1. Bill Downs worked for CBS News from 1942 to 1962 and for ABC News beginning in 1963.
45 Facts About Bill Downs
1. 2.
Bill Downs was one of the original members of the team of war correspondents known as the Murrow Boys.
3.
Bill Downs entered Tokyo with Allied occupation forces and covered the Japanese surrender, and was among the first Americans to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bombing.
4.
Bill Downs later covered the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, the Berlin Blockade, and the Korean War.
5.
Bill Downs was born in Kansas City, Kansas to William Randall Bill Downs, Sr.
6.
Bill Downs served as the managing editor of the Daily Kansan at the University of Kansas and graduated in 1937 with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
7.
Bill Downs began his career as a newspaper reporter for The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Kansan.
8.
Bill Downs soon joined the United Press and worked stints at the Denver and New York bureaus for the next three years.
9.
Bill Downs was sent to head CBS' Moscow bureau and remained there from December 25,1942, to January 3,1944.
10.
Bill Downs stayed at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow with other Western foreign correspondents along with their secretaries and translators.
11.
Bill Downs interviewed survivors of the Syrets concentration camp who were forced to participate:.
12.
Bill Downs later admitted to having "furious arguments" with Downs over how to report the story and wrote that his reluctance to wholly accept the claims resulted from witnessing some colleagues submit unsubstantiated stories.
13.
Bill Downs returned to the United States in January 1944 with the score of Dmitri Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony after CBS acquired the exclusive American broadcast rights for $10,000.
14.
Bill Downs found it difficult readjusting to life after Moscow because of what he had witnessed.
15.
Bill Downs was embedded with the 21st Army Group, and remained so until the end of the war in Europe.
16.
In September 1944, Bill Downs covered Operation Market Garden alongside his former United Press colleague Walter Cronkite, following the 101st Airborne Division's fight to maintain control of key bridges.
17.
Bill Downs discovered Downs at the Hotel Metropole and angrily asked why he had not looked for him.
18.
Bill Downs felt disillusioned by what he saw as indifference among the people at home who seemed to carry on as if nothing happened.
19.
Bill Downs later joined Murrow and several other of the Boys in a visit to the death camps at Auschwitz.
20.
Bill Downs was the first correspondent to broadcast from Hamburg after its surrender on May 3,1945.
21.
Bill Downs described the Spitfires and Typhoons overhead flying north in pursuit of Germans reportedly attempting to escape to Nazi-occupied Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
22.
In June 1945, Bill Downs joined a group of airborne correspondents organized by Tex McCrary to cover the Twentieth Air Force.
23.
Bill Downs arrived in Manila in August 1945 and landed with the initial occupying units of Japan, later being present for the signing of the Japanese surrender.
24.
Bill Downs received the plum assignment of flying in the observation plane during the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946.
25.
Bill Downs led a documentary team that retraced several major battlefronts he had covered in Western Europe.
26.
Bill Downs delivered a Christmas broadcast from the cockpit of a Candy Bomber aircraft piloted by Gail Halvorsen as part of Operation Little Vittles.
27.
Military censorship of press broadcasts and cables caused fury among reporters stationed there; Bill Downs' cables were among the scrutinized.
28.
In 1953, Bill Downs was assigned to the Rome bureau, where he spent the next three years covering the Mediterranean and Vatican City.
29.
Bill Downs returned to the United States the following week for the 1955 edition of Edward R Murrow's Years of Crisis radio series.
30.
Bill Downs joined other Murrow Boys to discuss the most pressing international political developments of the past year.
31.
Bill Downs reported primarily from Washington for the rest of his tenure at CBS.
32.
Bill Downs ran nightly screenings of the broadcast at his home in Rome to packed houses, mostly consisting of Americans, including members of the State Department and military attaches.
33.
On November 2,1952, Downs made a somber appearance with Edward R Murrow on See It Now after the Ivy Mike operation, the first successful testing of a thermonuclear weapon.
34.
Outside of his tenure in the CBS Rome bureau, Bill Downs spent much of his later career at CBS in Washington covering presidential elections with other members of the Murrow Boys.
35.
Bill Downs accompanied both candidates on the campaign trail during the 1952 presidential election, and reported from the Republican National Convention in Chicago.
36.
Bill Downs soon lost the radio show and grew increasingly frustrated and bitter with management.
37.
Bill Downs ultimately resigned as State Department correspondent for CBS in March 1962 during a shakeup that saw the replacement of Douglas Edwards with Walter Cronkite as the anchor of CBS Evening News.
38.
Bill Downs publicly stated that the departure was amicable, but hinted at his dissatisfaction with recent developments at the organization.
39.
Bill Downs asked Murrow for his thoughts on how Downs' wife, Roz, would do if he decided to quit and become a writer.
40.
Bill Downs joined ABC News on November 22,1963, as a radio news anchor in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, and covered the swearing-in of President Lyndon Johnson.
41.
Bill Downs spent his later years working various roles, and was ABC's correspondent at the Defense Department from 1963 to 1970.
42.
Bill Downs worked as a commentator covering the Nixon administration, during which time Downs drew accusations of bias from Vice President Spiro Agnew for his analysis of Nixon's "silent majority" speech, which Downs said followed the "Pentagon line" of asserting that American defeat abroad would promote recklessness among other world powers.
43.
Bill Downs had been hired at CBS as a desk assistant at the same time as Shirley Lubowitz, who later married Downs' colleague Joe Wershba.
44.
Bill Downs died of laryngeal cancer in Bethesda, Maryland on May 3,1978.
45.
Bill Downs was not related to the journalist Hugh Downs.