11.
December 7, 1941, was a Sunday. So Lowell Thomas was not on the air to announce that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, finally hurtling the United States into the Second World War. He was on the air at 6:45 the next evening to report that “only a few minutes after four,” President Franklin Roosevelt “signed the resolution declaring that the government and people of the United States were at war with the Japanese Empire.” A few minutes later, Thomas added, “On all sides people with knowledge of naval and military matters were warning that this may turn out to be a long, hard battle. The United States and its allies seem certain to win in the long run, but the defeat of Japan and the destruction of her armed power may take time and the largest kind of effort.” Germany and Italy declared war on the United States three days later.
One tiny consequence of the war was made clear by the next summer in a note from the commander in chief: “Lowell, I am afraid Hitler has ended our ball games for the duration.” The war also froze the progress of television.
It had taken not a month, but almost a year, for NBC’s experimental television station in New York to resume broadcasting—this time with a sharper picture and the right to air commercials. WNBT was NBC’s new name for its New York television station—the most advanced of a flock of new, Federal Communications Commission–approved television stations in the United States. Thomas showed up to once again read a newscast in front of WNBT’s cameras on the evening of July 1, 1941, when television returned to the air—his thin mustache now discernable on the new 525-line, less-low-definition screen. A pyramid of oilcans bearing the name Sunoco was visible behind him. An appearance on the day commercial television began in the United States was thus added to the list of Lowell Thomas’ accomplishments.
But Thomas would not be a regular participant in this new round of experiments in television, which ultimately had little impact. Once the United States entered the war, five months after commercial television’s debut, the need to produce weapons, radar and such for the military pretty much halted the production of new television sets. So TV’s audience remained minuscule. The 22 television stations that had taken to the air in the United States in 1941 could be picked up by a total of fewer than 5,000 sets. Commercial television in the United States was essentially on hold until the end of World War II.
Lowell returned to reading his radio newscasts without makeup, without Klieg lights, without two large television cameras staring at him. So when Thomas announced President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of a declaration of war against Japan, he was on the radio—only.1
After Pearl Harbor—with the nation’s and the world’s fate perhaps as close as they have come to being at stake, with the lives of so many loved ones at risk—audiences for radio news swelled.2 During the 1941–42 season, Lowell Thomas achieved his best ratings ever. On average 15.6 percent of the total radio households in the United States were listening to his newscast each night—more than were listening to any other show broadcast on multiple nights. Considering that in many homes at quarter to seven in the evening, finishing dinner and chatting still took precedence over turning on the radio, that is impressive. That rating made his one of the top five most-listened-to radio shows of any kind every weekday night. And by the 1944 presidential election, 59 percent of Americans would say they received their news primarily from radio—more than twice as many as said newspapers were their main news source. That meant that a large percentage of the population of the United States, rather than getting its news primarily from one of hundreds of newspapers with their dozens of reporters and editors, was getting it from Lowell Thomas. In 1940, according to one poll, 40 percent of Americans who said they had a favorite among all of the radio commentators would say it was Lowell Thomas.
He was now reading the news, again figuring conservatively, to about 11.4 million listeners Monday through Friday.
Walter Cronkite stated that his television newscast, which seems to have been the most-watched daily television newscast ever in America, reached an audience of 22 million Americans. That was in the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s—when at least 95 percent of U.S. households owned television sets, when the population of the United States was more than half again as large as it was in Thomas’ day. Thomas’ twice-weekly newsreel audience—interest in newsreels also intensified during the war—is hard to estimate. At one point he claims that it reached 80 million, which seems impossible to justify. But even adding an audience one-fifth that size to his radio audience at the start of the war would mean that the number of Americans to whom Thomas was telling the news, let alone the percentage, was likely larger than that tuning in to Walter Cronkite decades later.
At its height in 1950, Life, probably America’s most widely looked-at magazine, reported that its pages were turned each week by one in five Americans aged ten or older.3 Thomas’ daily radio plus twice-weekly newsreel audience at the start of the Second World War was likely closer to one-quarter of all Americans who were old enough to follow the news. The case can be made that no individual before or since has dominated American journalism as did Lowell Thomas in the late 1930s and, in particular, the early 1940s.
* * *
Not that Thomas was satisfied with his role: relaying news of the war from New York. Maybe it was a desire to relive his youth; maybe it was some macho thing; but Lowell wanted to report on the fighting himself. That is where, throughout the history of journalism, reputations were most often made.
And a few reporters had certainly been distinguishing themselves covering events leading up to, during and after the Second World War as Lowell had during and after the First World War. Dorothy Thompson, for example, managed to speak with Hitler in Germany before he came to power. “The interview was difficult,” she wrote in Cosmopolitan in 1932, “because one cannot carry on a conversation with Adolf Hitler. In every question he seeks for a theme that will set him off…; a hysterical note creeps into his voice[,] which rises sometimes almost to a scream.… He bangs the table.” Lowell had once been the one getting, or at least saying he had gotten, exclusive interviews with movers, shakers and table-bangers in Germany.
Then, on CBS, Edward R. Murrow began demonstrating that radio—Lowell’s own medium—need bow to no other in its ability to capture the drama, horror and opportunity for courage supplied by war, in this case the German bombing of Britain: “Suddenly all the lights crashed off and a blackness fell right to the ground,” Murrow intoned. “It grew cold. We covered ourselves with hay. The shrapnel clicked as it hit the concrete road nearby. And still the German bombers came.”
