← Harold's Old Time Radio
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Robert Trout
Oh, oh, oh. O'Reilly, you need parts. O'Reilly Auto Parts has parts. Need them fast. We've got fast. No matter what you need, we have thousands of professional parts people doing their part to make sure you have it. Product availability. Just one part that makes O'Reilly stand apart. The professional parts people. Auto parts. The voices of Studio 9. Edward R. Morrow on a London rooftop during the Blitz. This is London. I'm standing again tonight looking out over London. In the course of the last 15 or 20 minutes, there's been considerable action up here. Charles Collingwood describing the German surrender. General Yodel said in a voice that choked and almost broke with this signature. The German people and the German armed forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the victor's hands in this war which is last. H.V. keltonborn speculating about a third term for FDR. Good evening, everybody. There has been a contest of wits between the President of the United States and the Washington reporters. They have sought to make him tell what he intends to do about a third term. He has sought. Eric Severod, recalling the fall of France. The life just simply ran out of the city. It was like a beautiful woman lying in a coma with her life blood just draining out through every, every vein, every street. I noticed the one way. Those are the voices of CBS Radio News Studio nine. Those and others like Elmer Davis, William L. Shirer, John Daly and Alan Jackson, who through the dark days of Hitler's march through Europe and World War II, through the 50s and now the 60s, brought the living history of the world through Studio 9 and into the living rooms of the nation. Tonight, they bid Farewell to Studio 9. Farewell to Studio 9. An affectionate goodbye to the birthplace of CBS News. Here is CBS News correspondent Robert Trout. I am speaking to you from Studio 9. As broadcasting facilities go, this one is not remarkable at all. It's just a soundproof room, 15 by 20, surrounded on two sides by glass encased control rooms. On the third, it looks out into the clutter of the CBS newsroom. It's not the handsomest radio studio, not the most modern, not lovely at all. But for those who have worked here, it has a charm all its own. We shall miss it. We have been moving from this headquarters of CBS News at 52nd street in Madison Avenue in New York City to our new headquarters on the west side of Manhattan. And this old Studio 9 goes dead. The voices of those decades that have gone seem to be talking again, speaking words that once made people tremble and rejoice and laugh and cry sometimes, speaking words that Will not die. This program, an Affectionate Farewell to Studio 9, is a collection of reminiscences, recollections and reports by the men who built CBS News. Men like Edward R. Murrow. Bob, one of the infuriating things I remember about Studio 9 was that occasionally we would get through to Master control and then they couldn't get it down to Studio 9. And that produced some rather profane comments because we couldn't see why we could get a good signal 3,5000 miles and in New York they couldn't get it four floors. I think the engineers are going to be slightly embarrassed. Well, we have some recordings of some of the broadcasts. A few of those things that you did, Ed. Would you like to hear any of them? Would you like to hear the one on the rooftop? The Blitz in the Blitz. I've never heard it. Haven't you really? Probably terrible. No, listen to it now. This is London. I'm standing again tonight on a rooftop looking out over London, feeling rather large and lonesome. In the course of the last 15 or 20 minutes there's been considerable action up here. But at the moment there's an ominous silence hanging over London. But at the same time a silence that has a great deal of dignity. Just straight away in front of me, the third lights are working. I can see one or two bursts of anti aircraft fire far in the distance, just on a roof across the way, I can see a man standing wearing a tin hat with a pair of powerful night glasses to his eyes, scanning the sky again, looking in the opposite direction. There's a building with two windows gone. Out of one window there waves something that looks like a white bed sheet, a window curtain swinging free. In this night breeze. It looks as though it were being shaken by a ghost. There are a great many ghosts around these buildings in London. In some of them, companies of ghosts. Ed, I don't know how you feel about that. I find it kind of hard to take. I'll tell you something about that, Robert, that was never reported. I had to stand on a rooftop for six nights in succession and make a record each night and submit it to the Ministry of Information in order to persuade the sensors that I could ad lib without violating security. And I did it for six nights and the records were lost somewhere in the Ministry of Information. So then I had to do it for another six nights before they would finally give me permission after listening to the second take of six to stand on the rooftop. So I had a lot of time up there. You remember the studio at the BBC. That's right. B4 it was, was referred to as having formerly been a waitress's robing room. In fact meant that it had once been the ladies lavatory. And all the broadcasts from London came from there during the war. That's right. This is a reminiscence that you'd ever care to remember, but it's always been my story. You remember the first time that you ever went on CBS on the air? We'd gone to the Christmas