Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism | By Ralph Engelman, Foreword by Morley Safer | Columbia University Press | 440 pages | $34.50

Those who saw Good Night and Good Luck, the 2005 film about Edward R. Murrow’s encounter with Senator Joseph McCarthy, may have come away with the impression that Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly (played by George Clooney), was a quiet, sensible fellow who stayed demurely in the background. Ralph Engelman’s full-scale biography corrects that impression in spades. It offers a Friendly more recognizable to those who knew him—a ferocious, always impatient, fissionable mass. He was my colleague, off and on, at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and my temptation is to remember the intimidating personality, with its many failures of civility, and to overlook how well Friendly employed this persona to gain his ambitious ends. Possibly fueled by his youth in Providence as a dyslexic and a poor student, he grew up hypercompetitive, first creating a name for himself in the Army during World War II as a tireless roving journalist/lecturer. After the war, he hitched himself to Murrow’s star to create the legendary and short-lived See It Now CBS documentary series. As the ailing Murrow’s career faded at the network, Friendly rose to the presidency of CBS News, then the leading brand name in broadcast journalism. Through what may have been his miscalculation, he resigned in a dispute over coverage of the 1966 Vietnam hearings. At that point, he dusted himself off and set up shop at the Ford Foundation, where he helped create public television as we know it, and at Columbia’s journalism school, where he was promptly designated the Edward R. Murrow Professor.

There he devoted himself to training the young. He always seemed too large for the school,...

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