A COMPLEX FATE
William L. William Shirer and the American Century
Ken Cuthbertson
McGill-Queen's University Press
548 pages; $34.95
In November 1957, a Newsweek column called "Where Are They Now?" noted that William L Shirer, "made famous by his nightly radio reports from Berlin during the early years of the war and by his book 'Berlin Diary', has been off the air nearly 10 years and is now a writer and part-time lecturer".
The item had the ring of a professional obituary. After reaching the height of celebrity, influence and wealth as a member of Edward R Murrow and CBS radio's lauded wartime broadcasting team in Europe, he was fired and later blacklisted during the Red Scare. He was so broke he could not afford to fix the furnace in his Connecticut farmhouse.
Shirer spent his days tapping away on the typewriter he had set up on a table in one corner of his barn. He was hard at work on the book that would turn his reputation around for good, plunging once more into the Nazi era, many years of which he had witnessed first-hand in Berlin and Vienna: in the Austrian capital for the Anschluss, at Nuremberg for party rallies and in occupied France with the German Wehrmacht. As a correspondent, Shirer had gotten to know the likes of Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Heinrich Himmler and, most intimately, Hermann Göring.
With a dose of luck he had even scooped the Germans themselves on the French surrender. A broadcast he had taped for delayed transmission was aired live instead - before the Nazis had a chance to announce it.
The book he was writing went far beyond what he had personally witnessed. He had access to the 42-volume Trial of the Major War Criminals that had been compiled by the Allies. There was a trove of documents in United States Army warehouses in Alexandria, Virginia. The Hoover Library at Stanford had files belonging to Himmler.
For post-war interviews he could turn to people like General Franz Halder, the former chief of the General Staff of the Supreme High Command of the German Army, who crucially had kept a diary. Shirer located transcripts of Hitler's phone calls with subordinates and planning documents for the death camps. "Having lived and worked in Nazi Germany, Shirer found it utterly fascinating to read primary documents that cast new light on events that had long perplexed him or that he had not known at all," Ken Cuthbertson writes in A Complex Fate: William L Shirer and the American Century.
One day he recalled how a group of librarians at the Library of Congress "trundled out" a cart full of Hitler's personal papers. "I was astonished that they had not been opened since being cataloged. We took to untying the ribbons that bound them. Out fell what to me were priceless objects: among others, scores of drawings and paintings that Hitler had done in his vagabond youth in Vienna."
On the evening of August 24, 1959, "after five years of work, he finally typed the words 'The End' on the last page of his manuscript, Page 1,795", Mr Cuthbertson writes. Despite its length and complexity, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, as the historical doorstop was titled when it was published in 1960, won the National Book Award and was the biggest seller in the history of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Shirer never fit comfortably into the mould of a "Murrow Boy". He was older than Murrow and a far more seasoned reporter. The man who had covered Gandhi in India and been the only Western reporter at a coronation ceremony in Afghanistan had little interest at first in radio, which he saw as light entertainment. But Shirer had just lost his job with Hearst's International News Service when he went to meet Murrow at Berlin's elegant Adlon Hotel on August 27, 1937, and was willing to look past his disdain of radio for the sake of a paycheque.
With shades of Buzzfeed evolving from listicles and cat photos to entirely new approaches to delivering hard news, the Murrow Boys went on to revolutionise broadcast journalism. Mr Cuthbertson recounts the improvised thrill of the first-ever round-up from correspondents dotted all across Europe beaming the voices back to the United States, a model for network television broadcasts to this day but an outright marvel at the time. Shirer was frustrated that he couldn't do the kinds of live broadcasts from the streets of Berlin that made Murrow famous during the London Blitz. Eventually he was no longer even allowed to say "Nazi" because "the word supposedly sounded 'negative' to American ears, and so the preferred term was now 'National Socialist'".
His later firing by CBS caused an outcry. Critics at the time viewed it as a mix of censorship and the broadcaster bowing to advertisers, but Shirer himself admitted that perhaps he was "guilty of what the ancient Greeks called hubris". It's easy to see why George Clooney would want to make a movie about the tall, dashing Murrow, rather than the dowdy Shirer with his moustache and balding pate, who was missing one eye from a skiing accident.
Yet it's easy to understand why the author fell for this perpetual underdog. Shirer lost his father when he was just nine years old, found himself on the brink of penury numerous times and, like so many hurt by the McCarthy era, did not deserve to be named in the publication Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, which left him scraping together speaking fees and nearly ended his career for good.
Finally, in his struggle to explain Nazism, Shirer found what Mr Cuthbertson calls "the story of a lifetime, a story so compelling, so terrifying, so bizarre and so historically important that he had to tell it". In several classic volumes he did just that.
© The New York Times News Service 2015
