This Day in TV History (William S. Paley, Broadcast Titan and Philanthropist, Dies)

Oct. 26, 1990— Not merely in declining health but something worse for him—growing irrelevancy—longtime CBS chair, philanthropist and socialite William S. Paley died at age 89 of kidney failure in New York City.

For nearly six decades, this son of a Jewish cigar-maker was the broadcasting equivalent of the 19^th-century robber barons: leveraging an initially small operation into a multi-unit empire, charming when he could get his way easily and ruthless when he couldn’t, then late in life lavishing cultural institutions with sizable donations that burnished his reputation (in his case, money given to the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Broadcasting, renamed the Paley Center for Media in his honor).  

With an assist from his father, Paley assumed control of CBS in 1928. Contrary to the myth he created, he did not initially see the value of the financially ailing radio stations he was buying, but had to be persuaded to make the transaction. Two decades later, the same pattern of coming around reluctantly to a new medium repeated itself when he had to be convinced that TV would not threaten his radio interests but complement them.

In terms of vision, Paley was no match for RCA/NBC archrival David Sarnoff, who as early as 1916 had predicted in a memo that music, news, sports, and even lectures would be someday be broadcast through "radio music boxes." But NBC’s “General” inadequately defended his network against Paley’s 1950 “talent raids” that brought Jack Benny, Amos 'n' Andy, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, and Burns and Allen over to CBS.

Paley built his empire through charisma yet maintained it through caprice. He responded to the passionate advocacy of talented figures but could also leave them so guessing about his intentions that he alienated them. One example was newsman Edward R. Murrow, who became a CBS star with his reports from London early in WWII but left the network over its wavering commitment to the news.

Murrow’s was just case of someone who enjoyed the media mogul’s warm companionship only to see him turn cold. Another such figure was In Cold Blood writer Truman Capote, who would not only enjoy holidays abroad with Paley and his second wife, the glamorous socialite Barbara or “Babe,” but once even had them once transport his beloved bulldog to Europe on their private jet, according to an interview with Kansas FBI agent included in George Plimpton’s 1997 oral biography, Truman Capote.

That all changed in 1975, when the author retailed scandalous gossip about Paley in a notorious Esquire preview of his projected novel Answered Prayers. The CBS head’s claim that he had fallen asleep while reading the article was almost surely false, but it deprived Capote of the attention he craved—and then he followed it up by never having anything to do with the writer again.

Before Capote fell out with his friend, he colorfully put his finger on the acquisitive instinct that dominated Paley from youth to old age: “He looks like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.” An avid modernist art aficionado, Paley collected female conquests as much as he did modernist paintings. He could be generous, even gallant (financially supporting an old love, actress Louise Brooks, when she fell on hard times), but also cold enough to drive another to suicide.

It was Capote’s revelation of another liaison by Paley (thinly fictionalized as “Sidney Dillon,” a “conglomateur, adviser to Presidents”) in a hotel room that precipitated the end of their friendship and darkened the last days of Babe Paley, who was dying of cancer at that point.

Like an aging monarch, Paley was unwilling to relinquish his power and perquisites, successively forcing out a pair of men most felt were being groomed to take the helm from him: Frank Stanton, CBS president for 27 years, then anointed successor Thomas Wyman. But the September 1986 coup against Wyman proved disastrous, as Paley’s ally, Laurence Tisch, subsequently embarked on cost-cutting measures that undercut the “Tiffany Network” aura of class it had taken the chairman years to cultivate.

By the end of his life, this once-vital corporate titan owned less than nine percent of stock in the company he had built, so he could not influence events as he once did. By then, too, Sally Bedell Smith’s biography In All His Glory had questioned his pretension to business visions while exposing his aloofness and cunning.

But, if he wasn’t what he wanted the world to think he was, Paley had managed for years to sustain a media empire that, unlike the one overseen by Rupert Murdoch, did not debase Americans’ cultural tastes or undermine their belief in verifiable fact.

Quote of the Day (Edward R. Murrow, on the Allied Discovery of the German Death Camp Buchenwald)

"[In a small courtyard in the German concentration camp of Buchenwald] there were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as best I could and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than  five  hundred  men  and  boys  lay  there  in  two  neat  piles. 

