Description:
Long a familiar face to American television-news viewers, and more recently a familiar voice to public-radio listeners, Daniel Schorr recounts his 60-plus-year career covering some of the most significant events of the last century. Schorr knew that he wanted to be a journalist from a very young age, though his mother worried about her son entering a profession that required no advanced degree. ("Isn't it a little like being an actor?" she asked, presciently, given the shape of modern broadcast news.) Schorr's narrative begins before the Second World War, when, the son of Russian immigrants, he combed the streets of New York looking for news stories and eventually talking his way onto the staffs of newspapers and wire services. He had a gift for being in the right place at the right time, breaking news in the summer of 1941 that pointed to an impending war with Japan and reporting on the hostilities that followed the creation of the state of Israel, among many other events. That gift served him well as he rose through the ranks of foreign correspondents, eventually joining CBS and heading the network's bureaus in Bonn and Moscow, where he came to spend more time talking with Nikita Khrushchev than he would spend with the American presidents he was later charged with covering. Schorr had another gift: a particularly fine ability to irritate those who came under his scrutiny, from John Wayne to John Kennedy, from the KGB to the FBI. "It may be that I am just hard to get along with, but to me it always seemed that some principle was involved." Irascibility and high principle alike mark this memoir. Readers who grew up listening to Schorr's reports on such matters as Watergate and the Berlin Wall, as well as students of journalism and history, will find it illuminating. --Gregory McNamee
| 
