H.V. KALTENBORN - 28 YEARS IN NETWORK RADIO WITHOUT A SCRIPT.
"MAKE IT GOOD, OLD BOY..."
H.V. Kaltenborn was at the peak of his career and in the second of four consecutive Top 50 seasons in 1942-43. His 7:45 p.m. news commentary on NBC had been expanded from three to five nights a week and he had overtaken newscaster Lowell Thomas with Network Radio’s most popular Multiple Run program. Kaltenborn, 65, was earning a reported $200,000 annually from sponsor Pure Oil, for which he considered himself lucky after years in the lower paying newspaper business.
Time magazine reported a pep talk the lanky 65 year old gave himself before every broadcast, “Make it good, old boy. It may be your last.”
Far from it, Kaltenborn remained a radio and television notable for another dozen years, doing what he always felt he was destined to do, reporting and analyzing the news. His pursuit news put his life at risk several times and his objective analysis of what he observed caused him to lose several jobs. Yet, he never yielded to danger or pressure. He was truly an outstanding journalist, worthy of the title bestowed by his peers, The Dean of Broadcast Commentators.
Remarkably, that phase of his career didn’t begin until he was nearly 50 years old!
Hans von Kaltenborn was born in July, 1878, to immigrant parents in the German-American community of Merrill, Wisconsin, 200 miles northwest of Milwaukee. He was a bright and popular bi-lingual student in high school, nicknamed Spiderlegs Kalty by his classmates and particularly adept at extemporaneous debating.
He joined the U.S. Army shortly after graduation at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, a patriotic act that also began his professional newspaper career. The 19 year old Kaltenborn began sending weekly dispatches from his army training camp in Anniston, Alabama, to The Merrill Advocate with a second copy in German to The Lincoln County Anzeiger. With these credentials he also got himself appointed The Milwaukee Journal’s “special correspondent” attached to the Fourth Wisconsin Infantry in Anniston. The war was a quick one and young Hans never left the country, but the limited experience gave him a thirst for travel that was never quite quenched. So he delayed college and returned home determined to earn enough money to tour Europe - as a reporter for The Merrill Advocate with the promise of becoming the paper‘s first, (and only), foreign correspondent.
When he had he scraped together enough funds to begin his journey, Kaltenborn took his bicycle and boarded a train for New York City. At the New York docks he found dirty and sometimes dangerous work below deck of a cattle boat for the twelve day voyage to Liverpool. Once in England he began his bicycle trip from Livepool to London, stopping in Oxford where he discovered the University’s library. It made a lasting impression. As he wrote in his 1950 memoir, Fifty Fabulous Years:
“The Bodleian Library was the first large library I had ever seen. It was unforgettable. Here was a world of learning so alien to my untutored mind.. For the first time I realized how much there was to know and felt ashamed of my own ignorance. It was this visit to Oxford that determined me to get a college education. But I was destined to wait five more years until the ripe age of 27 until I stood before I stood before one of the great memorial gates leading into the Harvard Yard in Cambridge.”
Seeing the sights of London, then moving on to Paris, Berlin and Bremen, Kaltenborn familiarized himself with the customs of each country, polished his German and French, met his German relatives, worked at odd jobs and faithfully reported his activities to The Merrill Advocate. He returned to New York City in 1902 looking for a reporter’s job in a city which, to his advantage, had an abundance of newspapers. It didn’t take long for the former “War & European Correspondent” of The Merrill Advocate to land a starter job at The Brooklyn Eagle for eight dollars a week. (1)
Working his way up the Eagle newsroom ladder Kaltenborn had become the paper’s City Hall reporter at $25 a week in 1905, when he quit and enrolled at Harvard. For income, he became the Harvard correspondent for both The Eagle and The New York Post, then later in his college career he served as an assistant to several professors and tutor for undergraduates. His highly active undergraduate years included a Harvard-sponsored exchange semester to the University of Berlin in the fall of 1907. He wrote of his return visit to his family’s homeland:
“In 1907, Berlin was a wealthy, gay capital, devoid, so far as I could see, of any outstanding problems. There was a great deal of entertaining and much to see in the world of music, art and the theater. … The Germany I saw that year was enjoying unprecedented prosperity. The military atmosphere was omnipresent but the Germans did not feel then that war was in the near future.” (2)
Aboard ship returning to the United States in January, 1908, Kaltenborn, now 30, was attracted to 20 year old Olga von Nordenflycht, the American-born daughter of the German General Counsel based in Chicago. Their shipboard flirtation became a romance and then a long-distance courtship. Hans realized that Olga, who was also a linguist and writer who loved travel, was his perfect match. Following his graduation from Harvard and rejoining The Brooklyn Eagle staff, (for the princely sum of $45 a week), the couple returned to Berlin in 1910 for their marriage and a brief honeymoon tour of the continent. (3)
Shortly after his return to the paper, Kaltenborn was sent to Washington to become its capital reporter in a temporary shuffle that had him back in New York again in 1911 as The Eagle’s drama critic with additional duties overseeing its editorial and political columns. That period, which Kaltenborn later recalled as one of his favorites, ended in late 1913. when he was given another temporarily assignment. Hans and Olga took their three year old daughter and boarded a ship for France, where he headed The Brooklyn Eagle’s Paris bureau for six months.
