S
chorr died Friday at Washington's Georgetown University Hospital after a brief illness, said his son, Jonathan Schorr.
Daniel Schorr's path through the news business began in print, then led to almost three decades in television with CBS News and the fledgling cable network CNN.
By the time of his death, he was best known as a longtime senior news analyst and liberal commentator on National Public Radio. He also wrote several books, including his memoir, "Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism."
Bill Moyers, who like Schorr had stints at CBS News and in public broadcasting, said Schorr was a model of integrity.
"At NPR, he exemplified the very best of public broadcasting by refusing to be intimidated by either official funders or partisan thugs who besieged the brass in protest of his honest reporting," Moyers wrote Friday in an e-mail. "With razor-sharp wit, personal courage, and love of our craft, he distinguished himself and journalism."
CBS "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer said if not for Schorr, he doesn't know what reporters would have done to get stories about Watergate. "When Watergate came along, he kept us in the game," Schieffer said.
"He was a model for us all," Schieffer said. "I've never seen anybody who just enjoyed reporting a story as much as he did. He just loved it."
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."
Schorr's stories pointing out weaknesses of the administration's programs so angered Nixon that he ordered an FBI investigation of the reporter, on the pretext that 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" - against Nixon.
In White House recordings from 1971, Nixon and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman discuss a tax investigation of Schorr in the Oval Office.
"You take a fellow like this Dan Schorr, he's - I notice - he is always creating something, isn't he?" Nixon said.
"Oh ... He incidentally is on - you don't, shouldn't get involved in this, but he's on our tax list, too," Haldeman said.
"Good," Nixon replied.
"They're going after a couple of media people," Haldeman said. "They're going after Dan Schorr and (Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Star columnist) Mary McGrory."
"Good," Nixon said again.
The recording was made available by the University of Virginia, which is transcribing and annotating the secret Nixon tapes.
Schorr said he figured he became such a thorn in Nixon's side because his newspaper background gave him a bluntness rare on television.
Later in life, Schorr cherished his Nixon coverage, his son said.
"He had nothing more than the truth to go up against the president of the United States," the younger Schorr said.
Still, he and Nixon were "extremely cordial" by the end of Nixon's life, Jonathan Schorr said, "and my dad loved that."
Schorr became part of the story 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.
