WNPR Reporter Remembers Dan Schorr

NPR‘s Senior News Analyst Dan Schorr died today. WNPR’s Nancy Cohen has this remembrance.

I met Dan Schorr in the Fall of 1993 when he came to Harvard to deliver a lecture. He explained to the audience with a smile, that the word “leak” had changed from being an intransitive verb to a transitive one. What ensued was a thoughtful discussion about leaks that are true secrets and leaks that are authorized for a political purpose.

At the time I was earning a masters degree at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Somehow I had been given the honor to meet Schorr at the airport and to accompany him the 50 yards from his hotel to the lecture hall. I’m not sure why Harvard thought Dan Schorr couldn’t find his own way, but it gave me another chance to speak with him and his wife, Lisbeth.

A few months later I contacted Dan Schorr when I was in Washington and he graciously took me to lunch.

Before studying at Harvard I had been working in television for about a decade. I had produced a couple of public television documentaries, but the bulk of my work was as a sound recordist on network camera crews. Knowing how to handle a microphone had allowed me to travel to places like the war in Sarajevo, to Cuba to record an interview with Castro, to the rainforests of Guatemala and to Gorbachev’s Russia. I told Schorr about this over lunch and how I hoped, now, to make a career change and become a radio reporter.

As I sat across the table from him, Schorr shared something that made me squirm, but which was immensely constructive. He said that I didn’t seem especially proud of my sound recording experience. His observation gave me the confidence to embrace my technical knowledge and harness it in my new work as a reporter. Since then I’ve learned that despite his status as a Senior News Analyst Schorr made a point of appreciating the work of the audio engineers who supported him.

Not long after that lunch, I began working at NPR. In 1995 when I was editing All Things Considered it was my job to edit Dan Schorr’s commentaries. Something that had me shaking in my boots. Imagine changing one of his words. When I did he argued forcefully against it. But in the end Dan let me do my job.

In recent years when I’ve heard Dan Schorr on the radio I stop what I’m doing, turn up the volume and lean in. I have valued what he has to say, not only because he says it so well, but because it‘s drawn from his hard-won experience --- from what the rest of us think of as ‘history’.