Radio: Combination for Comment

As Hitler’s Berlin speech was relayed through CBS’s Studio 9 last week, a man who looks like a prosperous professor sat at a desk, listening through earphones. Before the hysterical roar at the end of the speech died away, he began to talk into a microphone with clipped, slightly pompous inflections, using facial expressions and gestures as if he were addressing a visible audience. Without pause Hans von Kaltenborn had translated and distilled a 73-minute speech, and for 15 minutes proceeded ex tempore to explain its significance and predict (correctly) its consequences.

This incident and many another like it led even rival networks to pay tribute to “H. V.” Kaltenborn last week. That he offered better comment on the crisis than any one else was because he also offered a better combination of talents. For one thing, he is German. His uncle, Lieut. General Hans von Kaltenborn-Stachen, was German War Minister for the years 1895-96. In Germany he himself is addressed as Baron. He knows German history and speaks the language (as well as French and Spanish) fluently. He knows news. He had 20 years’ (1910-30) newspaper experience on the Brooklyn Eagle as dramatic critic, editorial writer, associate editor. He has long trained himself in extemporaneous public speech. At Harvard (’09), he won the Coolidge and Boylston prizes for debating and oratory, and for the last 16 years he has stepped to the microphone with only scribblings for script. His most exciting ad lib was the first broadcast ever made of war—from a bullet-ridden haystack between Spanish Leftist and Rightist lines, with cannon fire for sound effects. Not scared by war, he was not to be scared by a war scare. His comments throughout were calm, hopeful, accurate.

For a fortnight he virtually lived in Studio 9, on call 15 hours a day. He slept at the nearby Harvard Club (his Brooklyn home was too far away) or in his office across the hall from the studio itself. His blue-eyed wife. Baroness Olga von Norden-flycht, brought hot food and coffee to his desk, occasionally led him outdoors for a walk and fresh air. His earliest broadcast was at 5 a. m., his latest at 11 p. m. After each talk he received a batch of letters. Their gist: in times of stress, listeners prefer conclusions and even bias to straight factual reporting.

> NBC, specializing in flashes right from Prague. Nurnberg, Berlin, London and Trieste, last week scored the most impressive beat of the crisis: it relayed the text of the four-power concord from Munich 46 minutes before any other system.

> MBS was without a commentator until Mutual’s Publicist Lester Gottlieb called in a friend, Quincy Howe, who had rarely been heard over radio before. After a 15-minute audition of comment on fake news bulletins, Howe was hired and told to report at once. Little, loquacious, quick, Quincy Howe is the author of the satire England Expects Every American to Do His Duty. MBS was afraid he was too inexperienced, but after breezing through his first broadcast without a hitch, he remarked casually: “I was grateful that I got off on the nose.*

*Radio slang for ending a program at precisely the right second.