Tufts gets war papers by Murrow

The World War II radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow are now regarded as high points in the history of journalism, vivid examples of how the spoken word can bring home events of infinite horror and complexity from thousands of miles away.

But when it came to preserving Murrow’s scripts and other papers from that time, few people had the foresight or the luck to think of history. Some materials were lost when the Germans bombed CBS offices in London, where Murrow was based during the war. Others were simply misplaced in the rush to meet the next deadline.

And some, like a batch just donated to the Edward R. Murrow Center at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, have turned up accidentally.

Back in the 1980s, CBS-TV’s London bureau was cleaning out files when producer Mark H. Harrington III spotted an unmarked “old brown envelope tossed into a box of other old files,” according to his widow, Kyle Good, a former CBS producer who is now a publicist with Scholastic Inc.

“He was shocked when he opened it up,” Good said. “When he first found them, he talked about where he might donate them, but I suspect he put them carefully away and just forgot about them. I suspect he thought about it from time to time but just never got around to doing it.”

Harrington died of cancer in 1998, and Good had thought little about the Murrow documents until a colleague urged her to donate them. Neither Anne Sauer, who directs the digital collections and archives at Tufts, nor Murrow’s son, Casey, say they had seen the papers before. Linda Mason, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the network has no original documents -- as opposed to audio records -- from Murrow’s war years. “They’re a fascinating glimpse of Murrow’s early years, when he was just coming into prominence,” Sauer says of the papers.

Murrow, born in rural North Carolina in 1908, joined CBS in 1935 and two years later was transferred to London, where he served as chief of the network’s European operations. When war came, he provided detailed, emotional radio broadcasts from London during the German air raids, with bombs often exploding in the background. In the 1950s, the dark-haired, chain-smoking Murrow went on to fame as a television newsman.