Journalism Legend Daniel Schorr Dies At 93

SCOTT SIMON, host:

From NPR News in Washington, DC, this is a special report. I'm Scott Simon.

Daniel Schorr has died. A colleague. A friend. Dan's career began at the age of 12 in the 1920s and continued until just before his death.

He broke many stories and interviewed many leaders. And sometimes, those leaders struck back. Dan famously found himself on President Richard Nixon' Enemies List, as Dan himself discovered on a live broadcast --

(Soundbite of archival audio)

DANIEL SCHORR: 17th, Daniel Schorr of the Columbia Broadcasting System in Washington. The note here is "a real media enemy."

SIMON: Later, Dan recounted the experience.

SCHORR: What went through my mind was...don't lose your cool, be professional. Make believe that the name you read was not your name; it was the name of somebody else. Try, try to act normal, if you can.

SIMON: Dan Schorr didn't lose his cool over a career that spanned decades. Dan Schorr, his life, work, and memories...after the news.

(Newscast)

SIMON: From NPR News in Washington DC, this is a special report. Dan Schorr has died. He was 93 years old, and worked, as he wanted to, until just about his last breath.

Dan was a legendary journalist, the last of Ed Murrow's boys, and his career spanned from covering the Cold War from behind the Iron Curtain, through Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Digital Revolution.

He was born before most homes had radios. He lived to give the news over radio, TV, satellites and the World Wide Web.

He was also our colleague, our friend, and an inspiration.

When Dan turned 90, All Things Considered host Robert Siegel talked with Dan about his long and extraordinary career. This hour, we're going to remember Dan by listening to extended excerpts from those conversations.

ROBERT SIEGEL: For Daniel Schorr, life as a journalist came early. He was 12 years old, living in a ground floor apartment in the Bronx when a body crashed onto the sidewalk just outside his window. Dan knew what to do. He called the police, and then he picked up the phone again.

SCHORR: I called our local newspaper, The Bronx Home News, which offered $5 for original news stories.

SIEGEL: When you saw the body outside the window, was your first impulse, I'm going to call up The Bronx Home News?

SCHORR: I often think back to that and say: Why did I stand there taking notes the first time I'd ever seen a dead person in my life? Why didn't I react more emotionally to that? Quite right, it was the essential journalist who manages to absent himself from the situation and simply report it without feeling it.

SIEGEL: Daniel Schorr was poor, a child of Jewish immigrants. Writing was his outlet, and by high school, it had become his passion. As a reporter for the high school newspaper, he was assigned to do a story about the upcoming prom. Dan wrote about it, floridly, before the event itself.

That turned out to be a mistake. By the time the paper came out, the prom had been canceled because of the deepening Depression.

SCHORR: But there was a vivid description of a prom that wasn't there, and so we solved it by putting an insert page, saying: And as to the story of the prom, of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: Well, did you describe it rather vividly, or...? You did, I see.

SCHORR: I described it rather vividly. I especially described how well-dressed I was.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: You were early on well-acquainted with the virtues and the vices of journalism.

SCHORR: Yes. I learned ethics later.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: The ethics lesson came a few years later, when he began to write occasional music reviews for the New York Times. Soon, Dan says, he was asking the Times music critic, Olin Downes, about something Downes had written.

SCHORR: I read the review, and I said, see that his tone was, as usual, impeccable, but the profile of the tone left something to be desired. What does that mean? He put his hand on my shoulder. He said: Boy, don't let that kind of thing worry you. That's (bleep) that you write when you're on deadline.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SCHORR: I decided that music criticism was not a respectable...

SIEGEL: By the time he graduated from the City College of New York in 1939, Dan was working for a Dutch news service, where he stayed until he was drafted in 1943. Not as good as other soldiers with guns or even at dishwashing, his career almost ended when he ventured across a shooting range on his way back from the latrine.

Dan was assigned to Army intelligence and never made it overseas, but that was where he set his sights after the war.

SCHORR: As soon as I was discharged from the Army, I said okay, now I want to be a foreign correspondent. The Christian Science Monitor agreed to use my articles as a stringer if I went to Holland, which I did because I'd worked for the Dutch news agency just before the war. Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, the London Daily Mail.

SIEGEL: You are everybody's man in the Lowlands. Was there a lot of news?

SCHORR: There was more news in the low countries than I would have anticipated.

SIEGEL: The International Court of Justice was forming. So was NATO. Over time, Dan had gotten to know Holland's Prince Bernhard, the husband of Queen Juliana. At one point, the prince asked for a private meeting, and he brought along a bottle of scotch.

SCHORR: Then he proceeded to tell me about how the queen took up with this faith healer, and it got to be a real problem, including the fact that she was against NATO.

So I collected all the information, wrote a long, long piece and sold it to Life magazine.

SIEGEL: Word got out that the story was coming, and a barrage of complaints followed, with dire warnings that an article about a faith healer's influence over the queen would endanger the Dutch monarchy.

SCHORR: And eventually, I called Life magazine, and I withdrew it. I cannot today tell you why I did it, nor if this happened today would I do it again.

