Bernard Shaw 1940–

Television news anchor and reporter

At a Glance…

Hungry for International Experience

Taking a Career Gamble

“Chicken Noodle Network”

From “The Center of Hell”

A Star Is Born

Sources

Television news anchor Bernard Shaw’s dispassionate manner, steady gaze, rich baritone voice, and crisply precise delivery virtually blend into the fabric of the news. As Cable News Network’s (CNN) principal Washington anchor, he takes a serious approach to journalism and is widely regarded for his belief that the messenger should not get in the way of the message. Shaw has worked for two of the three national television networks, CBS and ABC, and holds the number one anchor position at a number one ranked TV news network—the “fourth” network—CNN. In a career spanning three decades, he has covered some of modern history’s most dramatic events: Watergate (a political scandal that centered on the infiltration of Democratic party headquarters by Republicans during the 1972 presidential campaign), the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, the Nicaraguan Revolution, China’s Tiananmen Square student massacre, and American involvement in the Persian Gulf War. As CNN’s top anchor, Shaw is at the helm of television’s news phenomenon: a 24-hour, all-news cable network that has arisen as a challenge to the three leading networks.

Shaw is one of the rare few who has realized his childhood dreams. He grew up during the years of World War II, the emergence of television, and the days that begat the baby boom. His father was a house painter, his mother cleaned other people’s homes, and they lived on the South Side of Chicago. But far from being isolated in the “wrong” part of town and at the wrong end of the economic spectrum, the family brought the world into their home. “In those days,” Shaw told Parade Magazine, “Chicago had four papers and we got all four every day.” Even in his teens, Shaw had an obsessive interest in the news. “My ritual on Sunday morning was to walk to a place called the Green Door bookstore near the University of Chicago, which was the closest place I could find the Sunday New York Times, ” Shaw told New York magazine. Fourteen years old, paper cradled in his arms, the boy would plant himself in a coffeeshop and read the paper all the way through. But Shaw was not merely a spectator. He made announcements on the school public address system, participated in radio amateur hours, and, while some teenagers of the 1950s may have been totally absorbed in the birth of rock ‘n roll, Shaw found time to dial up newspaper and broadcast reporters and pepper them with questions about story preparation and deadline

At a Glance…

Born May 22, 1940, in Chicago, IL; son of Edgar (a railroad man and house painter) and Camilia (a housekeeper; maiden name, Murphy) Shaw; married Linda Allston, 1973; children: Amar Edgar, Anil Louise. Education: Attended University of Illinois, 1963-66.

Reporter, correspondent, and news anchor. WYNR/WNUS all-news radio, Chicago, IL, reporter and anchor, 1964-66; Westinghouse Broadcasting Company’s Group W, Chicago, reporter, 1966-68, White House correspondent, 1968-71; Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS-TV), reporter for Washington bureau, 1971-74, correspondent, 1974-77; American Broadcasting Companies (ABC-TV), Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, 1977-79, also ABC-News’ senior Capitol Hill correspondent; Cable News Network (CNN), Washington DC, news anchor, 1980—; one of three CNN Gulf War correspondents in Baghdad, 1991. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1959-63.

Awards: International Platform Association’s Lowell Thomas Electronic Journalist Award, 1988; Award for Cable Excellence from the National Academy of Cable Programming, 1988; Emmy Award, 1989, for outstanding coverage of a single breaking news story; gold medal, 32nd annual International Film and TV Festival of New York, 1989; National Association of Black Journalists annual award, 1989; George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, 1990; ACE Award, 1990; Bernard Shaw Endowment Fund created by University of Illinois, 1991; Eduard Rhein Foundation’s Cultural-H/Journalistic Award, 1991.

Member: Society of Professional Journalists (fellow), National Press Club, Sigma Delta Chi.

Addresses: Office —Cable News Network, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., 111 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., 3rd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20001.

pressures. Even in his youth, Shaw’s tastes in television programming ran toward the news and information genre: he used to watch the television news program Meet the Press religiously, and his hero was legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow. At 16, he personally witnessed his second Democratic convention—he had managed to engineer his way into both the 1952 and 1956 conventions. Shaw told Time: “When I looked up at the anchor booths, I knew I was looking at the altar.”

On the road to the “altar,” Shaw wangled another opportunity to speak to a journalist about his craft. It was 1961, the beginning of an era of political tensions that resulted in such historic moves as the construction of the Berlin Wall by the East German government and the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis (a period of threatened military confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet governments following the American discovery of Soviet missile sites in Cuba). Shaw was a 21-year-old corporal in the Marines stationed in Hawaii at the time, and Walter Cronkite, his other hero, was passing through. With the tenacity of youth—or perhaps that of a budding reporter—the corporal rang Cronkite’s room a total of 34 times. “He was the most persistent guy I’ve ever met in my life,” Cronkite said in the Washington Post, “I was going to give him five begrudging minutes and ended up talking to him for a half hour. He was just determined to be a journalist.” The two have been friends ever since.

In 1963, with four years of the marines behind him, a new sense of maturity, and college money, Shaw entered the University of Illinois, choosing history as his major. His career in journalism officially began just a year later when he joined Chicago’s WNUS, one of the nation’s first all-news radio stations. He worked there as a reporter and anchor until 1966 when Westinghouse Broadcasting Company’s Group W offered him a job. He quit school, relocated to Washington, D.C., and, at 28, became a White House correspondent. In the five years with Westinghouse Shaw’s assignments included local and national urban affairs, and the struggles of Hispanics and Native Americans.

In 1971, Walter Cronkite helped Shaw land a job with CBS. Shaw started as a reporter for the CBS News Washington bureau and in three years became a correspondent. It was during this period that his career got a boost: he conducted an exclusive interview with then attorney general John Mitchell. It was the height of the Watergate crisis and Mitchell, who was to be convicted for his role in the affair, was a major figure in the scandal. White House correspondent Shaw had pulled off a journalistic coup.

Hungry for International Experience

After nearly ten years of reporting from Capitol Hill, Shaw was restless. He was hungry for international experience. When ABC offered him the job of Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, an impressive but less visible position, he grabbed it. “I pushed myself out the door,” Shaw told the New York Times. The three years he spent with ABC proved especially eventful.

As Latin American correspondent from 1977 to 1979, Shaw covered the 1979 resignation and exile of Nicaragua’s enigmatic president, General Anastasio Somoza, and the months of simmering civil war that enveloped it. The year before, Shaw flew to South America when assigned to investigate rumors of a bizarre massacre in the remote jungles of Guyana. The scene was Jonestown, a religious commune named after its leader, Reverend Jim Jones, and populated by transplanted American families. Shaw was one of the first reporters to file from location, and he scooped the other networks by providing the only aerial photos of the tragedy. The picture that confronted them was sickening: the decomposing bodies of 911 men, women, and children who had died by drinking poisoned punch. The reverend had led the cultists to this mass suicide-execution as a reaction to a U.S. representative’s investigation of alleged mistreatment of the American citizens. Shaw commented in Parade Magazine, “You know how cameramen will shoot 15 minutes of tape just to be sure they get one shot right? Well, at Jonestown, a cameraman could [only] shoot for about six seconds before turning around and retching. That’s how bad it was.”

Back at the bureau Shaw told a colleague that he felt very lucky to have gotten the Jonestown story, adding, as quoted in the Washington Post, “You always have luck when you hustle.” And, as if to confirm this philosophy, ABC chose Shaw to file special reports during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis at the American embassy in Teheran. That led to Shaw’s return to Washington as ABC’s senior Capitol Hill correspondent.

Taking a Career Gamble

1979 was a tumultuous year for personnel at ABC News. As a result, Shaw’s colleague, Washington bureau chief George Watson, left to help start CNN, a 24-hour, all-news cable network. Watson urged Shaw to follow him as the new network’s principal anchor. “I had been negotiating a new contract with ABC, but I was dissatisfied with the terms, so I started talking to [maverick broadcasting entrepreneur and CNN founder] Ted Turner,” Shaw told New York magazine. “The time period in which I was trying to decide, it seemed like agony to me. I’d only been married three years and our children were very small, and I couldn’t selfishly take that gamble by myself.” His worries were compounded by an economy in recession with double digit inflation. “It’s no exaggeration,” Shaw added, “I walked around the dining room for two weeks, talking to myself. My wife, Linda, would wake up around one in the morning and come downstairs. So, finally we just sat down at the dining room table and she said, ‘Okay, you should take the job, because if you don’t and CNN takes off, I won’t be able to live with you.”’ Network bosses told Shaw it would ruin his career, but he disagreed. “I saw it as perhaps the last frontier on television,” he told the New York Times. “The first all-news TV network seemed like revolutionary stuff to me.”

“Chicken Noodle Network”

For three decades the rule of the Big Three had never been seriously challenged and, while they smugly claimed that no one else could pull together the resources to compete, Turner was telling Business Week, “The Turner broadcasting group is going to be the greatest business success story of all time.”

The so-called “Chicken Noodle Network” began broadcasting from its Atlanta headquarters on June 1, 1980. Using new satellite technology for live transmission, CNN’s staff of three hundred fresh faces drew on ceaseless energy to get the news out as it was happening, at any hour of the day or night. The cable network’s viewership rose and its presence began to be felt. But it wasn’t until 1987 that it achieved a contender’s rank. That status seemed to become official when Shaw’s became the fourth chair—joining those of CBS, NBC, and ABC—in a nationally televised interview with then U.S. president Ronald Reagan, held in the Oval Office on the eve of the summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That event served to introduce CNN and Shaw to millions of non-cable viewers. Another nationally televised event only a few months later ingrained Shaw’s face and style into viewers’ minds. But not all liked what they saw.

In April of 1988 Shaw moderated the second presidential debate from Los Angeles. In his role, he seemed rough with the debate audience, warning them that he would tell them to keep quiet “only once.” And, in general, he was his usual serious self. But it was his opening questions to the two candidates that caused a stir. George Bush was asked if he wouldn’t be worried about the country under President Dan Quayle’s leadership in the event Bush died before inauguration. Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was asked if he would still be against the death penalty if someone “raped and murdered” his wife Kitty Dukakis. “I’ve heard the questions called ghoulish and tasteless,” Shaw told the Washington Post, “I spent more than a day and a half working on those two questions. They were not asked with trivia in mind.” It’s difficult to accuse Shaw of being trivial. “I hope I didn’t seem severe,” he added, “I took the job seriously.”

