Unlike his counterpart, Ed Murrow, Bill Shirer was born in a large city, Chicago, and was raised for his first nine years in a rather intellectual family. His father had been a U.S. Attorney and was a populist in philosophy. Friends with Clarence Darrow, who was a frequent guest in the Shirer household, Shirer's father was constantly espousing on the likes of John Dewey and Theodore Dreiser. But very quickly, Bill Shirer's world would change. At age nine, his father suddenly died and Shirer's mother with little money moved the family to his maternal grandmother's home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. But because of his previous life in Chicago, Bill Shirer came to dislike the squeaky-clean life he lived in Iowa.

The lack of money only allowed Shirer to attend Coe, a small Presbyterian school in Cedar Rapids. He found it boring, but became the editor of the school's newspaper, which he promptly used as a forum to eschew bourgeois lifestyles. Upon graduation he took off for Europe where he was able to garner a job with the Paris Tribune. His newspaper career was born but Shirer would find himself in and out of work until he met Ed Murrow.

Murrow was trying to establish CBS as a news organization and felt hiring a journalist would add even more credibility to the task. Shirer, out of work at the time, accepted even though he did not feel he had the voice for broadcasting. Paul White, Murrow's boss felt the same way, but Murrow prevailed.

Shirer's work on CBS is a standout. He was able to get to the heart of what was happening to the people of Europe, especially Germany, in light of Hitler's rise. He was able to ferret out a story and reported with not only the people's comments, but with some wit of his own. As Nazi power increased, Shirer was increasingly in danger and had to be careful how he reported the news. Eventually, he had to escape Germany wherein he returned to the USA and began reporting news and commentary on his own news program in New York. He eventually left CBS and broadcast journalism and began working on several books detailing his own experience (Berlin Diary) in Germany. His most famous work was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which reports in details how Nazism was able to come to power, and how it ultimately fell from grace.

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