Lowell was the great anointer of World War I heroes. Now he had to watch as Ernie Pyle, reporting for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, earned acclaim by focusing on the ordinary experiences and sometimes extraordinary heroism of American soldiers and an otherwise unknown American officer: “I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Captain Waskow’s body down…,” Pyle typed reverently. “One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, ‘God damn it.’ That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, ‘God damn it to hell anyway.’ He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.…”
Almost a year after the war ended, John Hersey filled an entire issue of the New Yorker with his account of the United States’ dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima—from the point of view of those on the ground. “He saw the flash,” Hersey writes of a doctor who survived. “To him—faced away from the center and looking at his paper—it seemed a brilliant yellow. Startled, he began to rise to his feet. In that moment (he was 1,550 yards from the center), the hospital leaned behind his rising and, with a terrible ripping noise, toppled into the river.”4
But, of course, to accomplish reporting like this you had to be there. Lowell Thomas, back in New York, had been performing a crucial service—surveying the course of the war: “We hear that the toughest of all the tough battles fought so far in the Pacific is now going on, on the island of Peleliu.” Thomas was relied upon as few journalists have been before or since. But there wasn’t all that much glory in that.
Thomas’ bosses, in truth, did not really want their star newsman off covering the war, occasionally filing narrowly focused stories from one or another obscure place. He was more useful, as his sky-high ratings made clear, sorting out the day’s developments every evening. And there are indications that the Roosevelt administration also was pleased to have the war news announced each evening by this familiar, trusted, patriotic (when it came to his country Lowell was anything but objective) and generally optimistic voice: “Good evening, everybody. This is a big day in the history of the Second World War. On this day American troops crossed the German frontier and are tonight fighting on the soil of the fatherland.”5 Thomas may have been too valuable to morale at home to put at risk near the battlefields. Ernie Pyle, after all, was hit by a bullet and killed near Okinawa toward the end of the war.
* * *
In 1940 Lowell Thomas Jr. had enrolled at Dartmouth College. In 1942 he decided to leave Dartmouth, along with a number of his fellow students, to enlist in the Army Air Forces. (This was before the air force was a separate branch of the military.) “To what avail an education if our country goes under,” Sonny explained to Mom and Dad, who did not require convincing. Thus the son did something his father, for all his bravado, had never done: signed on, when he was the age for it, to actually participate in the fighting.
Even before enlisting Lowell Jr. had experienced a youth appropriate for the son of Lowell Thomas; indeed, it was a youth contrived by Lowell Thomas. Sonny’s childhood had been, of course, overstuffed with rugged activities and accomplished personages, but that was hardly the end of it. At the age of 15, Lowell Jr. had assisted a Fox Movietone cameraman on a circumnavigation of South America—and then managed, yes, to deliver a lecture about the trip. “It was probably pushed along by my dad,” he would acknowledge in his own memoir. At the age of 16, Sonny accompanied a mountaineer on a study of Alaskan glaciers. At the age of 17, Sonny joined an explorer on an expedition into the Canadian Rockies.
Sonny did not gripe about all this footstep following. Sonny did not rebel. He was by all accounts a highly companionable, loyal, kind, bright, competent young man. He was not, in contrast to his father, excessively outgoing or aggressive. And by forgoing imprudent introspection and remaining consistently good-natured, Lowell Jr. seems to have made sure that his father—who had difficulty with individuals with turbulent inner lives—had no difficulty with him.
A few months into Sonny’s military training, his famous dad came to visit the base and gave the boys a pep talk. “The fight’nest … heard in these parts in some time,” the local newspaper gushed. But Sonny was unable to attend his father’s talk. He was in the hospital. Lowell Jr.’s contribution to his country would not, in the end, extend to combat. While learning to fly, he took sick and spent more than a year in various military hospitals with rheumatic fever. “Join the Army and get sick!” he wrote his parents. “Kind of humiliating.”
Meanwhile, his tireless father was coming up with schemes for getting closer to the action. “Great news dad about your possible jaunt to North Africa,” Sonny writes him in a paragraph that reveals how hard it must have been to compete with him. “I envy you! But don’t get too close to enemy fire and planes. Leave at least that much for me someday.” After he recovered, Sonny ended the war training French pilots in Georgia. He got nowhere near enemy fire or planes.6
* * *
His parents had moved their Manhattan residence from the Waldorf to a more substantial apartment in the Hampshire House on Central Park South. But Quaker Hill remained the center of their lives. And Lowell Sr. continued populating it with high achievers—mostly of a certain cast.
In the summer of 1943, he rented one of the houses he was still sitting on to the entrepreneurial minister of the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, Norman Vincent Peale—a Protestant, a Republican. Peale and his wife soon borrowed enough money to buy a farm of their own up on Quaker Hill.7 Nine years later Peale would publish his hugely successful conflation of easygoing Christianity and dogged optimism, The Power of Positive Thinking. Dale Carnegie’s self-help blockbuster, How to Win Friends and Influence People, had first been published in 1936, with an introduction by Lowell Thomas. So pals of Lowell, who was relentlessly positive and a master of befriending and influencing, were responsible for the foremost self-help books of the age.
