by Lynne Olson
It was, proclaimed the Sunday Times, “an extraordinary triumph.”
* After losing to Winant, Frank Knox went on to become owner and publisher of the Chicago Daily News and secretary of the navy under Franklin Roosevelt.
WHEN GIL WINANT ARRIVED AT THE U.S. EMBASSY IN LONDON, he was intrigued to discover that the house once occupied by John Adams, America’s first envoy to Britain, was just steps away from his office. Both the embassy and the Adams house were on Grosvenor Square, one of the capital’s most fashionable addresses since Sir Richard Grosvenor laid it out in the early eighteenth century. From the time of its creation, one contemporary writer remarked, the spacious, tree-lined acreage was “the most magnificent square in the whole Town.”
The house leased by John and Abigail Adams from 1785 to 1788 was among several dozen Georgian residences lining the square, which had in its center a gilded statue of George I, surrounded by formal gardens and gravel paths. It was a lovely, gracious place in which to live—if one didn’t happen to be the first U.S. emissary to an England still smarting from the loss of its rebellious American colonies.
Like many of their countrymen, the Adamses’ aristocratic neighbors (one of whom was Lord North, England’s prime minister during the Revolutionary War) treated the American couple with haughty disdain. “An ambassador from America!” sniffed the Public Advertiser, a London newspaper. “Good heavens, what a sound!” Few in English official circles expected the upstart nation to survive, but, for as long as it did, they would do their best to ignore its representative. Of the English, Adams wrote to a friend back home: “They hate us.” Abigail, meanwhile, complained about the Britons’ “studied civility and disguised coldness,” which, she said, “cover malignant hearts.” She wrote to her sister in 1785: “I shall never have much society with this kind of people, for they would not like me any more than I do them.” Three years later, when Congress approved Adams’s request to leave London, Abigail was overjoyed. “Some years hence,” she wrote, “it may be pleasing to reside here in the character of the American Minister, but with the … present temper of the English no one need envy the Embassy.”
As later U.S. representatives would find, Britons’ patronizing attitude toward their American cousins showed little sign of abating. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who served as U.S. consul in Liverpool in the mid-1850s, wrote: “These people think so loftily of themselves, and so contemptuously of everybody else, that it requires more generosity than I possess to keep always in perfectly good humor with them.” Some thirty years later, the noted editor James Russell Lowell, the latest of Adams’s successors at the Court of St. James, was similarly exasperated: “The only sure way of bringing about a healthy relation between the two countries is for Englishmen to clear their minds of the notion that we are always to be treated as a kind of inferior and deported Englishman.”
By 1941, however, the situation was far different. The British now needed America too much to indulge in public displays of condescension. If Abigail Adams could have made a ghostly visit to Grosvenor Square, she likely would have been as astonished by the U.S. ambassador’s new status as by alterations in the square itself.
Although Grosvenor Square was still a sought-after address, many of its stately old houses had been torn down and replaced in the 1930s by blocks of luxury neo-Georgian apartment and office buildings, one of which was now occupied by the U.S. embassy. No. 9 Grosvenor Square, where the Adamses had lived, was among the few eighteenth-century houses still standing. The war had brought still more changes. German bombs had obliterated several of the buildings on the square; in its dusty center, service vehicles and low wooden huts had taken the place of lawns and a tennis court. The huts were occupied by members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), whose job was to tend a barrage balloon, fondly nicknamed “Romeo,” that floated overhead.
The contrast between the British treatment of John Adams and that of Gil Winant was equally dramatic. No longer a scorned parvenu, the United States was now crucial to Britain’s continued existence as a free country, and its envoy was not only welcomed but actively wooed by the British monarch, government leaders, and the press. When Winant held his first news conference at the embassy shortly after his arrival, so many journalists clamored to attend that he was forced to hold two separate sessions—one for British and European reporters, the other for American correspondents.
