Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  In 1935, CBS hired Murrow as its director of talks. Two years later, he was dispatched to London, to oversee CBS cultural, news, and educational programs from England and the Continent. As Europe lurched toward war, Murrow operated a frantic one-man show, traveling to European capitals to arrange debates, talks by international figures, and commentaries by well-known foreign correspondents, as well as coverage of events ranging from concerts to dog shows.

  With Hitler about to pounce on Austria, New York agreed in early 1938 to expand the network’s European operation. Murrow hired William Shirer, a veteran foreign correspondent based in Berlin. When the Nazis marched into Vienna in March, Murrow and Shirer saw their chance to establish themselves as radio reporters and to make broadcasting history. Several nights after the Anschluss, the two organized the first news roundup ever broadcast to America, with Murrow reporting from Vienna, Shirer and Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson from London, and various American newspaper correspondents from Paris, Berlin, and Rome. The last report came from Washington, where Senator Lewis Schwellenbach, an isolationist on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declared: “If the rest of the world wants to involve itself in a brawl, that is its business.”

  The roundup was a major success for CBS. Murrow and Shirer had proved that radio was not only able to report news as it occurred but also to put it in context, to link it with news from elsewhere—and to do all that with unprecedented speed and immediacy. They also set in motion a chain of events that would lead, in only one year, to radio’s emergence as America’s chief news medium and to the beginning of CBS’s decades-long dominance of broadcast journalism.

  DURING NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN’S tenure as British prime minister and head of the Conservative Party, Murrow, although never openly critical of the government’s conciliation of Hitler in his broadcasts, frequently reported what Chamberlain’s anti-appeasement opponents were saying about the policy. In turn, Downing Street and much of Whitehall were highly critical of him. “They have made it quite clear that they don’t like some of the things I’ve said lately,” he wrote to his parents in early 1939. “It may be that I shall be thrown out of this country before the war starts. Several people in high places have been giving me fatherly advice about it being in my own interests to do talks favorable to this country.”

  Officials counseled him to take his cue from the British Broadcasting Corporation, the sole source of broadcast news for most of Britain. Although the BBC received government funding and was ultimately answerable to Parliament, it was supposed to have editorial independence. Sir John Reith, its director general, viewed his charter differently, however. “Assuming that the BBC is for the people, and the Government is for the people, it follows that the BBC must be for the government,” Reith declared. Under Reith, the BBC squelched news that Chamberlain found unpalatable and relied almost entirely on official sources for its news broadcasts; it provided no analysis, no context for what was happening, and no alternative points of view. In the aftermath of the Munich crisis, a high-level BBC official wrote a confidential memo to his superiors accusing them of embarking on a “conspiracy of silence.” The public, he charged, had been kept “in ignorance” and denied “essential knowledge” of what was really going on.

  Murrow had no intention of following the BBC’s example. In addition to his own tough reports on Chamberlain’s policies, he invited Winston Churchill and other members of a small band of anti-appeasement Conservative MPs to broadcast to America via CBS. It was the only radio outlet for most of the parliamentary rebels, who had been barred from BBC broadcasts because of their views.

  Most of Chamberlain’s critics in the Conservative Party were members of the public school old-boy network that dominated British society and government, and they welcomed Murrow and his wife into their upper-class circle. Throughout the Murrows’ stay in England, they were frequent guests at elegant Mayfair dinner parties, lunches at exclusive private clubs, and weekend get-togethers at grand country houses. A crack shot, Murrow hunted grouse and pheasant with Lord Cranborne, the future Marquess of Salisbury and scion of one of the most noted aristocratic families in England, at Cranborne’s family estate in Hertfordshire. The boy from Polecat Creek was one of the few non-Britons to call Cranborne, a former undersecretary of foreign affairs who was among the most outspoken opponents of Chamberlain, by his childhood nickname of “Bobbety.”