SIEGEL: Dan says it went against all his journalistic beliefs to kill the story when he knew that he had the facts right, but in his book "Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism," Dan says that sometimes, other values have to be weighed against journalistic ones.

Dan's biggest story came in 1953, when a violent storm caused Holland's famous dikes to rupture. Years later, in an NPR commentary written just after Hurricane Katrina, Dan described what he had seen.

SCHORR: Standing atop the great Verdrach(ph) dike south of Rotterdam, I could see the water lapping up on one side. On the other, 15 feet below, lay fertile farmland and a group of farmers who showed no signs of evacuating.

I yelled to them to warn of the danger of the rising water. One of them yelled back: Where should I go? This is my home. I would rather drown here.

SIEGEL: Eighteen hundred people did drown. Dan sold the story to CBS News, and his reports caught the eye of Edward R. Murrow when they were carried on Murrow's evening newscast.

SCHORR: I received a cable, the wording of which I shall never forget: "Would you at all consider joining the staff of CBS News with an initial assignment in Washington?"

SIEGEL: So in short order, there was a lunch with Murrow's man in Paris, an equally elegant voyage to New York and then huge challenges for a print journalist entering the new world of television reporting.

SCHORR: I realized there were things you had to know. I asked a young producer: What is the secret of success for a newspaper person going into electronic journalism? He said, well, that's easy. All you need to know is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: In 1953, when Daniel Schorr began his job at CBS in Washington, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, had already begun his congressional investigations.

Former Senator JOSEPH McCARTHY (Republican, Wisconsin): Did you ever work for the Whitely corporation?

Unidentified Man #1: The who?

Former Sen. McCARTHY: The Whitely, W-H-I-T-E-L-Y, Corporation?

Unidentified Man #1: Senator McCarthy, on the advice of counsel, I refuse to answer the question on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me.

SIEGEL: Dan covered McCarthy, and within a few years, he was sent to cover the Communist regime McCarthy so vilified. He was dispatched to Moscow with hopes of reopening the CBS bureau, which had been closed by Stalin in 1947.

He was a one-man shop, carrying a heavy tape recorder, a movie camera, a still camera, and armed with just a few words of Russian in his vocabulary. Marvin Kalb became Dan's weekend translator and remembers marveling at how quickly Dan picked up a journalistic trick without even speaking the language.

Mr. MARVIN KALB: Any time in a Soviet editorial in the newspaper Pravda that the word odnako, which is the Russian word for however, whenever you saw odnako, you knew that there was going to be one or two sentences that gave you a glimpse of reality, of honesty, and Dan would do it so quickly and so well that he would be searching the entire column of print for the word odnako. The minute you found odnako, you'd know you got a glimpse of truth.

SIEGEL: And then there was Boris, a man who identified himself as a journalist but who Dan suspected was really a minder from the KGB, the secret police, because he knew so much about people at CBS.

SCHORR: He came up to my room at the National Hotel, bringing a bottle of vodka with him. Let's have a drink. How is Mr. Paley?

(Soundbite of laughter)

SCHORR: I said, oh, you're very well-informed. How about this glass? And he said: So, Mr. Schorr, here's mud down your hatch.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: But this was in the depths of the Cold War.

SCHORR: We had to contend with official censorship, you could not broadcast, you could not cable, you could not communicate with the outside world without first submitting a text of what you planned to say to the censors, a censor whom you'd never see.

They'd send you to a telegraph office. They'd take your script, put it through a slot into an unseen room, and then you would wait to see what, if anything, came back, and that became an enormous headache when, in February, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist boss, delivered his famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress.

SIEGEL: This is the speech in which Khrushchev, a couple years after the death of Joseph Stalin, publicly, or at least before these Communist functionaries, accuses Stalin of all kinds of crimes. What a story! Did American journalists in Moscow know about the speech right away?

SCHORR: Yes, we all heard little bits of it, but in the end, the first story that got out was a Reuter correspondent who left Moscow, went out to Helsinki, and filed it from there.

SIEGEL: Had to leave the country in order to get a reasonably good story out.

SCHORR: They had to leave the country and then risk not being allowed back in.

SIEGEL: How did you get the film out of Moscow when you took film for stories?

SCHORR: Oh, this was the beginning of the big tourist movement. I mean, here was this country, which nobody knew what had gone on there, and now they were opening up to tourists, and so a lot of tourists.

And you would take a package, and you would get a tourist to agree to take it out to their first stop. Then you would send a cable to New York, saying: My friend, so on and so forth, is arriving in Paris. Please extend our usual courtesies. I'm sure the Russians knew what we were doing, but they preferred to let us do that.

SIEGEL: There was talk in Moscow of an emergency meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee to deal with an uprising in Hungary and possible Soviet involvement in the dispute over the Suez Canal. But no one could find out when the meeting would take place. Both Dan Schorr and Marvin Kalb remember vividly what happened next.

KALB: One day at the British embassy, Nikita Khrushchev and the entire Politburo arrived.

SCHORR: And I went up to Khrushchev and tried to worm it out of him. I said I have a problem, which maybe you can help me with. I was going to go on vacation tomorrow, but my capitalistic bosses, CBS, back in New York, told me I could not go on vacation because of rumors of a meeting of your Central Committee.