Although the new ambassador received considerably better treatment from the British than John Adams, he was reminiscent of the first U.S. envoy in other ways. A description of Adams by his friend Jonathan Sewell could easily have applied to Winant as well: “He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and small talk and flirt with the ladies; in short, he has none of the essential arts or ornaments which constitute a courtier.”
Winant was his usual shy self at both meetings with the press, his hands fidgeting, his voice soft and hesitant, his words “coming so slowly,” in the words of one British reporter, “that shorthand is unnecessary.” With dozens of flashbulbs exploding in his face, he paced restlessly around his office as journalists fired their questions. He told them he had little to say, but that after he had settled in, he would meet them again and have a further talk. Such taciturnity normally would have raised the hackles of the hard-boiled scribblers of Fleet Street. Yet, once again, Winant was a hit. “EXCELLENT IMPRESSION MADE BY WINANT IN LONDON,” read a headline in the Washington Evening Star the following day. “In the first five minutes of the conference,” noted the News Chronicle, “it was obvious that he had won the sympathy of correspondents from all over Britain and the Empire by his charm and diffidence and obvious sincerity and honesty.”
Reporters also emphasized the differences between Winant and his gregarious, outspoken predecessor, Joseph Kennedy, who had hired a former New York Times correspondent to handle public relations for him in London and who had assiduously courted the American and British press corps. “His political views aside, Mr. Kennedy was a favorite among newspapermen,” Bill Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News wrote after Winant’s session with American reporters. “But it was generally agreed, by those who had not met Mr. Winant before, that his very soft spokenness would be an asset here.”
No one was more convinced of that than a tall, lean broadcast correspondent sitting in the back of Winant’s office during the press conference.
Joseph Kennedy, to put it mildly, had never been a favorite of Edward R. Murrow’s. For the past several months, the head of CBS’s European operations had lobbied Washington to replace Kennedy, whom he loathed, with Winant, a man he greatly admired.
BY 1941, ED MURROW had become the best-known American in London, the journalist who, according to Scribner’s magazine, “has more influence upon America’s reaction to foreign news than a shipful of newspapermen.” He and the men he had hired as CBS correspondents were now the chief sources of European news for many if not most of their countrymen.
Yet four years earlier, when Murrow had tried to join the American Foreign Correspondents’ Association in the British capital, that august organization had turned down his application. The reason for the rejection was unassailable: Murrow had not one day of journalistic experience to his credit when he first arrived in London in 1937. As CBS’s European director of talks, he had been sent over as a sort of booking agent, a functionary whose job was to arrange broadcasts of various kinds, from debates at the League of Nations to concerts by boys’ choirs in Vienna and Prague. At that point, neither CBS nor NBC, the other major U.S. radio network, had any reporters of their own to crisscross the globe and broadcast to listeners back home.
Murrow, however, set out to change that. As the threat of war increased, he convinced William Paley, the chairman of CBS, to let him hire his own band of correspondents, who came to be known in later years as the Murrow Boys. When Germany began its relentless aerial assault on London in September 1940, it was the event Murrow had been preparing for since he arrived in Eur
ope. The Blitz was perfect for radio: it had immediacy, human drama, and, above all, sound—the wail of sirens, the scream of bombs, the crash and thunder of antiaircraft guns. No other news medium could bring home to Americans the reality of the attack in such a powerful way.
Listening to Murrow’s broadcasts, with their famed “This is London” opening, became a national habit in the United States. Working eighteen hours a day, subsisting largely on coffee and cigarettes, Murrow emerged as the Boswell of wartime London, describing in little gems of detail how people struggled to live their lives, even as their city and world threatened to shatter around them. “You are the best reporter in all of Europe,” Nelson Poynter, the editor and publisher of the St. Petersburg Times, wrote to Murrow. “I say this because you do as comprehensive a job as the best of them, and in addition have given to listeners the homey little facts that make this God-awful nightmare real.”
