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Born in New York City as Walter Winschel, Winchell started performing in vaudeville troupes while still a teenager. His journalism began when he started posting gossipy notes about his acting troupe on backstage bulletin boards. He became a professional journalist during the 1920s.

Winchell`s publications were extremely popular and influential for decades, notoriously aiding or harming the careers of many entertainers. Although he concentrated on gossiping about entertainment figures, Winchell frequently expressed opinions about public affairs.

By the 1930s, he was "an intimate friend of Owney Madden, New York`s No. 1 gang leader of the prohibition era,"[1] but "in 1932 Winchell`s intimacy with criminals caused him to fear he would be "rubbed out" for "knowing too much." He fled to California, "[and] returned weeks later with a new enthusiasm for law, G-men, Uncle Sam, [and] Old Glory."[1] His coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping and subsequent trial was famous. Then he became in the space of two years, the friend of J. Edgar Hoover, the No. 2 G-man of the repeal era. He was responsible for turning Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, of Murder, Inc., over to Hoover.

His newspaper column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, and he was read by about 50 million people a day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His Sunday night radio broadcast was heard by another 20 million people from 1930 to the late 1950s.

Winchell, who was Jewish, was one of the first commentators in America to attack Adolf Hitler and American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund. He generally had a left-of-center political view through the 1930s and World War II, when he was stridently pro-Roosevelt, pro-labor, and pro–Democratic Party. After WW II Winchell began to perceive Communism as the main threat facing America. A signal of Winchell`s changed perspective was his wartime attack on the National Maritime Union, the labor organization for the civilian United States Merchant Marine, which he believed was run by Communists.[2] This evolution in Winchell`s perspective continued after the war. During the late 1940s, he became allied with the right wing of American politics. In this new role, Winchell frequently attacked politicians he did not like by implying in his commentaries that they were Communist sympathizers. In 1948 and 1949 he and the influential leftist columnist Drew Pearson "inaccurately and maliciously assaulted Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in columns and radio broadcasts."[3] Forrestal was, if anything, even more anti-Communist than Winchell, but he was also the strongest opponent in the Truman administration of recognition of the new state of Israel.


January 20, 1953: Gossip columnist Walter Winchell broadcasts from Pennsylvania Avenue, near the White House, during President Dwight D. Eisenhower`s inaugural parade.In 1948 Winchell had the top rated radio show when he surpassed Fred Allen and Jack Benny.[4]

During the 1950s Winchell favored Senator Joseph McCarthy, and as McCarthy`s Red Scare tactics became more extreme and unbelievable, Winchell lost credibility along with McCarthy. He also had a weekly radio broadcast which was simulcast on ABC television until he ended that employment because of a dispute with ABC executives during 1955.

The dispute with Jack Paar "effectively ended Winchell`s career," beginning a shift in power from print to televisio