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Comment by puckettd: Saturday, August 21

Thank you for remembering my grandmother and father. Donna Puckett, Jonesville NC...read more...

Obituary: Lorna Jo McBee, 14

Comment by AvidReader: Thursday, August 19

With loving prayers for the Mc Bee family. Your friends and family care deeply....read more...

Lincoln, Garrard eye regional detention center

Comment by AvidReader: Thursday, August 19

This issue is really confusing for me...some of the candidates at the last forum supported the idea....read more...

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Anyone who was buddies with musician Frank Zappa, arrested and briefly imprisoned by the KGB and ranked number 17 on Richard Nixon’s enemies list, is OK by me, but Dan Schorr, legendary newsman and First Amendment advocate, was far more than the sum of his associates; as a senior news analyst for National Public Radio for the last two decades, he was a constant companion, a reassuring voice and a model for an aspiring newsman. I didn’t always share his opinions, but his dogged reporting was spotless.

Schorr was born in New York City to Russian immigrant parents during the Great War. His parents, Russian Jews, immigrated to the United States in 1914, and an immigration officer gave the family, previously known as Tchornemoretz, the new name, Schorr.

Schorr was a born newsman. He made his first five dollars at age 12 breaking the news of a woman who’d either jumped or fallen from a building in the Bronx. He learned his craft in the print media on high school and college papers and worked for the Jewish Daily Bulletin after graduating from City College, writing reviews of sermons by famous rabbis and interviewing celebrities arriving in New York by ship, but he also wrote hard news and got a taste of investigative journalism at the Tribune.

Schorr was most proud of a six-part series he wrote on rackets Jewish syndicates were running in New York and his coverage of the nascent American Nazi movement.

Schorr relished his dangerous assignment as a Jew covering crowds of Americans, “Heiling Hitler and threatening the extermination of American Jews.” Schorr’s editors ate it up; the Jewish Daily Bulletin’s circulation was driven by fear of the Nazis. Schorr was a star there until the paper folded during a pressmen’s strike, but he worked for the paper’s parent organization and The Associated Press until he was drafted into the Army during World War II.

During the war, Schorr served stateside in Army Intelligence and never deployed to a combat zone. It wasn’t until the war ended and Schorr mustered out that he got to see the battlefields of Europe by taking a job as a radio reporter there. Impressed by his work, legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow recruited him to join CBS and a team of intrepid correspondents known as “the Murrow boys.” Schorr opened CBS’s first bureau in Moscow and scored a major coup by interviewing Nikita Khrushchev and relentlessly pursuing him on several points.

In 1957, the Soviets refused to renew Schorr’s visa, and he returned to the U.S., quickly scoring prime assignments and, as one biographer wrote, “including several years making himself a pain in the ass at the White House under the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who actually telephoned Schorr one night to call him a 'prize son of a bitch.'” Schorr rankled the Nixon administration so badly that FBI agents were sent out to dig up dirt on him, and Nixon’s Special Counsel Chuck Colson put him on the enemies list. In NPR’s obit for him they note, "Schorr … counted his inclusion on it as his greatest achievement.”

In the late 70s, Schorr joined the Independent Television News Agency that was subsequently purchased by Ted Turner, and Schorr was CNN’s first news anchor when the network went on the air in 1979. Schorr was fired in 1985 and subsequently joined NPR where he filled a number of important roles, mostly serving as elder statesman, supporting and grooming ascending younger journalists. Schorr was still on the air July 10, only one week before his death.

Throughout his career, Schorr received many honors and accolades, including three Emmy awards, but his most important contributions were always in pursuit of the freedom of the press. After receiving and leaking a classified copy of the Pike Report, a Congressional investigation of FBI and CIA misconduct, including assassinations, he was threatened with jail if he did not reveal his source. Schorr told the committee investigating the leak that "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.”

Schorr died in Washington on Saturday after a short illness and is survived by his wife of 43 years, Lisbeth, and two adult children. Dead at 93, Daniel Schorr, RIP.

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