Unlike his contemporaries in radio, who almost exclusively came from a newspaper background, Murrow was trained as an educational administrator. Born Egbert Roscoe Murrow in Greensboro, North Carolina on April 25, 1908, he graduated from Washington State University with majors in political science, speech, and international relations. He served as president of the National Student Federation, organizing international travel for students and debates between American and European universities. He also was assistant director of the Institute of International Education, where he supervised offices in London, Berlin, and Vienna. He was hired by CBS in 1935 for his executive ability, not his journalistic skills.
His first responsibility was as director of talks and special events, where he secured personalities to appear on the CBS radio network. In 1937 he was sent to London to schedule European speakers and oversee short-wave cultural programming. In March of 1938 he was on his way to Poland to arrange for a School of the Air broadcast when Adolf Hitler's German forces invaded Austria. Murrow chartered a passenger airliner and, out of necessity, reported the occupation from Vienna. He followed up with reports from London, describing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's negotiations with the Germans and the eventual annexation of Czechoslovakia a year later.
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