The show encouraged both famous and everyday people to write short essays about their own personal motivation in life and then read them on the air.
It has since been revived numerous times in recent years, first by Dan Gediman and Jay Allison on NPR from 2005 to 2009, and subsequently by Preston Manning on Canada's CBC Radio One in 2007.
The idea for This I Believe flowed from both the WWII broadcasting experiences of Edward R. Murrow, who had spent the latter 1930s and most of the 1940s in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, and the emerging Cold War hostility with the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Murrow had "covered the London air raids from the streets and rooftops ...went on 25 bombing missions over Germany and broadcast from a British minesweeper in World War II.
During these years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, political paranoia involving a Communist conspiracy was flowing from Washington, D.C., and it eventually came to be led by U.S.
Paley, with his CBS/OWI background, also became a firm supporter of the new Central Intelligence Agency after the war and allowed some of his part-time CBS newsmen to serve as CIA agents.
[2] At the same time the Pledge of Allegiance was being repackaged amid controversy as a general test of American loyalty at large, and it was into this climate of fear and agitation that Murrow introduced his new radio program: This I Believe.
According to Ward Wheelock who wrote a preface to the 1952 book, This I Believe was launched in 1949 at a business luncheon of four men, Murrow being one, with the other three left unnamed.
He related that the reasons for the project "were obvious": ...the uncertainty of the economic future, the shadow of war, the atom bomb, army service for one's self or loved ones, the frustration of young people facing the future.The original five-minute series began at WCAU in Philadelphia and was aired over the CBS Radio Network and 196 affiliated stations between 1951 and 1955.
The actual time allotted to each contributor in order to allow for the introduction, closing and sponsorship of the program, was three and a half minutes.
A cover description of its contents stated that: "...this book is the further extension of an idea that has already exploded into the most widely listened to radio program in the world.
They have "looked in their hearts and written," humbly and hesitantly, upon the invitation of the distinguished radio and television news analyst, Edward R. Murrow.
[5][failed verification] Called Our Noble, Essential Decency, it broke from standard tropes to talk glowingly about the inherent goodness of Heinlein's friends, local community, country, and humanity of all races and creeds.
The first English language European series of This I Believe began on September 16, 1956, at 9:30 pm on Sundays under the sponsorship of the Co-operative Wholesale Society, Ltd.
The series was produced by Monty Bailey-Watson in London where it was recorded by a unique process on to the audio tracks of film strips for later transmission from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
From May 2009 until August 2010, Edwards each week interviewed This I Believe, Inc.'s Executive Director Dan Gediman about a different episode of Murrow's 1950s radio series, which was then heard in its entirety.
A record titled This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Ten Living Americans, with commentary by Edward R. Murrow, was released along with the original books.