While Lowell Sr. pined on Quaker Hill for a chance to gain some proximity to action—his plan to cover the fighting in North Africa did not pan out—he convinced himself that, as he puts it in his memoir, “this wonderful place with its fine facilities could be put to use.” So he marshaled some of that positive thinking and ability to influence people and brought Quaker Hill—actually, nearby Pawling—into the war effort.
Lowell found an empty boys’ school, along with an unused farm, with cottages on a lake, owned by an electric company. He met in Washington with an old acquaintance, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, then heading the Army Air Forces. As a result of Lowell’s efforts, early in 1944 the Army Air Forces Convalescence Center would open in Pawling—to provide soldiers just out of the hospital with physical and psychological rehabilitation. These soldiers had the added benefit of access to Lowell’s horseback-riding trails, his little ski area and a Saturday-morning speaker series he arranged just for them. “There is very little ‘dead time’ at Pawling,” a Washington Post article explained about the center and its new, more aggressive approach to rehabilitation. That article does not mention Lowell Thomas. But that, of course, was a very Lowell-like approach.8
* * *
In 1941—before Pearl Harbor was bombed but with the possibility looming that the United States would be pulled into the war—President Franklin Roosevelt had explained the principles for which we might have to fight: “We look forward,” he said in his State of the Union address to Congress, “to a world,” the “very antithesis” of that “the dictators seek to create,” that would be “founded upon four essential human freedoms.” They were: “freedom of speech,” “freedom of worship,” “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.” Some conservatives at the time found Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—like most of what this president did and said—infuriating.
Republican Senator Robert A. Taft, an isolationist, insisted that “war will never spread such freedoms” and moaned that such talk, which seemed to imagine a “Utopia,” was “too visionary.” The novelist Ayn Rand, a champion of unfettered free enterprise, wrote in 1941 that “talk about freedom (even four freedoms)” by members of the left (“pinks,” she calls them) is just “an old, old trick” to hide their “subversive” purposes. Rand’s sometime ally, the writer Channing Pollock, blasted Roosevelt’s “preposterous and impossible ‘Four Freedoms’ of slaves and convicts.”
And then, in a letter dated June 8, 1943, Thomas received this “caution” from his primary contact at Sun Oil, Max Leister: “Without going into any detail, I am going to ask you to refrain from making any mention of the ‘Four Freedoms.’” The main attempt by the president of the United States to explain what the country was fighting for in this war could, in other words, no longer be mentioned on the country’s leading newscast.
Evidence, if there had been any doubt, that this directive could be traced to J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil, arrived in a letter from Mr. Pew three days later. The letter was friendly, congratulating Thomas on the quality of his broadcast and its great popularity. But it also included Pew’s rewrite of the “Four Freedoms” as: “Freedom of Speech, Freedom in News, Freedom of Choice, Freedom of Enterprise.” Pew had, not surprisingly, excised from Roosevelt’s original list “freedom from want”—which sounded “socialistic” to the right, like a global New Deal. And it certainly made sense that Pew had added “Freedom of Enterprise,” given the regularity with which he decried government interference in business. But, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, not J. Howard Pew, was president of the United States.
Once again there is no evidence that Lowell rebelled against such dictates from his sponsor. The arrangement under which he broadcast was still the same: Sun Oil purchased airtime from the radio network. Thomas worked for the Sun Oil Company; indeed, he was its highest-salaried employee—at $95,645 a year in 1941, more than $30,000 more than the salary earned by each of the Pew brothers (who, of course, in addition owned large amounts of stock in the company). The Pews were his bosses. Lowell had also managed to get himself in debt to Sun Oil for a quarter of a million dollars.
Scribbled in Lowell’s handwriting at the bottom of that note from Max Leister, cautioning that he no longer mention the “Four Freedoms” on the radio, is this short sentence: “I told Pros & will tell Louis.” Lowell presumably had, in other words, instructed his two newswriters, Prosper Buranelli and Louis Sherwin, to honor Leister’s injunction.9
Still, it can be reported—once again—that despite his allegiance to the Pew family, and despite their occasional attempts to fiddle with the content of his broadcast, Thomas generally kept playing it somewhere in the vicinity of “down the middle” in his newscast. Roosevelt, who was making so much news, continued to be mentioned with appropriate frequency in Thomas’ newscast. His war continued to be championed. The biggest test for Thomas’ own impartiality was, however, still to come: when his friend and neighbor became the Republican candidate for president.
* * *
Changes, meanwhile, were afoot in network radio and therefore in the arrangements under which Thomas broadcast. A new, activist chairman of the Federal Communications Commission managed to force NBC to divest itself of one of its two networks. On October 12, 1943, the FCC approved the sale of NBC’s junior Blue Network—Thomas’ network. The Sun Oil Company’s program Lowell Thomas with the News was now heard, for the moment, on a network called, for the moment, just “BLUE.” (It would soon be renamed the American Broadcasting Company, or ABC.)
Then, as of November 1, 1943, Lowell obtained what he had long wanted: a network called “Pacific Blue” contracted to broadcast Lowell Thomas with the News in the West. Sun Oil Company, since they did not do business in the West, had agreed to allow a remnant of the old Standard Oil to sponsor the program there. And—in the last of this flurry of changes—Sun Oil moved the eastern broadcast of Thomas’ newscast from BLUE back to NBC. As of January 24, 1944, Lowell Thomas with the News would be heard in the East on NBC’s formally dominant, and now only, network: what was once known as the Red Network.10
Thomas was in a stronger position than ever in radio: he was now heard across the country and on the top network in the East. His political significance was also about to peak, for in 1944 New York governor Thomas E. Dewey—Lowell’s neighbor, friend and, in some sense, protégé—received the Republican Party’s nomination for president.