The next couple of years drew Shaw into international news. He covered the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit; President Bush’s first visit to Eastern Europe, and his participation in the 1989 Economic Summit in Paris; Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s funeral; and the 40th-anniversary North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in Brussels. In May of 1989, Shaw received his biggest story yet: he provided 30 hours of continuous live coverage, worldwide, on the historic student demonstrations in Beijing, China. He was one of only two American anchors in Tiananmen Square when the Chinese government’s tanks rolled in and crushed the pro-democracy movement.

From “The Center of Hell”

Although Shaw initially expressed doubts about the probability of war between the United States and Iraq, four months later he admitted in Gentlemen’s Quarterly that this had been a “prediction grounded in hope.” In January of 1991, he was in Baghdad to interview Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein when history took a turn. On the 16th, just one day after the aborted interview, Shaw found himself stranded—along with CNN colleagues, Peter Arnett and John Holliman—in the enemy capital as the allied bombing attack launched the Gulf War. Shaw was one of the first reporters to announce to the world that the United States and its allies had gone to war, and CNN went on to provide continuous coverage for the conflict’s duration. Even after every major newspaper had pulled out, after the Big Three’s phonelines were cut, and after CNN lost its picture transmission, the network was able to make live reports from Baghdad via its secure phoneline. While the night sky was screaming with gunfire and air-raid warnings, the CNN trio crawled around the floor of their hotel room and delivered some of the most spellbinding audio reporting since Edward R. Murrow’s harrowing World War II accounts of the Nazi bombing of London. “By the time we stopped broadcasting to get some sleep,” Shaw told Parade Magazine, “I was so tired I was making no sense whatsoever. I was no sooner in bed and asleep when the bombing started again, and I stumbled down the hall in my pajamas to the suite where we broadcast and went back to work.” The experience unnerved the characteristically composed anchor. He announced: “Clearly I’ve never been there, but it feels like we are in the center of hell.”

CNN’s coverage was being cited by top Pentagon officials at press conferences while being eagerly viewed by Iraqi officials. CBS and NBC humbled themselves by asking the cable network’s reporters for interviews. Television coverage of the war belonged to CNN because it provided an uninterrupted flow of raw information. This process empowered the public: the viewer became the news editor. “We’ve been training for this story 24 hours a day for ten years,” CNN’s executive vice-president Ed Turner (no relation to Ted Turner) told the Chicago Tribune. Live wartime coverage from the center of enemy camp is unprecedented.

A Star Is Born

“Bernie” Shaw came back to the U.S. a star. But the kudos and popular attention seemed unprofessional and embarrassing to him. He was happy to be reunited with his family and had more private thoughts on his mind. “I came back from Baghdad a changed man,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I looked death in the eyes. No human gets many chances to do that twice.”

The journey from the South Side of Chicago to Baghdad was a long one, but Shaw never wavered, and that could have been easy in the beginning. The 1950s had no “black Murrows” as role models for a poor, young black boy with dreams of broadcast journalism. “But I didn’t see Ed Murrow as white,” Shaw told the New York Times, “I saw him as a journalist.” Shaw knew that it was certainly possible that he’d encounter racism along the way, but he says he has never been a knowing victim of it in his career.

Widely regarded as the nation’s most powerful black television journalist, Shaw has maintained his professional philosophy: a reporter must never get in the way of a story. As he told Essence magazine, “I never wanted to sit in this chair until I felt in my mind and heart that I had the necessary experience to anchor.”

Sources

Business Week, June 1980.

Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1991.

Essence, November 1990.

Gentlemen’s Quarterly, May 1991.

Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1991.

New York, February 1991.

New York Times, February 2, 1988; March 20, 1988.

Parade Magazine, June 23, 1991.

Time, February 22, 1988.

Washington Post, June 22, 1991.

—Iva Sipal

George Bernard Shaw

The British playwright, critic, and pamphleteer George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) produced more than 52 plays and playlets, three volumes of music and drama criticism, and one major volume of socialist commentary.

George Bernard Shaw's theater extended to his personal life. He considered himself a cultural miracle, and a partisan conflict among his readers and playgoers provoked a massive body of literature for and against him and his work. Much recent criticism concludes that he ranks as the greatest English dramatist since William Shakespeare.

Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 16, 1856. At an early age he was tutored in classics by an uncle, and when he was 10 years old, he entered the Wesleyan Connexional School in Dublin. There his academic performance was largely a failure. Shaw later described his own education: "I cannot learn anything that does not interest me. My memory is not indiscriminate, it rejects and selects; and its selections are not academic." Part of his nonacademic training was handled by his mother, a music teacher and a mezzo-soprano; Shaw studied music and art at the same time. He became a Dublin office boy in 1871 at a monthly salary equivalent to $4.50. Success in business threatened him: "I made good," he wrote, "in spite of myself and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting me go….In March, 1876, I broke loose." Resigning a cashier's position, Shaw joined his mother and two sisters in London, where they conducted a music school. Shaw had started writing, at the age of 16, criticism and reviews for Irish newspapers and magazines; in 4 years only one piece was accepted. Shaw lived in London for the 9 years after 1876 supported by his parents and continued to write criticism. He also entertained in London society as a singer.

