Don Hollenbeck

Don Hollenbeck was a CBS newscaster and commentator and colleague of Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly.

Hollenbeck was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and began reporting the news while at the University of Nebraska. His first assignment was to the Nebraska State Journal in 1926. During World War II, he was assigned to the foreign staff of NBC in London in March 1943. From there he went to Algiers just in time to take a place with the British troops landing at Salerno, Italy.

After the war, Hollenbeck was employed by the newspaper, PM (Picture Magazine). Founded in 1940 by department store magnate Marshall Field III and published in New York, PM was a left-leaning newspaper, and it garnered accusations of being sympathetic to Communism even though it was critical of the Soviet Union for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and of the American Communist Party for supporting it.

The newspaper published work by authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Erskine Caldwell, photographers like Weegee and Margaret Bourke-White, and cartoonists like Dr. Seuss, Crockett Johnson and Walt Kelly. It accepted no advertising, and dedicated itself to preventing "the little guy from being pushed around." It ended up becoming a target for anti-communists, and subsequently it went out of business in 1948. Because of this affiliation, Hollenbeck was a target for McCarthy-supporting columnist Jack O'Brian, whose attacks appeared in the New York Journal American and other newspapers in the Hearst newspaper chain.

The first newsman WCBS-TV viewers saw after Murrow's March 9, 1954 documentary on Joe McCarthy was Hollenbeck, who told the viewers he wanted "to associate myself with what Ed Murrow has just said, and say I have never been prouder of CBS." That prompted O'Brian in the Hearst newspapers (including the flagship Journal-American) to step up his criticism of CBS and especially of Hollenbeck, who, despite his news experience under pressure situations, was a sensitive man.

On June 22, 1954, the 49-year-old Hollenbeck committed suicide by gas in his Manhattan apartment. A newspaper account reported:

He had been in ill health. Clad in shorts and bathrobe, he was found lying on the kitchen floor. All burners on the gas stove were open. The assistant medical examiner pronounced the death a suicide. Hollenbeck's agent said he had been suffering from a bleeding ulcer. Hollenbeck’s body was discovered at about 11 a.m. after another tenant smelled gas and notified management.