Daniel Schorr, R.I.P.

Dead at 93. Daniel Schorr was the only decent person on the public radio for a long time. I'll miss him.

Veteran reporter and commentator Daniel Schorr, whose hard-hitting reporting for CBS got him on President Richard Nixon's notorious "enemies list" in the 1970s, has died. He was 93.

Schorr died Friday at a Washington hospital after a brief illness, said Anna Christopher, a spokeswoman for National Public Radio, where Schorr continued to work as a senior news analyst and commentator.

Schorr's career of more than six decades spanned the spectrum of journalism — beginning in print, then moving to television where he spent 23 years with CBS News and ending with NPR. He also wrote several books, including his memoir, "Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism."

Schorr reported from Moscow; Havana; Bonn, Germany; and many other cities as a foreign correspondent. While at CBS, he brought Americans the first-ever exclusive television interview with a Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1957.

During the Nixon years, Schorr not only covered the news as CBS' chief Watergate correspondent, but he also became part of the story. Hoping to beat the competition, he rushed to the air with Nixon's famous "enemies list" and began reading the list of 20 to viewers before previewing it. As he got to No. 17, he discovered his name.

"I remember that my first thought was that I must go on reading without any pause, or gasp or look of wild surmise," he wrote in his book "Clearing the Air."

"I do not know how well I carried off my effort to appear oblivious to the discovery of my name on an ominous-looking list, but I count this one of the most trying experiences in my television career."

Schorr's stories pointing out weaknesses of the administration's programs so angered Nixon that he ordered an FBI investigation of the reporter — saying he was being considered for a top federal job. That investigation was later mentioned in one of the three articles of impeachment — "abuse of a federal agency" — adopted by the House Judiciary Committee against Nixon.

He said he figured he became such a thorn in Nixon's side because his newspaper background gave him a bluntness rare on television and an antagonism to the "stage-craft, image-making and slogan-selling" that Nixon favored.

Schorr became part of the story once again in 1976, when he arranged for the publication of an advance copy of a suppressed House Intelligence Committee report on illegal CIA and FBI findings.

At the time, Schorr called it "an inescapable decision of journalistic conscience" to see that the report ended up in print. To his surprise, reaction from his own colleagues in the media was negative, because Schorr had handed the report over in exchange for a donation to a group that aids journalists in First Amendment issues.

My emphases.