Daniel Schorr
Analyst with ‘a matchless sense of history’
Schorr rehearses Saturday week-in-review segment with Scott Simon.Originally published in Current, March 12, 2001
By Geneva CollinsDaniel Schorr has become a kind of generational Rorschach test for Americans. If your first thought on hearing his name is "the CBS reporter who was on Nixon’s enemies list," chances are you’re over 40. If you answered "NPR news analyst," that marks you as an X-er.
A working journalist for more than six decades, Schorr, now 84 and showing no signs of slowing down, has moved with ease from newspapers to commercial television to cable news to public radio. His reporting has won him three Emmys, a Peabody, a duPont-Columbia Golden Baton (broadcasting’s Pulitzer equivalent), and induction into the journalism Hall of Fame.
His analyses (and he prefers this term to "commentaries" for his three-minute essays on All Things Considered and Weekend Edition Sunday, and his nine-minute week-in-review chat with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday) are impressive for their breadth as well as depth of subject matter. He can talk with equal authority about foreign policy, welfare efforts, tax initiatives and personal indiscretions of the 12 presidents whose eras he has covered.
Unlike an academic, Schorr is not afraid to pull punches or mince words. He castigated Congress in 1998 for focusing on impeachment proceedings while events elsewhere in the world warranted U.S. attention, but that same year he assailed Clinton for his "sense of unreality about where America is in a violent world" for doing little to stop the genocide in Rwanda. He has a broadcaster’s skill in delivering an artful phrase with maximum effectiveness, like calling the "win-win" politics of the Gingrich Republicans a "lose-lose situation" for the American public, or characterizing the Clinton pardons as "clemency for sale."
Even when a story is out of his area of expertise, Schorr can recognize its importance. When basketball player Magic Johnson was diagnosed as HIV-positive, according to Simon, Schorr at first hesitated to comment on the matter, saying it was a sports issue and out of his realm, but after some thought said, "I think we have to lead with it [in the news roundup]. Johnson put a smiling, laughing face on this disease."
As the last of Edward R. Murrow’s hand-picked reporting team still active in journalism, Schorr recognizes that he is a standard-bearer for a generation of network journalists who did not dumb-down their reporting.
"I say in my memoirs that if Ed Murrow were alive today, there would be no doubt he would be at NPR," Schorr said in a recent interview in his plaque- and picture-studded cubbyhole at NPR headquarters (where all the news staffers’ offices appear to be equitably cramped). Since 1985, Schorr has found a refuge of sorts here. The man who still plays tennis with half of A-list Washington also leads occasional panel discussions and files other reports when news events warrant.
Simon, for one, credits Schorr for helping make his show a success from the first.
"When he came willing to make NPR his professional home, it was an indication that NPR wasn’t just a place for people trying to make a reputation but for people who already had one. It helped the growth of this place enormously. It put our show on the map immediately," said Simon of Schorr’s weekly news roundup.
Schorr is one of the best things that NPR news programs have going for them, says Bob Garfield, new co-host of WNYC’s On the Media.
"I don’t think, as long as I’ve been listening to broadcast commentary, there has been anyone even remotely in his league," said Garfield, and he mentions Eric Sevareid among the also-rans. "I’ve heard hundreds of Dan Schorr analyses over the years, and I can’t remember one where I’d say, ‘That’s really thin, or that’s belaboring the obvious.’ His genius is that he always finds the point."
This is all the more impressive since, as Garfield points out, Schorr is "between 115 and 125 years old."
Actually, Daniel Louis Schorr was born in 1916, in New York City. He began writing for newspapers when he was in high school and was a New York editor for the Netherlands News Agency by 1941. After military service the news service stationed him in Holland, where he also reported for the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times. His insightful reporting caught the notice of Murrow, who made him a diplomatic correspondent for CBS in 1953.
In his work abroad, Schorr scored the first-ever U.S. television interview with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (later, he would be banned from the Soviet Union for refusing to bow to Soviet censors), covered the building of the Berlin Wall in Germany, and landed a face-to-face with Fidel Castro in Havana.