KALB: And I wonder if you could tell me, sir, just between you and me: Can I go on vacation?

SCHORR: And he leans over, very confidential-like, and said you want to go on vacation, Mr. Schorr, when? Tomorrow. And for how long? Two weeks. And you're afraid that during those two weeks, you could miss a meeting of my Central Committee? Exactly. He leans over further, drops his voice a little more and said: Mr. Schorr, I'll tell you, you can go.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SCHORR: I said, I can? You mean, there's not going - no, if absolutely necessary, we'll have the meeting without you.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIMON: Daniel Schorr speaking, around the time of his 90th birthday, with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel, about his earliest days in journalism from music criticism to covering the old Communist regime in Moscow. I'm Scott Simon and you're listening to a special report on the life of Daniel Schorr, from NPR News.

(Soundbite of music)

SIMON: From NPR News, this is a special report on the life of Daniel Schorr. I'm Scott Simon. Our colleague and friend Dan Schorr has died. He was 93 years old. At the time of Dan's 90th birthday, All Things Considered host Robert Siegel talked with Dan about his long career as a reporter and news analyst. We return to their conversation; talking about a time in the 1950s when Dan was reporting for CBS News in the Soviet Union.

SIEGEL: Dan's time in Moscow included a journalistic coup: an interview with Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, the first exclusive interview with the Soviet leader to be broadcast on Soviet television.

In the United States, Dan's interview made front page news when it brought Khrushchev into America's living rooms on "Face The Nation."

(Soundbite of television program "Face the Nation")

SCHORR: We know that the Soviet Union has been more in favor of a total and immediate ban on hydrogen atom bomb tests and weapons, and the question of control has made it very difficult. Do you see any hope for an agreement on the basis of the current American approach, a first, small step?

Mr. NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV (First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union): (Through translator) For the time being, I know of - I know not of the step that the United States is prepared to take, but we are quite prepared to limit ourselves to some small step instead of going after a comprehensive agreement at once. So that small step might lead to something bigger. We, for our part, have...

SIEGEL: In 1957, Dan was barred from the Soviet Union. The Cold War was still his story, but he had to cover it from Western Europe, especially Berlin.

SCHORR: We correspondents began spending more and more time in Berlin because we had a sense that war could happen here, and indeed, it almost did.

SIEGEL: You felt that at the time, that war was a real possibility?

SCHORR: In August, 1961, they closed off East Berlin by building a wall. It presented a challenge to the American establishment there. The U.S. was not formally supposed to recognize the existence of East Germany as a state. It was occupied by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union began to tell us if we didn't get out of Berlin, there would be war. That's what Khrushchev told Kennedy when they met in Vienna for a rather harsh meeting that they had. We had no reason to believe that there might not be a war.

Indeed, I saw one scene, which was close as I've ever come, to seeing how World War III might start. It had to do with the fact that a member of the American mission, in order to challenge East German control of the checkpoint, went across with his wife to go to the opera. They asked him to show credentials. He said we don't show credentials to Germans.

Then the Russians brought up some tanks. And then the U.S. tanks, muzzle to muzzle almost with Soviet tanks, facing each other. As I stood there, at one point standing between the tanks in order to report this astonishing thing, I said, you know, this looks like how World War III might start.

SIEGEL: In 1966, Dan took up a new post in Washington. He'd been gone a long time, and it wasn't clear which beat he would get. The good ones all seemed to be taken by other CBS reporters, many of whom eventually became household names: Dan Rather at the White House, Bob Schieffer at the Pentagon, Marvin Kalb was at the State Department.

KALB: I had the beat that was logical for him to have, the diplomatic correspondent beat, and he wasn't going to kick me out. And we were all wondering: What will Dan do? Dan being Dan, looked around Washington, DC, and said ah, the "Great Society." And he became the "Great Society" reporter.

SIEGEL: Daniel Schorr's "Great Society" beat covered the war on poverty, race issues, public school financing, neglect of children, and the environment. Here he is, in a 1966 CBS report dealing with air pollution in St. Louis.

SCHORR: The anti-smoke ordinances that followed a Black Tuesday soft call blight in 1939, and made St. Louis a national model for cleaner air enforcement, are helpless now against more sophisticated poisons in the air. The St. Louis laws dealing with smoke are simply not adequate to deal with industrial, automobile, and other pollution. And much of the industry is across the river, out of reach of city ordinances.

SIEGEL: Lyndon Johnson had wanted to make domestic policy his hallmark. But as the war in Vietnam took its toll on Johnson, and then on President Richard Nixon, priorities changed. Author David Wise says Dan's reporting didn't sit well, especially in the Nixon White House.

Mr. DAVID WISE (Author): Richard Nixon was not fond of Dan Schorr. Dan kept breaking stories that embarrassed the Nixon administration.

Ms. HELEN THOMAS (Columnist): I think he had the Nixon administration nailed, very early on, for the abuse of government power.

SIEGEL: Longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas.

Ms. THOMAS: They were always able to finger him, because I think he touched a nerve in terms of his reporting.