“There was a German trailer, which must have contained another fifty, but it wasn't possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that  most  of  the  men  and  boys  had  died  of  starvation; they  had  not  been  executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald.  God  alone  knows  how  many  men  and  boys  have  died  there  during  the  last  twelve  years.  Thursday I was  told  that  there  were  more  than  twenty  thousand  in  the  camp. There had been as many as sixty thousand. Where are they now?"—American journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965), “For Most of It I Have No Words” (CBS Radio broadcast, Apr. 15, 1945), in Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946 (1995)

Seventy-five years ago today, Allied forces came upon the ghastly scene described by Murrow. The carnage at this first of the Nazi concentration camps to be liberated was far beyond what he or anyone else could have anticipated beforehand. 

From its 1937 opening to its 1945 liberation, this site—constructed in woods a mere five miles from one of the pillars of German culture, Weimar—held some 250,000 prisoners under the thumb of the SS. The best if uncertain estimate for the death total is 56,000 male prisoners, some 11,000 of them Jews, according to an account by the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Astonishingly, Buchenwald was the best concentration camp in Germany, according to five of the “evil-smelling horde” of prisoners encountered by Murrow. It was just one of 44,000 incarceration sites erected by the Nazis and its allies in World War II. 

Within them, a previously unimaginable horror show took place: medical experimentation on prisoners; forced labor; detention of those deemed unfit to live by reason of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or mental condition; and mass murder. 

The cry continues to ring out over the years: Never forget. But we cannot only forget the statistics and scenes that occurred here and elsewhere under the sway of Hitler’s regime, but also what preceded it: economic dislocation that uprooted millions of Europeans from the best parts of their civilization and their most generous instincts and left them prey to the counsels of fear, prejudice and unreason. 

Don’t think it can’t happen again. Stay alert to the signs around you, and beware.

This Day in TV History (Murrow Assails McCarthy-Bred Fear and ‘Age of Unreason’)

March 9, 1954—In a hard-hitting takedown of unusual daring for television news at the time, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow (pictured) spotlighted to a nationwide audience the dangers to American civil liberties posed by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the Red Scare engulfing America. 

The year before, Murrow had given over an entire episode of his show See It Now to Milo Radulovich, a 28-year-old lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve, who was discharged as a security risk because of allegedly communistic sympathies of his father and sister. 

But this time on See It Now, Murrow was going directly at the senator who, in just four years, had ridden the fear of Communism gripping the nation to a position where he had intimidated not just ordinary citizens and government bureaucrats, but even his own peers on Capitol Hill. Murrow employed no investigatory work, merely used McCarthy’s own words to demonstrate the grave damage he had done.

Murrow later acknowledged ruefully that he should have confronted McCarthy sooner. Nor was he responsible for bringing him down: that distinction belongs, in varying degrees, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, so incensed that “Tail Gunner Joe” was going after the institution to which Ike had devoted himself the last four decades—the military—that he employed behind-the-scenes surrogates like Richard Nixon to undercut him; and then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who carefully marshalled the votes leading to the censure of McCarthy by his colleagues a half-year later.

But Murrow did bring the resources of the still-fledgling medium of television journalism to extremely controversial subject matter, and—for all his initial caution in finally taking on McCarthy—he never walked it back or stilled his voice thereafter, and survived the senator’s subsequent attempt to smear him on camera.

The broadcast aired despite deep concern shading into disapproval by CBS brass, including company head William S. Paley. Only two months before the broadcast, American public opinion still ran half in favor of McCarthy and only 29% against, according to a Gallup poll. Paley feared that he would lose the sponsor of See It Now, Alcoa--and, in fact, that company did not renew their contract with CBS.

Yet in the wake of that show, followed by an ineffectual rebuttal by the Senator and Murrow’s unflinching denial of McCarthy’s attempt to smear him, responses ran 15-1 in favor of Murrow, according to Jim Willis’ 100 Media Moments that Changed America.

That night, Murrow took on what had troubled his journalist colleagues: how to bring the American public face to face with a demagogue of unparalleled recklessness, cupidity and cruelty. That same dilemma has become an overriding concern of today’s journalists as well, as they try to report, news that Donald Trump would rather not hear. 

For a long time, I did not believe that the conditions were right in America for the appearance of another Joe McCarthy. But in the last few years, the conviction has hardened in me that Trump is not only McCarthy’s natural successor, but in certain ways is even worse. 