* * *
Never was playing it “right down the middle” harder for Lowell Thomas than during the 1944 presidential campaign. It wasn’t due only to his close friendship with the Republican candidate. Thomas faced even more than the usual pressure from the Pews, who had by this point endured 12 years of what they considered Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-business, socialistic, even dictatorial presidency—and sensed that they might have to endure four years more. J. Howard Pew even offered to hire someone to replace Thomas on the air to free him to “plunge into the midst of the … presidential battle” at “the eleventh hour”—presumably traveling about giving speeches on behalf of Thomas E. Dewey. Lowell responded that the tiptoeing in he had been doing would probably be more effective than an all-out plunge “for a political amateur (and that’s what I’d be if I jumped into it).” Pew’s suggestion also would have cost Lowell the reputation for nonpartisanship he had built up over a decade and a half.
When Prosper Buranelli wrote the previous spring that he had been hearing “remarks that the broadcast has an anti-Roosevelt tone and favors Dewey,” Lowell took umbrage: “We give the president fantastic publicity every day—and often 3 or 4 stories per broadcast.” During the fall campaign, Thomas must have heard enough such complaints himself to feel compelled to answer on the air the “charge” that “I favor Dewey”:
The president in the White House is in such a position that any public statement he makes is news.… The opposition candidate on the other hand can only make campaign declarations and arguments. And people warmly in favor of the administration don’t consider this news—especially in wartime. But it is news … and how can our Constitutional Opposition be heard if it is not considered news.
Looking through the scripts of Thomas’ radio program during the fall presidential campaign in 1944, it is indeed difficult to find any sign of pro-Dewey bias. President Roosevelt, often in his role as commander in chief, is mentioned in 81 stories, Governor Dewey in only 36. And once again any attacks or responses to attacks are left to the candidates themselves. Yet when writing to the Pews or their minions, Thomas claimed to have manifested a pro-Dewey slant: “This year, for the first time … I have gone completely overboard, and have been the only news broadcaster with a large audience to go all out for the Republican ticket.”
I’m not sure Thomas’ sense that he was being fair and this statement that he was going “all out for the Republican ticket” are necessarily contradictory. Thomas saw himself as one of the only broadcasters struggling to give the Republican candidate—challenging a popular, activist, wartime incumbent—not equal time but a decent chance to be heard. In this sense he was going “all out.” But on the radio Lowell certainly did not descend, as a more overtly partisan journalist might, to invective against the president or encomiums for the challenger.
Off the air—which for Thomas was something different—he clearly did “go all out.” He detailed his more-than-just-neighborly support for Tom Dewey in 1944 in a letter to Sun Oil:
• “Repeatedly advised concerning speeches.”
• Entertained “the press on a fair-sized scale in the country” in order to ease Dewey’s problems with “newspapermen.”
• “Loaned my right-hand man, Louis Sherwin, to Governor Dewey to help prepare speeches—this for nearly a year now.”
Lowell’s contributions to the Republican’s campaign were no secret in political and journalistic circles. Occasionally they were even mentioned in the press. “The resonant, well-modulated voice in which Dewey is making his campaign speeches is no accident…,” wrote, for example, a gossip columnist in Newsday on Long Island. “Tom’s Pawling neighbor, Lowell Thomas, took over and trained the Dewey voice. As a result the dulcet Dewey sounds a lot like Thomas.” A news article in the New York Post, then a liberal newspaper, went further: “Some Pawling people are convinced,” the Post asserted, “that Thomas, who lives two miles from Dewey’s estate, is more responsible than any other person for Dewey’s present political eminence.”
That was the worst of it. No scandal developed over this journalist’s closeness to that politician. After all, the principle that journalists should keep some distance from those they cover had not yet been established. (As late as the early 1960s, some journalists overlooked President John F. Kennedy’s appetite for and questionable taste in female friends because they enjoyed being among his male friends.) Lowell, for his part, seems to have remained more concerned that the Pews might think he wasn’t doing enough for Dewey than that the rest of the world might think he was doing too much.11
* * *
In the spring of 1945, the United States government became interested in having more journalists with large audiences examine the war in Europe. There was good reason for that: after the successful but terribly bloody Normandy landing in June 1944, after the successful but terribly bloody effort to repulse a German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge the next winter, the war seemed to be going well. It might now be looked upon by audiences at home not only with great pride but with true optimism and—the enemy’s ability to inflict large numbers of casualties having declined—with less terror. Nothing regularly gathered as large an audience back home as radio.
“Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces, telephoned Lowell and asked him to join—or, according to Thomas’ memoir, lead—a group of “radio news analysts” on a trip to Europe.12 Sun Oil agreed that Thomas could contribute to his newscast from Europe while substitutes hosted back in New York.
By the beginning of April 1945, Lowell Thomas had made it to London along with a collection of seven other previously homebound radio heavyweights. He contributed his first extended report for his newscast by shortwave radio, from an underground studio in a London just about ready to resume life entirely above ground. The journalists flew on to Paris and Luxembourg. And soon some of them were flying over, and then into, western parts of Germany, which the American and British armies had recently taken. Thomas sometimes left the others behind. On his fifty-third birthday, he was flying across the Rhine.