SIEGEL: Later, Dan found out the White House had asked the FBI Director to start an investigation of him.

SCHORR: They asked J. Edgar Hoover to do a little check-up on me. Presumably to find something that would not help my reputation.

SIEGEL: David Wise picks up the story.

Mr. WISE: J. Edgar Hoover, whether because he was a clever bureaucratic fox or because he misunderstood isn't clear, but he decided to do what they call an "applicant-type" FBI background investigation, the sort of investigation they do when someone is up for a government job.

SCHORR: And so, the next thing you knew, there were 16 interviews around the country, done in one day.

SIEGEL: They didn't even know where to find you at this point?

SCHORR: So they looked up in Who's Who. In Who's Who they had my name listed as being a correspondent in Germany. It was not a very new Who's Who.

(soundbite of laughter)

And so the first message that went out to the FBI, went to the FBI station in Bonn, Germany. And then it came back, No -- Schorr no longer in Germany...

SIEGEL: Not for several years.

(soundbite of laughter)

So, an out-of-date Who's Who passed for good research material at the FBI in those days, in the 1970s.

SCHORR: That's right. I think it still goes on. And eventually, an FBI agent came up to the CBS office and asked to speak to me. I said, what's this all about? Well, sir, you must know that you're in line for a position of trust and confidence in the United States government.

(soundbite of laughter)

I never forgot that. I said, who -- me? I said, it can't be, I don't know of any job that anybody is considering me for in the Nixon White House. And they called the White House to say that I wasn't being cooperative.

You told Schorr that we wanted him investigated? Cut it out, right away. But then they said, it's gonna get into the papers. Let's do some damage control here. And one of them said, well crazy as it may seem, there's only one way out: we say we were in fact considering him for a job.

(soundbite of laughter)

Ms. THOMAS: His name was being floated around as a possible appointee. It didn't ring true, but it was a hot rumor at the time.

SIEGEL: And when the White House press spokesman actually confirmed the rumors for reporters like Helen Thomas, guffaws could be heard all the way up on Capitol Hill. Senator Sam Ervin, the crusty South Carolina Democrat who later headed the Senate Watergate Committee, said it showed that the White House was guilty of either stupidity or duplicity. In February 1972 -- that was before the Watergate Committee was established -- Ervin called Dan to testify before his Judiciary subcommittee.

SCHORR: And on August 19, and that is the day before the start of the FBI investigation, I was invited by the White House to a meeting with officials to hear objections to my report on the CBS Evening News on the previous day -- a report that raised doubts about the concrete effects of President Nixon's promise to assist the Catholic parochial schools in their financial plight. Now, to me it seemed highly doubtful that the administration would beef to me on one day and set the FBI on me the next day, if only because that in itself would set some kind of a bureaucratic speed record.

SIEGEL: Two and a half years later, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach President Nixon.

SCHORR: When the bill of impeachment was drawn up, count two was abuse of governmental power, and under that was the unwarranted investigation of Daniel Schorr, CBS correspondent.

SIEGEL: It was something that Richard Nixon never forgot.

SCHORR: Some twenty years later, I'm invited to a dinner where Nixon, just back from a trip to the Soviet Union, is going to give a report on Yeltsin and the Soviet Union. At the end of dinner, as he stood up to leave, I would walk up to him and I said, Mr. Nixon, I'm not sure you'll remember me. And he put his hand on my shoulder, Dan Schorr -- damn near hired you once.

(soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: Nixon may have made a wisecrack to Dan then, but two decades earlier, getting the president's attention wasn't so funny. Nixon had his White House counsel, John Dean, go after people he saw as his political enemies.

SCHORR: He ordered John Dean to draw up lists of people whom they would be sure to have the IRS audit, whom they might have the FBI unleashed against, and all of that. And when John Dean testified that he had written these enemies lists, of course our bosses back in the office said, Get the lists; we want the lists; who's on the lists? And eventually copies were distributed to us, and boy when we got those lists, we went very fast.

SIEGEL: There were twenty names.

SCHORR: 15th -- Stewart R. Mott of Mott Associates, described as nothing but big money for radic-lib candidates. That is Mr. Mott who is a General Motors heir and a philanthropist. 16th -- Congressman Ronald Dellums of California, who is black. 17th -- Daniel Schorr of the Columbia Broadcasting System, in Washington. The note here is "a real media enemy." Number 18...

SIEGEL: Years later, Dan talked with NPR's Alex Chadwick about what it was like, live on the air, to have found his own name on that list.

SCHORR: What went through my mind was, don't lose your cool. Be professional. Make believe the name you read was not your name, but the name of somebody else. Try, try to act normal, if you can.

SIEGEL: Facing impeachment, Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. But the actions of his administration were still in the news. What especially caught Dan's eye, and the eyes of his bosses at CBS, were pieces by New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh about various questionable acts of the CIA.

SCHORR: And so they said, well, it looks as though this may be your next assignment. Son of Watergate. The investigation of the intelligence community.

SIEGEL: Author David Wise, who has written broadly on intelligence and espionage, says one particular story Dan uncovered enraged people in power.

Mr. WISE: Dan had broken the story that President Ford was upset about the possibility of word leaking out that the CIA had planned assassinations of foreign leaders.

