BEFORE THE NETWORK FALL

By JEFF GREENFIELD

Anyone who works in a highly visible enterprise toils in the shadow of legends: a ballplayer in Yankee Stadium knows he is standing where Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio once played. A newly inaugurated President stands on the Capitol rostrum knowing his words will be measured against those of Lincoln, F.D.R., J.F.K.

For broadcast journalists the legend of Edward R. Murrow and his colleagues who covered World War II for CBS has cast its shadow for more than half a century, and for good reason. Remarkably gifted, remarkably courageous, remarkably ambitious, remarkably young--Murrow was 29 when he was sent to Europe by CBS--this "band of brothers," as Murrow and his group referred to themselves, brought the most dramatic story of the 20th century home to millions of America's radio listeners, and literally created broadcast news in the process.

A straightforward account of what these men did would have been enough in itself to make a compelling book. But the husband-and-wife team of Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson (he's a former Washington bureau chief for TIME; she's a former correspondent for the Associated Press) is after something more ambitious with The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism (Houghton Mifflin; 445 pages; $27.95). The authors have given us a clear-eyed account of what happened to these luminaries as well as to broadcast journalism in the decades after World War II, in the process drawing a vivid portrait of idealists who believed that "a journalist should be the champion of the underdog," but who were also "intensely ambitious young men who yearned for admission to [the best] clubs and salons..." Cloud and Olson not only recount the broken friendships and broken illusions that saddened the later years of Murrow's boys, they also lay down a disturbing, if not completely convincing, indictment of commercial broadcasting for abandoning the legacy of Murrow and Company in a relentless pursuit of corporate profit.

For sheer drama few novelists would dare invent the stories of these correspondents: Cecil Brown (one of the long-forgotten Murrow boys) plunging off a sinking ship into the South China Sea; Eric Sevareid parachuting out of a doomed plane over the Himalayas and being rescued by a tribe of headhunters; William L. Shirer risking imprisonment by providing the first accounts of France's capitulation to Hitler; Charles Collingwood, the high-living, womanizing dandy, demonstrating incredible courage during the North Africa campaign. Dominating the story from London is Murrow himself, bringing the Battle of Britain and the Blitz back to an indifferent America, helping shift public opinion from isolationism to interventionism by painting vivid word pictures of ordinary Britons in extraordinary times.

What makes The Murrow Boys more than just great yarn spinning is that it tells us what happened next: while the network had built a great news team, CBS--like most of postwar America--had other things on its mind. Cloud and Olson write that CBS chief William S. Paley saw entertainment, not news, as the way to build a highly profitable television network. Already uneasy about their correspondents' editorializing during the war, top CBS brass were even more rattled when the journalists began taking on McCarthyism and civil rights. (Murrow's famous 1954 See It Now attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy was aired despite CBS executives so frightened that Murrow and producer Fred Friendly had to pay for the promotional newspaper ads out of their own pocket.)

At times Cloud and Olson seem to have been caught up in the "good old days" approach to contemporary journalism, dismissing the current crop of stars as parvenus, trading on the Murrow legacy. I am hardly a detached observer here, but I think they may be overlooking the fact that the sheer magnitude of World War II made the story compelling to a mass audience. Today, when Peter Jennings does prime-time specials on the agony of Bosnia, it is infinitely harder to win the attention of a mass audience.

But that is a minor quarrel with a book that is one of the most fascinating and important accounts of broadcast journalism I have read. You finish it knowing that the Murrow boys were all too human--and still absolutely worthy of the legends they built.

Jeff Greenfield, an ABC News analyst, is a regular contributor to TIME.