For the first time in decades, Lowell was keeping a journal. “Well, I’ve at last caught up with the war,” he notes, after managing to “jump from one plane to another” and penetrate deeper into Germany. Often he was scribbling sentences while inside one of those small planes: “Suddenly there’s no more traffic on the autobahn.… Bridges are down. We see an Amer. Tank on the alert.… We are at the front and only a little over 100 miles from Berlin.” For the first time in decades, Lowell was racing around, reporting, covering a war.
Lowell toured the destruction on the ground in Wessel: “In most of this large town every bldg. gone; cathedral, churches; 5 & 6 story bldgs.; all just heap of brick & stone & splinters.…” Then he saw from the air the destruction of a larger city, Cologne. “I wonder how we can make people understand what has happened,” Lowell writes on that excursion. “After other wars that has always been said. But this is diff. Even the destruct. of Carthage could have been nothing compared with this. One has a feeling of wanting to shout to all men not to be so stupid, but that not a strong enuf word. Not so dumb. But that doesn’t express it. Not so insane.…” Thomas was in philosophical mode; this was not his normal mode. “I wonder just what is the destiny of the human race.”
All the while Lowell was looking for shortwave radio transmitters, so he might get his observations on the air—live; there still was no tape. Thomas managed two broadcasts from a mobile transmitter in an apple orchard outside Wiesbaden, after being driven through the black, still city, which, like most in occupied Germany, was under a seven o’clock curfew. Lowell shared the shock of the American troops when their commander in chief, his old softball buddy, suddenly died on April 12, 1945.
Russian forces were approaching Berlin, and American forces were getting their first, dreadful look at the concentration camps, as Thomas made it on the air on April 20, 1945:
I am broadcasting tonight from Supreme Allied Army Headquarters. The talk here today—aside from the Russian drive—has centered largely around the topic of the Nazi Murder Camps that have been liberated by the advancing First and Third Armies. General Patton was the first, I believe, to issue an order that as many German civilians, and military people too, as transportation facilities will allow, be taken through these Murder Camps.… and [a] British delegation is said to be on the way to Buchenwald, a huge concentration camp that I visited several days ago. In fact, I described what I saw there with my own eyes, in a broadcast from a mobile radio transmitter, and then heard afterward that the short wave signal was bad and that I had failed to get through.…
We don’t know what Thomas said in that lost broadcast, and we don’t have a journal entry in which he describes in detail his visit to Buchenwald. But it does seem odd that in this broadcast, and in some short mentions in his journals, Thomas neglects to note the religious affiliation of many of the victims of this concentration camp. In this he was not alone. Edward R. Murrow’s report on Buchenwald, as the Holocaust scholar Peter Novick notes, also fails to use the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” And the New York Times, in an otherwise thorough and revelatory piece on Buchenwald that appeared two days before Thomas’ broadcast, uses more than half of its total of about 2,200 words before it identifies any victim as a “Jew.” The Allies—and their journalists—had not yet begun to confront the full horror of such camps: that the Germans had not just viciously punished their opponents but had attempted to exterminate an entire people.
Here is how Thomas’ on-air discussion of the Nazi camp ends:
Apparently there are many Germans who had little knowledge of the crimes the Nazis were committing in these enormous camps, or who had closed their eyes and ears and refused to believe. As witness to this, take the burgomeister and his wife, who visited Buchenwald at General Patton’s request, and who saw the gallows where the mass hangings had taken place daily, the torture chambers you no doubt have read or heard about by now, the furnaces, the piles of human bones, yes and the piles of dead. What is more, they saw the eighteen thousand pitiful creatures who are still in that Buchenwald camp, eighteen thousand remaining of the fifty thousand who were jammed into the place shortly before our troops got there. That burgomeister and his wife, loyal Germans, went home so overwhelmed with shame that they killed themselves.13
Thomas arranged for a U.S. Army Signal Corps cameraman to shoot film for him while he was at Buchenwald. The footage includes shots of Lowell walking through the camp wearing an officer’s peaked cap, shots of German prisoners of war and shots of newly liberated camp survivors, as well as images, which are as disturbing as any from the war, of a truck stacked with the bodies of Holocaust victims.14
* * *
Lowell was now—unlike when he was covering the First World War—sufficiently established so that a large public would hear his observations. His huge audience also enjoyed his gentle mockery of military regulations: an army censor, for example, refusing to allow mention of Allied carrier pigeons having been shot down. “Why?” Lowell quips. “Because the nearest of kin haven’t yet been notified.”
Lowell’s fame sometimes, to be sure, made life more comfortable. On at least one occasion, his bunkmate was a general. And his familiar voice and face must have helped him hitch rides on airplanes heading to particularly interesting places. In a broadcast on April 24, 1944, Thomas describes the most newsworthy of those flights, which was not at all comfortable: as the second passenger in “a single-seater fighter plane”—a P-51 Mustang—piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Karl Kraft of Clarks, Louisiana, “with me squeezed in behind Kraft. Piggyback they call it. The most cramped position so far devised by man.” Accompanied by another colonel flying another Mustang, they were heading toward Berlin:
The two flying colonels wanted to go as much as I did. They had never made it all the way to Berlin. And they wanted to verify with their own eyes the reports coming in that the Russians, at last, were in Hitler’s capital, blasting it to bits.
