Information at War. Philip Seib

For those not physically present during the attacks, receiving information was a way to “experience” the Blitz. Connecting information and experience can be done through vivid storytelling. Murrow convinced British authorities to allow him to broadcast live while the bombing was going on. He painted word pictures while the war provided the background soundtrack: “Four searchlights reach up, disappear in the light of a three-quarter moon … . Just overhead now the burst of the anti-aircraft fire … The searchlights now are feeling almost directly overhead. Now you’ll hear two bursts a little nearer in a moment. There they are! That hard stony sound.” The next night: “I’m standing again tonight on a rooftop looking out over London, feeling rather large and lonesome … . As I look out across the miles and miles of rooftops and chimney pots, some of those dirty-gray fronts of the buildings look almost snow white in the moonlight here tonight.” He saw a rooftop spotter and said, “There are hundreds and hundreds of men like that standing on rooftops in London tonight watching for fire bombs, waiting to see what comes out of this steel-blue sky.”¹⁰

      That kind of reporting underscored a difference between broadcast and print. Although a newspaper or magazine reporter could eloquently write about this same scene, there was special dramatic power about the mix of voice and background sounds – sirens, explosions – arriving in faraway homes. The impact of this was heightened by its novelty; the world had not yet become accustomed to real-time news delivering the sounds of major stories as a matter of course. (Not many years later, video would be wedded to these sounds, enhancing impact even more.) For the American audience, secure in its isolated cocoon, these reports stirred imagination and, perhaps, conscience.

      The domestic political backdrop of Murrow’s reports was a contest between strong isolationist sentiment and President Franklin Roosevelt’s recognition that Britain would not survive without American help. But FDR’s primary concern as the Blitz began was his own reelection in November 1940. He was seeking an unprecedented third term and faced an unconventional Republican opponent in Wendell Willkie, a one-time Democrat who was not wholly persuaded by the isolationist mantra of the Republican leadership. Robert Sherwood observed that Willkie’s relatively moderate foreign policy stance “tended to remove the isolationist–interventionist issue from the campaign (at least until the final days).”¹¹ In those final days, opinion polls showed that Willkie – increasingly aggressive in labeling Roosevelt a warmonger – had cut into the president’s lead in the race. Several days before the election, Roosevelt tried to put the issue to rest in a Boston speech: “I shall say it again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” (This pledge included a typical FDR sleight of hand. As he told his aide Sam Rosenman, “If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it?”¹²)

While the nominees for president mostly avoided debating the case for providing substantial aid to Britain, Murrow continued to deliver the war to American living-rooms. So did his CBS colleagues in London. Eric Sevareid observed in one of his reports: “London fights down her fears every night, takes her blows and gets up again every morning. You feel yourself an embattled member of this embattled corps. The attraction of courage is irresistible.”¹³

      These were the mixed messages Americans were receiving. From the presidential candidates, rhetoric about how much more committed to peace each was; while from Murrow and his colleagues more dramatic – and perhaps more believable – reports that clearly, if implicitly, endorsed the British cause.

      On Election Day, Roosevelt won 449 electoral votes to Willkie’s 82, although the popular vote margin of just 5 million votes was FDR’s smallest in his three presidential campaigns. Post-election opinion analysis, however, bolstered Roosevelt’s foreign policy position. A survey found that 11 percent of Roosevelt voters backed him because of the international situation, while only 2 percent of Willkie’s supporters backed him because of his promise to keep America out of the war.¹⁴

      Freed from campaign pressures, Roosevelt no longer had as much need to zig-zag in foreign affairs. American public opinion was steadily coming more into line with the president’s pro-British views. A Gallup survey in May 1941 asked if the United States should continue to aid Britain even at the risk of being drawn into the war, and 77 percent said yes. By a slight but consistent majority, Americans also approved using the US Navy to guard convoys sailing to Britain.¹⁵

      Roosevelt’s actions reflected his precise sense of what was politically possible – how far and how fast the public and Congress would allow him to go. Beginning in May 1941, the Gallup Poll asked, “So far as you personally are concerned, do you think President Roosevelt has gone too far in his policies of helping Britain, not far enough, or about right?” Commenting on the responses to that question, polling expert Hadley Cantril cited “the almost uncanny way in which the president was able to balance public opinion around his policies.” Despite the steady increase in US aid to Britain after May 1941, said Cantril, “the proportion of people who thought the President had gone too far, about right, and not far enough remained fairly constant.” (“Too far” and “not enough” each had held at about 20 percent, and “about right” at around 50 percent.)¹⁶

Americans also increasingly believed that Britain was holding its own against Germany. Cantril noted the close relationship between the willingness to help Britain and the expectation of an eventual British victory. “We do not like to bet on a loser,” wrote Cantril, “even if he is a friend.” He also observed that, although isolationism was far from extinct, it was on the wane. Public figures such as Charles Lindbergh and Joseph P. Kennedy who had said that Britain was doomed to defeat saw support for their position begin to wither. By mid-1941, the interventionists had become more fervent than the isolationists. Cantril observed that interventionism had grown stronger because “most of us were simply convinced that it was to our own self-interest to defeat the Nazis … Our extensive news services and mass media of communication won our confidence and kept us so well informed that we became increasingly alert to the implications events and courses of action had for our self-interest.”¹⁷

      By November 1941, belief in the inevitability of the United States going to war seemed to have taken hold. Among the public, the dominant question was “When will we fight?” Polls found that more than 80 percent of Americans expected war with Germany, and close to 70 percent anticipated war with Japan. About 70 percent said that it was more important to see Germany defeated than to stay out of the war, and approximately the same number said that if America’s political and military leaders thought the only way to stop Germany was to go to war, then it should be done.¹⁸

      How much of the shift in US public opinion was attributable to Roosevelt, Murrow, or any information in particular is difficult to know; survey research at the time was not as detailed as it later became. For that matter, the importance of any one type of information delivery was also difficult to measure consistently. But, as A. M. Sperber observed, Murrow’s broadcasts “were becoming a national listening habit, as essential, in millions of homes, as the evening meal.”¹⁹

      Radio delivered the messages of Murrow, Roosevelt, and many others – journalists, politicians, entertainers, and more – into America’s living-rooms. Hearing these voices, rather than reading their words or learning about them second-hand, increased their impact and credibility.

Probably the most important foreign visitor to American living-rooms during this time was Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. The rumbling rhetoric of his broadcast speeches captured the attention of even those Americans not ready to commit to his cause. Eleanor Roosevelt later said his speeches “were a tonic for us here in the United States as well as to his own people.”²⁰ Churchill understood how dependent Britain was on American help and thus on Franklin Roosevelt’s goodwill, which was in turn dependent on the political temperature of the American voter. Churchill’s recognition of this was a factor in his appointing his close aide, Brendan Bracken, in July 1941 to run Britain’s Ministry of Information. Bracken was knowledgeable about US politics and American journalism. He well understood the reason for Churchill putting him in this post; he promptly told the Ministry’s American Division that its job was to “draw the