Honoring Harold Burson, 1921-2020

Last week, Harold Burson passed away at age 98. Harold was a larger-than-life icon of public relations – he’s the Founding Chairman of Burson-Marsteller, a predecessor firm to Burson Cohn & Wolfe, he covered the Nuremberg Trials as a cub reporter after serving during WWII and he’s the author of one of the PR industry’s most seminal works, The Business of Persuasion.

To commemorate him, we are republishing a past podcast featuring Harold’s conversation with Becky Edwards, now CCO of Schneider Electric, at the 2018 Page Spring Seminar. Harold explains why he’s bullish on the future of the communications, his roundabout path into the profession, and how the digital era has and will continue to reshape it.

We’ve also published a handful of retrospectives on Harold to the PageTurner blog. Former colleagues and friends such as Roger Bolton (Page), Bill Nielsen (Johnson & Johnson), Carol Cone (On Purpose), Bob Feldman (ICF Next), Bill Wohl (United Rentals) and Herbert Heitmann (Karaktero) have contributed.

Do you have a story to tell? Share it with us. Please reach out to Eliot Mizrachi at emizrachi@page.org with your CCO story.