SIEGEL: Ironically, Gerald Ford himself was the source of the story. It turned out that the president had just named Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to head up a commission to investigate some of the activities of the CIA. There was a White House luncheon for the publisher of the New York Times and several Times editors; Dan wasn't there. But he learned about the president's conversation with the Times' top editor, Abe Rosenthal.

SCHORR: Ford said, when this committee goes in to examine the CIA, they'll have access to everything in the CIA. And, let me tell you, that they could turn up something a lot more serious than what they think they're investigating. Rosenthal said, like what? And Ford said, like assassinations. And a hush falls over them. It's a hell of a story -- CIA assassinations.

SIEGEL: At the president's request, the New York Times did not publish the story. But someone leaked it to Dan, and shortly afterward, in an interview with William Colby, the head of the CIA, Dan popped the question.

SCHORR: I said, Mr. Colby, um, did you people ever try to assassinate anybody? He said, Uh, not anymore. And I got on the air to report that the CIA had been involved in assassination conspiracies, one of whom was probably Fidel Castro. Who knows who else? The result was that the Senate committee which was investigating the CIA, headed by Frank Church, decided to do a crash special investigation on conspiracies. The next thing you knew, I had started something.

SIEGEL: Soon, the House of Representatives was conducting its own investigation. New York Congressman Otis Pike chaired the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Author David Wise says Pike's investigation was tenacious.

Mr. WISE: He dug deep, and found out a lot of things that the CIA had done, covert operations -- the betrayal of the Kurds in Iraq, involving Kissinger and a rug that had been given to Kissinger. And a lot of other things that many of the people in the CIA were appalled at the thought of being released to the American public.

SIEGEL: Pike and his staff put all that and more into a report that they expected would be made public.

Mr. WISE: But at the last moment, and rather unexpectedly, as I recall, the House voted to suppress the report. Now, Dan had been leaked a copy of the report.

Mr. SEYMOUR HERSH (Investigative Journalist): I hate the word "leak" because it always suggests there wasn't much work.

SIEGEL: Investigative reporter Seymour Hirsch.

Mr. HIRSCH: Dan got the papers because he had done so much work, and it wasn't an accident. I'm sure the people -- whoever they were -- knew that Dan would do his utmost to get it published.

SIEGEL: And he did. He turned first to CBS, of course.

SCHORR: I argued that we would do it the way the New York Times did the Pentagon Papers. They did a series of stories, and then they published the texts for those who wanted the historic texts. As I learned, television hates getting in trouble with a house of Congress. So they told me they would not support me. So, I had to do it myself. And that turned out to be the Village Voice.

SIEGEL: Dan sent the report to the Village Voice in a plain brown wrapper. CBS knew nothing. The Voice published it, in a 24-page supplement with the bold headline: The Report on the CIA that President Ford Doesn't Want You to See. The CBS bureau chief started asking questions. CBS had kept a copy of the report, so anyone there could have leaked it.

SCHORR: It's still a painful moment for me in this whole thing. When the report came out, when the Village Voice came out with the report, I was called into the bureau chief's office. Sandy Sokolow said to me, Does it mean anything that Lesley Stahl used to wait for her boyfriend to come and pick her up --

SIEGEL: Aaron Latham, who wrote for the Voice and for New York Magazine.

SCHORR: Aaron Latham, right. It's theoretically possible, since the thing appeared in the Village Voice and Aaron Latham works for the Village Voice, do you see any connection there?

SIEGEL: He asked you this?

SCHORR: Right. And I said, Hmm, who knows? I allowed him to entertain that thought. For one day. Next day, I decided that wasn't very honest of me. And I went into Sandy Sokolow's office and said, Forget what I said yesterday; stop looking for who it was. And so they knew within one day what the truth was, but found it -- for their purposes -- useful to suggest that I had not been very frank about it.

SIEGEL: And that you had contributed to casting suspicion on a colleague, Lesley Stahl.

SCHORR: That I had contributed to casting suspicion on a valued colleague.

SIEGEL: CBS took Dan off the air. And that was the end of his career with the network. The publication of the Pike Report became a national controversy. Dan was subpoenaed by the House Ethics Committee. David Wise.

Mr. WISE: It was a very dramatic moment when with his lawyer, Joe Califano, at his side and his wife, Lisbeth, with him, and the whole country watching, Dan appeared before the House committee and he was told he had to reveal the source of the Pike Report.

SIEGEL: Dan refused, even though he knew the committee could cite him for contempt of Congress, and he might go to jail.

SCHORR: And if you'll permit me one last personal word, beyond all this Constitutional argument, I would like to say that beyond all of this to betray a source would be, for me, to betray myself, my career and my life. And to say that I refuse to do it isn't quite saying it right: I cannot do it.

SIEGEL: Dan's son, Jonathan Schorr, remembers his parents preparing him and his sister for the worst. It was a hard thing for a nine-year-old to understand.

Mr. JONATHAN SCHORR: They'd just gotten done explaining to me that people, when they do bad things and break the rules and break the law, go to jail. And now they were having to explain to me -- both my parents were having to explain to me that Dad had done a good thing, but there were some people who didn't like that, and he might have to go to jail for doing a good thing.