party of the publicity department. And somehow it stretched on into the evening, at least for us. And I was practically a teetotaler, you know. I didn't know anything about all this alcohol. And of course you were always very circumspect. And as the evening wore on and I remembered I had to do a five minute news broadcast supplied by the press radio bureau. You decided that I really wasn't quite fit to do it. Do you remember that? If this is being recorded, I don't remember anything about it. And I sat in the studio when I was supposed to be doing it and you did. That's right. And you were going to give me the cut. You were going to give me the watch at the end. And you gave it to me a minute early. And we left 45 seconds of dead air at the end. I don't remember that at all. You were the director of talks and weren't supposed to be on the air at all. That's right. I think that was your first broadcast on cbs. And one thing that's almost hard to believe now as we think about it, in those early days we didn't have any press associations because the Associated Press, the United Press and the International News Service as they were then, refused to sell their services to broadcasters. Remember? Yes. And I can remember you night after night ending a five minute news broadcast by saying, for further details, read your daily newspaper. That's right. I can remember when I first went to Europe in 1937, I was not permitted to be a member of the American Correspondence association in London or Paris because I was involved in that ridiculous thing called radio. All I remember was that shortly after I got to London, you were the president of it. Well, that was in the build up for D day. Yes. Just happened to be my third. No, but I hadn't remembered that. You had a hard time getting in. Well, of course, during the war you made a number of bombing flights over the enemy territory over Germany, broadcasting as you went, astonishing broadcasts. I know that the management of CBS was kind of unhappy that you insisted on going on these things and tried to dissuade you and you wouldn't be dissuaded. We have the result of at least one of those air raids. Would you like to hear that one? Oh, yes. I began to see what was happening to Berlin. The small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet. The cookies, the 4,000 pound high explosives were bursting below like great sunflowers gone mad. And then as we started down again, still held in the light, I remembered that the dog still had one of those cookies and a whole basket of incendiaries in his belly. And the light still held it. And I was very frightened. I looked down and the white fires had turned red. They were beginning to merge and spread just like butter does on a hot plate. The bomb doors were open. And then there was a gentle, confident upward thrust under my feet. And Boz said, cookie gone. A few seconds later the incendiaries went and D Dog seemed lighter and easier to handle. I began to breathe and to reflect again that all men would be brave if only they could leave their stomachs at home. When there was a tremendous whomp, an unintelligible shout from the tail gunner and D Dog shivered and lost altitude. I looked to the port side and there was a Lancaster that seemed close enough to. He had whipped straight under us, missed us by 25, 50ft. No one knew how much. Berlin was a kind of orchestrated hell. A terrible symphony of light and flame. There were four reporters on this operation. Two of them didn't come back. Two friends of mine, Norman Stockton of Australian Associated Newspapers and Lowell Bennett, an American representing International News Service. There is something of a tradition amongst reporters that those who are prevented by circumstances from filing their stories will be covered by their colleagues. This has been my effort to do so. I have no doubt that Bennett and Stockton would have given you a better report of last night's activity. That was the broadcast that became known as orchestrated hell. Yeah, I remember that. I'm sure you do. One thing that I imagine the public, thinking back, listening a bit, perhaps listening to us talk would find amazing, could hardly believe it is that all during the war, of course, we didn't use recordings. It was all live. We were permitted to use them shortly before D Day and we used them from then onward. For example, they broadcasted George Hicks dead from the ship during the D Day landings. That was done on tape. Yes. Very well. Here we go again. Another plane's come over right over our port side. Looks like we're gonna have a night tonight. Another one coming over. Something burning is falling down through the sky and circling down. Maybe a hit plan. There he goes. They got one. They got one. We got that one right here. Did we? Yeah. The next record that we have here to listen to is the one when you got to the concentration camp and saw what had happened in Buchenwald. Listen to it. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. As I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand clapping of babies. As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling towards the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it. In another part of the camp, they showed me the children. Hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. D6030 it was. The other showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die. The children clung to my hands and stared. We crossed to the courtyard. Men kept coming up to speak to me and to touch me. Professors from Poland, doctors from Vienna, men from all Europe. Men from the countries that made America. We proceeded to the small courtyard. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation. They had not been executed, but the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Bougainville. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last 12 years. As I left that camp, a Frenchman who used to work for Havas in Paris came up to me and said, you will write something about this, perhaps. And he added, to write about this, you must have been here at least two years. And after through that, you don't want to write anymore. I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry. Listening to that edge makes me realize again how radio came to be the magnificent medium that it is. And how much you did to make it that kind of medium. And also, of course, I can't help thinking how much of those broadcasts, how many of them came through this studio? 9. What does it mean to you? I keep thinking of the people. I remember Elmer Davis, who was one of the most sensitive men I have ever met, although most people didn't realize it. I wish you could be here with us today. Let's listen to one of his broadcasts. Elmer Davis. Whatever the terms imposed on France may be, it can pretty safely be assumed that they will be such as to make it impossible for France ever to become dangerous to Germany again. Unless, of course, Hitler should be overthrown. How much farther they may go in the direction of attempting to make France over on the Nazi remains to be seen. But at least some of the Nazi theorists seem to have extensive hopes. One of the chief of these philosophers of Nazism, man who has worked out its doctrines very thoroughly, is Alfred Rosenberg. He is a less prominent figure than he used to be, but he still writes a good deal in the Felkischer Bailbachter, the principal Nazi paper. And some remarks of his, quoted in the New York Times last Sunday, are a suggestion of the sort of world that the more philosophical Nazis will create if they can. Mr. Rosenberg writes about Paris, the fall of Paris. He says, I quote, the fall of Paris is the beginning of the end of the spiritual and racial turpitude of Europe. For Paris was the center of the mental confusion that pervaded Europe, end quote. What Rosenberg and the other Nazis call mental confusion, and they mean this quite sincerely, it's part of a well thought out philosophy. What they call mental confusion is what the rest of us call freedom of thought, the liberty of the mind to work over everything and come to its own conclusions. This man had an ability to compress and condense without distorting that I've never heard by anyone in radio anywhere. He had always the essence of the news, great brevity and great clarity. His. His was a genius, I agree. It's still the best instrument through which to convey the news. This old fashioned radio. That's what I wanted. If you were going to say that's true, let me just say to you then, goodbye and good luck. Another voice that was already famous in the early days of the war belonged to H.V. kelton born, who even then, as a young fellow just entering his 60s, was known to the nation as the dean of radio news analysts. Now, having just celebrated his 86th birthday, HB Kaltenborn looks back to the Sudeten crisis of 38 and how it affected the lives of Americans who were keeping track of it. They'd Never used portable radios before. And they came in during that crisis. People carried radios all over with them. Wherever you went, you saw people carrying radios because they were listening to the crisis and didn't want to lose a minute of it. Yes. And they were as big as suitcases in those days. Yes, they were pretty big. But they carried them and got a lot out of them. Yes. Do you think that that crisis really is the. The first thing, the turning point that made this country more aware of the outside world and the whole world crisis? I think that's probably its significance, that for the first time the entire country was aware of the fact that the actions of one of these dictators operating over there in Europe could plunge this country into a world war. And that was its significance. How many days and nights you suppose? I guess neither one of us could possibly remember how many days and nights it lasted. But you used to sleep on the sofa and. And Mrs. Calvin Bourne would bring in the soup for you. Do you recall? That's right. I recall that very well. And it was essential that I be there because things were coming up every minute. There was no time, day or night, when we couldn't be called upon to analyze a major crisis. And so I did sleep in the studio. That was the only way we could handle it. And we certainly did our job. That is, of course, we never had the commendations that came to us after that crisis. Gosh, that was something that overwhelmed me. I got petitions and tributes and cups and Lord knows what all. You could have gone to the Senate. Yeah, I could have done something on the strength of the reputation that I gathered there. Yes, but then when the war did come in 1939 and we were again in Studio 9, the country still was. Was pretty solidly isolationist. I don't suppose the United States ever would have entered the war voluntarily. Well, best proof that it was isolationist was the fact that we had a hard time getting on a prayer by the archbishop of Canterbury for peace as against the Kentucky Derby. And so we set it for the. For the prayer and by jinks, if the two didn't come at exactly the same time. And I'll never forget the feeling, in the words of the announcer of the Kentucky Derby, but in Louisville, as he said, gee, we've just had the