Such thrilling hellos are gone forever, along with pioneer broadcasters like William L. Shirer, who died last week at 89 in Boston of heart complications. Shirer, along with Edward R. Murrow, was one of the first intrepid reporters whose eyes witnessed and whose voices transmitted the gigantic events of the century. Those voices, crackling through the radio, freeze-framed history for the mind’s eve. That broadcast from Compiegne, France, on June 22, 1940, was, Shirer said, “the greatest scoop of my journalistic life.” Hitler had ordered all reporters back to Berlin, but Shirer managed to get to the site of the French surrender and beat the world by several hours with the news.
But Shirer was more than scoops. He was a superb journalist, an unfoolable observer; he knew the languages and bad a common sense that shredded the emperor’s clothes. Shirer was a self-styled “Jeffersonian” from Chicago who became a crusading student editor at Iowa’s Coe College and worked his way to Europe in 1925 on a cattle boat, arriving in the Paris of Hemingway and Joyce in an attempt, he said, to get away from “Prohibition, fundamentalism, puritanism, Coolidgeism. Babbittry, ballyhoo…”
Shirer became a foreign correspondent for American papers, covering sports, Lindbergh’s landing in Paris, the rise of Gandhi in India, along the way losing an eye in a skiing accident. In 1937 Shirer was recruited by Murrow to work for CBS. His longtime friend, biographer William Manchester, says: “Bill couldn’t get a news job on TV today. He wasn’t handsome. He couldn’t even get a job on radio today; his voice was thin and high-pitched. All be had was the information, and it was solid because he got it himself.”
Shirer covered Hitler’s truncated “Thousand-Year Reich,” years vividly recaptured in the journalist’s 1941 “Berlin Diary.” While Morrow described the London blitz in memorable broadcasts, Shirer did the same for the Allied bombing of Berlin, battling German censorship and such trickery as making him use a “lip microphone” that wouldn’t pick up the sound of falling bombs. In 1947 he was forced out at CBS, for what he claimed in his 1990 memoir “A Native’s Return” were a sponsor’s complaints about his liberal views. Murrow’s role in his firing embittered Shirer, who wrote: “What had they done to Ed Murrow up on the nineteenth floor amid nineteen vice presidents?” Listed as a communist sympathizer by the infamous publication Red Channels, Shirer couldn’t get a broadcasting job. Ironically, this gave him time to write “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” which since its appearance in 1960 has sold 20 million copies worldwide.
The book’s success shocked publishers who had turned it down and nettled academics who scorned its “journalistic” history. But it remains the most accessible account of the Hitler era, powerfully narrated, totally authoritative. “I consider myself a journalist; I don’t think of myself as a historian,” said Shirer. He was too modest. In our age of ubiquitous TV, we nonetheless argue over the evidence of our eves. Shirer was an unimpeachable witness. He told us, sharply and clearly, what he saw, and he saw the truth.