  He was also included in weekend shooting parties at Ditchley, an eighteenth-century mansion in Oxfordshire and one of England’s most opulent country houses, owned by another of the rebels, Ronald Tree. The grandson of the Chicago department-store magnate Marshall Field, the fantastically wealthy Tree had grown up in England and was elected to Parliament in 1933. His wife, Nancy, was the niece of Nancy Astor, the former Virginia belle who became the first woman to win a seat in the House of Commons.

  Appalled in the abstract by Britain’s rigid class system, Murrow was unapologetic (though sometimes defensive) about his hobnobbing with those in its upper strata. He didn’t judge his friends by their class, he declared; in any event, “these people are valuable to me.” Janet Murrow had a more jaundiced response. The women in those rarefied circles often ignored her, preferring to focus on her handsome, influential husband. “They had a quick way,” she recalled, “of letting you feel that you weren’t particularly useful to them.” A Connecticut Yankee to her core, she also was not fond of what she viewed as the superficiality of the British upper-class lifestyle. After a stay at Ditchley, she wrote in her diary: “It’s a beautiful house—palace—country club—or what have you. But what a lot of trouble people take in their living! Too many people around; too much talk; too much fuss. Why do they do that?”

  IN SEPTEMBER 1939, Britain’s reluctant declaration of war against Germany put an end to much of the frivolity that Janet Murrow found so distasteful. It also turned her life, and the lives of virtually everyone else in the country, topsy-turvy. More than a million people, rich and poor alike, were evacuated from their homes or left voluntarily, marking the largest migration in Britain since the Great Plague of 1665. Houses were shut up, families separated, careers abandoned, schools and businesses closed.

  Ambassador Kennedy advised all Americans in England to leave the country as soon as possible. More than ten thousand U.S. citizens, including his own wife and children, took his advice, departing as fast as ships could carry them—half of them within forty-eight hours of the declaration of war. Long lines of Americans (and more than a few Britons) snaked into the U.S. embassy, seeking help to get out of the country.

  In London the trappings of war were everywhere. Sandbags and barbed wire barricades shielded Parliament, 10 Downing Street, and other government buildings, while barrage balloons, tethered on cables, bobbed high above the city. Soldiers and policemen stood guard at bridges and tunnels, keeping a sharp eye out for saboteurs. Store windows were boarded up or taped with strips of brown paper to prevent shattering after bomb blasts. The garish electric signs of Piccadilly Circus and the lighted marquees of West End theaters were doused by the blackout, and the fountains no longer danced in Trafalgar Square.

  Looming high above posh Portland Place, Broadcasting House, where Murrow made his broadcasts to America, had been particularly well fortified. The BBC headquarters, a giant white wedge of a building a few blocks from Regent’s Park, was considered a prime target for saboteurs and German bombs. Sandbags were piled high around the entrances, and rifle-toting sentries manned the massive bronze front doors, with orders to shoot to kill if necessary. The building’s graceful Art Deco interiors were divided by steel partitions and gas-tight doors, its trompe l’oeil murals covered by heavy soundproofing. The seats of the BBC’s concert hall were ripped out to create a giant employee dormitory, with mattresses lined up on the stage and floor.

  The news division was the only major BBC department to remain at Broadcasting House during the war; the others, including the entertainment division, had been evacuated to buildings in other part
s of London and the country. The heart of BBC news—the central control room, studios, and news room—was relocated to the building’s sub-basement, three stories below the street. Burrowed deep underground, with drainpipes clanking overhead and the smell of cabbage wafting in from the canteen, editors, announcers, writers, and other staffers worked around the clock to produce the latest news reports.

  Murrow and the other American radio journalists broadcast from Studio B-4, a tiny subterranean closet of a room formerly used by the canteen to store its goods. The “studio” was divided by a makeshift curtain. On one side was the broadcasting booth, consisting of a table, microphone, and two chairs; on the other were filing cabinets, clothes tree, desk, and cot, usually occupied by a sleeping reporter, engineer, or censor.

