Biography

Murrow's public attacks on Senator Joseph McCarthy were prompted by the suicide of Murrow's friend, former State Department official Laurence Duggan, whom had been accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Responding to Murrow, McCarthy challenged him to debate William F. Buckley about Communists within the U.S. Government; Murrow refused. Decrypted cables and archived documents later confirmed that Duggan was, in fact, a Soviet agent.

A chain smoker who by his own admission could not go for thirty minutes without lighting up, he died from lung cancer two years after an operation to remove his left lung, at the age of 57.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson as he left his post as director of the US Information Agency in 1964, and he also received an honorary knighthood by the British government in 1965.

His program See It Now (1951), a television version of his radio program "Hear It Now," was the first television news program to use the technique of taking its viewers away from the main studio to remote locations.

Keith Olbermann uses his signature sign-off, "And so good night, and good luck," in tribute to Murrow's work.