greatest letdown of our lives because you took the time that we had taken for the Kentucky Derby and the audience didn't get any of it. Well, those were the things that happened in those days of the old school studio after the war in Europe was what one year old. In 1940 we had a presidential election in this country. And that brings me to another record that we have from those days. Let's listen to this one. Carlton Born edits the news. Good evening everybody. For months past there has been a contest of wits between the President of the United States and the Washington reporters. They have sought to make him tell what he intends to do about a third term. He has sought by banter, persiflage, clever answer, smiles and occasional silence not to tell him. How long can that battle of wits go on without somebody losing his temper. However, Franklin D. Roosevelt is clever enough with Repertee and easy enough in almost any situation in relation to reporters to be able to continue to handle it. That's another one we know the end of now, Hvit, isn't it? But did you think at that time that. That Mr. Roosevelt would run again? Yes, I felt that he would run again. I'm sure that he believed that he could handle this difficult peace or war situation better than anyone else. And there was nothing against a third term. The Dean of American News Broadcasters, H.V. kaltenborn, a voice that today regularly commands the nation's attention is that of Eric Severide, one of broadcasting's most celebrated news analysts. When the war began, Eric Severide was a newspaper man in France and he joined the growing CBS news staff as the Germans drove nearer to Paris. Now it is June 9, 1940. This is Paris at midnight. It's been a great day for the moving and packing industry in Paris. At the time of the Battle of the Marne in 1914, the Germans were equally close to the city. I don't know how many more radio broadcasts can be made from the Paris studio. If there is an interruption, we will try to continue with facilities installed in other towns further south. I do not think there is any deliberate attempt to hide the real state of affairs from the people of Paris. They are as calm as could be expected. They are fatalistic people. It is this quality which makes Frenchmen stand half naked in this wilting heap, beating their red hot guns until literally crushed out by German tanks. Perhaps if this would permit young French men and girls, as I saw them today, to float on their backs in the Bois de Boulogne swimming pool and idly watch the flowering burst of anti aircraft shells in the sky. Robert that's the first time I've heard any of those broadcasts from that period so long ago when Paris was about to fall, I wouldn't recognize my own voice. That broadcast must have been one of the first half dozen or so that I ever did. And you can. And I must say it frightened me to death. And I know how to speak. And the microphone scared me. And I never quite got over it, really. I really made the last broadcast to the States from Paris. In fact, they packed up that radio station as soon as I finished that night. It was very bad. And in the city when the Germans were coming in, it must have been very shortly after that broadcast that the government pulled out. And they didn't tell the people what to do or where to go, whether to stay or to go. So they crowded around the railroad stations in the southern part of Paris. Garmoparnasse, for example, by the thousands. I was lucky. I had a car and I had all the francs that CBS had in the bank stuffed in my pocket. And I even had a bicycle on top of that car and an extra can of gasoline. So I was able to make my way south with the government. But it was perfectly terrible. But the roads were clogged, weren't they? It was awful. We drove all night and all day, just barely creeping along. It must have taken us oh, many, many, many hours to get on a tour where the government was. But that last day I was in Paris, there was a cloud of black smoke, the north way to the north, creeping toward Paris. I think some oil dumps or something been set on fire. This was very symbolic. The whole horizon began to dark and then close toward the city and looking up to the Champs Elysees great boulevard, there was hardly a car left. I noticed one waiter outputting the chairs from a cafe back inside. No one sitting there. The life just simply ran out of the city. It was like a beautiful woman lying in a coma with her lifeblood just draining out from every. Every vein, every street. But we had quite a run of luck. We had this break about. I'd send a cable, a sort of a code thing, in advance to New York that if I wired them such and such a phrase, it met a German breakthrough or a French breakthrough or something of the sort. And coming down from Cambrai on that long night ride in the refugee train, we could see the gun flashes off to the northeast. And then we would hear the sound of the guns. And in our group was an American who had been an officer in World War I. And he took out his stopwatch and he timed the period you see between the flashes and the sound. And then he figured out how far it was. And we measured this on a map that was perfectly clear from this little exercise that the Germans had broken through. Yes. And so I got to Paris and I finally remembered, after maybe some hours of having forgotten that cable, that I had such a cable in New York, sent this code phrase to Paul White in New York and then he finally remembered he had such a cable in his desk and drew it out. And I think Elmer Davis broadcast that they had what they believed to be reputable report that the