Radio prototype: Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly's Hear It Now.

MacArthur's Dismissal. If the Korean War was the biggest story of its time, the firing of the man who had directed the war was a close second. President Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of his duties on April 11, 1951. Hear It Now dedicated more than half of that week's program to the "supercharged atmosphere of pressure and conflict" in Washington and the outrage among Republicans and much of the nation's press. Murrow observed that all the "heat and passion appear to have caused some to forget that the war also goes on," adding, "If we are to do our duty over the long haul, we may need more stability and less hysteria and blind partisanship than we have displayed during the past three days" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951m).

MacArthur delivered his famous speech to Congress the following week. Again, Hear It Now spent the majority of its airtime on the general. Murrow said MacArthur was to "Congress and the nation a symbol of their own dissidence and disunity" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951n). The week after that, Murrow reported that "invective and accusations [still] ran heavy" even though the nation confronted "decisions as important as any we have ever had to face" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951o).

Hear It Now responded with what Murrow described as an attempt "to present the issues in this very serious debate": a long, sober overview of Truman and MacArthur's contrasting positions regarding Korea and the Far East (Murrow & Friendly, 1951q). Meanwhile, Congressional testimony highlighted the substantial concerns about MacArthur's views. By the end of May, Hear It Now noted that interest in MacArthur seemed to be waning, and partisan passions were displaced into the annual Congressional baseball game (Murrow & Friendly, 1951q, r, s).

The "Great Debate" over Europe. The MacArthur controversy in many ways paralleled what was termed the "Great Debate" over committing U.S. forces to Europe under Dwight Eisenhower's command (Murrow & Friendly, 1951g). President Truman asserted he had the authority to make that commitment; Republicans said he required Congressional approval. The debate also pitted isolationist Republicans such as Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft against the party's internationalists such as Thomas Dewey.

Hear It Now devoted substantial coverage to the controversy, and again Murrow lamented the angry divisions that had resulted. "No one can say how much damage the months of debate and confusion have caused in Europe among our allies, 3,000 miles nearer the threat of Russia," he said after the Senate finally reached a compromise (Murrow & Friendly, 1951l). He had been an internationalist from at least the time he covered the London Blitz (Seib, 2006), but he muted those sympathies on Hear It Now.

The closest thing to an exception came in Murrow's comments upon the death of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a onetime Republican isolationist who had become an eloquent advocate of a bipartisan, internationalist foreign policy. Vandenberg died at the peak of the MacArthur firestorm. "We are now divided--bitterly, hysterically," said Murrow. Vandenberg, however, "would have gloried in this controversy, and he would have steadied it," confident that "the little men of loud voice and small faith, those who consult partisan rather than national destiny, will yield to the collective changing judgment of the American people" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951n).

The Nuclear Age and the Cold War. Foreign policy debates played out against the specter of nuclear warfare. Hear It Now reported on atom bomb tests in Nevada (Murrow & Friendly, 1951e, f) and on a new bomber, the B-36, that could drop the bomb if necessary. The program recorded a B-36 crew's exultation upon successfully completing an arduous practice mission. The following week, Murrow somberly announced that most of the crew had been killed during a follow-up exercise (Murrow & Friendly, 1951o, p).

Hear It Now also reported on unmanned weaponry. In what was billed as "one of the most unusual recordings ever broadcast," the program aired a V-2 rocket test. The rocket's radio signal rose in pitch as the V-2 ascended into space, and then dropped as the rocket decelerated and plummeted back to earth (Murrow and Friendly, 1951s). Two weeks later, the program featured sounds of another test. "We believe you are listening to the prototype of a deadly weapon ... the most modern military music," said Murrow. The eerie electronic drone of the weapon's sensors was heard as Murrow described it creating "its own type of glorious crescendo ... and perhaps producing as its supreme triumph in its explosion the agonized cry of the hurt human being." The drone then broke up into static before abruptly ending in silence (Murrow & Friendly, 1951u).

