Post-war Years
During the war Shirer became a director of the Society for the Prevention of World War III, which lobbied after the war for a harsh peace with Germany.
The friendship between Shirer and Murrow ended in 1947, culminating in Shirer's leaving CBS in one of the great confrontations of American broadcast journalism (below).
Shirer briefly provided analysis for the Mutual Broadcasting System and then found himself unable to find regular radio work. He was named in Red Channels (1950), which practically barred him from broadcasting and print journalism, and he was forced into lecturing for income. Times remained tough for Shirer, his wife Tess, and daughters Inga and Linda until Simon & Schuster published The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1960. It was printed twenty times in the first year and sold more than half a million through Book of the Month Club. It won the 1961 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Carey-Thomas Award for non-fiction.
Shirer died in 1993 in Boston. He was 89.
Read more about this topic: William L. Shirer
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