Germans had broken through the main French defenses. At least that's what I was told later when I got to New York. And I remember in New York the big front page headlines on the newspapers more than once with a story of yours that had come from us through cbs. And we saw them, yes, especially just as Paris was falling. You didn't go to the south at all, to the Vichy government, you went? No, I left Bordeaux. Then when Petain took over in the. In fact, I was on this ship coming out of the mouth of the river. Our sister ship was bombed and sunk. I heard on ship radio Bill Shire broadcasting from Compien the formal surrender to Hitler. This was an extraordinary sensation, I must say. Thank God we're getting old, you know. CBS News correspondent Eric Severide. We'll listen to William L. Shirer at Compiegne describing the French surrender and talk to him about that day in just a moment. Farewell to Studio 9 will continue after a 10 second pause for station identification. This is the CBS radio Network. CBS News continues with Farewell to Studio 9. Here again is Robert Trout. As CBS News moves into its new headquarters and Studio 9 shuts down, the voices that broadcast Living History form a permanent record of our time. One of those who broadcast, William L. Shirer, a newspaperman in Berlin, was hired by European news director Ed Morrow to help fill the growing call for more broadcasts from Europe. As the lights again began going out one by one. Soon, with the second global war a reality, the voice of Scherer speaking almost nightly from Berlin was what we came to feel was the principal thread of sanity that still kept us linked in a way with the capital of the country that was, although then undeclared, the enemy, William L. Shirer, was in the forest at Compiegne in France, June 22, 1940, looking through a window of a train car where inside, Hitler was accepting the French surrender, the same train car in which, 22 years earlier, the French accepted the German surrender. William L. Shirer, on that June Day in 1940, described the scene. Hitler steps up into the car, followed by Goering and the others. We watch them entering the drawing room in Marshall Fusscher's car. We can see nicely now through the car windows. Hitler enters cross and takes the place occupied by Marshal Foch. The morning the first armistice was signed. The German salute, the French salute. The atmosphere is what Europeans call correct. But you get the picture when I say that we see no handshakes, not on occasions like this. Hitler and the other German leaders rise from their feet as the French enter the drawing room. Hitler, we see, gives the Nazi salute, the arm raised. The German officers give a military salute. The French do the same. Hitler, so far as we can see through the windows just in front of us there, does not say anything. He nods to General Keitel at his side. We can see General Keitel adjusting his paper and then he starts to read. He is leading the preamble of the German realistic term. The French sit there with marble like faces and listen intently. Hitler and Goring glanced at the green tabletop. We see Hitler stand up, salute stiffly with hand up raised. Then Freida of the drilling room, followed by Goering, General Brauchitz, Grand Admiral Raeder is there, Herr Hess, and at the end, Herr von Leventhalt. That was the first of the two day sessions when Hitler arrived at the little clearing in the forest near Compiegne and laid down the conditions. We were the only people for embarrassingly long hours that had a report that the French had signed the armistice. And that was due to, as are so many scoops in journalism, to a piece or two of very good luck. All the other foreign correspondents, including the Americans, the newspaper people, had flown back to Berlin that day because Hitler had said that the armistice news would come from him. I took a chance and stayed at Compiegne. The armistice was signed at 6:50pm and I think I went on the air at 7 and I assumed that it was being recorded in Berlin. But what happened? Somebody in Berlin forgot to pull the switch and it went straight out from Berlin on the German shortway center to New York. I was told later that even people like Churchill in London first got the news because Hitler did not release the news of the armistice for six hours. And I remember, I think later on I had a feedback with New York and I heard Elmer Davis, who was in doing the thing that afternoon, saying, well, it's exciting news, but there's no confirmation any place. The voice of William L. Shirer, John Daly, whom we then called John Charles Daly, broadcast for CBS in the 30s from Washington. Then with the creation of that great dividing line of our times, the start of hostilities, he made his permanent home here in New York. In this studio nine. It was here that he made his now famous broadcast on December 7, 1941. I was standing out there in the newsroom looking over the machines, waiting for any last minute things that came in. And this Pearl harbor announcement hit. And I came in and broke into the philharmonic concert to announce that Pearl harbor had been attacked. We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by air. President Roosevelt has just announced. The attack also was made on all naval and military activities on the principal island of Ohau. The staff was sitting around this, this table and they just. We took turns going out and picking up every little bit of information we could about relationships with the Japanese, the principles involved, the character and nature of Pearl harbor, getting little shreds of information and telephone