Shaw as a Novelist

Between 1876 and 1885 Shaw wrote five novels. Immaturity, the first, remained unpublished, and the other four, after a series of rejections from London publishers, appeared in radical periodicals. To-Day published An Unsocial Socialist in 1884; it was designed as part of a massive projected work that would cover the entire social reform movement in England. Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) also appeared in To-Day; juvenile, nonsensical, at times hilarious, it was produced in 1901 as the drama The Admirable Bashville; or, Constancy Unrewarded. The IrrationalKnot, a portrayal of modern marriage that Shaw asserted anticipated Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, appeared in another radical periodical, Our Corner, as did Love among the Artists (1887-1888).

Political Activities and Writings

At the age of 23 Shaw had joined a socialist discussion group, of which Sydney Webb was a member, and he joined the Fabian Society in 1884. Fabian Essays (1887), edited by Shaw, emphasized the importance of economics and class structure; for him, economics was "the basis of society." In 1882 Shaw's conversion to socialism began when he heard Henry George, the American author of Progress and Poverty, address a London meeting. George's message "changed the whole current of my life." His reading of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in the same year "made a man of me." For 27 years Shaw served on the Fabian Society's executive committee. In his role as an active polemicist he later published Common Sense about the War on Nov. 14, 1914, a criticism of the British government and its policies. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism (1928) supplied a complete summary of his political position. It remains a major volume of socialist commentary. For 6 years Shaw held office on a municipal level in a London suburb.

Shaw's other careers continued. Between 1888 and 1894 he wrote for newspapers and periodicals as a highly successful music critic. At the end of this period, he began writing on a regular basis for Frank Harris's Saturday Review; as a critic, he introduced Ibsen and the "new" drama to the British public. Shaw's Quintessence of Ibsenism appeared in 1890, The Sanity of Art in 1895, and The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898. All of them indicate the formation of his esthetics. He married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and fellow socialist, in 1898. She died in 1943.

The Plays

Shaw wrote drama between 1892 and 1947, when he completed Buoyant Billions at the age of 91. Widowers' Houses, his first play, was produced in 1892 at London's Royalty Theater. He identified this and the other early plays as "unpleasant." Widowers' Houses was about slum land-lordship. Preoccupied by the "new" woman, Shaw wrote The Philanderers in 1893. Also written in the same year but not produced until 1902 because of British censorship, Mrs. Warren's Profession revealed, he wrote, "the economic basis of modern commercial prostitution." Shaw's first stage successes, Arms and the Man and Candida, both of them "pleasant" plays, were produced in 1894. You Never Can Tell, first produced in 1896 and not often revived, is Shaw's most underrated comedy. The Vedrenne-Barker productions at the Royal Court Theater in London of Shaw, Shakespeare, and Euripides between 1904 and 1907 established Shaw's permanent reputation; 11 of his plays received 701 performances.

Shaw began as a dramatist writing against the mechanical habits of domestic comedy and against the Victorian romanticizing of Shakespeare and drama in general. He wrote that "melodramatic stage illusion is not an illusion of real life, but an illusion of the embodiment of our romantic imaginings."

Shaw's miraculous period began with Man and Superman (1901-1903). It was miraculous even for him; in a late play, Too True to Be Good (1932), one of the characters speaks for him: "My gift is divine: it is not limited by my petty personal convictions. Lucidity is one of the most precious of gifts: the gift of the teacher: the gift of explanation. I can explain anything to anybody; and I love doing it."

Major Barbara (1905) is a drama of ideas, largely about poverty and capitalism; like most of Shaw's drama, Major Barbara poses questions and finally contains messages or arguments. Androcles and the Lion (1911) discusses religion. John Bull's Other Island (1904), which is the least known of his major plays, concerns political relations between England and Ireland. Heartbreak House analyzes the domestic effects of World War I; written between 1913 and 1916, it was first produced in 1920. Most of the plays after Arms and the Man carry long prefaces that are often not directly related to the drama itself. Shaw systematically explored such topics as marriage, parenthood, education, and poverty in the prefaces.

Shaw's popular success was coupled with a growing critical success. Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah (1921; he called it his "metabiological pentateuch"), Androcles and the Lion, and Saint Joan (1923) are considered his best plays. They were all written between the ages of 57 and 67.

Shaw Explaining Shaw

The plays of Shaw express, as did his life, a complex range of impulses, ambitions, and beliefs. Reflecting on his life and his work, he explained at 70: "If I am to be entirely communicative on this subject, I must add that the mere rawness which soon rubs off was complicated by a deeper strangeness which has made me all my life a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it. Whether it be that I was born mad or a little too sane, my kingdom was not of this world: I was at home only in the realm of my imagination, and at ease only with the mighty dead. Therefore I had to become an actor, and create for myself a fantastic personality fit and apt for dealing with men, and adaptable to the various parts I had to play as an author, journalist, orator, politician, committee man, man of the world, and so forth. In all this I succeeded later on only too well."

