Egbert Roscoe Murrow was born on this date in 1908. He died in 1965.
A Murrow radio report from a bombing raid over Berlin (he made 25 bombing runs).
The clouds were gone and the sticks of incendiaries from the preceding waves made the place look like a badly laid out city with the streetlights on. The small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet. As Jock hauled the Dog up again, I was thrown to the other side of the cockpit, and there below were more incendiaries, glowing white and then turning red. The cookies—the four-thousand-pound high explosives—were bursting below like great sunflowers gone mad. And then, as we started down again, still held in the lights, I remembered the Dog still had one of those cookies and a whole basket of incendiaries in its belly, and the lights still held us. And I was very frightened.
The above from a fine article earlier this year by Nicholas Lehmann in The New Yorker. This article is excellent background for those who have seen Good Night, And Good Luck. (Quotation actually taken from Bob Edwards’ Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism.)
NPR has some good stuff including clips from World War II and commentary on McCarthy.
And here is the complete text of Murrow’s 1958 speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association featured in the film, Good Night, And Good Luck.