Daniel Schorr, 1916–2010

It was 1973, and the Senate Watergate hearings had the nation’s full attention. Covering the hearings for CBS News, Daniel Schorr landed a scoop so hot that he didn’t have a chance to fully digest it before he went on-air: President Nixon, Schorr reported, had compiled an “enemies list” of 20 prominent people deemed to be threats to the administration. As Schorr recited the list, he was shocked to find that it included his own name, as enemy No. 17. “I remember that my first thought was that I must go on reading, without any pause, gasp, or look of wild surmise,” he later wrote.

Schorr made more than a few enemies during a journalism career that spanned eight decades, said The Wall Street Journal. Born in the Bronx, N.Y., to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Schorr got his start in the news business at age 12, “when he sold an item to the Bronx Home News about a woman who was killed in a plunge from the apartment building where his family lived.” He gave his $5 fee to his mother, who was struggling to support the family after the death of his father. He went on to edit the student newspaper of New York’s City College, and then joined the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, an international news agency serving Jewish community newspapers. During World War II, he served stateside in an Army intelligence unit and later worked for a string of newspapers and news agencies. His tenacity and drive caught the attention of Edward R. Murrow, who was then assembling a team, including Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, for CBS’ nascent TV news operation.

Schorr quickly made a name for himself at CBS, said the Chicago Tribune. He landed the first U.S. television interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, but was soon kicked out of the Soviet Union as a “provocateur.” He won Emmys for his Watergate coverage and a Peabody for his 1967 documentary, The Poisoned Air. But in 1975, he clashed with the network after he obtained and reported on a draft report by a House investigative committee that included the bombshell allegation that the CIA had carried out assassinations of foreign leaders. Schorr tried to persuade CBS to publish the report in its entirety, and when CBS balked, he slipped it to New York’s Village Voice. CBS executives investigated the leak, and Schorr did not correct their impression that his colleague Lesley Stahl had been behind it. Schorr narrowly escaped a contempt of Congress citation when he refused to name the person who’d given him the report. The next year, he and CBS parted ways.

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After “a brief and disappointing stint as a journalism professor,” said The New York Times, Schorr returned to television thanks to Ted Turner, who was preparing to launch CNN. Schorr became the network’s first employee, and he insisted on an unusual contract clause that promised he could refuse assignments that he believed would “compromise his professional ethics and responsibilities.” He invoked that clause before the 1984 Republican National Convention, when CNN wanted to pair him with former Texas Gov. John Connally to offer political analysis. Protesting that Connally was a newsmaker, not a journalist, Schorr refused the assignment. By 1985, he was gone from CNN.

Schorr spent the final years of his career at National Public Radio, where he regularly commented on the news, working until shortly before his death. He often said that it made him “terribly nervous” not to work. His entire career, he explained, was driven by a simple motto: “Find out what they’re hiding.”