NBC Goes to War

NBC Goes to War
Author: James Cassidy
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0823299341

The diary of radio correspondent James Cassidy presents a unique view of World War II as this reporter followed the Allied armies into Nazi Germany. James Joseph Cassidy was one of three-hundred-and sixty-two American journalists accredited to cover the European Theater of Operations between June 7, 1944 and the war’s end. Radio was relatively new, and World War II was its first war. Among the difficulties facing historians examining radio reporters during that period is that many potential primary documents—their live broadcasts—were not recorded. In NBC Goes to War, Cassidy’s censored scripts alongside his personal diary captures a front-line view during some of the nastiest fighting in World War II as told by a seasoned NBC reporter. Ambitious and young, James Cassidy’s coverage of World War II for the NBC radio network notched some notable firsts, including being the first to broadcast live from German soil and arranging the broadcast of a live Jewish religious service from inside Nazi Germany while incoming mortar and artillery shells fell two hundred yards away. His diary describes how he gathered news, how it was censored, and how it was sent from the battle zone to the United States. As radio had no pictures, reporters quickly developed a descriptive visual style to augment dry facts. All of Cassidy’s stories, from the panic he felt while being targeted by German planes to his shock at the deaths of colleagues, he told with grace and a reporter’s lean and engaging prose. Providing valuable eyewitness material not previously available to historians, NBC Goes to War tells a “bottom-up” narrative that provides insight into war as fought and chronicled by ordinary men and women. Cassidy skillfully placed listeners alongside him in the ruins of Aachen, on icy back roads crawling with spies, and in a Belgian bar where a little girl wailed “Les Américains partent!” when Allied troops retreated to safety, leaving the town open to German re- occupation. With a journalistic eye for detail, NBC Goes to War unforgettably portrays life in the press corps. This newly uncovered perspective also helps balance the CBS-heavy radio scholarship about the war, which has always focused heavily on Edward R. Murrow and his “Murrow’s Boys.”

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Operation Iraqi Freedom
Author:
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2013-07-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1449450105

Go inside the historic Iraq War coverage of NBC News with this in-depth, illustrated history—with a foreword by Tom Brokaw. Operation Iraqi Freedom marked a new era in television war coverage. On-the-spot reporting by journalists, photographers, and cameramen captured combat in ways that are nothing less than historic. Viewers were transported to the front lines and embedded among the troops. Among all network and cable news organizations covering the Iraqi war, NBC news was the acknowledged leader. This book, written and produced by NBC News, presents a chronological narrative of reporting from the field supplemented by interviews and anchored broadcasts from Qatar, Kuwait, and the United States. Thousands of hours of images and words have been molded into a concise, eloquent summary of the historic events of the conflict. The book also includes an introduction by an NBC military expert, and a special dedication to fallen colleague David Bloom.

The War for Late Night

The War for Late Night
Author: Bill Carter
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2010-11-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1101443421

Bill Carter, executive producer of CNN’s docuseries The Story of Late Night and host of the Behind the Desk: Story of Late Night podcast, details the chaotic transition of The Tonight Show from host Jay Leno to Conan O’Brien—and back again. In 2010, NBC’s CEO Jeff Zucker, had it all worked out when he moved Jay Leno from behind the desk at The Tonight Show, and handed the reins over to Conan O'Brien. But his decision was a spectacular failure. Ratings plummeted, affiliates were enraged—and when Zucker tried to put everything back the way it was, that plan backfired as well. No one is more uniquely suited to document the story of a late-night travesty than veteran media reporter and bestselling author, Bill Carter. In candid detail, he charts the vortex that sucked in not just Leno and O'Brien—but also Letterman, Stewart, Fallon, Kimmel, and Ferguson—as frantic agents and network executives tried to manage a tectonic shift in television’s most beloved institution.

Washington Goes to War

Washington Goes to War
Author: David Brinkley
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre:
ISBN: 0593319451

David Brinkley, one of America's most respected and celebrated news commentators, turns his journalistic skills to a personal account of the tumultuous days of World War II in the sleepy little Southern town that was Washington, D.C. Carrying us from the first days of the war through Roosevelt's death and the celebration of VJ Day, Brinkley surrounds us with fascinating people. Here are the charismatic President Roosevelt and the woman spy, code name "Cynthia." Here, too, are the diplomatic set, new Pentagon officials, and old-line society members--aka "Cave Dwellers." We meet the brashest and the brightest who actually ran the government, and the countless men and women who came to support the war effort in any way they could--all seeking to share in the adventure of their generation.

The Road to War

The Road to War
Author: Marvin L. Kalb
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0815724934

The Road to War examines how presidential commitments can lead to the use of American military force, and to war. Marvin Kalb notes that since World War II, "presidents have relied more on commitments, public and private, than they have on declarations of war, even though the U.S. Constitution declares rather unambiguously that Congress has the responsibility to "declare" war.

