"Good night and good luck." It was his sign-off phrase. I shiver when I remember his distinctive voice saying those words when he closed his radio and later his television report of the news. He was a man of integrity unafraid to speak truth to power. He should be an exemplary presence in American journalism today.
I'm putting together this small tribute to Murrow for that reason, and because it's been six years since we saw the fine film narrated by George Clooney (it may be bought, rented or streamed from Amazon).
It has been much longer — before the beginning of World War II in Europe — since Edward R. Murrow's reporting career began, in effect bringing a revolution to American radio journalism with his short-wave broadcasts sent from London and aboard Allied bombers to listeners in the United States. He was a pioneer of a kind of journalism we see too little of in these days of media empires and news that must make its way by its entertainment value.
Murrow began a new kind of radio news, CBS's "World News Round Up." H.V. Kaltenborn, who narrated the program from New York, could be heard with anxiety in his voice because the quality of radio connection was uneven and unpredictable, "Come in Ed Murrow, Come in Ed Murrow." During the Blitz, when German planes rained bombs on London, Murrow sometimes spoke from the steps of damaged St. Paul's Cathedral. Air raid sirens could be heard in the background.
Murrow and other journalists followed Allied troops into the Nazi concentration camp of 
Buchenwald in April 1945, as it happened on the very day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs. Georgia. Murrow, obviously shaken by what he saw, described the exhausted physical state of the 21,000 concentration camp prisoners who had survived (many died of their starvation in the following days and weeks), mentioning "rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood." And he refused to apologize for the horror of his words:
"I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry."
It is now more than a half century since, in his pioneering television reporting on "See It Now," Murrow courageously took on Joe McCarthy, the junior Senator from Wisconsin who had made a career of irresponsible, bullying and dishonest red-baiting. On that program Murrow said something that bears repeating in 2011, in every time and place.
"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.... No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices."
Edward R. Murrow in his office, 1957
Later he initiated a program called This I Believe , an opportunity for ordinary Americans to speak for five minutes on their fundamental values. Fifty-three years ago he gave a memorable speech in Chicago on October 15, 1958. It is a speech as pertinent now as it was then.
A chain smoker throughout his life, Murrow was known for almost never being seen without his trademark Camel cigarette. He evidently smoked from sixty to sixty-five cigarettes a day, roughly three packs. His own television program See It Now was the first to have a report about the connection between smoking and cancer. Murrow said during the show, "I doubt I could spend a half hour without a cigarette with any comfort or ease."
His last major TV milestone was reporting and narrating the CBS Reports installment "Harvest of Shame," on the plight of migrant farm workers in the United States.
Edward R. Murrow died on April 27, 1965, two days after his 57th birthday. His colleague and friend Eric Sevareid said of him,
"He was a shooting star; and we will live in his afterglow a very long time."