calls to our station affiliates in the area. And we just kept the air and kept on reporting everything that came through. Doesn't, in the context of all that's done these days, perhaps sound very revolutionary? But for that time it was the. The concept that you would just take over a whole network's operation and give the broadest and. And widest coverage of the story that you were on in those days was a revolutionary concept. John Daly also broadcast the news on that April day in 1945. Wilderness Road Adventure on the American frontier with the Western family and Daniel Boone in the exciting days following the American Revolution. We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News. A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead. The president died of a cerebral hemorrhage. All we know so far is that the president died at Warm Springs in Georgia. I think its impact on me probably was greater than it would be on most because I had been White House correspondent for three or four years in that wonderfully informal atmosphere that existed in those days, in that assignment which doesn't unhappily exist anymore simply because it's grown so. But wherever Franklin Roosevelt went as president, that hard core of permanent correspondence assigned to cover the White House went with him. And we all were fond of him. The whole country was, was, I think, just brought up short when it did happen. John Daly recalling the day that was so hard to believe. Charles Collingwood joined CBS News in London not long after the war began. He broadcast his way through the blitz on London. Then the beginning of the march back to the continent of Europe. The invasion of North Africa. American troops going into the western end of the Mediterranean south shore as General Montgomery's British army chased the Germans from the eastern end. And when the Allies sailed from England for the coast of France, Charles Collingwood was there all the way through Paris to the surrender of the Third Reich. Charles is again in Paris now as chief European correspondent for CBS News. And we talk to him about those days. The entry into Paris was one of the most moving things that I have ever experienced. The sense of liberation, the great welcome for General de Gaulle, who exercised magic power over the French crowds, just as he does today. And they gratitude and the depth and the fervency of the welcome for the American troops was fantastic. And I spoke a little bit of French and I did, I guess, talk to them while the mic was open. And of course they responded with all of the fervor that was in their souls. Then. Yes, when I keep hearing you say, just the introduction, when you was. You knew you'd say, mes amis, you know, my friend, I can still hear you saying that in a loud voice, addressing in the multitude, they might have run you for something. You might have been elected to the deputies. Well, in those days it would. Was easier for an American to get elected to anything that it would be these. Well, then you went through the. The war, a lot more of the war and. And then came the big German surrender. And we have a tape, a recording that we've dug up from the files, or shall I say the archives. That sounds a little bit more imposing of you. At the surrender of Germany. Would you like. I'd like to hear that. Fine. General Yodel, chief of Staff of the German army, signed the last document. He sat there very straight with his head bent over the papers. And when he had signed the last one, he put the cap back on the pen and looked up at the men sitting across the plain wooden table. Opposite him sat General Beetle Smith, Eisenhower's chief of Staff. As he looked to his right, General Yodel could see a big powerful man in the uniform of a Russian general sitting next to General Smith. He was General Sus Leparov, the Russian delegate. Over his shoulder paired the extraordinary head of another Russian. The head was bald as a gourd, with fierce, unwavering eyes whose bright and sinister gaze did not for an instant leave the drawn face of General Yodel. Yodel did not meet his eyes for long. Then General Yodel looked again at General Smith. I would like to say something, he said. Smith nodded. Yodel rose stiffly to his feet. Herr General, he said in a voice that choked and almost broke. With this signature, the German people and the German armed forces are for better or worse, delivered into the victor's hands in this hour. I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity. Then General Yodel sat down quickly. No one else said anything. The Germans looked around as though wondering what to do next. And at another nod from General Smith, they got up. General Yodel, his aid. And Admiral Freeberg, who commands the German navy. With Yodel in the lead, they walked quickly out of the room. That sounded pretty good. You took the words out of my mouth, Charles. It sounded very good indeed. Very good. As I sit here listening and then we're playing the record here in New York. You're listening across the ocean. A question keeps going through my mind to which there isn't any answer. I wonder if younger people listening to these records, you know, and knowing what they are, that they are history not written in a book, but as it was being lived. I wonder if they get an emotion as I do. Or I wonder if they would just consider it a kind of curiosity. You know, you look in a book and you see someone wearing a strange costume and a picture. Or you read about a king dying or something like that. Now, it's a curious thing. To me, it's. They're very alive, very much alive. Well, they're very alive to