This Legendary Radio Broadcaster Brought the Nazi Blitz Into American Homes
As war clouds gathered in the 1930s, a new kind of journalist—the radio broadcaster—began transmitting, and taking the lead was Edward R. Murrow.
Here's What You Need to Know: Murrow used every trick he could think of to bring the war into American living rooms.
On the evening of August 7, 1937, two neophyte radio broadcasters went to dinner together at the luxurious Adlon Hotel in Berlin, Germany. Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer had never met before that night. Murrow, newly arrived in London as the European director for the Columbia Broadcasting System, was looking for an experienced reporter to cover the growing unrest on the Continent sparked by the bristling reemergence of Germany as a military power. In the unprepossessing, Chicago-born Shirer, Murrow had found just the man he was looking for, although other CBS executives did not know it at the time.