The short assignment with a brief side trip to Germany was enough to give the astute Kaltenborn a good grasp on the European situation as the two countries prepared for war. When the young family returned home in June, 1914, he wrote an acclaimed analysis for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Hans von Kaltenborn was named War Editor of The Brooklyn Eagle and was suddenly in demand as a knowledgeable lecturer on world affairs. Nevertheless, when the United States entered World War I in April, 1917, Kaltenborn’s German name and ancestry, coupled with the fact that his wife was a German diplomat’s daughter, made him suspect of having sympathies for the enemy. (4)
To its credit, The Eagle stood by its 39 year old War Editor who quietly dropped the “Von” from his name to become H. V. Kaltenborn for the remaining 47 years of his life. (5) The paper’s confidence in Kaltenborn was tested on November 8, 1918, when the United Press floated a rumor that World War I had ended. The rumor became “fact” prompting extra editions of newspapers and street celebrations. But The Brooklyn Eagle was silent, only saying “Armistice Still Unsigned” on its building’s message board. An angry crowd broke into the paper’s newsroom, demanding that its “Kraut War Editor" admit that the Allies won the war. But Kaltenborn and his management refused to cave while waiting for confirmation. History finally proved them right three days later.
Kaltenborn’s editorial prestige was furthered in September, 1921, when he was dispatched to Geneva for the first meetings of the League of Nations followed by stops in Germany, Austria and France on the way home where he found postwar resentments coupled with political and economic chaos.
H. V. Kaltenborn, 43, became “The Dean of Radio Commentators” on April 4, 1922, when he spoke to a Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce meeting on loud speakers in The Eagle’s auditorium from WJZ, then an experimental radio station in Newark. His 30 minute extemporaneous address is considered the first news commentary ever delivered on radio. His remarks were well received but Kaltenborn missed his audiences and their reactions, “In radio there is no comeback and you can’t tell how it’s received.”
He would soon learn how wrong he was when The Brooklyn Eagle signed a 39 week contract for Kaltenborn’s 15 minute commentaries on AT&T’s WEAF/New York City and WRC/Washington, D.C. beginning on October 23, 1923. As David Clark noted in the September 1965 issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly:
“Long before he completed that first season, Kaltenborn had realized there was plenty of ‘comeback’ to his radio talks. And sometimes he would know too well how they were received. In the eight months he almost ran afoul of a Federal District Judge, nearly precipitated labor troubles at AT&T, got himself cut off from WEAF’s sister station in Washington at the demand of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, stirred up a nest of anti-Catholics, infuriated prohibitionists and so irritated WEAF’s management that it declined to renew the paper’s his contract.” (6)
The Brooklyn Eagle printed two pages of letters, selected from over a thousand, protesting the end of Kaltenborn’s commentaries on WEAF. He next popped up on Long Island’s WAHG, the first in a string of small stations in the New York vicinity that would broadcast his commentaries until the protests began. Finally, powerful WOR/Newark ended his exile with a 15 minute Monday night commentary at 8:00, The Kaltenborn Digest, again sponsored by The Brooklyn Eagle.
H. V. Kaltenborn never worked from a script - just notes and memory. This makes his Tuesday 8:30 p.m. debut on CBS in 1927 all the more impressive. He stood before the network microphone and spoke extemporaneously for 30 minutes, just as he did in lecture halls. He continued these weekly broadcasts while continuing his day job as Associate Editor of The Brooklyn Eagle until the newspaper’s new ownership attempted to cut his salary by 50% in 1930.
At age 52, Kaltenborn decided his future lay in what had become his major source of income, lecturing, and the in new medium of Network Radio. He left The Eagle after 28 years and signed a contract with CBS, which was then assembling a news department under the ambitious direction of Paul White. Kaltenborn Edits The News became a wandering program in search of a permanent timeslot in the early 1930’s, while CBS assigned its sometimes controversial commentator to additional duties which included covering the 1932 Democratic and Republican National Convention with Ted Husing.
Hans and Olga Kaltenborn also made a return trip to Germany in the fall 1932 when he managed to get an interview with the charismatic and controversial head of the Nazi party, Adolph Hitler. He said of meeting Hitler, “I felt almost reassured. I could not see how a man of his type, a plebeian Austrian of limited mentality, could ever gain the allegiance of the German people…What we underestimated was the appeal of the irrational and the impact of cleverly manipulated and constantly hammered propaganda on the minds and emotions of the people. Hitler once said that there are three rules to successful propaganda: Make it simple, say it often and make it burn!”
