McMullen, Jay L.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Jay Latimer McMullen (1921-2012) attended Dartmouth College before serving as an army serviceman and correspondent during World War II. He was promoted to the rank of Sergeant in 1945. The Bronze Star McMullen earned for his Sunday night “Army Hour” broadcasts identifies his reports as “the most vivid and best received from any theatre of war.”

Upon returning from the war, McMullen earned a B.S. Degree from Columbia University (1948), where he also completed graduate course work in political science (1949-1950). He briefly worked for WINS AM, New York, before joining the CBS Radio team in 1954. At CBS Radio, McMullen produced award-winning reports, including “Chronicle of Terror: The Galindez-Murphy Case,” about a Columbia University Spanish professor who was kidnapped and murdered in New York by the administration of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.

McMullen then joined CBS News’ “CBS Reports” team, where he produced numerous documentaries. These included: "Biography of a Bookie Joint" (1961), about the Back Bay key shop and police corruption in Boston; "The Tenement" (1967), profiling dire living conditions in Chicago in the 1960s; "The Mexican Connection" (1972), for which McMullen traveled to Mexico for eight months to investigate the Mexican Drug Trade; and "The Toyota Invasion" (1981), profiling the arrival of Toyota in the United States.

McMullen taught journalism courses at Columbia University from 1970 to 1971; he also taught a summer journalism course at San Diego State University in 1983. In 1985, McMullen and student assistants at Columbia undertook an oral history project on the history of CBS, inc. McMullen retired later that year.

Source:

Alexander, Geoff. Jay McMullen. Academic Film Archive of North America. Accessed September 1, 2011. http://www.afana.org/mcmullen.htm .

From the guide to the McMullen, Jay, Papers 2010-017; 2010-091; 2010-160., 1942-2006, (Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin)