BOOK REVIEW : Fall, Rise of Blacklisted Broadcaster

20th Century Journey: A Native’s Return, 1945-1988, by William L. Shirer (Little, Brown: $24.95, 484 pp).

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 and Murrow, who together had literally invented broadcast journalism during the Second World War, now found themselves negotiating over the script of Shirer’s final broadcast. A few words of farewell were grudgingly approved by CBS. Still, Murrow was fearful that Shirer might say something unseemly over the CBS microphone, so he took precautions.

“You son of a bitch!” Murrow threatened. “You better stick to the script--or else!”

“No problem, Ed,” Shirer replied. “Look at all the experience I’ve had in sticking to scripts. In Berlin. Remember?”

Shirer’s words of bitter irony hark back to his glory days as a pioneer radio correspondent based in the heart of Nazi Germany. Those were the days that are recounted so vividly in Shirer’s first bestseller, “Berlin Diary,” an enduring classic. What is truly shocking and depressing about Shirer’s latest volume of memoirs is his perception that the world has only deteriorated since the terrible days of what he insistently calls “the Nazi cuckooland.”

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.

Shirer reminds us that he was an eyewitness to the decline of nations as well as men; for example, he laments the passing of Great Britain as an imperial power within the span of his own remarkable lifetime.

Shirer writes honestly, if not always straightforwardly, about the triumphs and failings of his life and work: the great men and women he has known, the books he has written, the intermittent financial woes, the burned-out love affairs and failed friendships, even the suicide of a lover and the bitter break-up of his marriage.

The book is particularly instructive on the plight of journalists and authors, even the most successful ones. Like many literary diarists, Shirer describes his constant financial worries in painful detail: “1957-58 lecture season. $7,000. Estimated.” And, to any aspiring writer, I commend Shirer’s account of the wranglings with publishers (“The true relationship between a publisher and a writer is essentially an adversarial one”) and the treacheries of the critics: “for the most part, they were miserable little worms, ignorant, illiterate, and envious.”

There is a certain grandeur to “A Native’s Return”--and to the memoirs in their entirety--that arises from the sheer sweep of great events Shirer has observed from the firsthand perspective of the journalist and the historian. The three volumes of “20th Century Journey” amount to a superb short course in contemporary history, a who’s who of the 20th Century, and an essential repository of eyewitness testimony. But Shirer’s epitaph for the waning century is hardly a comforting one:

“The longer I have lived and the more I observed, the clearer it became to me that man had progressed very little beyond his earlier savage state,” writes Shirer, displaying the moral fatigue that is, tragically, the badge of our times. “Civilization is a thin veneer. It is so easily and continually eroded or cracked, leaving human beings exposed for what they are: savages.”