Daniel Schorr (1916-2010)

"Radio keeps me going": In 2008, at 91, Dan Schorr offered his predictably wise perspective on the state of the news business, and his own career, to WNYC's Leonard Lopate.

"'I consider my presence on the [Nixon] enemies list,' [Schorr] said in a 2009 interview with The Gazette of Montgomery County, Md., 'a greater tribute than the Emmys list.'”

-- from Robert D. Hershey Jr.'s New York Times obit
of Daniel Schorr, who died today at 93

by Ken

In the years when CBS News still mattered, when it still took both the news and itself seriously, Dan Schorr was a mainstay of the operation. And later, when he had to, he invented two new news careers for himself, first on the fledgling CNN, then on public radio.

His great ambition in life, Robert Hershey records in his NYT obit, had been to be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and during a three-day tryout in New York he won the editors' attention with a huge scoop on the project that turned out to be Lincoln Center. But the Times, he later found out, was concerned about a pile-up of Jewish bylines. After he returned to his old stomping ground of the Netherlands, his reporting on a major storm attracted the attention of CBS's legendary Edward R. Murrow, who brought him into the fold. His CBS News career got off to an auspicious start and had a pretty fine run (including three Emmys for his Watergate coverage), but came to a wrenching gutless-corporate end.

Mr. Schorr, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, initially made his mark at CBS as a foreign correspondent, most notably in the Soviet Union. He opened the network’s Moscow bureau in 1955 and became well enough acquainted with the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev — whom he called “the most fascinating person I ever met” — to secure for “Face the Nation” the first television interview for which Khrushchev ever sat. (He had never even done one for Soviet television.) At the end of 1957 Mr. Schorr went home for the holidays and was denied readmission to the Soviet Union.

His 23-year career at CBS was cut short in 1976 when, in what Mr. Schorr later called “the most tumultuous experience of my career,” he obtained a copy of a suppressed House of Representatives committee report on highly dubious activities by the Central Intelligence Agency.

He showed a draft on television and discussed its contents, but when neither of CBS’s book subsidiaries was willing to publish the document, produced by the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Otis G. Pike, a New York Democrat, Mr. Schorr provided it — anonymously, he vainly hoped — to The Village Voice.

This led to threats requiring police protection, to investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress, and to Mr. Schorr’s being relieved of reporting duty. Although editorial and public opinion subsequently swung in his favor and Mr. Schorr, who came to be seen as a beleaguered reporter defending a principle, became a popular speaker on the lecture circuit, what he called his “love-hate affair” with CBS News was ended.

A quarter-century later he mused: “Washed away by one controversial leak too many? Undone by a reporting style that proved indigestible to a network worried about affiliates and regulations? Unable to adapt myself to corporate tugs on the reins? Unwilling to exempt my own network from my investigative reporting?” His conclusion: “All of that, I guess.”

(Interviewed in 2008, Mr. Schorr still refused to identify his source for the Pike committee report.)

From that point he had no obvious path in the news business, and had to invent those new careers. He had help with the first one, being in on the founding of CNN with Ted Turner. Having gotten contractual commitments from Turner which theoretically protected the independence of his news judgment, Schorr managed a number of years of pretty productive coexistence. Still, it was Ted Turner.

Eventually, however, Mr. Schorr and Mr. Turner fell out over a CNN plan to team John Connally, the former Texas governor and Nixon Treasury secretary, with Mr. Schorr as commentators at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas.

It was improper, Mr. Schorr said, to mix a politician with a journalist, and he invoked for the first time the 1979 agreement allowing him to veto assignments. The network asked him to drop that right in early 1985, and when he refused, he was told to take leave until his contract expired that May. Shortly thereafter he joined NPR as a commentator, a position he held until his death.

During those years, I got hooked on NPR's Saturday-morning Weekend Edition, in good part because of anchor Scott Simon, but also in good part for the weekly segment in which he surveyed the week's news with Dan Schorr. When the Sunday edition came into being, I flirted with it for a while, but it didn't have either Simon or Schorr, and in time I drifted away. Eventually I drifted away from the Saturday edition too, but that was after a lot of Saturdays shared with a trusted presence who'd earned a lifetime's worth of trust.

Fittingly, Hershey ends the NYT obit with what Schorr considered "one of his proudest accomplishments":

Mr. Schorr, who won three Emmys for his coverage of Watergate, long maintained that one of his proudest accomplishments was being included on President Nixon’s so-called enemies list as a result of that reporting.

“I consider my presence on the enemies list,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Gazette of Montgomery County, Md., “a greater tribute than the Emmys list.”

#