  AS DRAMATIC AS the physical changes of the BBC were, the shifts in its philosophy and style were even more startling. Before September 1939, it was, as one employee remembered, “an agreeable, comfortable, cultured, leisured place, remote from the world of business and struggle.” The man responsible for setting that high-brow, haughty, slightly puritanical tone was Sir John Reith, who, from the network’s inception in 1922, directed its announcers to wear dinner jackets while at the microphone. After delivering a talk over the BBC in 1937, Virginia Woolf described its milieu as “sad and discreet” and “oh so proper, oh so kindly.”

  When he first arrived in London, Murrow, in a meeting with Reith, made clear that he and CBS had no intention of adopting the BBC’s nose-in-the-air attitude. “I want our programs to be anything but intellectual,” he said. “I want them to be down to earth and comprehensible to the man in the street.” With a dismissive wave of his hand, Reith replied: “Then you will drag radio down to the level of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.” Murrow nodded. “Exactly.”

  In early 1940, Reith was named head of the new Ministry of Information; even before his departure, the BBC began a metamorphosis that would make it the most trusted news source in the world by the end of the war. It would also become, as one BBC staffer put it, “Ed’s true spiritual home.”

  A throng of new producers and editors, many of them former print reporters, were hired, bringing a burst of energy and journalistic experience to the newsroom. R. T. Clark, a classics scholar and former editorial writer for the Manchester Guardian, was put in charge of the domestic news service. On the day Britain declared war, Clark, a cigarette dangling from his lips, signaled a seismic shift in the BBC’s news policy when he announced to his staff: “Well, brothers, now that war’s come, your job is to tell the truth. And if you aren’t sure it is the truth, don’t use it.” His statement was cheered not only by the new hires but also by a group of longtime staffers who had been openly critical of the BBC’s manipulation of the news and its refusal to allow critics of the Chamberlain government to broadcast. Many of them were friends of Murrow’s, who stood at the back of the newsroom during Clark’s announcement and added his own applause to the call for truth.

  Like the American radio networks, the prewar BBC had no foreign or domestic correspondents of its own and got most of its news from newspaper and wire service stories. That changed under Clark: on-the-spot reports by BBC journalists became a major feature, along with more interpretation of events and greater liveliness and vigor in its news bulletins. Throughout the war, Clark and other BBC officials fought to maintain the network’s independence, resisting repeated attempts by the government under both Chamberlain and Churchill to use the BBC for propaganda purposes. Early in his premiership, a grumbling Churchill referred to the BBC as “one of the major neutrals;” in response, the BBC declared that the maintenance of national morale, laudable though it was, was no excuse for a “deliberate perversion of the truth.” For the most part, it succeeded in keeping the government at arm’s length. In 1944, the usually cynical George Orwell noted: “The BBC, as far as its news goes, has gained immense prestige…. ‘I heard it on the wireless’ is now almost equivalent to ‘I know it must be true.’ ”

  The BBC’s wartime evolution had a major impact on Murrow, whose own philosophy and style of reporting the news were still evolving. “We were giving in full the bad news, the hellish communiqués,” said one BBC editor, “and this meshed with Ed’s desire to tell the truth even if it was a hard and nasty truth. There was a complete meeting of minds on that.” Even though Murrow was employed by CBS, the BBC was the first real news organization with which he was closely associated. He and his British colleagues were both creating something new; they had the same ideas about truth and independence; as the war progressed, they learned and grew together.

  A key influence on Murrow was Clark, who became a kind of mentor and counselor. After the American’s nightly broadcasts, the two would chat for hours in Clark’s cramped, book-filled underground office, the smoke from their omnipresent cigarettes spiraling to the ceiling. Not infrequently, Murrow would invite Clark and other BBC staffers back to his flat in nearby Hallam Street to continue their discussions over tumblers of American bourbon. In the words of one participant in those early morning bull sessions, “Everyone regarded [Ed] as part of the outfit here, not simply because the BBC gave him the facilities, but because he fitted in…. He was immediately accepted and acceptable. We were very British; he was very American…. But we were traveling the same road. In the halls of Broadcasting House, the name of Ed Murrow is there in gold. He was one of us.”

