood, playwright and confidant of President Roosevelt, wired Paley that it would be “a tragedy if CBS lost the broadcasts of William L. Shirer.” Archibald MacLeish, the poet, also a confidant of Roosevelt and a personal friend of Murrow, wired Ed that the action of CBS “will be interpreted… everywhere as another retreat by the networks before the pressure of advertisers.” He was sure, he told Murrow, “that you have done everything possible to prevent [such] an action.” He couldn’t have been more wrong.
"Ralph Ingersoll, former editor of P.M. and of some of the Luce magazines, and also a friend of Ed, was more skeptical with his old friend. He wrote him:
"Dear Ed: I’ve just read the shocking news of Bill Shirer’s being dropped by Columbia and I want to tell you how appalled I am. What have they done to you since you came back from England, that you aren’t out in front fighting for him?"
Shirer was informed by the sponsor that the company preferred to hire him back, in face of the backlash. But Bill Paley at CBS informed him to the contrary, when Shirer called him.
" ... Elmo Roper could not believe it. But I was beginning to. I was beginning to see that Paley could not forgive me for having crossed him. You did not do that to the chairman of the board of a big corporation. For a day or two perhaps he had hesitated until he saw whether Murrow would be loyal to him and the company or to an old friend. Now that Ed had made it clear where he stood, Paley did not hesitate. He would show me the cost of insubordination.
"And he would put out of his mind, as the imperious Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune had done fifteen years before, as all the great American tycoons did, any thought of the services one had rendered the company over the years, the risks a foreign correspondent had taken to get the news, to cover the war, the lack of normal personal and family life, the long hours of toil seven days a week, week after week, month after month, the prestige one had brought the organization by one’s work, the loyalty and devotion one had showed it. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d been through it all before with Colonel McCormick, as had so many of my colleagues with their respective press lords. Bill Paley was just another one of the breed. With Ed Murrow, of course, it was different. I was still baffled by his behavior."
" ... Several radio editors and columnists on the metropolitan newspapers quickly exposed the Paley-Murrow hypocrisy. But support from another and unexpected source soon made the network look ridiculous—to the embarrassment of both executives."
"A few days after I was replaced, the press announced that I would be the recipient of what was then radio’s highest honor, the George Foster Peabody Award for “outstanding reporting and interpretation of the news,” at the seventh annual presentation of the awards on April 17 at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York."
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