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Murrow,  Edward Roscoe  [Ed; Egbert Roscoe]  (1908-1965), radio and television broadcaster, was born on 25 April 1908 at Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, the youngest of the four sons (one of whom died in infancy) of Roscoe C. Murrow (c.1879-1955), farmer, and his wife, Ethel (1876-1961), schoolteacher, daughter of George Van Buren Lamb, farmer. His parents were both Quakers. In 1913 the family moved west to Blanchard, Washington, where his father worked as an engine driver for a timber company. Murrow was educated at Edison High School, and in 1926, after a year working as a compassman on a survey gang in the timber camps of the Olympic peninsula, he enrolled at Washington State College, Pullman. It was at this time that he became Edward, and shortened his name to Ed. At college he took a course in radio broadcasting, the first such course in the United States, and graduated in 1930 with a BA in speech.

In 1930 Murrow was elected president of the National Student Federation of America, based in New York city. From 1932 to 1935 he was assistant director of the Institute of International Education, and through this he became assistant secretary to the emergency committee in aid of displaced German scholars, formed in 1933 to place exiled German professors in American universities. On 27 October 1934 he married Janet Huntington Brewster (b. 1910), daughter of Charles Huntington Brewster, car dealer, of Middletown, Connecticut: they had one son. She was a cousin of Kingman Brewster, later president of Yale University and American ambassador in London from 1977 to 1981.

Murrow joined Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1935 as director of talks and education, and in 1937 was appointed European director, based in London. At first he had no staff, but as war approached he built up a team of reporters. In Warsaw at the time of the Anschluss, he chartered a plane and flew to Vienna, where he made his first broadcast on 13 March 1938, the day before Hitler entered the city. After war was declared, Murrow and the other American correspondents in London were given every facility by the BBC: the American liaison unit helped to arrange visits to enable them to see as much as possible of the British war effort, as the government realized the propaganda value of these broadcasts in influencing American public opinion. Murrow remained in London throughout the blitz, and managed to get permission from the Air Ministry to send live reports from rooftops during air raids, refusing to go into an air-raid shelter except as a reporter. In his daily broadcasts to America, which always began 'This is London', he described in detail, in a calm, deliberate style, what he saw happening in London, against a background of air-raid sirens and falling bombs. He saw his role as that of a reporter, not a commentator, but the effect was to bring the reality of war and the extent of British suffering to the American public, and to help the British cause in the United States. At a dinner in honour of Murrow in New York in December 1941, the poet Archibald MacLeish said:

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead-were all men's dead-were mankind's dead-and ours. (Friendly, xvi)
He flew on over twenty-five bombing missions: many thought his best report was from the plane 'D-for-Dog', returning from a bombing raid on Berlin on 3 December 1943. He was the first allied war correspondent at Buchenwald, reporting on its liberation on 15 April 1945. Many of his broadcasts to America were repeated by the BBC, and he also appeared on BBC programmes: he was a frequent panellist on Freedom Forum, and he introduced Meet Uncle Sam in 1941. A close associate of the prime minister, Winston Churchill, and a frequent visitor to Chartwell, Murrow greatly admired Britain for maintaining parliamentary democracy throughout the war. In his last broadcast before leaving London he said,

I am persuaded that the most important thing that happened in Britain was that this nation chose to win or lose this war under the established rules of parliamentary procedure ... I have been privileged to see an entire people give the reply to tyranny that their history demanded of them. (10 March 1946)

Murrow returned to New York in 1946 as vice-president and director of public affairs at CBS, but he hated administration, and returned to radio broadcasting in 1947, when he was also appointed to the CBS board of directors. For the next twelve years he delivered a nightly radio news broadcast. With Fred Friendly, later president of CBS News, he established the CBS documentary unit, and launched the radio documentary series Hear it now in 1948, which became the television series See it now in 1951. In See it now Murrow tackled the most controversial and important subjects of the day. His programmes on McCarthyism, including an attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy himself on 9 March 1954, helped to discredit McCarthy, who was condemned by the senate in 1955. He interviewed J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist accused of disloyalty, and in 'The lost class of 1959' reported on the closed schools of Norfolk, Virginia. Continuing his wartime tradition of eyewitness reports, he flew on bombing missions during the Korean War, reported in September 1957 from Little Rock, Arkansas, on the desegregation of schools, and flew into the eye of Hurricane Edna with the air weather service. See it now came to be regarded as the most important television show on the air, but it was dropped in 1958, and Murrow, worried by the replacement of serious programmes with popular entertainment during peak viewing hours, took a year's sabbatical in 1959. CBS Reports replaced See it now, but Murrow had less control over the content. One of the last programmes he narrated was Harvest of Shame, put out at Thanksgiving 1960, an expose of the exploitation of migrant farm labourers, described as a 1960 Grapes of Wrath. In a lighter vein, from 1953 to 1959 Murrow presented Person to Person, in which he went into the homes of famous people. During these years he continued to visit Britain and to take part in BBC discussions, and he covered the coronation in 1953 for CBS.

Murrow left CBS in 1961 on his appointment by President Kennedy as director of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in Washington, with a seat on the National Security Council. Kennedy wanted the USIA to play a more active role in promoting a good image of the United States abroad, and Murrow concentrated on improving the Voice of America broadcasts, establishing the principle that all the facts should be broadcast, including those embarrassing to the government, believing that such objectivity could only enhance the prestige and credibility of the Voice of America. He felt that the director should take part in making policy, or at least be informed in advance, but one of his first tasks was to explain the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, an invasion he disapproved of, and had not known about. Murrow was suggested as a possible Democrat senator in 1962, but he collapsed with pneumonia, and in 1963 was operated on for lung cancer. He resigned from the USIA in January 1964.

Murrow was awarded the medal of freedom, the highest American civil honour, in 1964, and was appointed an honorary KBE in March 1965. He died of lung cancer on 27 April 1965 at his home, Glen Arden Farm, Quaker Hill, Pawling, New York.

Anne Pimlott Baker 

Sources  E. Barnouw, A history of broadcasting in the United States, 2: The golden web, 1933 to 1953 (1968) + A. Kendrick, Prime time: the life of Edward R. Murrow (1969) + E. Bliss, ed., In search of light: the broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, 1938-1961 (1968) + DAB + A. M. Sperber, Murrow: his life and times (1987) + J. E. Persico, Edward R. Murrow (1988) + F. W. Friendly, Due to circumstances beyond our control (1967) + BBC WAC + The Times (28 Feb 1965) + New York Times (28 April 1965) + WW
Archives Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Edward R. Murrow Center, papers SOUND BBC Sound Archives
Likenesses  photographs, c.1945-1958, Hult. Arch. · photograph, 1953, repro. in Sperber, Murrow, following p. 588 · C. Beaton, photograph, Sothebys, London, Cecil Beaton archive [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in Bliss, ed., In search of light, facing p. 145