Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,413

This is the grave of Howard K. Smith.

Born in 1914 in Ferriday, Louisiana, near the Mississippi border, Smith grew up with a railroad conductor father, so it’s not like he was super rich. But he went to Tulane University, graduated in 1936, and then made the strange choice to study further at Heidelberg University in Germany. I’m not sure what Smith knew about the Nazis really at this time–he was something of a socialist in college, but he went to Germany after it anyway. In any case, the only thing he seems to have learned in Germany was that the Nazis were terrible and so he got back to the U.S. as quickly as possible, moved to New Orleans, and got a job with the New Orleans Item-Tribune, a newspaper. He only stayed at that for about a year. Then he went to England to graduate study at Oxford. He was disgusted by the British unwillingness to confront the Nazis, led the Oxford Labor Club, and led protests against the Tories. Not bad for an American.

Smith liked journalism and as a young Nazi-hater, the early 40s gave him quite a bit of opportunity to spread his wings. In 1939, United Press in London hired him as a reporter, just as the war with Germany broke out. They sent him to Berlin and while there, he switched over to CBS. He was so anti-Nazi that the Germans refused to let him broadcast from there. He was well connected and personally interviewed Hitler and Goebbels before the government crackdown. Basically, he intervened them and then told Americans what scumbags they were. He fled from Germany on January 6, 1941, heading on a train to Switzerland. He then wrote Last Train from Berlin, about his time there, which sold well and helped make Smith’s name.

Smith stayed in Switzerland for the rest of the war, reporting on anti-fascist movements working out of that country. When the U.S. invaded, he joined the military and reported from the Battle of the Bulge. As a CBS war reporter, he was of the Murrow Boys and when Murrow left London for the U.S. in 1946, CBS named Smith as its lead European correspondent. This put him at the front line of the Cold War and he would remain in Europe until 1957. He was a strong liberal by this time, someone who personally opposed both American support of anti-democratic regimes in nations such as Greece and the Soviet policies of domination in eastern Europe. Despite being so openly critical of the Soviets, Smith still had to deal with blacklist pressure from American fascists after his publication of The State of Europe, in 1949, which laid out some of the problems with American policies, as it did with the Soviets.

Despite Smith’s pretty up front opinions, he rose within CBS. He was the moderator for the legendary Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. He was the anchor for many of the CBS Reports episodes and won an Emmy for his work on the documentary The Population Explosion in 1960.

The story about what halted Smith’s rise is about as perfect Beltway awfulness as I can imagine. See, Smith had taken a long journey since his days growing up in eastern Louisiana. He had seen a lot of pretty terrible things. I cannot imagine that he did not hold white supremacist sympathies as a child; it would have been almost impossible for him not to, though from what I can see, he at least claimed to have never liked it when he was growing up. Maybe that’s true, not all whites supported white supremacy, at least not actively. But by 1961, he sure didn’t, at least not compared to his disgust over segregation and the violence behind it. So as the chief correspondent for the Washington Bureau of CBS News, he was on the ground for the civil rights movement and he was pretty angry about the level to which government and police worked with locals to commit violence against the protestors. So he wrote about it. Writing about the Freedom Riders, Smith uncovered the ways in which Birmingham sheriff Bull Connor worked with the Ku Klux Klan.

And it was pointing out this fact that ended Smith’s career at CBS News. He had a show on it called “Who Speaks for Birmingham.” This was actually a project that Murrow himself had started and when he left CBS, he asked Smith to finish it for him. Smith wanted to end it with Edmund Burke’s famous quote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” CBS flipped out. You can’t offend the South! The network killed the line. Smith was furious. He had also gone on the radio after the beating of the Freedom Riders in Birmingham, stating, his worried “of becoming a racial dictatorship, like Nazi Germany, or reverting to barbarism, as has happened…in Alabama.”

The president of CBS News told Smith he couldn’t editorialize anymore. Smith pointed out that discussing the beating of innocent and idealistic protestors by the KKK and the cops wasn’t editorializing. It was just telling the truth. But this was the Beltway and Both Sides always rules. After a heated meeting with CBS executives, William Paley just fired him. Paley said of Smith’s civil rights coverage, “I’ve heard all this junk before. If that is what you believe, you had better go somewhere else.” And Smith did.

Smith immediately found work at ABC. But now a full-fledged liberal reporter, he wouldn’t shut up. After Richard Nixon lost the race for California governor in 1962, Smith did a documentary for ABC on all the people Nixon had bullied on his way up the ladder and in doing so, he interviewed Alger Hiss. This led the sponsor of the show to cancel the sponsorship and forced Smith into a minor role at the network for the next several years. He was working the California primary when RFK got shot in 1968 and so that was a big story for him.

In 1969, Smith was able to get his bigger position back because he became something of a supporter of the Vietnam War, largely because his son fought in it. He generally moved right overall on foreign policy and became comparing Johnson’s inability to get serious in Vietnam with the failure of the rest of the West to stop Hitler. I mean, what a brain worm that must have been to make that comparison. Nixon loved it. They made up. Smith’s career improved once he became part of the Blob again. He was still a domestic liberal and got in trouble for his open support of Ed Muskie in 1972. By this time, he was working closely with Harry Reasoner and other leading journalists and it didn’t hurt him too bad. And Smith’s support of Nixon’s Vietnam policies did not mean he was going to put up with the lies and he called for Nixon to resign before nearly any other reporter.

Smith was pushed out of the lead roles for ABC, mostly for age reasons, in 1975, though he remained with the network until 1979. Still, a total media hound, he appeared as himself all the time in movies, including in Nashville and Network, naturally. He spent much of the 80s and 90s lecturing for big money talks. He died in 2002, at the age of 87.

Howard K. Smith is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

If you would like this series to visit other TV news people, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frank Reynolds is in Arlington and Harry Reasoner is in Humboldt, Iowa. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.