I had another reason, an unimportant reason, for wanting to get to Berlin in these closing hours of the European end of World War Two. Twenty-seven years ago, at the end of World War One, Webb Waldron—then with Collier’s, now an editor of the Readers Digest—… and I were the first from the outside world to get to Berlin, and stay to follow the German revolution and then tell the story.…
The plane, with Thomas squeezed in behind Colonel Kraft, reached the Elbe:
We passed over several Nazi airfields with dozens of planes dispersed about them. But none took off to chase us … Following the Elbe and then the Mulde north to where the two rivers join at Dessau, we saw fires every mile or so.… And then from Dessau, we headed right up the Autobahn for Berlin.…
Potsdam and the southern side of the city seemed comparatively undamaged. The rest of it—in flames from one end to the other. We swung in over Berlin at about four thousand feet. Much too low. But we had to because of the heavy cloud layer above us. Below us an artillery duel was going on. Apparently the heavy guns on both sides going all out. Dense clouds of smoke were rolling over Berlin, concealing much of it.…
Thomas’ radio report was one of the first on the battle for Berlin and was picked up in newspapers back home. He announced that what they were witnessing was the “bombardment and burning of the world’s fourth largest city,” which he called—speaking figuratively—“Hitler’s smoking funeral pyre.”15 In about a week it would be that literally.
* * *
Back in London, where he was preparing to fly home, Lowell made contact with his friend Jimmy Doolittle—former Army stunt flier, leader of a daring air raid on Tokyo, now, as a lieutenant general in the Army Air Forces, undertaking various international missions for the United States during World War II. His latest would be a fact-finding trip from North Africa to Asia and then across the Pacific to make a report in Washington. “Jimmy said that he was arranging to make this round-the-world trip in a speedy bomber,” Lowell later explained. “He said that aside from himself and the crew and one member of his staff there would be room for one more—a place he would hold for me!” Lowell was exhausted after a month racing about Europe … but golly! The plan was for Thomas to zip back to the States and then meet up with Doolittle in North Africa to take his seat on that bomber.
“All that would be necessary,” Thomas writes, “would be for me, upon arrival in America, to get the okay of General ‘Hap’ Arnold, the secretary of war, my radio sponsor, the heads of Fox Movietone and my wife.” Oh, and it should be noted that this delineation of the tasks in front of Lowell appeared in the draft of a newspaper column. He had, just in case there might occasionally be a free moment in his day, accepted another job: a regular column on the war to be syndicated to American newspapers.
Lowell got the necessary approvals. And after two weeks in the States, he embarked, with a film camera and what would be a very busy portable typewriter, upon a trip around the world—some of which was still at war.
On May 17, 1945, via Newfoundland and the Azores, Lowell flew into Casablanca—a huge Allied air base. Then it was across North Africa in a race to meet up with Jimmy Doolittle, who was supposed to be flying down from England. Three days later Lowell was back in Cairo—from which he had set off, 27 years earlier, for Palestine and later Aqaba. But this time there was a snag: Doolittle and his plane were not there.
“At the moment it’s sort of a game of tag around the world,” Thomas tells his radio audience from Cairo. “Until I do fly in and find him on some Asiatic flying field, I’ll be flying in any plane”—any military plane—“that can take me.” Lowell later recalled that another general in Cairo bet him a magnum of champagne that he would never catch Doolittle.
On to Baghdad: but no General Doolittle. Lowell stopped in Aden; the general once again was nowhere to be found. Thomas’ second broadcast was from Delhi on May 24. He did not have a rendezvous with General Doolittle to report. Finally, in Calcutta on May 28, Lowell read in the Times of India that the swift Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, whom he had presumably been chasing around the world, had just landed in Washington, DC. Lowell had lost the bet, lost his ride and lost his host and guide. Actually, a book Thomas later co-wrote about Doolittle seems to indicate that the general had canceled that round-the-world trip, flown directly back to the States from London and, before heading to Washington, had been grabbing a little rest in Florida while Lowell was setting off after him.
Anyway, Lowell found himself alone in India—left to his own resources. Fortunately, those resources were formidable and were now topped off by his door-opening, ride-securing renown. So he decided to slow down some and look more closely at the last stages of the war in Asia: would a bloody invasion of Japan be necessary? And he decided to look more closely as well at Asia itself. He had never before been to China.16
Lowell managed some more radio broadcasts on this trip. But the bulk of the journalism he produced appeared in the series of syndicated newspaper columns reported and written mostly while Lowell flew from India “over the hump” into China, then to the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii and San Francisco, where the new United Nations was getting started. In the Los Angeles Times, at least, where I found 42 (!) of them, the columns did not appear for weeks or months after Thomas returned from his trip.
Some of these pieces were small, almost Ernie Pyle–like vignettes: the horseman from Virginia, Colonel Dan Mallon, whose job it was to buy large numbers of Chinese horses—because gasoline for trucks was in short supply; or the marine sergeant and former Virginia Tech running back who “threw himself on” a grenade to save his platoon. One column detailed having met, in China, both a British officer who had been with T. E. Lawrence when he died and a British newsman whose task it had been to tell Lawrence’s mother about the fatal motorcycle accident. Thomas got two columns out of an interview with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, in which the Chinese leader stated that “the Chinese Reds were not a major problem.”17
* * *
Many of the syndicated newspaper columns Lowell Thomas produced were essentially travel pieces, reporting on exotic sights and customs—an old and reliable genre for him. One column focused on the Chinese belief that “nothing is more honorable and meritorious than to have aged parents and to display filial piety toward them.” Lowell, he reports, had gained respect when speaking with a group in China by noting that his father, “although more than three-score and ten, was still a practicing physician and surgeon,” and that both his parents “were still alive.”
