Martin Agronsky
Martin Zama Agronsky, also known as Martin Agronski, was an American journalist, political analyst, and television host. He began his career in 1936, working under his uncle, Gershon Agron, at the Palestine Post in Jerusalem, before deciding to work freelance in Europe a year later. At the outbreak of World War II, he became a war correspondent for NBC, working across three continents before returning to the United States in 1943 and covering the last few years of the war from Washington, D.C., with ABC.
After the war, Agronsky covered McCarthyism for ABC; fearless against McCarthy, he won a Peabody Award for 1952. When broadcast journalism moved away from radio, Agronsky returned to NBC, covering the news as well as interviewing prominent figures, including Martin Luther King Jr. as a young man. He returned to Jerusalem for a time and won the Alfred I. duPont Award in 1961 for his coverage of the Eichmann trial there. At the end of 1962, he recorded a documentary aboard the submarine USS George Washington which received an award at the Venice Film Festival. A prominent news reporter, and associate of John F. Kennedy, he extensively covered the 1963 assassination of Kennedy. The following year, he joined CBS, reportedly becoming the only journalist to work for all three commercial networks. With CBS, he moderated Face the Nation and won an Emmy for his interviews with Hugo Black, which marked the first television interview with a sitting Supreme Court Justice.
He left major companies in 1968, joining a local network to helm his own show, Agronsky & Co. A success, the show pioneered the "talking heads" news format. He added the Evening Edition, an interview format, to his show, which became prominent for its coverage of the Watergate scandal. Agronsky then joined PBS, swapping the Evening Edition for a longer interview show, Agronsky at Large. In his later career, he also acted as variations on himself in film and television. A graduate of Rutgers University, this institution would also award Agronsky an honorary Master of Arts and the Rutgers University Award, as well as inducting him into its Hall of Distinguished Alumni. He continued hosting Agronsky & Co. until 1988, when he retired from his over 50-year journalism career.
Early years
Martin Zama Agronsky was born Martin Zama Agrons in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 12, 1915, to Isador and Marcia, Russian Jewish immigrants from Minsk in present-day Belarus. Isador Agrons changed the family name from Agronsky to Agrons some time before Martin's birth, but Martin chose to use the original name when he began his journalism career. Members of the family variously used the names Agronsky, Agrons, and Agron. In his career, Agronsky had a friendship with Harry Golden, who befriended and became a confidant to Isador.Agronsky's family moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, when he was a young child, and he graduated from Atlantic City High School in 1932. He studied at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, graduating in 1936. At Rutgers, Agronsky was a member of Jewish fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu and represented them on the Interfraternity Council.
Career
1936–1945: Early career and World War II
In 1936, upon his graduation, Agronsky was offered a job as a reporter for the English-language Palestine Post, precursor to today's Jerusalem Post, which was owned by his uncle, Gershon Agron, and moved to Jerusalem. He left the newspaper in 1937 – he was uncomfortable working for Agron, calling it "pure nepotism", as he "wanted to make it on his own" – and moved to Paris to open a bookstore, before becoming a freelance journalist covering the Spanish Civil War. During his time in Europe, primarily Britain and France, he freelanced for various newspapers and translated French stories into English for the International News Service; he notably wrote an in-depth piece for Foreign Affairs magazine on the rise of anti-Semitism in Mussolini's Italy. This article caught the attention of the Paris bureau of the New York Times, the newspaper at which Agronsky had long aspired to work.At the outbreak of World War II, he moved to Geneva in Switzerland, where he met Max Jordan, the National Broadcasting Company bureau chief in Europe, who initially asked Agronsky to work freelance writing radio stories. Agronsky sold his stories to both NBC and the New York Times. Despite having no broadcast journalism training, in April 1940 he was hired by NBC as a radio war correspondent when the company expanded their coverage. Agronsky was conflicted in taking the job, as on the same day he had been offered a foreign assignment job by The New York Times, his dream job, but NBC was offering $250 per week plus expenses. Jordan wanted to put together an NBC presence throughout Europe to cover the British conflict with Germany in the Balkans and tapped Agronsky to be the bureau chief there. Joining NBC as their Balkan correspondent, Agronsky became accredited by the British military and Royal Air Force. He covered the war from all over the Balkans and much of Eastern Europe before opening a permanent NBC bureau in Ankara, the capital of neutral Turkey. Although based in Ankara, Agronsky spent most of his time in Istanbul. He then became a foreign correspondent in Europe and North Africa, transferring to Cairo and being accredited to cover the British Eighth Army, in North Africa. Though NBC's European war coverage was not particularly celebrated, Agronsky "was a bright spot distinguishing himself under fire in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East."