By 1936 the Kaltenborns had become annual summer visitors to Europe and H.V. Kaltenborn was the first in what would become a long list of CBS “star” newsmen over the next decade. The world’s attention had turned to Spain in July where the three year Civil War had broken out between the government Loyalists, supported by most of Europe, with cash and volunteers, against the Nationalist Party led General Francisco Franco, supported by dictators Hitler of Germany and Mussolini of Italy, with cash, arms, equipment and men. Given Germany’s active participation with its Luftwaffe fighters and bombers, Kaltenborn correctly sensed that this was the preliminary to World War II and he headed for the action in Spain on September 3rd. It was here that Kaltenborn, the newsman, first became Kaltenborn, the newsmaker. As he later told the story in his autobiography:
“On the Franco-Spanish frontier near Hendaye there was a narrow river with a snakelike course. A French farm jutted right out into the midst of the battle for the Spanish city of Irun but both sides were careful not to violate French soil. As the battle for Irun began and shells and bullets whizzed over this French farm I conceived the ideal of broadcasting a battle description punctuated by actual battlesounds. … To get the best battle sounds we ran a long telephone cable from the abandoned farmhouse to a small haystack located between the two battle lines to both see and hear the artillery shells, I was determined to get the first actual battlefield broadcast in radio history. When I finally got through to CBS in New York and told them what I had, they replied, ‘Stand by…too many commercial programs right now…will call you later.’
“So I stuck to my haystack hoping that the scene of battle would not shift. … Finally, at nine o’clock in the evening we got through and for 15 minutes I described the burning buildings and cars, stopping occasionally to let listeners hear the peculiar whine of flying bullets and the dull explosion of artillery shells.”
Kaltenborn returned home two weeks later, unharmed and the first hero in the early years of broadcast journalism. CBS “rewarded” him by moving his weekly 25-minute commentary on Friday nights at 6:35 to Sunday nights at 10:45 and reducing it to 15 minutes. This was actually a major gain stations carrying Kaltenborn’s commentaries, following the 45-minute Gillette Community Sing starring Milton Berle on CBS. When the Berle show was cancelled, in October, 1937, Kaltenborn took the 10:30 half-hour for Headlines And Bylines, sharing host duties with CBS newsman Bob Trout and later with staff announcer Ralph Edwards. (7) The network refrained from selling their star commentator’s program to a sponsor, so it went unrated and the size of his audience will never be known.
However, it’s a cinch that most of America heard the staccato and precise delivery of H.V. Kaltenborn during the final three weeks of September, 1938. As he wrote in Fifty Fabulous Years:
“The world looked on in fascinated horror as Hitler began a series of moves that was to result in the capitulation of Czechoslovakia without the firing of a single shot. In the Munich settlement of September, 1938, the Czechs were not even represented! France and England were pursuing a policy of complete appeasement and they made abject concessions to the dictator’s demands. He got Czechoslovakia’s western Sudetenland and said he wanted nothing more. Millions of Europeans foolishly believed that now we would have ‘peace in our time.’ Had not Neville Chamberlin, Britain’s Prime Minister, proudly displayed a piece of paper that said so?”
Because of the five and six hour time difference between New York and the European capitals, both CBS and NBC went into 24 hour operation. During the 20 days of leading up to the notorious Munich Agreement, Kaltenborn didn’t leave CBS - he lived, slept and ate in its offices, on immediate call for 102 separate broadcasts ranging from two minutes to two hours as information filtered in from London, Paris and Berlin. (8) Because he spoke both French and German, he was able to listen to foreign broadcasts in his earphones and immediately translate what he heard for his CBS listeners.
Kaltenborn continues in his memoirs: “When the Czechoslovak crisis began CBS was prepared to cover the progress of events thoroughly and completely… Largely because of this advance preparation CBS managed to capture the bulk of the listening audience throughout the duration of the crisis. The intensity with which America listened to the radio reports of the Munich crisis was without parallel in radio history. Never before had so many listened so long to so much….the American people heard in person every leading figure in the crisis - Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, Daladier, Benes, Eden, Masaryk. In 1938, all of this was still a novelty and much of it unprecedented. Two way transmissions enabled me to talk with newsmen in different foreign capitals while all America listened in. On several occasions I was able to tell a man stationed in a foreign capital news of which he was totally unaware because of censorship.
“It was my job t broadcast and comment on the news as it happened. As a result, none of my 102 talks was prepared in advance. They were all extemporized under a pressure I had never experienced in 17 years of broadcasting. News bulletins were handed to me as I talked. Speeches of foreign leaders had to be analyzed and sometimes translated while they were being delivered.”
Variety wrote of the networks’ coverage on September 28, 1938: “Hans Von Kaltenborn of CBS seemed to be emerging as the dominant broadcasting personality of the siege and CBS was credited with a general edge over NBC. Kaltenborn was on the air, or so it seemed, morning, noon and late night - interpreting, interviewing and reporting. And going out on a limb that there would not be a war.” (9)
When the “negotiations” were over and the Munich Agreement was signed on September 30, German troops crossed into Czechoslovakia the following day and the world was relieved to have “peace in our time.” Kaltenborn, however, was more than skeptical. He reminded his listeners of the words of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, spoken in the 1700’s: “Today they ring the bells. Tomorrow they will wring their hands.”