SIEGEL: In the end, Dan didn't go to jail. The Ethics Committee did not cite him for contempt.

SIMON: All Things Considered host, Robert Siegel, speaking with Daniel Schorr at the time of Dan's 90th birthday. We're going to return to their conversation after this break.

(Break)

SIMON: From NPR News, this is a special report on the life of Daniel Schorr. I'm Scott Simon. Our NPR colleague, and our friend, Daniel Schorr has died at the age of 93. To remember Dan's life, we're spending this hour listening to excerpts from a conversation he had with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel at the time of Dan's 90th birthday.

SIEGEL: In May of 1979, Daniel Schorr's fortunes changed again. The Atlanta businessman Ted Turner had an idea, and he was hungry for the right journalist to help him get started. Dan got a call.

SCHORR: There was going to be a new Cable News Network, with news 24 hours a day. And that Ted Turner wanted to make me an offer to be the first person on board. I didn't at that time know what cable did or was.

SIEGEL: But Dan was unemployed at the time, and so he figured, Why not? And headed for a meeting with Turner in Las Vegas. Dan says he thought of Turner as a fast-talking Southern buccaneer, so he wanted some things in writing, up front.

SCHORR: He says, what do you want a contract for? I said, I think I need one. I would have right to veto any assignment given to me if I didn't think it accorded with my ethics and standards of journalism. I really didn't trust him.

SIEGEL: Dan got his contract, and in the spring of 1979, the veteran reporter of print and television paired up with the flamboyant media entrepreneur. Dan thought Turner was like his old boss at CBS, Bill Paley. Both had the same combination of business acumen, programming awareness, and a grasp of the possibilities opened by technological change. But Turner told Dan there was a practical problem -- at the time CNN went on the air, Washington, DC didn't have cable.

SCHORR: He said, how's your family gonna know what you're doing? I said, I guess that's right. Next day, I got a call and he said Mr Turner wanted us to put a dish in your backyard. Well, they did put in a dish that's still there. I was, for a while, the only person in Washington who could see cable television, because I was getting it directly by satellite.

(soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: CNN started broadcasting on June 1, 1980, with Dan's interview with President Jimmy Carter. In time, Dan covered the G-7 Summit, and the Republican Convention -- where CNN's inexperienced staff placed him and anchor Bernard Shaw too close to the band. CNN broadcast from Frankfurt when the Americans held hostage in Iran were released, and Dan did an investigative report on John Hinckley, who had attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. But then, another problem with management -- for its coverage of the 1984 Democratic National Convention, CNN wanted Dan to be a co-commentator with John Connelly, the former governor of Texas. Dan refused, and invoked the contract he had negotiation in 1979. William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times columnist, says that wasn't surprising.

Mr. WILLIAM SAFIRE (Columnist): Dan's greatest journalistic accomplishment is his standard of integrity. Within the organizations that he's worked for, he always has stood up to the top brass, as nobody else ever has. He didn't let Bill Paley push him around at CBS, or Ted Turner push him around at CNN, and I don't think anyone tries to push him around at NPR.

SIEGEL: In the end, Dan left CNN, and not without some friction between him and Ted Turner.

SCHORR: When I left CNN, I got a call the next morning from Bill Hedline, Washington bureau chief, and he said, Dan, they want the dish back. I said, well, I'll tell you I distinctly recall Ted saying, Let me give you a dish. And what does 'give you' mean? I consulted a couple of lawyers and I called back and said, OK I want a letter from Turner saying that he wants the dish. Secondly, since it was the first dish in Washington and people took pictures of it for the newspapers, they might want to take pictures of the dish being removed, and that might be very interesting around town. He said, OK, thank you, I'll get back to you. And then he called me back and he said, they say, keep the (bleep) dish.

(soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: A lot of people were watching CNN by the time that Daniel Schorr and Ted Turner parted ways in 1985. Dan was no longer essential to CNN, but he was becoming increasingly important to another network on the rise, National Public Radio, where he had been doing occasional commentaries for several years. In 1985, I was running NPR News, and I signed up Dan to a role that was novel for him -- senior news analyst. He would explain the news, not report it.

SCHORR: It very quickly became evident in NPR, there were those who valued me primarily, perhaps entirely, because I was a walking history book. You want to know about Nikita Krushchev? You want to know about Stalin? You want to know why Truman did this, and about General MacArthur? Ask Dan, he was there.

SIEGEL: The Spanish-American war? Well, ask Dan.

SCHORR: That actually happened. A colleague stuck his head into my office, Hey, Dan, excuse me. You covered the Spanish-American War, no? He saw the look on my face and he said, I guess not, that was earlier, huh? And you get an awful lot of people not quite sure, when was the Korean War, when was the Vietnam War? When did we do Panama? I enjoy it.

SIEGEL: Again, William Safire.

Mr. SAFIRE: He's remembered something that most of us have forgotten -- the importance of analysis and reporting when you are commenting. Both the anecdotes that he remembers from his history with these important people, and a certain wisdom that allows you to make judgments.

