On 7 December 1941 John Charles Daly, Jr., made an indelible mark upon U.S. radio audiences with the first bulletin of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Working for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Daly broke into the network at 2:25 P.M. Eastern time: "The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air, President Roosevelt has just announced."

     Although he was ridiculed for his English accent in prep school, Daly possessed one of the richest speaking voices on the air. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on 20 February 1914. He was the youngest son of John Charles Daly, Sr., a Boston geologist, and Helene Grant Tennant, an Englishwoman.

     After his father died of complications from yellow fever in the Belgian Congo, young John Charles, his older brother John Grant, and their mother moved to Boston in 1923. Daly graduated from the Tilton School in New Hampshire and was offered a scholarship to attend Boston College in 1930. He worked as a telephone switchboard operator to make ends meet during the Depression, but his salary was later reduced because of the worsening economic times. Two years later, when the financial burden of supporting his ailing mother became too great, Daly was forced to drop out of college. He first took a job at a wool factory in New England and later moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for a transit company.

     Seeking to join the new and exciting mass medium of radio, Daly was hired as a Washington reporter with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). He became known for his ability to speak extemporaneously with great ease under the time constraints of broadcast airtime. However, his trademark diction and eloquence on the air sometimes upset NBC's listeners; a few wrote letters to complain that Daly's English accent sounded too foreign and pretentious.

     In 1936, at the age of 22, Daly jumped from NBC to CBS just as the latter network was expanding its news service. Daly soon became an original member of the legendary CBS News broadcasting team that worked under Edward R. Murrow.

     Daly succeeded Robert Trout as the CBS White House correspondent. He had traveled more than 150,000 miles with Roosevelt throughout the United States, Europe, and South America by 1941. After the United States' entry into the war, he broadcast accounts of military operations in North Africa and Italy. Daly broadcast the first bulletins of Roosevelt's death from Warm Springs, Georgia on 12 April 1945.

     As the new medium of television loomed, Daly was persuaded to host What's My Line? in 1950, in which a celebrity panel would guess the occupation of invited guests. The CBS network program eventually brought Daly the most fame and fortune of his broadcasting career.

     In 1953 Daly was offered an unprecedented opportunity to become the vice president of news, special events, public affairs, religious programs, and sports with the rival American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network while continuing to host What's My Line? During the period 19 5 3-60, Daly was ABC's only on-air news anchor on television. He was reported to have a quick temper and often clashed with management over news policy matters. Although Daly broke new ground by hiring a then largely unknown Howard Cosell to broadcast the first nightly sports report on national television, ABC executives said that Daly was a weak administrator who failed to hire other on-air talent to build the news division. In 19 57 Daly publicly objected to the management hire of Mike Wallace to host a weekly personality interview program, Night Beat, saying that Wallace lacked hard news credentials. A decade later, Wallace would become the leading correspondent for the CBS newsmagazine, 60 Minutes.

     Daly resigned from ABC in November 1960 over a much­ publicized dispute about the network's purchase of outside news programming. He was appointed director of the Voice of America (VOA) in 1967. Succeeding NBC journalist John Chancellor, Daly was expected to enhance the agency's image in its broadcasts around the world. He resigned the following year, complaining about a lack of management autonomy from VOA's parent agency, the United States Information Agency. Leaving VOA a year later, Daly said he was entering a "state of semi-retirement."