Winston M. Burdett

Notes:

Winston Burdett Is Dead at 79; Covered World and War for CBS
NY Times, By ERIC PACE
Published: May 21, 1993

. .Winston Burdett, a radio and television correspondent for CBS News who covered major events in World War II, the Middle East and Washington, died on Wednesday in the Villa Flaminia Clinic in Rome. He was 79 and had lived in Rome since 1956.

His death followed a long illness, said Tom Goodman, vice president for communications at CBS News in New York.

Mr. Burdett was based in Rome from 1948 to 1951 and from 1956 until his retirement in 1978. He had begun working for CBS News in 1940. Began in Radio

He was a radio reporter during his first years at CBS. In the 1950's, after the introduction of television, he began to report on that medium.

During World War II, he covered the fighting in North Africa, the Allied invasion of southern France and the surrender of German forces in Italy.

In later years, he traveled widely. He reported on subjects including turmoil in Africa, the Berlin wall crisis of 1961, conflict on Cyprus and the Middle East War of 1967.

He also reported on Italy and on the deaths, election and installation of popes and other news of the Vatican.

Mr. Burdett, who was born in Buffalo, received a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1933. He worked in New York for the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Hired by CBS

He went to Europe in 1940 as a freelance reporter and began reporting freelance for CBS News that year in Scandinavia. As the war went on, he continued covering it for CBS from various points, and in 1943 he became a CBS News staff correspondent.

After the war, he reported from the CBS News Washington bureau until he began his first tour of duty in Rome, ending in 1951. He then spent four years in New York, serving as anchorman of the CBS World News Round-Up on the CBS Radio Network and as CBS News's United Nations correspondent.

In the 1950's, he testified before the United States Senate Internal Security subcommittee that he became a Communist spy after being recruited into the Communist Party in 1937. He quit the party in 1942 after a succession of inconclusive espionage attempts in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. He gave the subcommittee the names of some other journalists whom he said he knew or assumed to have been Communists. A Murrow Protege

Mr. Burdett was a protege of Edward R. Murrow, and CBS kept him on after Mr. Murrow arranged for him to be removed from the glare of publicity and reassigned to Rome, 1956.

At his death he was writing a book on the Italian novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873).

The prizes he won included an Overseas Press Club Award in 1959 for his reporting about the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958 and the election and installation of his successor, Pope John XXIII, and a Sigma Delta Chi award in 1966 for distinguished service in journalism.

His first wife, the former Lea Schiavi, died in 1942.

He is survived by his second wife, the former Giorgina Nathan, to whom he was married in 1945; a daughter, Cristina of Turin; a son, Richard, of London; and four grandchildren


Former CBS correspondent, one of "Murrow's Boys"
Winston Burdett, by Variety Staff:
"Winston Burdett, whose career as a journalist for CBS spanned four
decades, has died at his home. He was 79.
Burdett died Wednesday in Rome, where he lived for many years, said
his son, Richard.
Burdett, who retired from CBS in 1978, had suffered from a long
illness, but the cause of death was not immediately known.
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Burdett began his career in the 1930s as a film
and theater critic for the Brooklyn Eagle. During World War II, he was
a stringer for CBS radio and made his first broadcast from Stockholm
in 1939.
While in Europe, Burdett was chosen by Edward R. Murrow to help cover
the war for CBS. He broadcast from the Balkans, North Africa and
Italy.
He returned to Italy in 1948 to cover the country's first postwar
elections. In 1956, he took up residence in Rome as the chief European
correspondent for CBS. During the next 22 years, he reported on four
papal elections, dozens of governments and Red Brigade terrorist
attacks.
He traveled frequently to the Middle East and India. In 1967, he
covered the Arab-Israeli war from Cairo, Egypt, where he was one of
the few American journalists reporting.
Burdett also was a scholar of Italian art and literature. When he
died, he was writing a book on 19th century author Alessandro Manzoni.
Burdett is survived by his wife, Giorgina, and two children, Richard
and Christina.
Funeral services were to be held in Rome on Saturday."
-----------------------------
Winston Burdett, R I P - journalist - Obituary
National Review, June 21, 1993 by Robert Morris
"ONE DAY IN the early Firties, I got a call from Winston Burdett, who
was then an assistant to Edward R. Murrow at CBS. He told me that a
few years earlier, when he was a reporter on the old Brooklyn Daily
Eagle, he had been a member of the Communist Party, which controlled
the Newspaper Guild. One day the local Communist whip called him in
and said that he had had orders from Moscow to recruit a member to
cover the Soviet-Finnish War from the Western side. He gave Winston
half a matchbox and told him to go to a Stockholm hotel and wait for
an agent to appear with the other half.
Winston called himself an ideological Communist. So he was very
disillusioned when the other agent proved to be a tough KGB
man--crude, churlish, and offensive. Winston's disillusionment had
begun-and he incautiously let it be known.
At that time, South Persia was occupied by the British and North
Persia by the Soviets (the two now make up Iran). Winston's wife was a
reporter in South Persia. One day her car was stopped along the North
Persian border by a truck full of Russian soldiers who inquired
whether Mrs. Burdett was inside. She was killed instantly. Soon
thereafter, I got him to agree to tell the story to the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee, where I had been counsel just a few
years before.
After his testimony before the committee he was sent by CBS to Rome,
where he became a specialist in Vatican affairs; even after his
retirement he was activated to cover the elevation of Pope John Paul
II. Winston would lecture visiting American students on world events
from the roof of the CBS building there. His talks were brilliant and
penetrating. His charm and affability left a lasting impression.
Winston died last week in Rome. He will be missed as a professional
journalist and as a witness to his past.

Winston married Lea Schiavi about 1940. Lea was born on 02 Mar 1907 in Italy; died on 24 Apr 1942 in Tehran, Iran. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Winston married Living [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Ricky Burdett is an adviser on architecture to the mayor of London and
a member of the Greater London Authority's Architecture and Urbanism
Unit. He is also a member of the City of Barcelona's Quality
Committee; director of the Urban Age project organised by the LSE
Cities Programme; and adviser on architecture to the BBC, Tate and
other public agencies in the UK and abroad. Professor Burdett has been
appointed Director of the 10th Venice Architectural Biennale, running
from September to November 2006.
Languages: Italian [Spoken: Fluent (Broadcast); Written: Fluent]
Married with two children, all live in London,England