Harold Burson collection

Harold Burson, a native of Memphis, Tennessee (born 1921), graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1940, and worked initially as a report for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and then went to work as director of publicity for the H.K. Ferguson Company in New York. Drafted in 1943, he served in the United States Army as a combat engineer during World War II, seeing service in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Following the war, he was assigned to work as a news correspondent for the American Forces Network, covering the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-1946. In that capacity, he wrote scripts summarizing daily developments at the trial, which would then be used in the evening broadcast of AFN. After returning from Europe in 1946, he started his own public relations firm in New York, but eventually became best known as the co-founder and CEO of the public relations firm of Burson-Marsteller, which was established in New York in 1953.