However, at the end of the next year, Lowell’s mother, Harriet M. Thomas, passed away in Asbury Park, New Jersey, at the age of 77. She died “after a long illness”—as the tiny obituaries in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times put it. That was, in those days, often a euphemism for cancer.
“Some of my most vivid memories of my mother have religious overtones,” Lowell would explain in a letter years later. “After Sunday School, we would hear the minister deliver his sermon. Also every Wednesday evening she would drag me out to prayer meeting.… While all this exposure didn’t make a ‘fundamentalist’ out of me, I so admired my mother that I have always had a special regard for all clergymen, missionaries, evangelists and so on.”18 It would soon become clear that this regard extended to Buddhists.
* * *
Lowell’s wartime newspaper column was soon permanently retired, and he eased back, for the moment, into Quaker Hill, winter skiing, large-scale entertaining, New York City, unceasing speaking engagements, Fox Movietone, NBC, Sun Oil—his routine.
However, that jam-packed schedule concealed a rather large and, for Lowell, familiar problem: he had once again fallen hugely in debt. In successfully saving Quaker Hill from tacky overdevelopment, Lowell had, in purchasing the vast French holdings himself, undertaken a huge real-estate speculation—one well beyond his means. And his bet had gone bad. Yes, he had sold some homes to various interesting people. But he was not recouping enough by selling land or houses to make much of a dent in the debt he had assumed in buying those lands and houses—especially given the short supply during wartime of construction materials and construction labor, with which he might have engaged in some non-tacky development of his own.
Lowell and Fran finally decided to move themselves into the grand, 30-room unsold French estate, Hammersley Hill; no sense letting it sit empty. They would bid adieu to their beloved Clover Brook Farm. But this was just rearranging the furniture on what had become a financial Titanic.
Rescue arrived in the person of a short, chubby man, who would become another member of Lowell’s burgeoning associates-for-life club: Frank Smith. Smith, Lowell’s new business manager and future partner, had been raised in Jellico, Tennessee, when the distance between such places and New York City remained vast. But his father was a banker, and the young man eventually graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration. The distance between Harvard and Wall Street was small. Still, Smith shied away from finance and chose to enter a then relatively new, relatively entrepreneurial business: broadcasting. Lowell met Smith during the war, when Smith’s contribution was producing special programming for the war effort and among Lowell’s manifold contributions was appearing in one of Smith’s programs.
They hit it off. And Lowell’s new lawyer—Gerald Dickler, who would become another Lowell lifer—suggested that Smith might just be the financial wizard Lowell had long been searching for: someone who might resuscitate and then stabilize his finances. Lowell offered. Smith—“Smitty,” he called him—accepted, and soon established himself as a full-fledged, first-circle friend of Lowell by acquiring a place of his own on Quaker Hill and being invited to join the golf foursome that included Lowell and Tom Dewey.
“It is my considered opinion that no man in the annals of humankind, who had so little interest in gambling, strong drink or fancy women, has ever managed to unload as much money as has LT,” Frank Smith concluded. For example, Lowell, or “LT” as his associates increasingly called him, had supplemented the nine-hole Robert Trent Jones–designed golf course on Quaker Hill with 21 holes on his own Hammersley Hill estate, which would include, just for fun, the longest hole in the world: 830 yards, par 7.5. Smith, consequently, had insisted on one condition before agreeing to work with Lowell: the great newsman and Pawling potentate had to agree that he would not write a check without Smith’s approval. That was a large concession for a sophisticated and proud man. That was the key to making the whole thing work. And it worked magnificently.
With Lowell’s checkbook (more or less) under lock and key, Smith could get around to dealing with the damage produced when it had roamed free. This was a client, after all, who did have a hefty annual income to go along with his debt. Smith’s charge was to release Lowell from the shackles of Sun Oil, his main creditor, and the Pew brothers.
Once again, it would be cheering to think that Lowell’s gripe with Sun Oil had to do with the political pressure the Pews sometimes put on him and his broadcasts. It may have been, but that is not how Lowell told the story. “They wanted me to sign up with Sun for life,” Lowell maintains in his memoir. “I just couldn’t do it. Life was such a long time.” As employer-employee relations go, a request for a lifetime contract does not seem that huge an irritant. Couldn’t Thomas and the Pews have agreed, by way of a compromise, to take it a decade at a time?
Whatever had inspired this break with Sun Oil—and it may just have been a search for higher compensation—Smith deftly managed to accomplish it. He secured a new sponsor for Lowell Thomas with the News: Procter & Gamble, an enormous but innocuous and politically quiescent household-products company. Smith arranged that Procter & Gamble would employ Lowell on sufficiently favorable terms—with sufficient money up front—so that Lowell could rapidly repay his debt to Sun Oil.
