Howard K. Smith: The Louisiana Boy Who Interviewed Hitler and Exposed Bull Connor

The Louisiana Boy Who Interviewed Hitler and Exposed Bull Connor

Howard Kingsbury Smith was born on May 12, 1914, in Ferriday, Louisiana — a small town near Natchez, Mississippi, about as far from the glamour of network television as a person could start. He worked for the New Orleans Item as a young journalist, then moved to United Press in London and The New York Times before joining CBS under Edward R. Murrow in January 1940. Smith became one of Murrow's Boys — the celebrated team of war correspondents who set the standard for broadcast journalism during World War II.

Last Train from Berlin

Smith reported from Nazi Germany, interviewing Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels. His 1942 book Last Train from Berlin became a bestseller — an eyewitness account of Germany at war that gave Americans their clearest picture of what was happening in Europe. A kid from Ferriday, Louisiana, standing in the same room as Adolf Hitler and reporting what he saw. That's journalism at its most essential and most dangerous.

Birmingham and Beyond

In 1961, Smith produced "Who Speaks for Birmingham?" — a documentary that exposed the collaboration between Birmingham's police commissioner Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan. It was one of the most important pieces of civil rights journalism ever broadcast, and it cost Smith his job. CBS management intervened, and Smith was fired for editorializing. He moved to ABC, became co-anchor of the Evening News, and continued broadcasting for nearly two decades.

Howard K. Smith died on February 15, 2002, at eighty-seven. He had gone from the New Orleans Item to Berlin to Birmingham to the anchor desk — a career that spanned the most consequential events of the twentieth century. Louisiana gave him the grit. Murrow gave him the craft. And Smith had the courage to use both in the places where it mattered most.