12–17 April 1945

The Death of Roosevelt

Bulletin, silence, then a funeral train

The bulletin runs twenty-five seconds. What follows is the strangest four days in American broadcasting: all four networks cancelled their commercial schedules and carried memorial programming with no sponsors at all — something they had never done and would not do again until November 1963. You can hear the machinery of a country improvising: La Guardia on WNYC, Murrow reporting Buchenwald on the 15th because the war had not stopped for the funeral, the description of the train moving north from Warm Springs, and a small Nebraska station signing off its own day five days later.

25 recordings · 10 broadcasters