On And Off The Air: An Informal History Of CBS News
On And Off The Air: An Informal History Of CBS News
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Noted for decades not only as one of the great early television broadcasters, but as the author of such best-selling titles as AS FRANCE GOES and SOLDIERS OF THE NIGHT, David Schoenbrun was just finishing this last, most personal of his books when he died unexpectedly in May 1988. Much has been written of the glory of the Ed Murrow days, but until now none of the Murrow old-timers has set the record straight.
The author breezily sets the stage, then delves wholeheartedly into the early days of TV: Eisenhower's 1952 campaign, the first ever to be televised, in which Schoenbrun himself played a crucial role; the showdown between Murrow and Senator Joe McCarthy; the tensions and respect between Murrow and CBS chairman Bill Praley.
He paints a lavish picture of a Paris bureau chief's life at the hub of postwar Europe in the 1950s, and furnishes a litany of illuminating anecdotes about some of the best-known figures of CBS News: Walter Cronkite, Douglas Edwards, Fred Friendly, Howard K Smith, Mike Wallace, and so on. The book climaxes with Schoenbrun's brief stint as Washington bureau chief and his rupture with CBS.
Providing a brisk, anecdotal celebration of the heady days of early CBS News, David Schoenbrun punctures the myth that Ed Murrow-style broadcasting was ever a popular phenomenon with CBS managers.
Internationally renowned reporter-broadcaster, David Schoenbrun had witnessed and reported on tumultuous would events for over a half century when he died, in May 1988, while working on ON AND OFF THE AIR, his last book. Schoenbrun lived and worked in the eye of all the storms that have buffeted the United States from the Berlin Blockade to the Arab-Israeli wars, from the creation of NATO to Camp David, from the liberation of the living dead at Buchenwald to the apocalyptic Cuban missile crisis, from the French-Indochinese war to the tragic U.S.-Vietnamese war. A pioneer and master of radio and television journalism, Schoenbrun provides an incisive and informal look at the TV news industry.
