By Lindsay Underwood
“I remember having heard that he had strikingly blue eyes, attractive dramatic blue eyes, but I looked in his eyes and I didn’t see the slightest bit of drama. He had blue eyes.”
That’s how the unflappable and incomparable Richard C. Hottelet described his face-to-face encounter with Adolf Hitler to students of the George Washington University last week at a special master class moderated by GW School of Media and Public Affairs Professor Michael Freedman.
The master class was part of the legendary reporter’s whirlwind trip to Washington to be honored by the National Press Club for his extraordinary career contributions to journalism.
Mr. Hottelet’s eight decades in the field began as a foreign correspondent for the United Press in Berlin. At 23 years old, Mr. Hottelet became the only American journalist to be taken prisoner by the Nazis in World War II.
Three years later, in 1944, Edward R. Murrow hired Mr. Hottelet just as the Allied Forces were preparing for D-Day.
Mr. Hottelet earned his keep, providing American radio audiences with the first eyewitness account of the largest seaborne invasion in history as nearly three million Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, France.
At 26 years old, Mr. Hottelet became a member of the vaunted Murrow Boys of CBS Radio, the group of journalists who literally invented broadcast news as we know it today.
Mr. Hottelet was the last of the “boys” to retire in 1985 after 41 years at CBS News.
A visiting fellow at the George Washington University Global Media Institute, Mr. Hottelet has guest lectured in journalism classes every semester since 2001. And in 2007, Mr. Hottelet donated his papers, including his World War II CBS Radio scripts, to GW’s Gelman Library.
During the master class, students held copies of those scripts in their hands as Mr. Hottelet recounted his WWII days and described what it was like to work for Edward R. Murrow.
“When he smiled it was like the sun coming out,” remembered Mr. Hottelet. “Ed [Murrow] was I think a natural-born pessimist, and so when he smiled it was really a change.”
Mr. Murrow was a “level-headed and even-handed man,” said Mr. Hottelet, and a big believer in honest barebones reporting: “He didn’t want trombone voices or characters, he wanted reporters, and that’s what he got.”
How does he compare war coverage today with that of WWII?
“All I can do is envy the courage and competence of the people who are covering war now,” said Mr. Hottelet. “Covering WWII was like covering a ballet…there was a line, the enemy was on one side, and you were on the other…it was a very simple thing.”
And how does he view his own death-defying exploits like spending four months in a Nazi prison, dodging artillery fire and delivering historic reports from some of the most tumultuous regions in the world?
“Anything you survive is fun,” Mr. Hottelet said with a smile, “I told my story and that was it.”
Mr. Hottelet spoke of a time when “atmospherics” governed successful broadcasts, a broken wire recorder was repaired with the lit end of a cigarette, and a White House press conference consisted of six people standing around the president’s desk in the Oval Office.
The last surviving member of Mr. Murrow’s original Broadcast Brotherhood left the aspiring journalists with these words of wisdom:
“Start with being curious,” he said, “and never be afraid to say ‘I don’t know’…You do your best. Sometimes maybe you don’t succeed, but you do your best to be absolutely straightforward…it’s sometimes hard to be totally factual, but you’ve got to try.”
That evening, Mr. Hottelet was honored at the National Press Club with the President’s Citation at the 38th Annual NPC Journalism Awards. Mr. Hottelet sat at GW’s table, and was joined in the audience by his granddaughter, great-grandchildren, Mr. Freedman, GW Kalb Report Moderator Marvin Kalb and Amy LeSueuer, daughter of another Murrow Boy, the late Larry LeSueuer.
Mr. Hottelet’s original reports from D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge echoed through the ballroom as the awe-inspired crowd flew below the pre-dawn clouds, hovering above the “fine deep blue” waters of the English Channel and over the barges of Utah Beach.
Young scholarship recipients, celebrated columnists, and award-winning broadcasters jumped to their feet and waited with baited breath as Mr. Hottelet approached the podium. The sage of sound had every ear in the room as he shared the secret of his success:
“I tried.”
That was it. No frills. No fluff. Just the facts.