And this change of sponsorships necessitated a change of radio networks: Smith shifted Thomas’ western broadcast back to CBS in 1946. Then, on September 29, 1947, Lowell Thomas and the News (at about this time the show’s title exchanged a preposition for a conjunction) began being carried by CBS throughout the United States. Lowell Thomas would now be heard on the chief rival of NBC, his home for 17 years. This divorce left NBC, according to one trade magazine, “considerably steamed.”19
* * *
After Edward R. Murrow had returned from covering the war in Europe and supervising CBS’ coverage of that war, the longtime leader of CBS, William Paley, made Murrow a vice president of CBS News. And once Lowell Thomas began his migration to CBS, he invited Murrow and his family out to spend some time on Quaker Hill. Murrow declined. He felt it inappropriate to socialize with someone he would be supervising—albeit very, very loosely. Murrow’s refusal may also have reflected their differences.
Ed Murrow and Lowell Thomas both hailed from the West and had both achieved outsized success in radio journalism by great displays of energy and talent. Murrow’s view of journalism, however, was different from Thomas’: He brought to his work an alertness to injustice, even a commitment to social justice. He would later call attention, for instance, to the exploitation of migrant farmworkers in United States.
Thomas was certainly a caring person. Charities found him free with his time and his money. He was sensitive to the plight of individuals, such as the elderly rich women preyed upon by the grifter he had exposed in Chicago, Carleton Hudson Betts. But given Lowell’s trust in capitalism and America, he wasn’t disposed to look into, or even look for, systematic flaws. It is hard to find any Murrow-like crusades in Thomas’ travelogues, books or newscasts. “Lowell wasn’t a real journalist to Ed,” Frank Stanton, who became president of CBS, later explained. In Murrow’s view, with which Stanton said he disagreed, Thomas “was just a storyteller.”
Murrow was serious, occasionally somber. He could usually be found with a cigarette in one hand and, when out in company, a scotch and water in the other. Frequently he was engaging in social situations, but Murrow could also be distracted and prickly. He was a demanding boss. Yet his coworkers at CBS News mostly loved and respected him. Despite the fact that he later did a gossipy show on CBS television called Person to Person—a series of celebrity interviews shot inside the subjects’ homes—Murrow was seen at CBS News and elsewhere in broadcast journalism as epitomizing that which was most noble in broadcast journalism. Thomas was easy to work for, well liked by his colleagues and well loved by his audience. But he was not generally seen as that. He was once the subject of an installment of Person to Person—and had the largest home of any of the celebrities the show visited.
In the end, Ed Murrow proved uncomfortable as an executive, and by 1947 he had surrendered the position. Instead, he undertook his own nightly CBS radio newscast—on at 7:45 p.m., an hour after Thomas’. The next time Lowell invited him out to Quaker Hill, Murrow accepted. He, his wife and their young son ended up spending a month in a cottage belonging to Thomas. “I shall always embarrass you with my gratitude for the month we spent on Quaker Hill…,” he warned Lowell. “It was, in all respects, ideal.”
Murrow enjoyed the golf and played often in that foursome with Thomas, Dewey and Frank Smith. And Murrow, who had grown up on a farm in Washington State, fell hard for Quaker Hill’s agrarian charms. He was taken, in particular, with one rural-looking house made out of cedar logs. In 1948, on a train out of New York City, Murrow and his wife, Janet, met Charles Murphy, the man who owned that house. “By the time we reached Washington,” as Janet Murrow tells the story, “I knew we had bought the house.” (Murphy’s family soon purchased another house on Quaker Hill.)
To a colleague at CBS Murrow wisecracked that he was “surrounded” on Quaker Hill “by reactionary Republicans.” He advised his wife not to “get into any political discussion with the people there.” Murrow himself didn’t socialize much and mastered the art of avoiding the subject. “Though Dewey and I are friends and neighbors,” he explained, “we have a strictly arms’-length relationship when it comes to politics.”
Still, Murrow loved Quaker Hill. And he could be there more during the summer because he could borrow Lowell’s studio for his own radio newscast. Seven years later—looking for a tax shelter—the Murrows traded up to a 281-acre spread there: Glen Arden Farm. The actual farming was done by a farmer, who leased the land. But Murrow relaxed by clearing brush or moving dirt. He bought a bulldozer. Upon nearing his farm, Janet Murrow reported, “You could see him start to unwind.”20
* * *
When the war ended, Lowell Thomas Jr. returned to and graduated from Dartmouth. Then, in 1948, he was recalled into the military to fly with Stuart Symington, first secretary of the air force, on a trip around the world, which included a chance to observe the test of an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Presumably Lowell Sr.’s influence had helped gain his son this opportunity. Presumably Lowell, as resistant as he may have been to remorse, had been regretting his failure to fulfill what he called, in one of the World War II journals, “my ½ way promise to Sonny to remember this was his war.”
Father and son, however, still had a large adventure—perhaps the most audacious of either of their lives—in front of them.
* * *
Lowell had one more opportunity to root for, but not tilt his newscast toward, Thomas Dewey in a presidential election. In 1948, running against Harry Truman, the Republican was heavily favored.
Eric Sevareid remembers broadcasting the election returns with Ed Murrow and some others on CBS on November 2, 1948. “Lowell was there wearing that white Stetson of his, which he kept on all evening, absolutely certain that his close friend and neighbor, Tom Dewey, was going to be the next president…,” Sevareid later recalled. “As the returns went on, Lowell’s smile slowly faded and his head slowly drooped and that hat went down over his eyes. And late, late in the evening, when it was clear that Dewey wasn’t going to make it, I think he fell either into a deep sleep or into a depression, but he was immobile. And that I never forgot.”21