  NEITHER MURROW NOR the BBC had much major news to report in the first eight months of what at first was a sham conflict, known as the “Bore War” by the British and the “Drôle de Guerre” by their allies, the French. (The neutral Americans called it “Phony”) Britain and France did little but drop millions of propaganda leaflets on enemy territory, impose a naval blockade against Germany, and send a few token patrols across the Maginot Line, France’s vaunted chain of fortifications on the French-German border. This somnolent period abruptly ended in April 1940, when Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark and then, a month later, sent his panzers hurtling through the Low Countries and into France. In June, the French capitulated, and Britain, with barely a tenth of the forces fielded by Germany, was left to face the führer’s juggernaut on its own.

  The soaring, combative rhetoric of Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, inspired his countrymen, but inspiration by itself could hardly ward off a German invasion. “As far as I can see, we are, after years of leisurely preparation, completely unprepared,” Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, wrote in his diary. A government report observed: “Everyone is going around looking as if they want to put their heads into a gas oven.”

  Once again, Ambassador Kennedy advised the Americans who remained in Britain to flee the country, and several thousand more, including a number of journalists, complied. When Janet Murrow’s parents urged her to do the same, she replied with a firm no. “We decided a year ago that the only thing to do was to live dangerously and not run away from things,” she wrote. Later, she added: “It just isn’t possible for me to go off and enjoy myself when the world I have known over here is about to enter upon the darkest period of its history. I hope you understand.”

  Yet, while many Americans departed, others arrived, notably a score or more of U.S. correspondents who had covered the Allied debacle in France and Belgium. Among them were several of America’s most prominent journalistic heavyweights, whose datelines had ranged from Addis Ababa to Prague to Madrid. There was the handsome, hard-drinking Vincent Sheean, whose memoir, Personal History, had been the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Foreign Correspondent, as well as a major influence on a generation of American reporters. Equally colorful (and bibulous) was Quentin Reynolds, the star war correspondent for Collier’s magazine. A genial bear of a man, the 220-pound Reynolds was, in the words of the New York Times, “a man of facile enthusiasms,” whose personality sketches and other feature stories were enormously popular back home.

  The newcomers joined Murrow and several d
ozen other Americans who remained in London after the fall of France to report for U.S. broadcast networks, newspapers, wire services, and news magazines. “Never before, I’m sure, has there been such a concentration of journalists in such a small area,” Janet Murrow wrote to her parents. “Already they’re ready to tear each other’s eyes out!”

  The newly arrived Americans were regarded with a certain distrust and hostility by some of their British counterparts. Harry Watt, a news documentary filmmaker, viewed them as “vultures and jackals of the war, who admitted they were there to report on the fall of Britain. They had been on the spot to see all Europe conquered, so now they had their new headlines ready.” Not even the air battles between the RAF and Luftwaffe, which began in the summer of 1940, satisfied the Americans’ appetite for disaster. Midway through the Battle of Britain, Eric Sevareid of CBS, one of those who had covered the fall of France, joined two colleagues in creating a fake war monument out of a concrete slab, a tomato can, and some wilted poppies. The sign on the slab read: “Here lie three pressmen who died of boredom waiting for the invasion, 1940.”

  Boredom, however, would soon be the least of their problems.

  ON A WARM, drowsy afternoon in early September, Ed Murrow, Vincent Sheean, and Ben Robertson, a correspondent for the New York newspaper PM, stopped at the edge of a field several miles south of London. The three had spent the day driving down the Thames estuary in Murrow’s Talbot Sunbeam roadster, enjoying the sun and looking for dogfights beween Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Their search had been fruitless, and they stopped to buy apples from a farmer. Stretching out on the field to eat them, they drowsily listened to the chirp of crickets and buzzing of bees. The war seemed very far away. Within minutes, however, it returned with a vengeance. Hearing the harsh throb of aircraft engines, the Americans looked up at a sky filled with wave after wave of swastika-emblazoned bombers that clearly were not heading for their targets of previous days—the coastal defenses and RAF bases of southern England. Following the curve of the Thames, they were aimed straight at London.