When the Watergate story broke in 1972, Schorr became CBS’ chief correspondent on the scandal. His craggy face and sonorous voice were an almost daily fixture for Americans during the televised hearings.
It was at these hearings that White House counsel John Dean revealed Nixon’s 1971 enemies list with Schorr’s name on it. Schorr likes to joke that this revelation hiked his lecture fees and boosted his career (decades later, it got him a mention on a Simpsons episode). But was it sobering at the time to realize that the most powerful man on Earth hated him?
"By the time I learned about it, in 1973, Nixon was already in terrible trouble. He wasn’t going to be able to do anything to anybody." Schorr replied. "But every now and then I’m sort of retrospectively alarmed. I think, jeez, what do you think he would have done? It is true that for the first and only time in my life, my income tax was audited that year. The Treasury denies there was any connection, but it’s a big, big coincidence."
Out of the Watergate mess grew subsequent scandals involving the CIA and FBI that Schorr covered for the network. When the House of Representatives voted to suppress an investigating committee’s report on the matter, Schorr obtained a copy of the report and leaked it to the Village Voice. His refusal to reveal his source got him investigated by the House Ethics Committee, but after his eloquent defense of First Amend-ment rights, the committee dropped its contempt citation. Schorr and CBS parted ways in 1976 over the incident, although there is disagreement about what happened.
CBS News President Richard Salant, who died in 1993, wrote in his memoirs, "I remain an admirer of Dan’s abilities as an investigative reporter. I will have to leave it to others more objective and less self-defensive than I to decide whether Dan voluntarily resigned or whether I fired him—or whether it was a little bit of both." (Salant’s memoirs, published in 1999, were edited by Bill Buzenberg, now v.p. for news and information at Minnesota Public Radio, and his wife, Susan.)
For the next few years Schorr taught, wrote newspaper articles, and in 1978 started doing occasional commentaries for ATC. In 1979 Ted Turner asked him to join his nascent Cable News Network, where he served as senior Washington correspondent until 1985.
"Shortly after I left CNN, I was in a restaurant with my family and somebody stopped me and said, ‘Didn’t you used to be Daniel Schorr?’ I thought that was really the end," he said. When NPR officials approached him in 1985 about serving a bigger role and doing more commentaries as well as participating in a Saturday news show Simon was about to launch, Schorr viewed it as a kind of semi-retirement.
After decades of hard-nosed journalism and posing for a TV lens, Schorr said he finds doing radio, and news analysis, "wonderful."
"All of my life … I made rather a religion of being an impartial, dispassionate, detached reporter. … This put me in a new role. First place, as I was beginning to grow older, the physical environment of television had begun to become taxing. They want you to run out, stand in front of the Watergate building or God knows where, be made up, or go into a studio, you have to watch your tie, watch where you’re looking. There was something about radio that was so pristine. The process between thinking and writing something and getting it on the air became much, much simpler. … Also, because I’m the only person at NPR with this title of senior news analyst—that is a position that I value and prize and try not to abuse—they let me say things that a reporter would not be allowed to say."
One thing he could say as analyst but could not as reporter, for example, was his assessment of the Supreme Court ruling in December that essentially awarded the presidency to George Bush. In his ATC commentary, the outraged Schorr referred to the court majority as "the Gang of Five, philosophically led by archconservative Antonin Scalia." He used the phrases "judicial coup," "the fix was in" and "junta" to describe their actions. ATC followed his analysis—by Schorr’s own admission one of his most acerbic—with a commentary by a judicial scholar who supported the court’s decision.
"I’ve had to defend him a lot of times. He has a lot of critics," said Buzenberg, who headed NPR news until 1997. More recently, Buzenberg said, he has written many letters to Minnesota Public Radio listeners who objected to Schorr’s Supreme Court commentary. "I was happy and pleased and enjoyed defending him for his analyses. He’s a great credit to public broadcasting. . . . He’s the poster child for the supposedly liberal bias in public broadcasting. I defend him and say listen to the diversity of opinions we offer on the air."