Broadcasting magazine profiled Kaltenborn in its issue of October 1st which read in part: “War clouds gathering more and more quickly over Europe during the last few weeks have focused the attention of the world on Europe where statesmen have plotted the paths that might lead to peace or war. Throughout America millions of families have stayed up past their bedtimes listening to bulletins of last minute news flashed from London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Moscow and Rome … listening to interpretations of the news by expert commentators who draw upon their intimate knowledge of European history to give their audiences a clear picture of each critical event and its significance. In the front rank of these interpreters stands H.V. Kaltenborn, ace news analyst of CBS who though of German descent has never once shown a disposition to be anything but factual, fair and objective. … From six to ten times a day his clear, crisp, professorial voice has been going out over the network presenting a clearly defined and easily understood picture of what’s going on…”
Hans & Olga flew to Great Britain on August 3, 1939, where he had arranged to broadcast his CBS commentaries from BBC’s London studios. The couple made brief side trips to Paris and Berlin but were prevented from visiting Warsaw and Copenhagen. They flew back to the United States on August 30, 1939, two days before Germany invaded Poland and four days before England and France declared war on Germany. CBS welcomed him home with a new timeslot on September 25, four nights a week at 6:30. His reaction to the fall of Warsaw is contained in his broadcast of September 27, 1939. Another broadcast from this period, October 6, 1939, is in response to Hitler's speech to the Reichstag several days earlier. From October 16, 1939, Kaltenborn describes the first German bombing raid on Britain, in Scotland. And from a week later, October 23, 1939, he discusses peace negotiations with Japan.
Kaltenborn traveled to both the European and Pacific fronts during World War II, but his most important trip was within New York City when he moved from CBS to NBC on April 6, 1940. NBC had one star newcaster, Lowell Thomas, who had been heard nightly by huge audience and sponsored by Sun Oil since 1932. But Thomas was primarily a news reader, not an in-depth commentator. From the events of 1938 and 1939, NBC News Director A.A. (Abe) Schecter realized that he needed a commentator of Kaltenborn’s stature and proceeded to pursue him with the lures of an early weeknight evening timeslot and more money provided by a sponsor, Pure Oil. With war imminent, Kaltenborn, now
62, realized that his lecturing income would be reduced by limited wartime travel and a guaranteed weeknight program with the promise of no censorship had enough appeal to make him forget his squabbles of 1923 with WEAF and WRC, which, Schecter reminded him, was before NBC owned the stations.
It was a good move that finally gave proof of Kaltenborn’s popularity. His first of ten rated seasons at 7:45 p.m. on NBC resulted in the first of six in double digits and five in the Annual Top 50. (See The 1940-41 Season.) Kaltenborn’s peak was 1941-42 with a 15.2 Hooperating and 22nd place in the Top 50. An historic recording of poor quality from that season contains Kaltenborn's commentary about the Pearl Harbor attack broadcast on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. Sloppy technical work interrupts the start and cuts off the end of his analysis of the Allied victory in Europe on May 7, 1945. The usually reserved Kaltenborn becomes uncharacteristically enthusiastic in his six minute special commentary of August 14, 1945, hailing the Japanese surrender and the end of World War II.
The biggest gaff in Kalenborn’s career came on Election Night of 1948 when he predicted on NBC Radio and Television - along with others - that late-counted rural votes would elect Thomas Dewey the next President over incumbent Harry Truman. It didn’t happen and Truman got his revenge at a subsequent banquet when he performed a pretty good impersonation of Kaltenborn’s prediction. Embarrassed, but not angry, the good natured 70 year old Spiderlegs Kalty took it in stride and continued on with a limited schedule until 1955.
In tribute to their friend, Ed Murrow on CBS, ABC’s Elmer Davis and Bill Henry on Mutual all devoted segments of their programs to salute NBC’s H.V. Kaltenborn, 74, on his 30th anniversary in radio on April 4, 1952.
Hans and his beloved Olga remain together today, buried side by side at Union Cemetery
in Milwaukee.
(1) The Booklyn Daily Eagle, (1841-1955), was at one time America’s leading afternoon newspaper in circulation. Its online successor is www.brooklyneagle.com
(2) World War I broke out in late July, 1914.
(3) Hans & Olga von Kaltenborn remained married until he died 55 years later in 1965. The union resulted in two children, daughter Anais, (b. 1911), and son, Rolf, (b. 1915), seven grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Olga died in 1977 at age 88.
(4) Making matters more awkward, Kaltenborn’s uncle, after whom he was named, Prussian General Hans von Kaltenborn-Stachau, was Germany’s War Minister from 1890 to 1893.
(5) This was actually a restoration. Kaltenborn, like his father, substituted “V” for “Von” many years earlier. Harvard, however, insisted that he use his full name in college, and he continued using it until 1917.
(6) WEAF attempted to cancel Kaltenborn months earlier when he refused to submit his scripts for approval, (he worked from notes), and tame his “offensive” editorial remarks. The Eagle responded that if WEAF cancelled Kaltenborn it would be forced to print the motives for its censorship.
(7) The same Ralph Edwards created Truth Or Consequences on NBC in 1940.
(8) Olga Kaltenborn kept her husband supplied with fresh laundry and homemade soup during his broadcast marathon which has never been matched.
(9) Kaltenborn explained his miscalculation, “I had seen how utterly unprepared the British were for war. I could not see how they could challenge Hitler’s military might. I failed to allow for the determination and courage of the British people once they looked squarely at the issues involved. I have never since underestimated the British.”