Shaw was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature. At the patriarchal age of 94, he died in his home at Ayot St. Lawrence, England, on Nov. 2, 1950.

Further Reading

The literature on Shaw is extensive. Shaw wrote numerous letters, some of which are in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874-1897, edited and with an introduction by Dan H. Laurence (1965), the first of a projected multivolume collection of his correspondence. Not particularly revealing of Shaw's private life is the Autobiography, edited by Stanley Weintraub (2 vols., 1969-1970), an assemblage of Shaw's personal writings on a host of topics over a half century.

The standard biography of Shaw is Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet (1932). William Irvine, The Universe of G.B.S. (1949), is one of many attempts at a definitive critical biography. Stanley Weintraub, Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw, 1914-1918 (1971), is a fascinating biographical study of Shaw during World War I. Two good introductions to Shaw and his work are G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (1909), and Eric Bentley, Bernard Shaw (1947; 2d ed., 1967). Recently there has been a critical reassessment of Shaw. The most important works are Richard M. Ohmann, Shaw: The Style and the Man (1962), and Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-century Theater (1963). □

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), playwright. The most famous and possibly the most controversial of 20th‐century English dramatists was described by the Times in its review of the first major American production of Arms and the Man as “the eccentric and able London socialist, essayist, music critic, Ibsenite, and wearer of gray flannel clothes.” With occasional shadings of difference, critical opinion of Shaw in America has remained much the same ever since. Especially in early years his subjects offended many playgoers and critics, dealing as they did with such matters as prostitution, religious hypocrisy, slum landlordism, profiteering, and, of course, socialism. In these early years his most noted exponents included Richard Mansfield and Arnold Daly, while in after seasons the Theatre Guild regularly offered even his minor plays. The last several decades have witnessed fewer Shaw works on Broadway but a marked increase Off Broadway and in regional venues. Caesar and Cleopatra, Candida, The Devil's Disciple, Man and Superman, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan each has its own entry. A thumbnail history of some other Shaw works in America follows.

The short comedy Androcles and the Lion, twitting early Christians, was hissed at its 1913 London premiere but received a cordial welcome when Harley Granville‐Barker presented it in New York in 1915 with O. P. Heggie as Androcles. The major American revivals occurred in 1925, when the Theatre Guild presented it with Henry Travers as the hero and such superior players as Romney Brent, Clare Eames, Tom Powers, and Edward G. Robinson in supporting roles, and in 1946 when the American Repertory Theatre offered it with Ernest Truex in the lead. Arms and the Man, Shaw's beguiling spoof of militarism, was his first play presented in America. Mansfield played the antihero Bluntschli in 1894, and William Winter thought his performance “a delicious piece of mystification, crisp in speech and diversified by airy nonchalance and whimsical humor.” Never one to proclaim Shaw, Winter admitted the script “causes thought as well as mirth.” A major revival was in 1925 when the Theatre Guild presented Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the leads. Howard Lindsay recalled Lunt's Bluntschli as “cold, precise, hard and. . . probably one of the greatest high‐comedy performances any actor, American or British, has given in our time.” Of Shaw's most accessible works, Arms and the Man has often been seen in New York since the 1920s but has not enjoyed any outstanding productions. Many Americans know the play best through its musical version, the Viennese operetta The Chocolate Soldier. The Doctor's Dilemma, a comedy about egocentricity and medical ethics, was first produced in New York by Arnold Daly in 1915. The first major revival was by the Theatre Guild in 1927 with a remarkable cast that included Helen Westley, Dudley Digges, Earle Larimore, Fontanne, and Lunt as Dubedat. Many critics felt the acting was superior to the play. A change in emphasis came in 1941 when Katharine Cornell revived the work, playing Jennifer Dubedat with support from Raymond Massey and Bramwell Fletcher. The Phoenix Theatre mounted the play in 1955 with Roddy MacDowall as the doomed artist. The Theatre Guild's 1920 mounting of Heartbreak House provided that play's belated premiere. This look at a modern Armageddon seems to have spoken eloquently to a world where a major war is always looming and so has been offered a number of fine revivals. Orson Welles, dressed to resemble Shaw, played Shotover in the Mercury Theatre's 1938 mounting, while Maurice Evans assumed the role in a 1959 production and Rex Harrison played it in an abridged but superb 1983 revival at the Circle in the Square.