McCarthy, after all, had to content himself with the not-inconsiderable powers given to Senators to conduct hearings on matters that call for legislation. Trump, though, has the full power of the Presidency behind him. 

Moreover, alcoholism not only hastened McCarthy’s descent from influence and ensured he would not make a comeback, but sped him to an early death, at age 48, from cirrhosis of the liver. On the other hand, Trump—with older brother Fred as a warning example—has avoided substance abuse.

The greatest factor differentiating Trump from McCarthy, however, derives from Trump’s fortune. No other occupant of the Oval Office has ever combined the inherent powers of this position with the financial resources of a billionaire—commercial influence he has continued to wield even after entering the White House.

It is rich indeed that Trump has decried the Mueller investigation as a “Witch hunt” and an example of “McCarthyism” in his daily tweets, for reasons going back the oft-noted fact that his friend and attorney when he was just starting out was Roy Cohn, who in his youth had been McCarthy’s chief counsel. 

Trump hopes that the longtime understanding of “McCarthyism”—i.e., guilt by association—will work wonders with followers who see nothing wrong with hanging out with Russians. But the term  also represents charges sprayed out indiscriminately, without a shred of evidence, even contradictory at points. When proof is requested of the politician, he offers distraction rather than evidence. 

Thus, McCarthy, in the event bringing him to the world stage, saying he had “in my hands a list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party,” kept changing the number. Thus Trump, having made a big splash with GOP voters by calling for Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate to prove he was a U.S. citizen, eventually not only admitted that Obama was, but ludicrously suggested that the falsehood had been spread by Hilary Clinton rather than himself. 

In other respects, the press in both cases found it difficult to pierce the veil of lies woven by the Senator and the President:

*Each had a strong right-wing media “amen corner.” The Hearst organization enjoyed a direct link to McCarthy through Cohn and the latter’s close young friend, David Schine; Trump enjoys the near-total support of Fox News.

*GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill started out believing they could use McCarthy and Trump for their own purposes, only to crumble spinelessly when he influenced the party faithful against anyone who spoke out against him. In 1950, "growing numbers of Republicans were convinced that McCarthyism was their ticket to political power," wrote Thomas C. Reeves in his 1982 biography, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy. They were right in that assumption, but wrong in believing that they could simply use him with no danger to themselves. After seeing McCarthy help defeat a critic, conservative Democrat Millard Tydings, Republican senators were terrified of taking him on. Similarly, even Republicans who harshly criticized Trump during the primaries, such as Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz, have fallen in line after witnessing the rank-and-file’s support of the President.

*The menace of physical assault hung in the air around journalists covering the demagogue. McCarthy’s assault on muckraker Drew Pearson was so shockingly brutal (a knee to the groin, followed by a slap) that it even met with disapproval by otherwise sympathetic conservative historian Arthur Herman; Trump merely excites crowds against journalists such as Katy Tur, or praises a congressman (Greg Gianforte, R-Mont.) for pummeling a reporter.

In dealing with McCarthy, Murrow had to depart from one of the tenets of journalism—objectivity. His “Report” would not be a “he said, they said,” point-counterpoint presentation of points of view. He was reporting in a way that left no doubt whatsoever how he felt about what he called the Senator’s “methods.” 

Contemporary journalists face a not-dissimilar problem with Trump. His relationship to the truth has been so casual that they have increasingly transitioned how they process his claims. Early in his White House, stories would say that Trump's claims were "without evidence." Now, they are increasingly calling these outright "falsehoods." But as this reporting becomes more aggressive, it leaves the media open to being called by the President "enemies of the people."

They would do well to go back to Murrow's original broadcast.  

Though most of his report used McCarthy’s words against him, the closing was in Murrow's own words. Unlike in much of today's journalism, whether from the right or left, a tone of sobriety infuses the message and raises it to a level of eloquence virtually unimaginable now. The words are as searing to read as to listen to and watch:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. 

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator [Joseph] McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. 

“We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. 

“And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’"

Quote of the Day (Edward R. Murrow, on Confusion and Understanding)

“Anyone who isn't confused doesn't really understand the situation.”—Edward R. Murrow quoted in Walter Bryan, The Improbable Irish (1969)

Quote of the Day (Arthur Miller, on How Fear Is Like Love)

“Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.”—Arthur Miller, "The Night Edward Murrow Struck Back," Esquire, December 1983

Photograph of the American playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005) from the U.S. State Department.