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
H.V. Kaltenborn was at the peak of his career and in the second of four consecutive Top 50 seasons in 1942-43. His 7:45 p.m. news commentary on NBC had been expanded from three to five nights a week and he had overtaken newscaster Lowell Thomas with Network Radio’s most popular Multiple Run program. Kaltenborn, 65, was earning a reported $200,000 annually from sponsor Pure Oil, for which he considered himself lucky after years in the lower paying newspaper business.
Time magazine reported a pep talk the lanky 65 year old gave himself before every broadcast, “Make it good, old boy. It may be your last.”
Far from it, Kaltenborn remained a radio and television notable for another dozen years, doing what he always felt he was destined to do, reporting and analyzing the news. His pursuit news put his life at risk several times and his objective analysis of what he observed caused him to lose several jobs. Yet, he never yielded to danger or pressure. He was truly an outstanding journalist, worthy of the title bestowed by his peers, The Dean of Broadcast Commentators.
Remarkably, that phase of his career didn’t begin until he was nearly 50 years old!
Hans von Kaltenborn was born in July, 1878, to immigrant parents in the German-American community of Merrill, Wisconsin, 200 miles northwest of Milwaukee. He was a bright and popular bi-lingual student in high school, nicknamed Spiderlegs Kalty by his classmates and particularly adept at extemporaneous debating.
He joined the U.S. Army shortly after graduation at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, a patriotic act that also began his professional newspaper career. The 19 year old Kaltenborn began sending weekly dispatches from his army training camp in Anniston, Alabama, to The Merrill Advocate with a second copy in German to The Lincoln County Anzeiger. With these credentials he also got himself appointed The Milwaukee Journal’s “special correspondent” attached to the Fourth Wisconsin Infantry in Anniston. The war was a quick one and young Hans never left the country, but the limited experience gave him a thirst for travel that was never quite quenched. So he delayed college and returned home determined to earn enough money to tour Europe - as a reporter for The Merrill Advocate with the promise of becoming the paper‘s first, (and only), foreign correspondent.
When he had he scraped together enough funds to begin his journey, Kaltenborn took his bicycle and boarded a train for New York City. At the New York docks he found dirty and sometimes dangerous work below deck of a cattle boat for the twelve day voyage to Liverpool. Once in England he began his bicycle trip from Livepool to London, stopping in Oxford where he discovered the University’s library. It made a lasting impression. As he wrote in his 1950 memoir, Fifty Fabulous Years:
“The Bodleian Library was the first large library I had ever seen. It was unforgettable. Here was a world of learning so alien to my untutored mind.. For the first time I realized how much there was to know and felt ashamed of my own ignorance. It was this visit to Oxford that determined me to get a college education. But I was destined to wait five more years until the ripe age of 27 until I stood before I stood before one of the great memorial gates leading into the Harvard Yard in Cambridge.”
Seeing the sights of London, then moving on to Paris, Berlin and Bremen, Kaltenborn familiarized himself with the customs of each country, polished his German and French, met his German relatives, worked at odd jobs and faithfully reported his activities to The Merrill Advocate. He returned to New York City in 1902 looking for a reporter’s job in a city which, to his advantage, had an abundance of newspapers. It didn’t take long for the former “War & European Correspondent” of The Merrill Advocate to land a starter job at The Brooklyn Eagle for eight dollars a week. (1)
Working his way up the Eagle newsroom ladder Kaltenborn had become the paper’s City Hall reporter at $25 a week in 1905, when he quit and enrolled at Harvard. For income, he became the Harvard correspondent for both The Eagle and The New York Post, then later in his college career he served as an assistant to several professors and tutor for undergraduates. His highly active undergraduate years included a Harvard-sponsored exchange semester to the University of Berlin in the fall of 1907. He wrote of his return visit to his family’s homeland:
“In 1907, Berlin was a wealthy, gay capital, devoid, so far as I could see, of any outstanding problems. There was a great deal of entertaining and much to see in the world of music, art and the theater. … The Germany I saw that year was enjoying unprecedented prosperity. The military atmosphere was omnipresent but the Germans did not feel then that war was in the near future.” (2)
Aboard ship returning to the United States in January, 1908, Kaltenborn, now 30, was attracted to 20 year old Olga von Nordenflycht, the American-born daughter of the German General Counsel based in Chicago. Their shipboard flirtation became a romance and then a long-distance courtship. Hans realized that Olga, who was also a linguist and writer who loved travel, was his perfect match. Following his graduation from Harvard and rejoining The Brooklyn Eagle staff, (for the princely sum of $45 a week), the couple returned to Berlin in 1910 for their marriage and a brief honeymoon tour of the continent. (3)
Shortly after his return to the paper, Kaltenborn was sent to Washington to become its capital reporter in a temporary shuffle that had him back in New York again in 1911 as The Eagle’s drama critic with additional duties overseeing its editorial and political columns. That period, which Kaltenborn later recalled as one of his favorites, ended in late 1913. when he was given another temporarily assignment. Hans and Olga took their three year old daughter and boarded a ship for France, where he headed The Brooklyn Eagle’s Paris bureau for six months.
