Clearing the Air, by Daniel Schorr
Cropsey, Seth
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Clearing the Air, by Daniel Schorr" American, for whom he was to cover nearly every major story of the Roaring Twenties. The Fowler legacy of hijinks, hell-raising, tomcatting, and donnybrooking, along with top-notch reporting,...
...Still, Schorr was angry at having been left out of the postmortem, angry that Nixon had slipped away without a final drubbing, and he clung to his suspicion that CBS management had dictated the attitude of its news stars...
...The Christian Democrats are direct descendants of those Italian Catholics who fought diligently against unifying Italy in the last century...
...Every time I urinate there is a rainbow over the bedpan...
...This virtue had led to other flaps in his career...
...But perhaps Smith's campaigning is justified...
...Italian police are usually the most harmless and demoralized in the world, which should be a point of pride for progressives everywhere...
...Schorr leads up to the CIA-CBS affair with a career sketch and remarks about the proper function of a reporter...
...But Schorr doesn't offer an intelligent or even reasonable explanation of CBS's actions...
...For his own part, Fowler reassured the concerned: "I am aware of the surgical consequences that sometimes attend this type of operation...
...It might be useful to ask, for instance, why the Pike committee retreated so quickly from its investigation of the leak to Schorr...
...Thus, while Schorr's unpleasant character pervades the book, that is not the real problem with it...
...Further study had convinced him, however, that efficiency could be put to use even by upright socialists, and henceforththe Minister of the Budget planned to thump for it strenuously...
...According to Schorr, CBS worried that in resigning Nixon would attack the media...
...fifties...
...Giolitti once admitted to La Repubblica that for years he, economic wizard that he was, had thought "efficiency" to be a device peculiar and essential to bourgeois exploiters...
...He is also one who gets it...
...Was this a dilemma for him...
...That committee accomplished nothing...
...Nor were they anxious to keep a man of proven disloyalty around, or one who was simply a pain in the neck...
...Schorr did not apologize for this last botch...
...Several years ago he drew up the government's five-year plan, argued for it with customary socialist ardor, and then voted against it in Parliament when his socialist colleagues came down with a seizure of Marxist purity and stepped out of the governing coalition...
...Hence they are never really sure whether they are of thegovernment or not, a mental state that makes governing tricky...
...Evidently, Schorr is a man who aches for odium...
...Indeed, some time later, when word leaked out that Fowler was in search of an expert cutter for the family jewels, reaction was swift and excited...
...He rambles off, captivated by the idea of himself as defender of the First Amendment...
...Yet listening to his colleagues after the speech he could not help but feel that, except for Roger Mudd, they had all gone soft on Nixon—and he concluded that the conciliatory tone of Cronkite et al., had been governed by network executives, grateful and relieved to have escaped Nixon's parting salvos...
...BOOK REVIEW Clearing the Air Daniel Schorr / Houghton-Mifflin / $11.95 Seth Cropsey Sometimes an author's personality over- shadows the events he writes about...
...He is a troublemaker...
...Friendly expected responsible reporting and told Schorr that he had saved his job from an angry William S. Paley...
...CBS was furious that its own correspondent had gone to a hostile newspaper...
...Since reading this "distortion" Eric Sevareid has not spoken with Schorr...
...Though most of the contents had already been published and televised, CBS shrank from the report itself "as though it were a plague...
...Not only do they scowl at the open society, industry, and private initiative, but many among them suspect all this to be sinful...
...At the least, one would like to know why CBS refused to come out with the entire report...
...It is mostly Schorr's account of what happened when he leaked a congressional subcommittee's secret report on the CIA—and how the ensuing fuss led to his dismissal by CBS News after a 22-year career...
...As Nixon was announcing his resignation, Schorr' s first thought was to holler "you deserved it you bum...
...The CIA story fell to Schorr coincidentally...
...His later troubles with CBS over the CIA report grew out of the same failure to distinguish between the rights of government and employer...
...By January 1976 Otis Pike's House Intelligence Committee had drafted a 340-page report on CIA operations from Vietnam to Iraq, including footnotes on a film of Indonesian President Sukarno having sex in Moscow...
...Yet no one can laugh at Italy with clear conscience...
...The socialist magic has worked its wonder...
...Intelligence and freedom are on the run everywhere on the 36 The American Spectator May 1978...
...For Schorr, "reality" in political affairs is seldom, if ever, the way participants perceive it...
...He survives principally in the glass jars that Literature provides for its own: biographies, memoirs, and fiction (in Fowler's case the MacArthur-Hecht play The Front Page...