In his reporting, Murrow also earned his listeners’ trust. If he implied, as he did more and more often, that England couldn’t go it alone, that America would have to join the fight, well, maybe he was right, many in his audience thought. Hundreds of Americans wrote him to say his broadcasts had taken them from neutral detachment to support for the British. In September 1940, a Gallup poll reported that 39 percent of Americans favored providing more U.S. aid to Britain. One month later, as bombs fell on London, and Murrow brought the reality of it into American living rooms, 54 percent thought more aid should be sent.
In 1941, the Overseas Press Club in New York named Murrow the best broadcast journalist of the previous year. At the age of thirty-two, he had become a bona fide celebrity. Newspaper and magazine stories were written about him, and his broadcasts were printed as newspaper columns in the United States. “You are the No. 1 man on the air,” his CBS colleague William Shirer wrote him from New York. “No one here touches you or has your following.”
Murrow now was the man to see in London, the person whom official visitors from Washington sought out for information and guidance about the British government and people. Among those who called on him was Harry Hopkins, the president’s closest adviser, who invited Murrow to dinner a few hours after arriving on a special mission for Roosevelt in January 1941. Hopkins had come to London, he told Murrow, to serve as “a catalytic agent between two prima donnas. I want to try to get an understanding of Churchill and of the men he sees after midnight.”
Murrow could tell Hopkins what he needed to know because of his intimate access to Churchill and other top officials in the British government. Well aware of the importance of the CBS broadcaster and other influential American journalists to the British cause, the prime minister had been diligent in cultivating them since his accession to power. The Americans, one British reporter said with a tinge of envy, were “treated as tin gods because they were so useful.” When British officials turned down Murrow’s request to broadcast live during the Blitz, the matter was referred to Churchill, who immediately approved the idea. Anything that might help persuade America to come to the aid of Britain had the prime minister’s blessing.
In late 1940, Murrow and Churchill began to see each other on a more personal level after their wives became friends while working on Bundles for Britain, an American-sponsored program to collect clothing and other supplies for British citizens bombed out of their homes. Ed and Janet Murrow were frequent guests at 10 Downing Street; once, when Murrow dropped by to pick up his wife after a luncheon with Clementine Churchill, the prime minister emerged from his study and waved him inside. “Good to see you,” Churchill boomed. “Have you time for several whiskies?”
Like many of his American colleagues in London, Murrow’s sympathies were entirely with the British. His country’s neutrality, which his CBS bosses supported, was an unworkable policy, he felt, one that failed to take into account the astounding moral inequality between Nazi Germany and the Allies. While covering the German takeover of Austria in 1938, Murrow had observed Nazi thugs burning down Jewish-owned shops, forcing rabbis to their knees to scrub sidewalks, and kicking Jews unconscious. One night, as he was having a drink in a Vienna bar, a man with Semitic features standing near him suddenly pulled a razor from his pocket and slashed his throat. When Murrow returned to London, he found himself unable to rid his mind of the brutalities he had seen. He asked a friend from the BBC if she would let him talk to her about what had happened. Years later, she said: “I still have a picture in my mind of the horror of the scene—and the agony with which he told it.” According to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a friend of Murrow’s, “Ed seemed devastated by the Anschluss experience.”
Obsessed by the danger that Germany posed to the world and convinced of the importance of Britain’s survival, Murrow did little to disguise his disdain for Joseph Kennedy and his pro-appeasement stand. While he never directly criticized Kennedy in his reports, he once broadcast, with great gusto, excerpts from a magazine column by Harold Nicolson, an anti-appeasement member of Parliament, that savaged the ambassador. So strongly did Murrow feel about Kennedy that shortly after the war, he chastised a friend for visiting the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach. Staying with the former ambassador, he said, was like paying a visit to Hermann Göring, Hitler’s deputy. Murrow was convinced that “the British somehow would come through this,” recalled Eric Sevareid, one of the Murrow Boys. “And he was furious with people who took the defeatist line, even in private conversations.”
