Radio: 13 Years in 45 Minutes

The voices of Caesar and Napoleon, of Genghis Khan, George Washington and Pontius Pilate were never heard by posterity. But the voices of the captains, kings, heroes and villains of the recent past are on record and can be heard as long as the records last. The latest collection,*in an album of five Columbia records called I Can Hear It Now . . . , contains excerpts from famous broadcasts.

Beginning in the early 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt assured the U.S. that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and ending in 1945 with General Douglas MacArthur’s acceptance of the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship Missouri, the album preserves historic high spots of the years between. Here is Britain’s Edward VIII confessing that Wallis Simpson of Baltimore is “the woman I love”; here, as the dirigible Hindenburg explodes in flame above Lakehurst, N.J., the announcer’s gasp, “It’s terrible . . . it’s terrible! . . .” There are the soothing phrases of Neville Chamberlain, returned from Munich; the hysterical scream of Hitler, punctuated by the thunder of his Storm Troopers’ “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”; the uninflected, almost casual voice of Joseph Stalin promising death to the invading Nazis, and the stentorian challenge of Churchill, rallying his little island against a continent.

I Can Hear It Now … is the result of a two-year collaboration between Narrator Edward R. Murrow, Writer Fred Friendly and Producer John G. Gude. From 500 hours of broadcasting they selected some 60 minutes of outstanding events. Humorist James Thurber listened to the records and, over a weekend, wrote a 10,000-word critique, recommending a new and faster opening and more condensation. The collaborators went to work again and finished up with the present tightly knit ten-side album.

The hardest part of the job was the final editing. To get down to a 45-minute playing time, they had to drop such highlights as Gandhi urging nonresistance, Fiorello La Guardia reading the comics over New York City’s station WNYC, and a musical background that was to include such popular songs of the Depression as Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? and Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

*The voices of Queen Victoria and Jenny Lind were recorded in the late 19th Century, but no copies of the recordings were preserved. The voices of all U.S. Presidents since McKinley have been impressed in wax, as was William Jennings Bryan’s famed “Cross of Gold” speech delivered at the 1896 Democratic convention. Other voices recorded for posterity: Tolstoy, Lloyd George, Florence Nightingale, Ellen Terry, Gladstone, Edwin Booth, Caruso, Sarah Bernhardt.