The short assignment with a brief side trip to Germany was enough to give the astute Kaltenborn a good grasp on the European situation as the two countries prepared for war. When the young family returned home in June, 1914, he wrote an acclaimed analysis for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Hans von Kaltenborn was named War Editor of The Brooklyn Eagle and was suddenly in demand as a knowledgeable lecturer on world affairs. Nevertheless, when the United States entered World War I in April, 1917, Kaltenborn’s German name and ancestry, coupled with the fact that his wife was a German diplomat’s daughter, made him suspect of having sympathies for the enemy. (4)
To its credit, The Eagle stood by its 39 year old War Editor who quietly dropped the “Von” from his name to become H. V. Kaltenborn for the remaining 47 years of his life. (5) The paper’s confidence in Kaltenborn was tested on November 8, 1918, when the United Press floated a rumor that World War I had ended. The rumor became “fact” prompting extra editions of newspapers and street celebrations. But The Brooklyn Eagle was silent, only saying “Armistice Still Unsigned” on its building’s message board. An angry crowd broke into the paper’s newsroom, demanding that its “Kraut War Editor" admit that the Allies won the war. But Kaltenborn and his management refused to cave while waiting for confirmation. History finally proved them right three days later.
Kaltenborn’s editorial prestige was furthered in September, 1921, when he was dispatched to Geneva for the first meetings of the League of Nations followed by stops in Germany, Austria and France on the way home where he found postwar resentments coupled with political and economic chaos.
H. V. Kaltenborn, 43, became “The Dean of Radio Commentators” on April 4, 1922, when he spoke to a Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce meeting on loud speakers in The Eagle’s auditorium from WJZ, then an experimental radio station in Newark. His 30 minute extemporaneous address is considered the first news commentary ever delivered on radio. His remarks were well received but Kaltenborn missed his audiences and their reactions, “In radio there is no comeback and you can’t tell how it’s received.”
He would soon learn how wrong he was when The Brooklyn Eagle signed a 39 week contract for Kaltenborn’s 15 minute commentaries on AT&T’s WEAF/New York City and WRC/Washington, D.C. beginning on October 23, 1923. As David Clark noted in the September 1965 issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly:
“Long before he completed that first season, Kaltenborn had realized there was plenty of ‘comeback’ to his radio talks. And sometimes he would know too well how they were received. In the eight months he almost ran afoul of a Federal District Judge, nearly precipitated labor troubles at AT&T, got himself cut off from WEAF’s sister station in Washington at the demand of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, stirred up a nest of anti-Catholics, infuriated prohibitionists and so irritated WEAF’s management that it declined to renew the paper’s his contract.” (6)
The Brooklyn Eagle printed two pages of letters, selected from over a thousand, protesting the end of Kaltenborn’s commentaries on WEAF. He next popped up on Long Island’s WAHG, the first in a string of small stations in the New York vicinity that would broadcast his commentaries until the protests began. Finally, powerful WOR/Newark ended his exile with a 15 minute Monday night commentary at 8:00, The Kaltenborn Digest, again sponsored by The Brooklyn Eagle.
H. V. Kaltenborn never worked from a script - just notes and memory. This makes his Tuesday 8:30 p.m. debut on CBS in 1927 all the more impressive. He stood before the network microphone and spoke extemporaneously for 30 minutes, just as he did in lecture halls. He continued these weekly broadcasts while continuing his day job as Associate Editor of The Brooklyn Eagle until the newspaper’s new ownership attempted to cut his salary by 50% in 1930.
At age 52, Kaltenborn decided his future lay in what had become his major source of income, lecturing, and the in new medium of Network Radio. He left The Eagle after 28 years and signed a contract with CBS, which was then assembling a news department under the ambitious direction of Paul White. Kaltenborn Edits The News became a wandering program in search of a permanent timeslot in the early 1930’s, while CBS assigned its sometimes controversial commentator to additional duties which included covering the 1932 Democratic and Republican National Convention with Ted Husing.
Hans and Olga Kaltenborn also made a return trip to Germany in the fall 1932 when he managed to get an interview with the charismatic and controversial head of the Nazi party, Adolph Hitler. He said of meeting Hitler, “I felt almost reassured. I could not see how a man of his type, a plebeian Austrian of limited mentality, could ever gain the allegiance of the German people…What we underestimated was the appeal of the irrational and the impact of cleverly manipulated and constantly hammered propaganda on the minds and emotions of the people. Hitler once said that there are three rules to successful propaganda: Make it simple, say it often and make it burn!”
By 1936 the Kaltenborns had become annual summer visitors to Europe and H.V. Kaltenborn was the first in what would become a long list of CBS “star” newsmen over the next decade. The world’s attention had turned to Spain in July where the three year Civil War had broken out between the government Loyalists, supported by most of Europe, with cash and volunteers, against the Nationalist Party led General Francisco Franco, supported by dictators Hitler of Germany and Mussolini of Italy, with cash, arms, equipment and men. Given Germany’s active participation with its Luftwaffe fighters and bombers, Kaltenborn correctly sensed that this was the preliminary to World War II and he headed for the action in Spain on September 3rd. It was here that Kaltenborn, the newsman, first became Kaltenborn, the newsmaker. As he later told the story in his autobiography:
“On the Franco-Spanish frontier near Hendaye there was a narrow river with a snakelike course. A French farm jutted right out into the midst of the battle for the Spanish city of Irun but both sides were careful not to violate French soil. As the battle for Irun began and shells and bullets whizzed over this French farm I conceived the ideal of broadcasting a battle description punctuated by actual battlesounds. … To get the best battle sounds we ran a long telephone cable from the abandoned farmhouse to a small haystack located between the two battle lines to both see and hear the artillery shells, I was determined to get the first actual battlefield broadcast in radio history. When I finally got through to CBS in New York and told them what I had, they replied, ‘Stand by…too many commercial programs right now…will call you later.’
