General Discussion

At the threshold of the McCarthy era, William L. Shirer was abruptly fired from his highly rated CBS radio broadcast by the sponsor, a shaving-cream manufacturer, who pronounced him to be “too liberal.” To Shirer’s shock and grief, the decision was endorsed by CBS as well as Shirer’s boss and former comrade-in-arms as a war correspondent in World War II, Edward R. Murrow. The firing “destroyed my career in broadcasting,” Shirer writes, “and almost destroyed me.”

The blacklisting of Bill Shirer--and his rebirth as a popular historian and the author of “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”--is at the heart of “A Native’s Return,” the third volume of Shirer’s memoirs, “20th Century Journey.” Now in his mid-80s, Shirer’s valedictory is bittersweet, and nothing captures his sense of disappointment in the downward spiral of history more poignantly than the Murrow incident.

Shirer excoriates the executives of the American media--including the networks, the advertising agencies, the sponsoring corporations--for surrendering to McCarthyism and making it work. “They were the shabby cowards,” he writes. “If just one of them had shown a little courage and decency and said he was going to hire people on their merits and not on whether they were in Red Channels , the blacklists would have faded away. But none dared. Not one.”

Murrow is not the only man whom Shirer justifiably sees as a betrayer. Shirer recalls that his own attorney, Morris Ernst, “one of the foremost champions of civil liberties in the country,” refused to file a libel action on Shirer’s behalf against “Red Channels.” (“I see no valid basis,” Ernst advised, “for letting you spend your money on a libel suit.”) Much later, as Shirer explains, it was revealed that Ernst had been a secret but fawning admirer of J. Edgar Hoover who shared private correspondence--and actually screened prospective cases and clients--with the FBI.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-01-17-vw-17-story.html