...He was tossed out of Russia for disobeying censorship restrictions in the Seth Cropsey is a researcher-writer at Fortune magazine...
...Truly, Italian government is more ludicrous than Georgian government...
...Bugs Baer, a Fowler cohort facing a similar fate, engaged Fowler in a ribald game of Can You Top This, writing Fowler: "The doctor chalks my cue with cocaine...
...He went to the Village Voice, the story appeared, and made a splash...
...began to look upon himself as a man whose writing talent had gone down the drain...
...It became a Big Story like Watergate, and for a reporter whose "keenest enjoyments" came from unearthing the secrets of the powerful, this was a chance for ecstasy...
...A string of autobiographical and biographical works (including a tome on John Barrymore, Good Night Sweet Prince) brought Fowler a degree of renown, as a slew of Hollywood screenplays brought him prosperity, but the greater prize of satisfaction eluded him...
...As it turned out, he wasn't given a chance...
...My favorite Italian politician, and actually one of my favorite politicians in the whole wide world, is Sr...
...Clearing the Air ultimately fails because it fails to illuminate...
...The Left-Socialists are even more muzziheaded...
...They are probably the most politically naive socialists in Europe, living as they do in academic reveries from which they take leave only for a quotidian requirement of pasta and vino...
...Of course his problem is not in taking sides—since the "reality" of an issue is sometimes grasped by one of the disputants—but in assuming the same side will always be wrong...
...he is pious, indignant, angry, moral, humorless, self-righteous, often incompetent, virginal, messianic, and liberal...
...and, by the way, whether I was in Rome, Paris, or London thoughtful Europeans would lower their voice's and respectfully inquire as to what was wrong with the Carter administration—"Is he stupid...
...Too much sadness has been wrought by cowardly and vicious children of the once credulous...
...Schorr saw red...
...They have no sense of the needs of a modern state...
...The committee scheduled it to be released on the last day of January, but the Housevoted decisively to wait for presidential approval before making it public...
...Referring to his own Watergate coverage, he says, "I was aware that I was consistently more pointed in analysis than most of my colleagues, but I knew no other way to conduct myself...
...This caused no major problems at CBS—until the resignation, when Schorr's open antipathy for the President combined with his self-appointed role as First Amendment Protector to run him afoul of the network executives...
...Unfortunately, when a lawyer noted that his employers were within their contractual rights, Schorr wasn't listening...
...A mixture of self-pity, self-justification, self-infatuation, and a great dose of huffy First Amendment righteousness, the book is one long wail...
...He prefers "the people" as opposed to their representatives, and makes a virtue of this prejudice...
...Congress might worry about national security but "as a reporter I marched to a different drummer...
...And it fails to illuminate because Schorr is so wrapped up in himself that he cannot usefully observe what has been close to him...
...He thought he was being censored (false) as he had been in Moscow (true...
...They came to power with the anti-government mentality of the left-wing underdog and have never quite abandoned it...
...The media made it clear that, although they might criticize Schorr, they would not stand for an investigation of his source...
...One thing led to another and before long, according to Schorr, "the press...had stimulated Congress to expose the errant ways of the intelligence agencies...
...In the Watergate summer of 1972, Schorr had decidedinstantly that Nixon was guilty...
...Schorr got a copy of the report a few days after it was written...
...Aware of possible risks, I had no doubt where journalistic duty lay...
...Perhaps this explains Smith's efforts to insinuate Fowler into a higher rank of literati, in the manner of a moviehouse usher sneaking a friend into the matinee...
...Antonio Giolitti, the fragrance of whose botches is typical of politicians in both of these antique political parties...
...rigorists would ask...
...Too many innocent citizens have been butchered by common thugs...
...But on the afternoon of Nixon's speech, the network somehow learned this would not happen, and Schorr was cautioned not to be vindictive...
...So different, in fact, that not even CBS executives could hear the beat...
...The Socialists and Christian Democrats were nearly a decade ahead of the other western powers in humanizing their Servizio Informazioni Difesa (SID), a combination of our FBI and CIA...
...This explanation is as implausible as Schorr's desire for more criticism of Nixon was vengeful...
...There, it was a government, here an employer...
...And he is unequivocally an ass, as Fowler himself would have been the first to point out...
...In exchange for a little more disgrace heaped on the CIA, Schorr showed that a House committee is incapable of keeping secrets, and in so doing lessened the chance that such a spectacle will occur again...