“So I stuck to my haystack hoping that the scene of battle would not shift. … Finally, at nine o’clock in the evening we got through and for 15 minutes I described the burning buildings and cars, stopping occasionally to let listeners hear the peculiar whine of flying bullets and the dull explosion of artillery shells.”
Kaltenborn returned home two weeks later, unharmed and the first hero in the early years of broadcast journalism. CBS “rewarded” him by moving his weekly 25-minute commentary on Friday nights at 6:35 to Sunday nights at 10:45 and reducing it to 15 minutes. This was actually a major gain stations carrying Kaltenborn’s commentaries, following the 45-minute Gillette Community Sing starring Milton Berle on CBS. When the Berle show was cancelled, in October, 1937, Kaltenborn took the 10:30 half-hour for Headlines And Bylines, sharing host duties with CBS newsman Bob Trout and later with staff announcer Ralph Edwards. (7) The network refrained from selling their star commentator’s program to a sponsor, so it went unrated and the size of his audience will never be known.
However, it’s a cinch that most of America heard the staccato and precise delivery of H.V. Kaltenborn during the final three weeks of September, 1938. As he wrote in Fifty Fabulous Years:
“The world looked on in fascinated horror as Hitler began a series of moves that was to result in the capitulation of Czechoslovakia without the firing of a single shot. In the Munich settlement of September, 1938, the Czechs were not even represented! France and England were pursuing a policy of complete appeasement and they made abject concessions to the dictator’s demands. He got Czechoslovakia’s western Sudetenland and said he wanted nothing more. Millions of Europeans foolishly believed that now we would have ‘peace in our time.’ Had not Neville Chamberlin, Britain’s Prime Minister, proudly displayed a piece of paper that said so?”
Because of the five and six hour time difference between New York and the European capitals, both CBS and NBC went into 24 hour operation. During the 20 days of leading up to the notorious Munich Agreement, Kaltenborn didn’t leave CBS - he lived, slept and ate in its offices, on immediate call for 102 separate broadcasts ranging from two minutes to two hours as information filtered in from London, Paris and Berlin. (8) Because he spoke both French and German, he was able to listen to foreign broadcasts in his earphones and immediately translate what he heard for his CBS listeners.
Kaltenborn continues in his memoirs: “When the Czechoslovak crisis began CBS was prepared to cover the progress of events thoroughly and completely… Largely because of this advance preparation CBS managed to capture the bulk of the listening audience throughout the duration of the crisis. The intensity with which America listened to the radio reports of the Munich crisis was without parallel in radio history. Never before had so many listened so long to so much….the American people heard in person every leading figure in the crisis - Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, Daladier, Benes, Eden, Masaryk. In 1938, all of this was still a novelty and much of it unprecedented. Two way transmissions enabled me to talk with newsmen in different foreign capitals while all America listened in. On several occasions I was able to tell a man stationed in a foreign capital news of which he was totally unaware because of censorship.
“It was my job t broadcast and comment on the news as it happened. As a result, none of my 102 talks was prepared in advance. They were all extemporized under a pressure I had never experienced in 17 years of broadcasting. News bulletins were handed to me as I talked. Speeches of foreign leaders had to be analyzed and sometimes translated while they were being delivered.”
Variety wrote of the networks’ coverage on September 28, 1938: “Hans Von Kaltenborn of CBS seemed to be emerging as the dominant broadcasting personality of the siege and CBS was credited with a general edge over NBC. Kaltenborn was on the air, or so it seemed, morning, noon and late night - interpreting, interviewing and reporting. And going out on a limb that there would not be a war.” (9)
When the “negotiations” were over and the Munich Agreement was signed on September 30, German troops crossed into Czechoslovakia the following day and the world was relieved to have “peace in our time.” Kaltenborn, however, was more than skeptical. He reminded his listeners of the words of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, spoken in the 1700’s: “Today they ring the bells. Tomorrow they will wring their hands.”