The War Reporter

The War Reporter
Author: Martin Fletcher
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466879920

Winner of a Jewish National Book Award and author of The List and Jacob's Oath, both of which achieved outstanding critical acclaim, NBC Special Correspondent Martin Fletcher delivers another breathtaking tale of love, war, and redemption. Tom Layne was a world-class television correspondent until his life collapsed in Sarajevo. Beaten and humiliated, he fell into a hole diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Eleven years later he returns to the Balkans to film a documentary on the man who caused his downfall: Ratko Mladic, Europe's biggest killer since Hitler, wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity. Mysterious forces have protected Mladic for a decade, preventing his arrest, and these shadowy but deadly foes swing into action against the journalist. Tom soon falls into a web of intrigue and deceit that threatens his life as well as that of the woman he loves. Drawing upon his own experiences reporting on the wars in Bosnia and Sarajevo, Martin Fletcher has written a searing love story and a painfully authentic account of a war reporter chasing down the scoop of a lifetime.

Radio Goes to War

Radio Goes to War
Author: Gerd Horten
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2002-02-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780520930735

Radio Goes to War is the first comprehensive and in-depth look at the role of domestic radio in the United States during the Second World War. As this study convincingly demonstrates, radio broadcasting played a crucial role both in government propaganda and within the context of the broader cultural and political transformations of wartime America. Gerd Horten's absorbing narrative argues that no medium merged entertainment, propaganda, and advertising more effectively than radio. As a result, America's wartime radio propaganda emphasized an increasingly corporate and privatized vision of America's future, with important repercussions for the war years and the postwar era. Examining radio news programs, government propaganda shows, advertising, soap operas, and comedy programs, Horten situates radio wartime propaganda in the key shift from a Depression-era resentment of big business to the consumer and corporate culture of the postwar period.

And Then All Hell Broke Loose

And Then All Hell Broke Loose
Author: Richard Engel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-02-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451635117

When he was just twenty-three, a recent graduate of Stanford University, Richard Engel set off to Cairo with $2,000 and dreams of being a reporter. Shortly thereafter he was working freelance for Arab news sources and got a call that a busload of Italian tourists were massacred at a Cairo museum. This was his first view of the carnage these years would pile on. Over two decades, Engel has been under fire, blown out of hotel beds, and taken hostage. He has watched Mubarak and Morsi in Egypt arrested and condemned, reported from Jerusalem, been through the Lebanese war, covered the whole shooting match in Iraq, interviewed Libyan rebels who toppled Gaddafi, reported from Syria as Al-Qaeda stepped in, and was kidnapped in the Syrian crosscurrents of fighting. He goes into Afghanistan with the Taliban and to Iraq with ISIS. Engel takes chances, though not reckless ones, keeps a level head and a sense of humor, as well as a grasp of history in the making. Reporting as NBC's chief foreign correspondent, he reveals his unparalleled access to the major figures, the gritty soldiers, and the helpless victims in the Middle East during this watershed time.

Inside Television's First War

Inside Television's First War
Author: Ron Steinman
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826214195

Steinman describes his experiences as head of the NBC news bureau in Saigon from 1966 to 1968, and he writes of how the war changed the news coverage of battle to a home audience.

Presidents of War

Presidents of War
Author: Michael Beschloss
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 754
Release: 2019-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307409619

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From a preeminent presidential historian comes a “superb and important” (The New York Times Book Review) saga of America’s wartime chief executives “Fascinating and heartbreaking . . . timely . . . Beschloss’s broad scope lets you draw important crosscutting lessons about presidential leadership.”—Bill Gates Widely acclaimed and ten years in the making, Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War is an intimate and irresistibly readable chronicle of the Chief Executives who took the United States into conflict and mobilized it for victory. From the War of 1812 to Vietnam, we see these leaders considering the difficult decision to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths; struggling with Congress, the courts, the press, and antiwar protesters; seeking comfort from their spouses and friends; and dropping to their knees in prayer. Through Beschloss’s interviews with surviving participants and findings in original letters and once-classified national security documents, we come to understand how these Presidents were able to withstand the pressures of war—or were broken by them. Presidents of War combines this sense of immediacy with the overarching context of two centuries of American history, traveling from the time of our Founders, who tried to constrain presidential power, to our modern day, when a single leader has the potential to launch nuclear weapons that can destroy much of the human race. Praise for Presidents of War "A marvelous narrative. . . . As Beschloss explains, the greatest wartime presidents successfully leaven military action with moral concerns. . . . Beschloss’s writing is clean and concise, and he admirably draws upon new documents. Some of the more titillating tidbits in the book are in the footnotes. . . . There are fascinating nuggets on virtually every page of Presidents of War. It is a superb and important book, superbly rendered.”—Jay Winik, The New York Times Book Review "Sparkle and bite. . . . Valuable and engrossing study of how our chief executives have discharged the most significant of all their duties. . . . Excellent. . . . A fluent narrative that covers two centuries of national conflict.” —Richard Snow, The Wall Street Journal