When Murrow discovered in late 1940 that Kennedy was returning to the United States, he immediately began pressing his acquaintances in the Roosevelt administration to intercede on behalf of Gil Winant as Kennedy’s successor. Despite a twenty-year age difference, Murrow and Winant had been friends since the early 1930s, during the former governor’s ILO tenure in Geneva. “Ed had enormous regard for [Winant],” recalled a friend of both. The two men, said another mutual acquaintance, had much in common—“both rather inward-looking, both absolutely dedicated, very much on the same wave length.” With a strong social conscience of his own, Murrow, like Winant, “expected individuals and their government to live up to high moral standards,” Sevareid said in the 1960s. “He believed in a foreign policy based on moral principles, which few people really believe in anymore.”
Although he greatly admired Roosevelt, Murrow was increasingly impatient with America’s hesitancy in coming to the aid of Britain. In Winant he saw mirrored his own sense of urgency and passionate commitment to ideals—qualities that he longed to see in the president and other U.S. political leaders. “I hope that life goes well for you in America, and that your nostrils are not assailed by the odor of death … that permeates the atmosphere over here,” he wrote to one friend back home. To another, he remarked: “If the light of the world is to come from the West, somebody had better start lighting some bonfires.”
Of Murrow, a British friend recalled: “He was concerned, very concerned, that his own country wasn’t aware of the facts of life. And that if Hitler & Co. were not stopped here, the next stop was Manhattan.”
WHILE ED MURROW and Gil Winant were alike in many ways, their backgrounds were vastly different. Murrow’s father had been an impoverished dirt farmer in Polecat Creek, North Carolina, who moved his wife and four sons to Washington State when Ed was five, to find work in logging camps. The family did not have indoor plumbing until Murrow was fourteen and didn’t have a phone during the entire time he lived at home.
Idealistic and at the same time intensely ambitious, Murrow was a critic of unearned privilege who strongly believed that journalists should be champions of the underdog. Yet he also yearned for admission to the clubs and salons of upper-class America and England. In London, he took to wearing Savile Row pinstripes, one of the methods he used to erase the vestiges of his hardscrabble origins. Eric Sevareid never forgot his first glimpse of Murrow—”a young American in a beautifully fitting suit and hard collar chatting easily on the phone with Lady so-and-so. His ease, the cultivation in his voice … was difficult for me
to believe.”
But the farther Murrow traveled from his impoverished, rural roots, the more guilt he seemed to feel for doing so. He told friends in London that he sometimes wished he had stayed home in Washington State and continued working as a lumberjack, his summer job while in high school and college. Murrow used to say that “there was a satisfaction about that life” and that “he had never known that kind of satisfaction since,” one friend remembered.
A voracious reader, Murrow attended Washington State College, where he majored in speech, joined the most prestigious fraternity on campus, and was elected president of the student government. After his graduation in 1930, he served as president of the National Student Federation of America, a group representing the student governments of some four hundred American colleges and universities. He later worked for the Institute of International Education, primarily as an organizer of student exchanges and conferences in the United States and Europe. In his frequent overseas travels, Murrow made a number of important new friends and contacts, including the prominent English socialist Harold Laski, who was also a close friend of Gil Winant’s. In 1933, through his work at the institute, Murrow became involved in helping eminent German scholars and scientists, among them Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and Hans J. Morgenthau, emigrate to America from Nazi Germany. That experience, he later said, was “the most richly rewarding of anything I have ever undertaken.”
The following year, at the age of twenty-six, he married Janet Brewster, a pretty, dark-haired Mount Holyoke graduate from Connecticut, whose family roots could be traced back to the Mayflower. Quiet and reserved on the surface, Janet had a love of adventure, a wry sense of humor, and a mind of her own; in college, she rejected the conservative Republicanism of her parents and became a committed New Deal Democrat. Before she met Murrow, her ambition had been to move to New York and become a social worker.