Grace George presented and starred in the 1915 American premiere of Major Barbara, the play about big business and warmongering, offering a notable cast of famous or soon‐to‐be‐famous theatrical names, including Clarence Derwent, Guthrie McClintic, Ernest Lawford, John Cromwell, Mary Nash, and Conway Tearle. It was welcomed at the time as “a provocative, often richly amusing and continuously stimulating comedy.” Major revivals have included a 1928 Theatre Guild presentation; an exceptionally successful 1956 production, which ran seven months, with Glynis Johns and Charles Laughton in the leads; and a well‐acted Broadway revival in 2001 with Cherry Jones as Barbara. Mrs. Warren's Profession, the play about prostitution that prompted court action in 1905, both during its New Haven tryout and in New York, starred Arnold Daly, who was also the producer, and Mary Shaw. Both were arrested but were acquitted of charges of presenting an immoral play. However, the work proved more sensational than durable, revivals being infrequent and short‐lived. Uta Hagen headed a fine 1985 revival. As the fate of Mrs. Warren's Profession suggests, the initial success or notoriety of a Shaw play was no reliable indicator of its future vogue. Several plays that were huge successes at their first American presentation have since been largely neglected, while other works, often branded as minor, have enjoyed tremendous success later on, thanks on occasion to an unusual production or the appearance of a major star. An example of the former would be Fanny's First Play, which ran eight months in New York when it was premiered there in 1912 but which has never had a major revival outside of the Shaw Festival in Canada. By contrast such plays as The Apple Cart and The Millionairess, dismissed or totally ignored at first, enjoyed newsworthy and relatively successful mountings when produced with Maurice Evans (1956) and Katharine Hepburn (1952) respectively.

Bernard Shaw 1940–

Television news anchor and reporter

At a Glance…

Met Journalistic Idol

Hungry for International Experience

“Chicken Noodle Network”

From “The Center of Hell”

A Star Is Born

Sources

Television news anchor Bernard Shaw’s dispassionate manner, steady gaze, rich baritone voice, and crisply precise delivery virtually blend into the fabric of the news. In his twenty years as Cable News Network’s (CNN) principal Washington anchor, he has taken a serious approach to journalism and has been widely regarded for his belief that the messenger should not get in the way of the message. Before joining CNN, Shaw worked for two of the three national television networks, CBS and ABC. In a career spanning three decades, he has covered some of modern history’s most dramatic events: Watergate, the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, the Nicaraguan Revolution, China’s Tiananmen Square student massacre, and American involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Widely regarded as the nation’s most powerful black television journalist, Shaw, retired from CNN in 2001 in order to pursue his interest in writing.

Shaw grew up during the years of World War II, the emergence of television, and the days that begat the baby boom. His father was a house painter, his mother cleaned other people’s homes, and they lived on the South Side of Chicago. But far from being isolated in the “wrong” part of town and at the wrong end of the economic spectrum, the family brought the world into their home. “In those days,” Shaw told Parade Magazine, “Chicago had four papers and we got all four every day.” Even in his teens, Shaw had an obsessive interest in the news. “My ritual on Sunday morning was to walk to a place called the Green Door bookstore near the University of Chicago, which was the closest place I could find the Sunday New York Times,” Shaw told New York magazine. Fourteen years old, paper cradled in his arms, the boy would plant himself in a coffee shop and read the paper all the way through.

But Shaw was not merely a spectator. He made announcements on:he school public address system, participated in radio amateur hours, and, while some teenagers of the 1950s may have been totally absorbed in the birth of rock ’n roll, Shaw found time to dial up newspaper and broctdcast reporters and pepper them with questions about story preparation and deadline pressures. Even in his youth, Shaw’s tastes in television programming ran toward the news and information genre: he used to watch the television news program Meet the Press religiously, and his hero was legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow. At 16, he personally witnessed his second Democratic convention—he had

At a Glance…

Born May 22, 1940, in Chicago, IL; son of Edgar (a railroad man and house painter) and Camilia (a housekeeper) Shaw; married Linda Allston, 1973; children: Amar Edgar, Anil Louise. Education: University of Illinois, 1963-66. Military Service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1959-63.

Career: Reporter, correspondent, and news anchor. WYNR/WNUS all-news radio, Chicago, IL, reporter and anchor, 1964-66; Westinghouse Broadcasting Company’s Group W, Chicago, reporter, 1966-68, White House correspondent, 1968-71; Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS-TV), reporter for Washington bureau, 1971-74, correspondent, 1974-77; American Broadcasting Companies (ABC-TV), Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, 1977-79, senior Capitol Hill correspondent; Cable News Network (CNN), Washington D.C., news anchor, 1980-2001.

Member: Society of Professional Journalists (fellow); National Press Club; Sigma Delta Chi.

Awards: international Platform Association, Lowell Thomas Electronic Journalist Award, 1988; National Academy of Cable Programming, Award for Cable Excellence, 1988; Emmy Award, 1989; 32nd annual International Film and TV Festival of New York, gold medal, 1989; National Association of Black Journalists, annual award, 1989; George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, 1990; ACE Award, 1990; Bernard Shaw Endowment Fund created by University of Illinois, 1991; Eduard Rhein Foundation, Cultural-H/Journalistic Award, 1991.

Addresses: Office— CNN 820 1st St. NE, Washington D.C. 20002-4243 (202)898-7900.

managed to engineer his way into both the 1952 and 1956 conventions. Shaw told Time: “When I looked up at the anchor booths, I knew I was looking at the altar.”

