Postwar Career
After the war, Trout anchored a daily 15-minute radio newscast, The News 'til Now, sponsored by Campbell's Soup. His year-and-a-half tenure on the show ended in September 1947, when Murrow—who had been CBS's vice president for public affairs—returned to on-air work and took over the broadcast. Trout left CBS for NBC, where from 1948 to 1951 he was the first emcee of the game show, Who Said That?, in which celebrities try to determine the speaker of quotations taken from recent news reports.
Trout returned to CBS in 1952. Until 1964, he doubled as a network correspondent and as main anchor at CBS' New York television flagship, WCBS-TV.
When the CBS Television coverage of the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco (anchored by Walter Cronkite) was trounced in the ratings by NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, CBS replaced Cronkite with Trout and Roger Mudd for the Democratic gathering in Atlantic City. The duo failed to overtake Huntley and Brinkley, and Cronkite was back at the TV anchor desk when the conventions rolled around again four years later. Trout remained on radio but also did in-depth news features for the TV network, including field reports for the CBS News broadcast 60 Minutes.
One aspect of Trout's career that is overlooked by many is the fact that in the late 1950s, he appeared on bandleader Guy Lombardo's annual New Year's Eve special on CBS-TV. Trout would report from Times Square during the special, and would count down the seconds to 12 Midnight (Eastern Standard Time) and the start of the new year.
Trout remained at CBS through the early 1970s. He later worked for ABC, serving mostly as a correspondent based in Madrid, where he lived for most of the last two decades of his life. Almost to the end of his life he broadcast commentaries and essays on National Public Radio. Some of them were reminiscences of 20th century events he covered, accompanied by recordings. And Trout continued to attend political conventions. He had interviewed every U.S. President from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. In 2000, he joined his old colleague Roger Mudd for a History Channel look at the quadrennial gatherings.
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