...Soon after, a House ethics committee voted to investigate the original leak to Schorr...
...The newsman of today venerates the Geraldo Riveras, the "Woodsteins," and Brit Humes...
...Schorr does not...
...While Minister of the Budget, Sr...
...and after he incorrectly reported that Barry Goldwater wanted to "link up" with the German right wing in 1964, Goldwater cancelled CBS interviews, saying he would not "talk before a CBS microphone again...
...He had been given general assignments after Watergate and the CIA's Chilean operations was among them...
...No one leaked about the leaks, and when Schorr arrived to testify the committee nearly gave him an award for protecting the Constitution...
...His achievements left him doubting, but there was more of bewilderment than bitterness in his musings of later life...
...Giolitti had taken on a large task, yet who would ever put anything past him...
...A remark or two like this could be overlooked, but the book positively wallows in them...
...Instead, he had words with Fred Friendly, the president of CBS News...
...But CBS didn't need a correspondent who was himself a news story...
...Despite protestations that "this is not a critical biography," the attempt to freeze Fowler as another icon on the shelf in the Hall of Neglected Geniuses is rather blatant, and somewhat patronizing...
...and while there is some troublemaker in all journalists, the sensible ones know the difference between goading employers or colleagues, and public figures...
...Perhaps they reckoned that the CIA is not your usual leaking agency, that the best and only hope for further information was Pike-like committees, and that such committees would lose all credibility if their entire reports routinely fell into media hands...
...Judging from these stories and the relish with which he tells them, it is clear that Schorr thinks the measure of a good journalist is the number of important people he offends...
...However, should my voice change, I can get a job at the Boy's Choir at St...
...In fact, one suspects that his narrow vision, limited as it is by a need for self-aggrandizement, may be responsible for the very opposite of what he intended by publishing the CIA report...
...He "vented [these] suspicions with unpremeditated candor" at a Duke University speech from which a Washington newsThe American Spectator May 1978 35 letter published "a totally distorted version...
...The memory of this man who swashed so magnificently across our journalistic landscape, seeming always to be living in the teeth of a wind, and loving every minute of it, is growing dim...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) the amazing feat of bringing into one government perhaps the two most implausible political parties of modern time, the Italian Christian Democrats and the Italian Left-Socialists...
...And when CBS found out what Schorr had said, they told him that future speaking engagements would have to be cleared in writing...
...As Smith comments, "It seems clear that Gene Fowler, in his later years...
...Italy with all its culture, its craftsmanship, and its inestimable charm is being transformed into a Hobbesian state of nature, where even the Communists fear to govern...
...I have the only male organ on earth that is a narcotic addict...
...Schorr followed the story's unravelling with the rest of the pack, bounding ahead once with his disclosure of foreign assassinations...
...Schorr, "aware of the irony," as he puts it, denounced the leak which exposed him as the source...
...Sebastian's...
...Then the tale of how the Voice got it came out and made a bigger splash...
...So Schorr was left holding a paper which the House of Representatives classified as a confidential document...
...When they published photographs of the suspects it turned out that two of the culprits were already in jail and two other photographs were of the same man...
...But Schorr would not be stopped...
...Mindful of the Great Constitutional Issues, Schorr retorted, "if [my job] had to be saved, it isn't worth saving...
...Hardly...
...I suppose we owe him some sort of thanks for that...
...He writes that, "The word 'reporting' was always closely associated in my mind with reality," but it is hard to take him seriously since he also declares that his "keenest enjoyments...came from finding out something that people in power didn't want known...
...They dream of medieval grandeur and still hold the notion that capitalism is a Protestant heresy...
...So Schorr was quietly fired—or as he says, banished to the "ultimate unreality" ofbeing off the air, a state in which he remains...
...Clearing the Air by Daniel Schorr is a good example...
...Black shrouds, it was joked, decorated every whorehouse west of the Mississippi, and a famous madam wired Fowler that the President should declare southern California a disaster area...
...Most likely, his colleagues realized the gravity of the occasion and responded appropriately...
...The Fowler legacy of hijinks, hell-raising, tomcatting, and donnybrooking, along with top-notch reporting, survived his migration eastward...
...Fowler did not age gracefully...
...There are excellent reasons for wondering whether this man's experience raises any serious issues...
...When Moro was abducted it took police nearly an hour to seal off the city of Rome...
...President Kennedy wanted CBS to take him off assignment in Germany because his reports were causing tension between the two governments...
Vol. 11 • May 1978 • No. 7