Met Journalistic Idol

On the road to the “altar,” Shaw wangled another opportunity to speak to a journalist about his craft. It was 1961, the beginning of an era of political tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Shaw was a 21-year-old corporal in the Marines stationed in Hawaii at the time, and Walter Cronkite, his other hero, was passing through. With the tenacity of youth—or perhaps that of a budding reporter—the corporal rang Cronkite’s room a total of 34 times. “He was the most persistent guy I’ve ever met in my life,” Cronkite said in the Washington Post, “I was going to give him five begrudging minutes and ended up talking to him for a half hour. He was just determined to be a journalist.” The two have been friends ever since.

In 1963, with four years of the marines behind him, and a new sense of maturity, Shaw entered the University of Illinois, choosing history as his major. His career in journalism officially began just a year later when he joined Chicago’s WNUS, one of the nation’s first all-news radio stations. He worked there as a reporter and anchor until 1966 when Westinghouse Broadcasting Company’s Group W offered him a job. He quit school, relocated to Washington, D.C, and, at 28, became a White House correspondent. In the five years with Westinghouse Shaw’s assignments included local and national urban affairs, and the struggles of Hispanics and Native Americans.

In 1971, Walter Cronkite helped Shaw land a job with CBS. Shaw started as a reporter for the CBS News Washington bureau and in three years became a correspondent. It was during this period that his career got a boost: he conducted an exclusive interview with then-attorney general John Mitchell. It was the height of the Watergate crisis and Mitchell, who was to be convicted for his role in the affair, was a major figure in the scandal. White House correspondent Shaw had pulled off a journalistic coup.

Hungry for International Experience

After nearly ten years of reporting from Capitol Hill, Shaw was restless. He was hungry for international experience. When ABC offered him the job of Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, an impressive but less visible position, he grabbed it. “I pushed myself out the door,” Shaw told the New York Times.The three years he spent with ABC proved especially eventful.

Back at the bureau Shaw told a colleague that he felt very lucky to have gotten the Jonestown story, adding, as quoted in the Washington Post, “You always have luck when you hustle.” And, as if to confirm this philosophy, ABC chose Shaw to file special reports during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis at the American embassy in Teheran. That led to Shaw’s return to Washington as ABC’s senior Capitol Hill correspondent.

1979 was a tumultuous year for personnel at ABC News. As a result, Shaw’s colleague, Washington bureau chief George Watson, left to help start CNN, a 24-hour, all-news cable network. Watson urged Shaw to follow him as the new network’s principal anchor. “I had been negotiating a new contract with ABC, but I was dissatisfied with the terms, so I started talking to [maverick broadcasting entrepreneur and CNN founder] Ted Turner,” Shaw told New York magazine. “The time period in which I was trying to decide, it seemed like agony to me. I’d only been married three years and our children were very small, and I couldn’t selfishly take that gamble by myself.” His worries were compounded by an economy in recession with double digit inflation. “It’s no exaggeration,” Shaw added, “I walked around the dining room for two weeks, talking to myself. My wife, Linda, would wake up around one in the morning and come downstairs. So, finally we just sat down at the dining room table and she said, ‘Okay, you should take the job, because if you don’t and CNN takes off, I won’t be able to live with you.’” Network bosses told Shaw it would ruin his career, but he disagreed. “I saw it as perhaps the last frontier on television,” he told the New York Times. “The first all-news TV network seemed like revolutionary stuff to me.”

“Chicken Noodle Network”

For three decades the rule of the Big Three had never been seriously challenged and, while they smugly claimed that no one else could pull together the resources to compete, Turner was telling Business Week, “The Turner broadcasting group is going to be the greatest business success story of all time.”

The so-called “Chicken Noodle Network” began broadcasting from its Atlanta headquarters on June 1, 1980. Using new satellite technology for live transmission, CNN’s staff of three hundred fresh faces drew on ceaseless energy to get the news out as it was happening, at any hour of the day or night. The cable network’s viewership rose and its presence began to be felt. But it wasn’t until 1987 that it achieved a contender’s rank. That status seemed to become official when Shaw’s became the fourth chair—joining those of CBS, NBC, and ABC—in a nationally televised interview with then U.S. president Ronald Reagan, held in the Oval Office on the eve of the summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That event served to introduce CNN and Shaw to millions of non-cable viewers. Another nationally televised event only a few months later ingrained Shaw’s face and style into viewers’ minds. But not all liked what they saw.

In April of 1988 Shaw moderated the second presidential debate from Los Angeles. In his role, he seemed rough with the debate audience, warning them that he would tell them to keep quiet “only once.” And, in general, he was his usual serious self. But it was his opening questions to the two candidates that caused a stir. George Bush was asked if he would be worried about the country under President Dan Quayle’s leadership in the event Bush died before inauguration. Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was asked if he would still be against the death penalty if someone “raped and murdered” his wife Kitty Dukakis. “I’ve heard the questions called ghoulish and tasteless,” Shaw told the Washington Post, “I spent more than a day and a half working on those two questions. They were not asked with trivia in mind.” It’s difficult to accuse Shaw of being trivial. “I hope I didn’t seem severe,” he added, “1 took the job seriously.”

