Free Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley

Sundays). Realizing that his clear voice was a resonant asset, Murrow, who had been studying elocution since college at Washington State in Pullman, majoring in speech, wanted a broadcasting career. Late in 1936 the young executive received permission from Klauber to step behind the microphone and deliver a news broadcast. At the time, the CBS network was not much more sophisticated than struggling KCMO in Kansas City: broadcasts consisted of a few lines for each story, with no original reporting or remote feeds. Murrow was nervous enough to solicit private coaching from Robert Trout, a North Carolinan with a dozen years of experience in radio. Unflappable in the extreme, Trout had taken to radio easily, and he tried to impart the importance of a natural cadence to the budding Murrow.
    Murrow was assigned to Europe by CBS to broadcast cultural events such as Viennese waltzes and German operas. In March 1938, CBS journalist William L. Shirer told Murrow that the expected Anschluss , Hitler’s annexation of Austria, had begun. German troops were pouring over the border. Springing to action, Murrow flew first to Berlin, then chartered a twenty-seven-seat Lufthansa transport at great expense to get to ground zero: Vienna. Taking a streetcar from the airport to downtown Vienna, he described on a shortwave radio the sacking of the Austrian city perched along the Danube River. On March 13, with Cronkite listening in Kansas City, Murrow broadcast his dramatic report from Austria for American listeners’ edification. It was a leap into grown-up reality:
    This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna. It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived. No one seems to know just when he will get here, but most people expect him sometime after ten o’clock tomorrow. . . . I arrived here by air from Warsaw and Berlin only a few hours ago. From the air, Vienna didn’t look much different than it had before, but nevertheless it’s changed . . . they lift the right arm a little higher here than in Berlin and the “Heil Hitler” is said a little more loudly . . .
    Up until that Murrow broadcast, the most illustrious voice Cronkite knew was NBC’s Lowell Thomas, an old boyhood hero. Murrow’s Anschluss report turned Cronkite inside out like a sock. For the first time, Cronkite started listening regularly to CBS News. The whole CBS News “Round-up” crowd—from William L. Shirer in London, to Edgar Ansel Mowrer in Paris, to Pierre Huss in Berlin, to Frank Gervasi in Rome, to the indomitable Robert Trout everywhere—were major discoveries to Cronkite. How did CBS News present real-time history in the making with such dramatic flair? The tumultuous events in Europe were being routed via a shortwave transmitter in Berlin, onward to London, then to New York and straight to the American heartland.
    Generally, radio news in 1936, during the lull between the two wars, was synonymous with such diligent and dapper men as Trout. He happened to be a good newsman, but first he had been a voice. A mesmerizing voice: that was the only thing that radio offered over newspapers at the time. Cronkite had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned print journalism— Houston Press style—for wireless entertainment. At first, talking to the microphone was fun for Cronkite. His star turn each week lay in broadcasting sporting events without seeing them. That was the accepted sleight-of-hand of radio, first learned in Texas bookie joints. Cronkite, fast on his feet, mastered the art of what he called “reconstructed games.”
    During the fall of 1936, Cronkite, broadcasting under the fictional name Walter Wilcox (Cronkite sounded too German), sat in the KCMO studio every Saturday and received via Western Union telegraph a running description of a preselected college football game. Cronkite had to rely on a nimble mind and a tireless imagination to create a fully believable and exciting live broadcast. Listeners were informed at