Shirer’s Book

In The Times’ review of William L. Shirer’s volume of memoirs (View, Jan. 17) and in a subsequent feature interview (Feb. 4), the author is guilty of rewriting the history of his departure from CBS News while maligning his friend, Edward R. Murrow.

Shirer says he was relieved of his program of news analysis because views he voiced were thought to be too liberal and displeasing to his sponsor and that Murrow, then vice president of news and public affairs for the network, refused to defend him to CBS management. Shirer told his interviewer that he was unable to obtain work elsewhere in broadcasting because of a reputation as a leftist and was thus an early victim of McCarthyism.

The fact that his departure from CBS predated the rise to power of the red-hunting senator from Wisconsin disposes of Shirer’s claim to martyrdom quite aside from his innocence of being tainted by red-oriented commentary. It’s largely forgotten now but in those days CBS News did not include commentary in its policy requirements. News analysis, as it was called, forbade the expression of opinion by its news broadcasters.

Shirer’s version of his break with the company portrays Murrow as a sellout heavy who did the corporation’s dirty work in ridding it of an alleged fellow-traveler. The truth is something else.

Like many of those reporters who were launched on broadcasting careers by the outbreak of World War II, Shirer was a print journalist who had to accommodate to the requirements of telling his story to a microphone. His broadcasting skills, voice quality and delivery, which always were marginal, had made him dull beyond survival once the high drama of what he was reporting or analyzing was scaled down by peace-time subject matter.

In my own role at CBS in those years I had to listen to an unending stream of complaints from the sales department about the declining quality of the ratings in Shirer’s time period.

So it is sad beyond expression that he’s never been able to believe that he found no takers after CBS--not because of his views, but because he could no longer command a broadcast audience large enough for the requirements of broadcast commerce. That’s bitter medicine for anyone--and Shirer was not the first nor the last to swallow it. But to build an ego-sustaining version of what happened at the expense of seeking to throw discredit on the reputation of as old and close a friend as Murrow was to Shirer is sadder still.

Your book reviewer appeared to think that Shirer had disclosed the feet of clay which underpinned Murrow’s reputation, which he described as “mythic” among broadcast news people. Murrow’s reputation needs no burnishing; it was and remains well-founded in his integrity and loyalty to those who worked for and with him.

Shirer’s misfortune was far more serious in our commercial society than being thought a “lefty.” He had become unmarketable. A number of others in his craft subsequently discovered to be politically tainted were saved or rehabilitated. Those whose commercial value was ended were not.

J.F. BECK

Encino