With Schorr ranging across a broad swath of news topics, it was not surprising that he eventually would stumble on details of a story he did not know first-hand. The details, however, were inflammatory enough to prompt a libel suit. In a 1992 Weekend Edition discussion with Simon, Schorr confused the name of a Secret Service agent who had foiled an assassination attempt with someone who had performed a similar act of heroism and who was gay. Schorr aired an apology; the libel suit eventually was dismissed.
"When Dan misidentified the man, I said something like, ‘uh-huh.’ We got sued for a million dollars, and we called that around here ‘the million-dollar uh-huh’," Simon remembered.
Even more than most journalists, Schorr is a stickler for accuracy who hates to be caught making a mistake, said Jonathan Kern, former supervisory news editor at ATC, who recently took the assignment of heading a training unit for NPR news. "Because of his long experience in journalism and his familiarity with many decades of news events, he provides context to the spot news," said Kern, who estimates he edited some 500 Schorr commentaries in five years. Because Schorr knows so much first-hand—and has the home phone numbers of all the movers and shakers inside the marble halls—"something can break at 7 a.m., and he’ll have the piece done by one o’clock. Other commentators we’ve auditioned couldn’t turn around something that fast." (And he does it on an electric typewriter, instead of a computer, slamming out double-spaced copy with lots of cross-outs.)
Simon looks to Schorr to bring to his show "a matchless, and I do mean matchless, sense of history," the host said. "He can put contemporary emergent events into perspective. It’s not that he thinks he’s seen it all, but that he knows there’s something more to see. He brings a real sense of excitement about the news. During the entire post-election trauma he was exultant. His cheeks were even rosier than usual."
Schorr, for his part, seems to thrive on his role as human reference library for the 20- and 30-something reporters seeking a quick primer on Eisenhower isolationism or the Reagan-Gorbachev conference in 1988. The day he was interviewed for Current he had rewritten a commentary on the Hanssen spy case because his editor wanted the line "When I was in Moscow in 1956" moved higher in the story. "They love it when I can say, ‘50 years ago when I was here,’ or ‘30 years ago when I was covering Watergate, Nixon told me—’," he said.
In the 16 years since Schorr joined NPR, public radio has mushroomed in both audience and prominence. "Today, lecture requests come in at a rate no less than when I was at the peak of my television career," said Schorr. "It’s not just the number of listeners that have increased at NPR, it’s the company in which you are seen. If you are on NPR—a lot of people view it as a rather hallowed institution."
Now in restaurants, he says, "people swivel around in their chairs and say, ‘I’d know that voice anywhere. Aren’t you Daniel Schorr on NPR?’"
Schorr’s involvement in public broadcasting is not limited to radio. In 1996 he wrote and narrated a Frontline documentary for PBS covering his old network’s handling of a 60 Minutes investigation into the tobacco industry. The now-famous events, involving Brown & Williamson whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, were the subject of the 1999 film The Insider. In the film, the actor playing producer Lowell Bergman asks the actor playing 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace why he doesn’t quit if the network refuses to air the program.
"I don’t plan to spend the end of my days wandering in the wilderness of National Public Radio," the Wallace character snaps.
Shortly after the film was released, Schorr addressed the apparent reference to himself in a commentary on Weekend Edition Sunday. He acknowledged that because of cinematic license Wallace might not have uttered those words; however, Bergman had said that Wallace and others at CBS "customarily speak with scorn of those like Fred Friendly, Bill Moyers and myself who had parted company with the network over issues of principle."
Schorr concluded the commentary by saying, "It may be Mike Wallace who is wandering in an affluent wilderness. I found the Promised Land."
. To Current's home page . Others profiled in March 2001 Forces to Reckon section: Ruth Seymour, Rob Gardner, Mark Plotkin. . Outside links: audio files of Schorr analyses on Weekend Edition Saturday and Weekend Edition Sunday
Web page posted March 28, 2001
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