(soundbite of music)

SIEGEL: Dan is a regular on three of NPR's programs -- All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Saturday, and Weekend Edition Sunday, with host Liane Hansen.

LIANE HANSEN: One of the first big stories that we had to cover was the release of Nelson Mandela. This was happening live, and Dan and I were in the studio, we were watching the release as it happened, broadcasting it.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: And now Mr. Mandela walks through the gates; he's a free man at this moment.

HANSEN: I found it to be a real emotional moment. So much so, that as Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, I could feel myself starting to tear up, my throat starting to close just a little bit, and Dan Schorr just looked at me, in a very kind way said to me, Now remember, we're journalists here; our job is to tell the story.

SIEGEL: Dan says that at NPR, his editors have given him the greatest freedom of his career. One of his most forthright commentaries was aired on All Things Considered in December, 2000.

SCHORR: In Third World countries such as Pakistan, Chile, and Sierra Leone, a transfer of power is often accomplished by military coup. In an advanced country like ours, it's done by judicial coup. Admitting here to something less than cool dispassion, I marvel at the way the "gang of five," philosophically led by arch-conservative Antonin Scalia, tried to camouflage their 5-4 operation behind a nominal 7-2 agreement that there was something wrong with the Florida recount. That seemed to leave open a chance of fixing the system. The fix was in, all right, but a different fix. It suppressed the recount for good.

SIEGEL: Weekend Edition Saturday host, Scott Simon.

SIMON: When we get letters of complaint about Dan, they're almost always complaining about the zeal and glee with which he bites into a story. Grrrr, like that.

SIEGEL: Over the years, Dan's Saturday morning chats with Scott became a mainstay of Weekend Edition Saturday. Here's a recent example.

SIMON: Is it impossible for the G-8 Summit to stay on its agenda?

SCHORR: No, and this reminds me of 1982, when there was a G-7 Summit in Versailles with President Reagan there, and on the first day, Israel invaded Lebanon. The result was that all the things they wanted to talk about -- world trade and money, all -- had to give way because you had all the leaders of the countries which would have had to take positions anyway. Something like that, I think, is happening now.

SIEGEL: Covering politics and international affairs may be Dan's passion. But regular listeners to Weekend Saturday, as well as its host, are also familiar with Dan's total disinterest in sports.

SIMON: It's amazing for somebody who I believe grew up within four blocks of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, he is proudly oblivious to what happens in organized sports, year in and year out. With exceptions -- when it crosses the line into news. I'll never forget a late afternoon when Magic Johnson held his press conference to announce that he had tested positive for HIV and was going to be retiring from basketball, and it was shortly thereafter that we had our weekly Friday meeting with Dan to try to go over what subjects he wanted to talk about, and Dan said, Oh, no Scott, that's sports, that's you, you can write one of your little essays about it. And then Dan called me at home that night. And he said, You know, Scott, I've been watching the news, and it seems to me that the face, the visage, of this smiling young man, so personable, so charming, to now make itself the visage, the very image, the emblem of this terrible virus that is tearing our country apart. This, it seems, I think we've got to lead with this story, Scott. (laughter) Thank God, Magic Johnson is still among us. I will never forget, the next morning when Dan came in, we called him Mr. Sports. (laughter)

SIEGEL: Dan's ability to swing with the news punches wasn't lost on one NPR listener who thought that Dan might have something to offer his audience. The late Frank Zappa, the creative and eccentric rock & roll musician, like Dan, cared deeply about the political process.

SCHORR: One day, I was sitting at home. My daughter was in the same room, reading. The phone rings, and I'm saying, Frank who? Can you spell that? Z-A-P-- Lisa, meanwhile, has put down her book, her eyes have widened, and in a loud whisper she says, Daddy, is that Frank Zappa? And I put the phone in my chest, and said, Yeah, who's Frank Zappa? (laughter) He said he was coming to Washington and he would like to see me, he had a proposition to make to me.

SIEGEL: It was time for one of Dan's power meals. Zappa came dolled up in a pinstriped suit, with his hair tied back in a long ponytail. Dan came with his curiosity.

SCHORR: He was going to start a television program, late at night. One segment of it would be that he would be there with his band in Los Angeles, and I would be in a studio here, and the members of his band would ask me questions to find out what was really going on. And, I said, well, why me? And he said, because these kids want a guy who they've known, he's been in Watergate and all of that. Sure, I'd consider that, why not? And we finished lunch, we walked back to the NPR office, by now we were talking about music and people were passing by my office, and occasionally one would pass by, look in, and then his mouth would drop, and I think you were one of them.

SIEGEL: I was one of them. He described an idea he had. On his program, politicians would be speaking and then he would use video techniques to elongate their noses, depending on how much they were lying; it would be like Pinocchio.

SCHORR: I had forgotten that. In any event, ABC in the end did not go for this very brilliant idea.

SIEGEL: And, that was that. Sort of. When Frank Zappa came to Washington for a performance at the Warner Theater, he asked Dan to lunch again.