me, I suppose young people, after all, you could be quite mature now and not even have been born. When these things happen, it must seem like. Like ancient history. But to me it makes it very much alive how things have changed since the war. Here we have the great Franco German reconciliation. The friendship between Germany and the United States. The scars of war in Germany are nearly all healed now. Yes, and of course, it could have been different. That's the thing really, isn't it? I don't know. I think there's something about fate. I really somehow believe that people who are motivated by what in old fashioned terms we'd call wickedness, and I think Hitler was a wicked man. Somehow inevitably make the miscalculations that bring about their downfall. And at the same time, those people who are motivated by. By all the things that we believe in generally somehow tend to make the right decisions. Charles, that's not only a highly comforting. I think it's an idealistic note on which we could end our transatlantic conversation today. Goodbye, Bud. Pleasure to talk to you again. Bye. After a couple of years in England before the D Day landings, I found myself back in New York here in Studio 9 again as the war followed its tortured path to victory. When the Germans collapsed, the center of our world broadcasting was here. Many experts said it would take years to conquer the Japanese. But three months after the day of victory in Europe, Japan was falling. I moved out of Studio 9 just outside the door where the news machines are the teletypes and a direct telephone from the White House hung on the wall there to be able to broadcast the great news a few seconds faster than if I had remained inside the studio. I sat in a chair in the newsroom for four days and nights, waiting. And then the word came. 7pm Eastern. War time. Bob Trout reporting. The Japanese have accepted our terms fully. That's the word we've just received from the White House in Washington. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the Second World War. The United nations, on land, on the sea, in the air, and to the four corners of the earth are united and are victorious. The great rift between the Communist world, roughly of the east, and the civilization of what we call the Western world was to mark the years after the war, the post war east west conflict grew worse. And at its height, the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin. The Allied reply successfully carried out was, of course, the airlift. But in another part of the world, after the airlift saved Berlin, the Communists attacked in open warfare in Asia. The North Koreans crossing the border into South Korea, supplied by the Soviet Union and later reinforced by the Communist Chinese. Robert Pierpoint was in Korea. For CBS news, the date, June 1, 1951. The place, a foxhole during a battle. We have just hit the dirt. I don't know whether this tape is still going, but I'm awful low right now. What was that that came over? That was artillery. Time to raise that thing now. It's just 1:00. Straight up and down on the morning of the 18th. And we're still out here on the hill with Fox Company and Captain Sutton looking down at Chinese throats as they try to advance up the valley here. Whoop. There was a big one. The weapon that changed the world and gave our age its nuclear name. The atomic bomb was first publicly displayed for newsmen in April 1952. Dallas Townsend was at Yucca Flats in Nevada. Five, four, three, two, one, zero. That's it. You could feel the flash. You could feel the heat. We're waiting three seconds. We can see the cloud going up in the air. 1002, 1003. We're taking our goggles off. There's the cloud, the enormous. The enormous cloud already going high into the air. A great glowing mass. Now the cloud is beginning to expand. A sort of cataract of white foam. White cloud is pouring over the top of it. That was the Shock wave. The space age arrived with the Soviet launching of the first splutnik. That caught the United States by surprise. Even into the era of manned flight, the Soviet Union at first had the field or the sky to itself. Then on May 5th, 1961, the first American to enter outer space, Alan Shepard went up from Cape Canaveral. The broadcast went through this Studio 9 and I was in Florida at the scene. 3, 2, 1, 0, ignition. You don't hear the sound yet, but we see the flame. Very slowly, majestically, the Redstone rises into the sky. It's man invisible inside the capsule and a flame clearly seen like a beaming light, like a searchlight focused down at the earth again as that thin slim pencil goes slowly, slowly up into the clear sky. And now the sound grows louder and louder and swallows everything many times. From this Studio 9 we called in the eternal city Rome, often to hear a timely and timeless event like the announcement that the Roman Catholic Church had a new Pope. Here is Winston Burdett reporting. We have a Pope. The Pope is Giovanni Batista Cardinal Montine, the 65 year old Archbishop of Milan and he has taken the name of Pope Paul vi. There have been all night broadcasts and all day broadcasts in and through this Studio 9. Invasions, Coronations, Elections and the collapse of empires. Events like the drive across France reported by Bill Downs and Larry Le Sueur. The founding of the United nations reported by Ned Calmer. The rise of post war Germany reported by Richard C. Hotelet. The sinking of the Andrea Doria reported by Douglas Edwards. And then there came the day of the broadcast that at first no one could quite believe. No one wanted to believe. The day of November 22, 1963, Alan