A Contrarian’s Contrarian   

Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism

By Daniel Schorr
Pocket Books
354 pages; $26.95

When Daniel Schorr was 6, his father died suddenly. The tragedy must have been "shattering," Schorr writes, but he was left with almost "no recollection whatsoever" of it.

At age 12, Schorr earned his first money as a journalist, gaining $5 for tipping the local paper when a woman fell to her death outside his apartment building. Schorr "coolly" called in the news, feeling "no particular sense of awe or emotion about the first dead body I had ever seen."

Later he would wonder "about my sense of detachment from tragedy and customary lack of emotional response."

There is something both poignant and disturbing in Schorr's revelation of these feelings and in his unsparing insight into the psychology that has led many people into journalism.

"I came to realize how, being poor, fat, Jewish, fatherless, I came to feel like the quintessential outsider, fighting my way into journalism, which I have always thought of as an outsider's profession," he writes.

If you count age 12 as his entry into the news business, then Schorr, who turns 85 in August, has been applying this outside-in perspective to local, national and world events for nearly three-quarters of a century.

On the air, in the book, and in his own self-analysis, Schorr comes across as a contrarian's contrarian. The evidence here shows a cantankerous and indefatigable reporter, a witty and ebullient raconteur, a passionate and populistic citizen.

What characterizes him as much as anything seems to be a willingness, perhaps even an overwillingness, to pinch the thin skin of authority. The list of those with whom Schorr had run-ins ranges from Nikita Khrushchev to Richard Nixon in politics and from William Paley to Ted Turner in journalism. He was targeted for investigation by both the KGB and the FBI. President Kennedy once told a CBS executive, "[T]hat Dan Schorr in Germany is a pain in the ass."

And Schorr ranked No. 17 on Nixon's notorious "enemies list," a document Schorr had the fortune to be reading live on the air when, in "the most electrifying moment in my career," he suddenly found himself saying aloud his own name.

Schorr presents himself as "the last of the Murrow boys," that stable of exceptional reporters lured to CBS by Edward R. Murrow, and in a way "Staying Tuned" is a valediction to a 24-carat journalistic era.

The breadth and scope of Schorr's reporting is almost stunning, and it is hard to think of modern broadcast reporters who could come near it. The kinds of things Schorr specialized in--foreign coverage, depth reporting, documentaries--are exactly what TV news no longer stresses. It seems almost quaint when he mentions his hour-long broadcast, "Poland--Country on a Tightrope," his "CBS Reports" episode on "Germany After Hitler--Adenauer Sums Up," or his Peabody Award-winning hour-long look at "The Poisoned Air."

He covered hearings from Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s to Bill Clinton's impeachment a half century later. He reported from Moscow, Warsaw and Bonn, served as the CBS "Great Society" correspondent during LBJ's presidency and was the network's mainstay reporter on Watergate and subsequent investigations into abuses by the CIA. In "the most tumultuous experience of my career" (and the one that effectively ended his CBS tenure), he was hauled before Congress and nearly held in contempt over making public secret investigations of the intelligence agencies.

From there, Schorr turned up as the "senior news analyst" for Ted Turner's brand-new CNN in 1979, where he made it through six years before leaving over "CNN's effort to limit my editorial freedom."

Next stop was as analyst and commentator for National Public Radio, making Schorr something of an "elder statesman, consulted on almost everything from Russia under Stalin to America under Roosevelt."

He seldom strayed far from controversy. When Nixon told a publishers' group, "your president is not a crook," Schorr said on the air that "the evidence indicates otherwise." When Oliver North testified before Congress in the Iran-contra case, Schorr commented, "As they taught us in school, magnetic North should not be confused with true North."

"My motto was 'Find out what they're hiding and tell those who need to know,' " he writes.

But Schorr also brings a charm that softens his crustier moments. He has sung on stage with Frank Zappa and played a newscaster in movies such as "Siege" and "The Net," although he declined Robert Redford's request to play himself in "All the President's Men."

In his final chapter, Schorr offers a few crunchy observations about the state of the media, but in some ways they seem superfluous. Like the best of writing, "Staying Tuned" shows more than it tells. Schorr's trajectory--from tough street reporter for the Tiffany network to analyst for a cable news network to commentator for a noncommercial medium--parallels the arc of postwar broadcasting, from its grandest age to today's struggle for relevance. The book is good reading, and its lessons are both inspiring and sobering.