Most journalists just report the news. But at times, Daniel Schorr has become the news.
Now 84 years old, the senior news analyst for National Public Radio and the keynote speaker at University Convocation on Tuesday, Schorr has covered the Joseph McCarthy hearings, Watergate and the President Clinton impeachment process. He reported in the middle of the night as Germany built the Berlin Wall and he scored the first exclusive television interview with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
But as he went looking for the headline, he also became the headline, as Schorr described it. Richard Nixon put him on his “enemies list,” and had the FBI investigate him — supposedly for a job in Nixon’s office, a claim the former president stuck to when he and Schorr met about two years before Nixon died.
The Khrushchev interview broke so many Russian censorship laws that the KGB arrested him and barred him from the Soviet Union.
All in a day’s work for a man who got his start in journalism at the age of 12 when he watched a man commit suicide by jumping from the roof of his Bronx apartment complex.
“The New York Times was paying $5 for news tips at the time,” he said. So he called the paper, took notes and said that, without making a conscious decision, he has been a newsman since that day.
His first real reporting experience came after three years in the Army during World War II. He worked in intelligence, but spent the entire time at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.
He wanted to go to Europe and write for a military magazine, which he said marks the time he fully realized his ambition to be a journalist.
He jumped at the chance to report from Western Europe for the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times, two of his early writing assignments. In 1953 his coverage caught the eye of Edward R. Murrow, who asked Schorr to join his CBS television news team.
Schorr is the last member of that team still active in the field.
Since then, he has literally been in the middle of almost every major news event of the last half century.
And after all the stories and scandals, Schorr said he knows it can’t be a big coincidence that he ends up being part of so many stories, but he’s not sure why.
“Each time was a peculiar accident,” he said. “That was quite weird to me.”
He built his reputation on a combination of accurate, vibrant news coverage, a refusal to compromise his principles and a desire to bring the story to the mass audience — even when it meant spending a few hours with the KGB during the heart of the Cold War.
After the Khrushchev interview ran, Schorr and his photographer were taking some pictures of a children’s department store in Moscow for another story. KGB officers arrested them for “filming forbidden objects,” claiming they were shooting KGB headquarters on the other side of the square.
He didn’t spend any time in jail, but Schorr said the event was the KGB’s way of telling him that he was in trouble and about to leave the country.
“It’s the KGB signal that it’s going to get worse,” he said.
Schorr also built his reputation on his unwavering defense of the First Amendment and freedom of the press, a principle that brought him one vote away from a conviction by the House Ethics Committee for contempt of Congress.
He went to press with an exclusive, the final report of the House committee investigating the CIA and FBI after Watergate, given to him by an unnamed source.
CBS suspended him for the decision, and the ethics committee threatened him with jail time if he didn’t give up the source’s name.
Schorr vehemently refused and told the committee, “To betray a source would mean to dry up many future sources for many future reporters. It would mean betraying myself, my career and my life.”
The committee voted five to six against the contempt charge, and CBS asked him to return. He decided to resign instead. Three years later, Ted Turner asked him to help start the Cable News Network — better known as CNN.
Now a news analyst for NPR, Schorr said he thinks that, of all the scandals he’s witnessed, the Clinton impeachment hearing hurt the country the most — even more than Watergate.
He said Watergate had the potential to be very damaging, but was stopped quickly enough that Americans actually came out of the scandal invigorated by the process.
“The residue of mistrust goes very deep now. We no longer automatically trust our leaders” after the Clinton impeachment hearings, he said. “Maybe in 10 or 20 years we’ll look back and it will be Watergate.”