SCHORR: And at lunch, he said, You know what bothers me more than anything these days? That young kids don't vote. Now, will you come on stage with me at the Warner Theater and help tell kids they've got to go out and vote so we can get rid of this lousy bunch that's running this government. I said, yeah, I might be willing to do that. And then we came out, in glaring light on the stage, he said, and here's Dan Schorr, he's gonna tell you about -- you gotta get out and vote. And I did that, and finished, and he said, listen, while you're on stage anyway, would you like to sing something? And I, ham that I am, said, Yeah, I'd like to do that! He said, well what would you like to sing? I said, well I don't know whether your band can play what I want to sing. You try us. Something maybe from Porgy and Bess? OK, just let me hear a couple of bars of that. And I said, "It ain't necessarily so." OK, one more line. "It ain't necessarily so." He looks at the thing, they hit a couple of beats, not necessarily what it's supposed to be, but it gave you a sense that they were backing you up. And there I stood and sang from Porgy and Bess, "It Ain't Necessarily So."

(laughter)

SIEGEL: And the record will show that youth participation at the next election showed no dramatic increase as a result.

SCHORR: I guess that's right. On the other hand, I don't think we drove any away.

(laughter)

SIEGEL: Over these past 20 years at NPR, what stands out as the most important stories that you've been able to analyze for us, comment on, follow.

SCHORR: When I think of the things that stand out in my mind, it is being with colleagues on the air on a big, big event like the hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal. There were all these younger, but very bright people, sitting there hour after hour after hour ad-libbing. I found that that is more fun than anything I've written.

SIEGEL: Really, really? Being live on the air?

SCHORR: Being live on the air. It's a great thrill.

SIEGEL: Still?

SCHORR: Still.

SIEGEL: Well, a lot of us who have watched you, listened to you, and worked with you are very pleased with your career choice, and we're very proud of you here.

SCHORR: Thank you, it's been fun.

Mr. FRANK ZAPPA (Musician): Ladies and gentlemen, Daniel Schorr.

SCHORR: It ain't necessarily so. It ain't necessarily so. They tell all you chillen, the devil's a villain, but it ain't necessarily so.

Mr. ZAPPA: Everybody. Second verse.

SCHORR: Little Moses was found in a stream, little Moses was found in a stream. He floated on water til old Pharaoh's daughter, she fished him, she said, from that stream.

Mr. ZAPPA: Daniel Schorr, ladies and gentlemen, singer extraordinary.

SIMON: And that was Frank Zappa, introducing Dan Schorr to fans. I hope they were still fans at the Warner Theater in Washington, DC, a number of years ago. I'm joined by Robert Siegel, because we've been listening to his conversation that Dan had with Robert to mark his 90th birthday. Robert, we have a few minutes here. I want to tell one of the backstories of that meeting with Zappa, because as Dan recounted with you, we would walk by and we would look in there to see this man in a very well-tailored pinstripe suit and an enormous ponytail as I recall, hanging almost to the floor. Of course, Frank Zappa, and we rushed into Dan's office after Frank Zappa had left, to find out what it was all about. And Dan just looked up and said, Oh you know, Frank's a very intelligent man, a true artist. And we said, yes, of course. But Dan, have you heard his music? No, but he gave me these CDs, maybe I'll listen to a couple tonight. And I remember saying, Dan, if you haven't heard his music, how do you know he's a highly intelligent man? And Dan said, well, he came to ask me for advice.

(laughter)

SIEGEL: Listening back to those conversations I had with Dan a few years ago, as everyone can hear, I enjoyed Dan's stories immensely, and it was great fun to talk with him and to listen to him. And I'm reminded of that again. And the other thing, Scott, that I'm reminded of is that in all those stories about covering Khrushchev, getting the interview, covering the Nixon White House and Watergate, you know that in the doing, Dan was the most tough-minded, competitive reporter -- nothing could be more serious to him than getting the story and getting it right. In the retelling, though, he was so full of irony, he was self-effacing and so amusing in the telling, you could almost think he hadn't taken it that seriously. Not so. This was a great reporter.

SIMON: Yeah, you know I'm reminded, those of us who've worked with him -- who've been blessed to work with him over the years -- um, he kept his elbows sharp until the very end. He was -- if his segment of the show had to be cut by 10 seconds, you would hear about it. And I remember once saying to him, I forget -- some news event had broken and we had to make extra time and I said, Dan, look, nobody gets cut on this show, you know, than I do. I mean, it's like the mob -- you can't complain about it, this is the life we have chosen, and sometimes they cut our time. And Dan said, you know, Scott, I admire your attitude. I don't share it, but I admire it.

SIEGEL: It's been, to me, it's been a great honor to remember this voice on the radio, this man on the television, who told me that a wall had gone up in Berlin when I was I was 14, and then to have been his colleague all these years, and to have had a wonderful friendship with a man 30 years my senior, as you did, was just a great treasure. I will miss him.

SIMON: A great national treasure for this country, and of course, the millions of people who gotten to know him here. Robert, thanks for being with us.

SIEGEL: Thank you, Scott.

SIMON: Robert Siegel, of course, the host of NPR's All Things Considered. Our colleague and friend, Daniel Schorr, was 93 years old. And this has been a special report on the life of Daniel Schorr, from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.