Broadcasting magazine profiled Kaltenborn in its issue of October 1st which read in part: “War clouds gathering more and more quickly over Europe during the last few weeks have focused the attention of the world on Europe where statesmen have plotted the paths that might lead to peace or war. Throughout America millions of families have stayed up past their bedtimes listening to bulletins of last minute news flashed from London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Moscow and Rome … listening to interpretations of the news by expert commentators who draw upon their intimate knowledge of European history to give their audiences a clear picture of each critical event and its significance. In the front rank of these interpreters stands H.V. Kaltenborn, ace news analyst of CBS who though of German descent has never once shown a disposition to be anything but factual, fair and objective. … From six to ten times a day his clear, crisp, professorial voice has been going out over the network presenting a clearly defined and easily understood picture of what’s going on…”
Hans & Olga flew to Great Britain on August 3, 1939, where he had arranged to broadcast his CBS commentaries from BBC’s London studios. The couple made brief side trips to Paris and Berlin but were prevented from visiting Warsaw and Copenhagen. They flew back to the United States on August 30, 1939, two days before Germany invaded Poland and four days before England and France declared war on Germany. CBS welcomed him home with a new timeslot on September 25, four nights a week at 6:30. His reaction to the fall of Warsaw is contained in his broadcast of September 27, 1939. Another broadcast from this period, October 6, 1939, is in response to Hitler's speech to the Reichstag several days earlier. From October 16, 1939, Kaltenborn describes the first German bombing raid on Britain, in Scotland. And from a week later, October 23, 1939, he discusses peace negotiations with Japan.
Kaltenborn traveled to both the European and Pacific fronts during World War II, but his most important trip was within New York City when he moved from CBS to NBC on April 6, 1940. NBC had one star newcaster, Lowell Thomas, who had been heard nightly by huge audience and sponsored by Sun Oil since 1932. But Thomas was primarily a news reader, not an in-depth commentator. From the events of 1938 and 1939, NBC News Director A.A. (Abe) Schecter realized that he needed a commentator of Kaltenborn’s stature and proceeded to pursue him with the lures of an early weeknight evening timeslot and more money provided by a sponsor, Pure Oil. With war imminent, Kaltenborn, now
62, realized that his lecturing income would be reduced by limited wartime travel and a guaranteed weeknight program with the promise of no censorship had enough appeal to make him forget his squabbles of 1923 with WEAF and WRC, which, Schecter reminded him, was before NBC owned the stations.
It was a good move that finally gave proof of Kaltenborn’s popularity. His first of ten rated seasons at 7:45 p.m. on NBC resulted in the first of six in double digits and five in the Annual Top 50. (See The 1940-41 Season.) Kaltenborn’s peak was 1941-42 with a 15.2 Hooperating and 22nd place in the Top 50. An historic recording of poor quality from that season contains Kaltenborn's commentary about the Pearl Harbor attack broadcast on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. Sloppy technical work interrupts the start and cuts off the end of his analysis of the Allied victory in Europe on May 7, 1945. The usually reserved Kaltenborn becomes uncharacteristically enthusiastic in his six minute special commentary of August 14, 1945, hailing the Japanese surrender and the end of World War II.
The biggest gaff in Kalenborn’s career came on Election Night of 1948 when he predicted on NBC Radio and Television - along with others - that late-counted rural votes would elect Thomas Dewey the next President over incumbent Harry Truman. It didn’t happen and Truman got his revenge at a subsequent banquet when he performed a pretty good impersonation of Kaltenborn’s prediction. Embarrassed, but not angry, the good natured 70 year old Spiderlegs Kalty took it in stride and continued on with a limited schedule until 1955.
In tribute to their friend, Ed Murrow on CBS, ABC’s Elmer Davis and Bill Henry on Mutual all devoted segments of their programs to salute NBC’s H.V. Kaltenborn, 74, on his 30th anniversary in radio on April 4, 1952.
Hans and his beloved Olga remain together today, buried side by side at Union Cemetery
in Milwaukee.
(1) The Booklyn Daily Eagle, (1841-1955), was at one time America’s leading afternoon newspaper in circulation. Its online successor is www.brooklyneagle.com
(2) World War I broke out in late July, 1914.
(3) Hans & Olga von Kaltenborn remained married until he died 55 years later in 1965. The union resulted in two children, daughter Anais, (b. 1911), and son, Rolf, (b. 1915), seven grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Olga died in 1977 at age 88.
(4) Making matters more awkward, Kaltenborn’s uncle, after whom he was named, Prussian General Hans von Kaltenborn-Stachau, was Germany’s War Minister from 1890 to 1893.
(5) This was actually a restoration. Kaltenborn, like his father, substituted “V” for “Von” many years earlier. Harvard, however, insisted that he use his full name in college, and he continued using it until 1917.
(6) WEAF attempted to cancel Kaltenborn months earlier when he refused to submit his scripts for approval, (he worked from notes), and tame his “offensive” editorial remarks. The Eagle responded that if WEAF cancelled Kaltenborn it would be forced to print the motives for its censorship.
(7) The same Ralph Edwards created Truth Or Consequences on NBC in 1940.
(8) Olga Kaltenborn kept her husband supplied with fresh laundry and homemade soup during his broadcast marathon which has never been matched.
(9) Kaltenborn explained his miscalculation, “I had seen how utterly unprepared the British were for war. I could not see how they could challenge Hitler’s military might. I failed to allow for the determination and courage of the British people once they looked squarely at the issues involved. I have never since underestimated the British.”
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
| h.v._kaltenborn__9-27-39.mp3 |
| h.v._kaltenborn__10-6-39.mp3 |
| h.v._kaltenborn__10-16-39.mp3 |
| h.v._kaltenborn__10-23-39.mp3 |
| h.v._kaltenborn__12-07-41.mp3 |
| h.v._kaltenborn__5-07-45.mp3 |
| h.v._kaltenborn__8-14-45.mp3 |