Revered broadcaster provides surprisingly shallow history/autobiography (bgoodday's Helping Hands Write-Off)
Written: Jul 20 '01 (Updated Mar 17 '03)
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Pros: Daniel Schorr is a man of conviction who has witnessed important history.
Cons: You'd hardly know that from his book.
The Bottom Line: People who admire Schorr passionately might find something worthwhile here. Everyone else is better off waiting for a book about him by someone else.
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| eplovejoy's Full Review: Daniel Schorr - Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalis... |
Daniel Schorr describes himself in his autobiography as the "recording secretary" of his generation. It is an unfortunately apt analogy. Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism reads like the minutes of a long meeting.
Schorr's uncharacteristically flat prose provides an outline of his career and of many of the significant events of the second half of the 20th-century, which Schorr covered for CBS, CNN and National Public Radio. But his recounting of his history and the world's is so shallow that it, like notes taken for minutes, is helpful mostly as a reminder to those who were there. Anyone who expects Schorr to convey a sense of what it was like to be a distinguished correspondent in Khrushchev's Russia, Adenauer's Germany or even Nixon's Washington will be disappointed. In a memoir Schorr said he "had" to write to "help people remember an era fast disappearing," Schorr provides nothing to help his readers understand what he has seen.
Schorr saw, for example, the hearings in the 1950s on alleged Communist infiltration of the United States government. Schorr writes that he watched Senator Joseph McCarthy "destroy" a government worker whom Schorr had known in Europe. He says it was a "chilling" experience. But in the mere four sentences Schorr writes about the trials, he adds no detail to the historical record. His reporting consists almost entirely of quoting lawyer Joseph Welch's famous admonition of McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of shame?"
That quote is familiar to anyone interested in the history of the era. And Schorr quotes it incorrectly. Welch said, "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Shame on Schorr. Reading his glancing and inaccurate citation serves only to leave the reader wondering in frustration why he bothered to mention it all.
That frustration will become depressingly familiar to anyone who wades through all of Schorr's 349 pages of fleeting references and vague descriptions. It taints also his contemporary account of his coverage of Watergate, which made Schorr a familiar figure throughout the U.S. There is nothing in his chapter on the White House coverup that led to Richard Nixon's resignation that hasn't been reported elsewhere in more detail. Schorr's reporting of Watergate and other stories infuriated Nixon and earned Schorr a spot on the president's infamous "enemies list." That list was revealed to Congress by former White House counsel John Dean and reflected Nixon's goal to target those who antogonized him: "Stated a bit more bluntly -- how we can use the Federal machinery to screw our political enemies."
Schorr's inclusion on that list could be the subject of a fascinating book by itself. But Schorr's treatment of it in Staying Tuned is cursory.
What interested me was that paranoid word enemy, an ominous new concept in American political life where opponent, adversary, and rival had sufficed before. I do not know what tax audits and possible break-ins would have lain in store for us "enemies" (with other lists they totaled 499 names) had Nixon not soon become preoccupied with his own survival.
That conclusion could have been written by any casual observer of Watergate, and the reader of Staying Tuned gains nothing from Schorr's having been involved personally.
This is true of Schorr's description of every single event he covered then and mentions now. Schorr's recollections of reporting from the U.S. South as it was torn by racial strife in the early 1960s are absolutely empty. His memories of covering Germany during the time that the superpowers struggled fiercely and dangerously over control of Berlin are notable only for their extraordinary accomplishment of making the Atomic Age anxieties sparked by the conflicts seem unimportant and uninteresting. Schorr's contemporary account of his years of reporting from the Soviet Union during some of the hottest years of the Cold War so lacks vividness that it could have been written by someone who got no closer to the country than Moscow, Idaho.
Schorr fails to give his readers any sense of the people he met. He spent years covering Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and decades later call him a "friend." He says their acquaintance was "remarkable," but provides no explanation. The reader is left to conclude that its only remarkable feature is that two men could be civil to each other while their countries were hostile. Schorr's conclusion after Khrushchev is dead: "So, Nikita Sergeyevich, in the end they buried you." That epitaph has been offered by hundreds of writers who never met Khrushchev.
Schorr's squandering the opportunity to describe such familiar figures as Khrushchev is not as maddening as his refusal -- it is too constant to be accidental -- to provide details about other people he covered, people who are not as well-known to contemporary audiences. Konrad Adenauer defied the Nazis when he was mayor of Cologne, and he went on to shape much of the foundation of modern Germany while he served as the country's chancellor. But Schorr shares little of his insights into Adenauer's character and reports nothing new about his actions. Schorr's conclusion after Adenauer dies in 1967 is to note "the contrast between [John F.] Kennedy, cut off in his youth, and Adenauer, who had outlived his era." That observation is so obvious that it is insulting to require a reader to invest time and money to reach it.