Jackson was on the air. We interrupt this program for a CBS Radio Net alert bulletin. President Kennedy and Governor John Connally of Texas were both hit by a would be assassin's bullets as they toured downtown Dallas in an open automobile a short while ago. That is the latest word that had just come in from Dallas on United Press International. The Associated Press in its first report says that President Kennedy was shot just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy, who was riding with him, jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy and cried oh no. As I listened to that tape just now, I recall that the first dawning of the the disaster that had happened came to me intuitively perhaps when I read across ran the quote of Mrs. Kennedy when she said oh no. Somehow this just struck me very deeply at the time. This was one of those stories where you believe it and yet you don't want to believe it. And then, of course, as time went on, you kept fearing the inevitable conclusion that you knew was coming. I haven't the slightest idea of anything else that was happening that day. It was the usual run of things, I suppose. Africa and Europe and maybe something at the UN but at this moment, I can't recall anything else but that one story. I don't think I ever will, for that matter. It wasn't long before the word was final. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States is dead. John F. Kennedy has died of the wounds received in an assassination in Dallas less than an hour ago. We repeat, it has just been announced that President Kennedy is dead. That was the hardest announcement I ever put on the air. Anytime it took a great big deep breath on my part to be able to get it out. Here was this thing which had happened. You knew it was true, and yet there was this great reluctance to announce it as a fact. And yet it had to be done. It was something like 15 or 20 minutes later before the wires came through with the announcement that the President had died. Here was another great bit of awful agony in waiting out confirmation. You, you were fearful of being having reported the death too soon. And on the other hand, you were hoping that maybe you had been wrong after all. But yet knowing that you couldn't be. Politics, as much as anything, were a part of Studio 9. And they echoed again through here from San Francisco's Cow palace, where the Republicans were nominating Senator Barry Goldwater as their presidential candidate. I was there at the convention, my 15th, keeping track of the tally. Mr. Chairman, humbly grateful that we can do this for America. South Carolina cast 16 votes for Senator Barry Goldwater to take him over the count. And up in the air go Hattie Philos. Cushions, placards sailing into the air. The final demonstration on this night of nominations. As just as we had expected, South Carolina did it and put him over. It's a Goldwater party now. Barry Goldwater is the Republican candidate for the presidency. And they're unrolling a big banner down there in one of the delegations in those gold letters. Arizona's Barry is America's future. Takes three men to hold that one. The Republican Convention of 1964, the last one to go through this Studio 9 as we say goodbye to the one room that has been headquarters and home to all CBS News correspondents. Three of them tell us what it has meant to them. John Daly, H.V. kaltenborn and Edward R. Morrow. So I was brung up in this room and I really was. I learned much of my trade here. Very often we tend to forget that the days which culminated in. On December 7th in the attack on Pearl harbor really were the. The days when we first put together what is now the great electronic news fraternity. And almost overnight we built a tremendous organization in one thing. I sit around this table, I think of the careers that started here. Men who came out of other disciplines in the communications field. Major George Fielding Elliott, who was our military analyst for so many years. Elmer Davis Quincy Howe. That great CBS staff got its basic training right at this table in Studio 9. Well, Bob, I feel that it was a great opportunity for radio. And I'm only happy that I was one of the minor instruments in voicing it for the American people. Any accomplishment like that makes us feel that we have not lived in vain. Very difficult to put it into words, Bob. I can remember it in the utmost detail. I know exactly where the leather couch was. How you used to swing that microphone around, sort of three quarter angle. I'm wondering about your new quarters. I haven't seen them, but I'm wondering if they will make it any easier to know what to say and how to say it. I rather doubt it, no matter how fancy they are. What do you think? I doubt it very, very much. Very much. Now that we have come to the end of our look backward, one point stands out. How much of the history of three decades went through this studio. How little of it we have been able to bring back in this space of time. So many broadcasts, so little time to remember them. Let us salute the words that because time cannot be expanded. Were not spoken again on this broadcast today. As the electric current dies and the microphones grow cold. As the lights are switched off and the soundproofing comes off the walls. As Studio 9 itself passes into the history of our Farewell to Studio 9 with Robert Trout produced for CBS News by Al Snyder. Correspondent Steve Rowan was special reporter. Audio engineers Mort Goldberg and Mike Truskas. Research by Jerry Morgan. Executive producer Lee Hanna. This is George Bryan speaking. This is the CBS Radio Network.