Despite that story's ominous tone, Murrow was no Cold War pacifist, which the future head of the United States Information Agency made clear in a Hear It Now report on the Voice of America. Murrow said more "boldness and imagination" was needed to counter the "ridiculous lies" of Soviet propaganda and win the fight "to capture, or rather to liberate, men's minds." Otherwise there was "the prospect of inevitable collision, with all its consequences" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951g).

McCarthyism. Eventually, Murrow himself would collide with a senator accusing him of having "consciously served the communist cause" (Sperber, 1986, p. 447). The impending confrontation with Joseph McCarthy was foreshadowed on Hear It Now. The series premiere reported on subversion charges aimed at Anna Rosenberg, in line for a top Pentagon post. Her successful defense prompted Murrow to say "the character assassin had missed" (Murrow & Friendly, 1950a). The following week, Don Hollenbeck in his next-to-last appearance on the series reported on a physical altercation between McCarthy and columnist Drew Pearson. Hollenbeck later fell victim to redbaiting and suicide, but here he only observed mildly that the McCarthy-Pearson brawl had done little to address the nation's problems (Murrow & Friendly, 1950b).

As for McCarthy himself, he was heard excoriating the "crimson, motley crowd that has been selling our nation out all over the world to international communism" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951g). He called the MacArthur firing "high treason" and the Democrats "the party of betrayal" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951m), adding that the Truman administration was "preparing for another planned Pearl Harbor" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951q). Finally, he launched a highly publicized attack on defense secretary George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan and symbol of the bipartisan internationalism of the prior decade. That prompted a Murrow response the next day on Hear It Now.

"In Washington, the cause of truth and free men who will not be divided was being served on the floor of the Senate by Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin," Murrow began. "It wasn't until late Thursday afternoon that Senator McCarthy's colleagues gave him the floor and heard his expose." Excerpts of McCarthy's Senate speech followed: Marshall was Stalin's stooge, was to blame for Yalta and China and Korea, and so forth. "These are merely a few of the highlights from Senator McCarthy's 60,000 word story of George Catlett Marshall," Murrow continued. "Compiled, as he calls it, from the pens and lips of sources friendly to [Marshall]. There is much more that these sources have written and spoken that is not in the record compiled by the senator from Wisconsin."

Then, "to keep the record straight," Murrow quoted effusive praise for Marshall from Winston Churchill among several others before concluding:

It is the same George Catlett Marshall of whom the great Republican

statesman, the late Henry L. Stimson, said, ... "The destiny of

America at the most critical time of its national existence has

been in the hands of a great and good citizen. Let no man forget

it." Great and good citizen--or arch-conspirator--Secretary of

Defense Marshall is still in harness as a servant of his

government. (Murrow & Friendly, 1951v)

Murrow's comments on Marshall aired on June 15, 1951. That same broadcast, Murrow announced that Hear It Now was going on summer hiatus. Before ending (for the only time during the series) with his signature, "Good night, and good luck," he promised that they would return "fortified by travel, research, and study" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951v). In fact, arrangements already were being made for Hear It Now's demise.

Transition to Television

In a June 20 memo, CBS program director Hubbell Robinson wrote to William Paley and Frank Stanton that he had been "discussing the termination of Hear It Now" with Murrow and Friendly, who had told him that "they wanted to spend the next six weeks studying and researching the best way to handle television news" (Robinson, 1951, p. 318). Robinson attached a note that Friendly had sent him the previous day. "Ed and I have begun spending many long hours on TV," wrote Friendly:

The more we talk the more convinced I am that television news can

never be just a translation of radio news into a medium of

pictures. I think we must concern ourselves with an entirely new

concept.... I think we are in the position newspapers were in before

there were newspapers. I think we are where radio was before there

were radio programs. We cannot merely copy or translate. We have to

create. With a medium to challenge the imagination, it is time we

started to stagger it. (Friendly, 1951, p. 318)