The next couple of years drew Shaw into international news. He covered the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit; Presicent Bush’s first visit to Eastern Europe, and his participation in the 1989 Economic Summit in Paris; Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s funeral; and the 40th-anniversary North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in Brussels. In May of 1989, Shaw received his biggest story yet: he provided 30 hours of continuous live coverage, worldwide, on the historic student demonstrations in Beijing, China. He was one of only two American anchors in Tiananmen Square when the Chinese government’s tanks rolled in and crushed the pro-democracy movement.

From “The Center of Hell”

Although Shaw initially expressed doubts about the probability of war between the United States and Iraq, four months later he admitted in Gentlemen’s Quarterly that this had been a “prediction grounded in hope.” In January of 1991, he was in Baghdad to interview Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein when history took a turn. On the 16th, just one day after the aborted interview, Shaw found himself stranded—along with CNN colleagues, Peter Arnett and John Holliman—in the enemy capital as the allied bombing attack launched the Gulf War. Shaw was one of the first reporters to announce to the world that the United States and its allies had gone to war, and CNN went on to provide continuous coverage for the conflict’s duration. Even after even; major newspaper had pulled out, after the Big Three’s phone lines were cut, and after CNN lost its picture transmission, the network was able to make live reports rrorn Baghdad via its secure phone line.

While the night sky was screaming with gunfire and air-raid warnings, the CNN trio crawled around the floor of their hotel room and delivered some of the most spellbinding audio reporting since Edward R. Murrow’s harrowing World War II accounts of the Nazi bombing of London. “By the time we stopped broadcasting to get some sleep,” Shaw toldParade Magazine, “I was so tired I was making no sense whatsoever. I was no sooner in bed and asleep when the bombing started again, and 1 stumbled down the hall in my pajamas to the suite where we broadcast and went back to work.” The experience unnerved the characteristi cally composed anchor. He announced: “Clearly I’ve never been there, but it feels like we are in the center of hell.”

CNN’s coverage was being cited by top Pentagon officials at press conferences while being eagerly viewed by Iraqi officials. CBS and NBC humbled themselves by asking the cable network’s reporters for interviews. Television coverage of the war belonged to CNN because it provided an uninterrupted flow of raw information. This process empowered the public: the viewer became the news editor. “We’ve been training for this story 24 hours a day for ten years,” CNN’s executive vice-president Ed Turner (no relation to Ted Turner) told the Chicago Tribune.Live wartime coverage from the center of enemy camp is unprecedented.

A Star Is Born

“Bernie” Shaw came back to the U.S. a star. But the kudos and popular attention seemed unprofessional and embarrassing to him. He was happy to be reunited with his family and had more private thoughts on his mind. “I came back from Baghdad a changed man,” he told theLos Angeles Times. “I looked death in the eyes. No human gets many chances to do that twice.”

The journey from the South Side of Chicago to Baghdad was a long one, but Shaw never wavered, and that could have been easy in the beginning. The 1950s had no “black Murrows” as role models for a poor, young black boy with dreams of broadcast journalism. “But I didn’t see Ed Murrow as white,” Shaw told the New York Times, “I saw him as a journalist.” Shaw knew that it was certainly possible that he’d encounter racism along the way, but he has said that he has never been a knowing victim of it in his career.

Although he has never experienced racism in his career, Shaw raised the issue of racial profiling at the vice-presidential debate. As moderator of the second presidential debate in 1988, Shaw had asked the candidates to imagine a situation and then explain how they would respond. Using this same tactic, Shaw asked vice-presidential hopefuls Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney to imagine themselves as victims of racial profiling. Whereas in 1988, Shaw was criticized for asking Michael Dukakis if he would reverse his position on the death penalty if his own wife was a victim of a brutal crime, in 2000 Shaw managed to bring an issue that, only a few years before very few had even heard of, into the national consciousness.

As CNN’s top anchor, Shaw stood at the helm of television’s news phenomenon: a 24-hour, all-news cable network. In his twenty years at CNN, he saw the network evolve from a long-shot endeavor known as the “Chicken Noodle Network” to become the top-ranked televison news network. But, in November of 2000, Shaw announced to viewers that he was resigning from CNN, saying that, while he hoped to return for the occasional special assignment, he wanted to spend more time with his family. He also planned to focus much of his time on writing fiction, essays, and a primer on journalism. He decided his first writing project, however, would be his autobiography, for, as he told Broadcasting & Cable, “If I don’t do it now, I’ll never get it done.”

In many ways, Shaw’s departure heralded the end of an era at CNN. A rogue network no longer, talks for an AOL-Time Warner merger began. With a new management team on board, the network also launched plans to experiment with new types of programming. With his final newscast on February 28, 2001, Shaw left the anchor seat he had worked so hard to earn. He told Jet, “Harder than entering this business is leaving it.”

Sources

Periodicals

Business Week, June 1980.

Business Wire, February 12, 2001.

Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1991.

Essence, November 1990.

Gentlemen’s Quarterly, May 1991.

Jet, November 27, 2000.

Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1991.

National Review, February 19, 2001.

New York, February 1991.

New York Times, February 2, 1988; March 20, 1988.

Parade Magazine, June 23, 1991.

Si.Louis Dispatch, March 2, 2001.

Time, February 22, 1988.

Variety, November 13, 2000.

Washington Post, June 22, 1991.

—Iva Sipal and Jennifer M. York