He was also accredited to cover "Malaya and the Dutch East Indies" in Southeast Asia; when NBC's Asia correspondent John Young had to leave Singapore in November 1941 due to lack of British accreditation, Agronsky was sent in his stead, arriving from Ankara on December 22, 1941. After Pearl Harbor and Singapore were bombed by Japan on December 7–8, 1941, Agronsky, now considered a seasoned war correspondent, was sent to the Pacific theater. His Pacific coverage would take him to Australia, where he was set to cover Douglas MacArthur's arrival in Melbourne. In Singapore, Agronsky first stayed at the Raffles Hotel with other journalists, but left the week after Christmas 1941, on the day martial law was declared, to stay outside the city. He was not allowed to send news of the implementation of martial law, due to the short length of his broadcasts, and was subject to the same censorship as the local press; fellow journalist Cecil Brown was ultimately completely censored, and Agronsky was not permitted to telegraph this news for several days. Brown had met Agronsky in Ankara in 1941, and described him then: "He is a jet-haired, zealous correspondent... who gets almost all his information from the British Embassy. He works very hard... and he and Burdett are busy cutting each other's throat to achieve what are euphemistically known as 'scoops.'"
Agronsky was still in Singapore as the Japanese arrived, managing to catch the last plane out before the city was captured. He was then attached to MacArthur's troops and primarily covered Japan's conquest and the Allied retreat in Asia, nearly being captured by Japanese soldiers in Kuala Lumpur and riding with the Dutch military on a Lockheed Lodestar for the final leg to Australia. He came to national attention in 1942 due to his reporting in the Pacific, after broadcasting news that the Allies were struggling in Java due to expired munitions and that the RAF had been turned away from Singapore as the Americans were not expecting them, suffering severe Japanese attacks in the confusion. He flew with the RAF on some bombing missions.
NBC was ordered to divest its radio network through the Red and Blue Networks in 1943, and Agronsky's contract was among those assigned to the "Blue" network, which NBC chose to divest. The associated assets became the American Broadcasting Company ; smaller and less-renowned than the already-established networks, ABC did not have a television bureau. Agronsky returned to the United States in 1943 when he joined ABC. While other prominent war journalists found themselves able to take senior positions on television, Agronsky was instead assigned to Washington, D.C., where he did The Daily War Journal until the end of World War II.
1946–1955: ABC and McCarthy coverage
Agronsky maintained his prominence as a radio journalist for ABC following the war. An early proponent of civil rights, when president Harry S. Truman gave his speech to the NAACP in 1947, Agronsky was sceptical, suggesting that it was "a political gesture"; NAACP president Walter Francis White wrote to Agronsky to disagree, showing the NAACP's support for Truman. In 1948, Agronsky helped to pioneer television coverage of American political conventions, continuing to report from them with the first major television broadcasts in 1952. In 1948, Agronsky had the most sponsors in broadcasting, with 104.He then took a principled stance against growing McCarthyism, also reporting on the Hollywood 10 and House Un-American Activities Committee. While many reporters gave milquetoast coverage of McCarthyism, said to be out of fear, Agronsky, like CBS's Edward R. Murrow after him, was openly critical of McCarthy and of the senators who enabled him. This bold stance saw Agronsky targeted with anti-Semitic hate mail and his show lose sponsors, apparently pressured to leave by McCarthy so that Agronsky's show would be taken off air; ABC, however, "congratulated him and took him to lunch", and encouraged him to continue with the criticisms. The conversation reportedly went:
He won the Peabody Award for 1952 for his coverage and criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy's excessive accusations, with the awarding committee noting that his ability to get "the story behind the story is distinctive". He summarized McCarthy by saying: "Joe didn't take criticism very well."
In 1953, Agronsky questioned president Dwight D. Eisenhower on investigating communism in churches and on book burning. ABC then became the only major network to broadcast the 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings on television, growing their prominence and "sinking McCarthy" due to the public exposure to his excesses.
Agronsky also did a one-on-one discussion show at ABC, At Issue, which aired on Sunday evenings in 1953. One prominent episode dealt with the tobacco crisis in 1953; new medical reports were appearing that suggested a link between smoking and lung cancer, and the tobacco industry was keen to encourage suppression of this information. One of few shows to cover the reports, Agronsky's program nevertheless "ended on a favorable note after conferences ", the public relations firm hired by Big Tobacco. At Issue was moved to Sunday afternoons as part of its block of public affairs programming in 1954, and ended later that year when ABC faced technical and sponsorship issues, scrapping its Sunday afternoon programming. Agronsky was a member of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association from 1948; and became its chair, ending his term in 1954 and becoming an ex officio member of its executive committee.