Students of journalism will find Schorr's memoir no more satisfying than will students of history. He was, briefly, a visiting professor until he realized that he is not interested in shaping the minds of disinterested students. Sadly, he is no more interested in educating interested readers.
Schorr was thrust into a spotlight when the U.S. House of Representative's Ethics Committee threated in 1975 to hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to reveal his source for a secret government report about the Central Intelligence Agency's illegal involvement in espionage in the United States. Schorr writes that he absolutely could not reveal his source, but he leaves it to his readers to guess the reasons for his deep conviction and to try to divine the philosophy behind it. It is profoundly unsatisfying that a man celebrated for representing freedoms of the press should require that we project on him our own ideas about those liberties.
Schorr is as inscrutable about his thinking in other instances where circumstances challenged his commitment to reporting. For instance, Schorr was a reporter in the Netherlands in the early 1950s, when that country's membership in NATO was important but tenuous. After Princess Juliana reluctantly assumed the throne from her phenomenally popular mother, Queen Wilhelmina, she sought guidance from a religious leader whom Schorr calls a "fanatic" and compares to Rasputin, without providing any support for the charges. Schorr has come to be fond of the Dutch and worries that his article about the spiritual leader's influence might harm their country. So he asks Time magazine to kill the article. Later the government of the Netherlands gives him a medal in appreciation. Does Schorr regret his decision? Why? Or why not? Did this incident affect his decisions later in his career? To these and other questions, Schorr is resolutely indifferent.
Schorr criticizes a 60 Minutes segment about him by Mike Wallace as a "hatchet job" without sharing any corroboration for so damning an indictment of one of his former colleagues. And he lambastes Dan Rather for living in a "luxurious glass house" while throwing stones at journalists who don't do their jobs properly. But Schorr keeps to himself any suggestion of how he would have handled things differently if he were in their positions. Whatever Schorr sees from the journalistic high road he claims to travel, he keeps it to himself.
Occasionally Schorr quotes himself to good effect. He thought Oliver North was a charming liar during his Iran-Contra testimony in 1987. "As they taught us in school, magnetic North should not be confused with true North." And of Boris Yeltsin's rise to power, Schorr notes, "The Gorbachev era in Russia comes to an end with a singular inelegance, looking less like a succession than an eviction." But these bits at the end of his lengthy and lifeless account serve mostly to remind the reader that Schorr's prose throughout almost the entire book is plain and flat.
Schorr promises that his chronicle will be more about his career than his personal life. And while Schorr doesn't go into extensive detail about his life off-camera and away from microphones, he ironically manages to tell his readers more about his family than he does about his reporting. An ulcer hindered his social life for years, and it was only after surgery to repair it that he was able to meet the woman he loves. Schorr was 50 years old when he and his wife, Lisbeth, married. His mother was nervous. When A.M. Rosenthal, executive editor of The New York Times compliments her about her son's marrying so intelligent and beautiful a woman, Schorr's mother answers, "Believe me, Abe, I would have settled for a lot less."
But there are very few sparks like that. More typical is his being mystified that Bill Clinton learns that Schorr's wife's is nicknamed "Li." How does the president know that, he wonders. Gosh, Mr. Schorr, perhaps she told him during the long conversation you report they shared. And, gee, perhaps you could ask her for real rather than asking your readers rhetorically.
The first two hundred pages or so of former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham's memoir are like Schorr's book because Graham, who died this week, mentions events without describing them. It is as if she and Schorr shared a reticence that is not as common today as it was when they were being raised about 80 years ago. But Graham's narrative in Personal History picks up after she gets past her husband's fatal mental deterioration and other personal pains. By the time she gets to the controversies surrounding The Post's coverage of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, her account is lively and illuminating. The Pulitzer Prize awarded to the book could have been a lifetime achievement award for Graham, except that her chronicle deserves its accolades.
But any prizes that Schorr receives for Staying Tuned actually will be for his entire body of work over a long and rich career. He has given his readers a superficial and dull book that deserves no awards of its own. He has left to some future biographer the task of crafting an adequate volume about him. Schorr has led a remarkable career and lived a full life, but in his book he leaves them unexamined.
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For the second year, Epinions member bgoodday has organized a Helping Hands Write-Off. Participants donate the proceeds from their reviews to organizations that help make the world a better place.
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