IN THE LIONS' DEN

Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism
by Daniel Schorr
Pocket Books. 368 pages. $26.95

BY WALTER GOODMAN

To the degree that a reporter's success can be determined by his run-ins with employers and sources, with presidents and other politicians, Daniel Schorr's career must rate him some sort of award for contretemps. Whether out of a matter of principle or a case of disposition or indisposition or just inadvertence, the high and low points of his new autobiography, Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism, have to do with his encounters with power.

From the time in 1953 when he was rejected for a job on The New York Times because of the paper's brief freeze on hiring more correspondents with Jewish names, to many years later when he was in effect fired from CBS, where he had become the last surviving member of Ed Murrow's fabled team, and then hired and fired by CNN, in whose birth pangs he had shared, he seemed unable to keep a job even after holding it for years, or to part amicably from it. His many encounters with officials of various nations, most notably Richard Nixon, brought him considerable celebrity, and a commotion about the leak of a classified document almost got him a contempt-of-Congress charge from a congressional committee.

As he recounts these matters in his generally engaging memoir, he seems often to have been taken unaware by the way he managed to get involved in recurrent scrapes. Anyway, the good news as far as television journalism is concerned was that at the age of thirty-nine, Schorr found himself covering Moscow for CBS as part of the estimable Murrow team (Sevareid, Smith, Burdett, Kendrick, Hottelet, Schoenbrun), an experience that serves as a window into the strains and burdens of reporting from the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era, when the Kremlin was trying to figure out where exactly the line could be found between liberalization and repression. The censors seem to have had as much trouble as the correspondents.

These years, for all their frustrations, make for droll copy. Schorr's greetings from his KGB overseer, an apparatchik of the Soviet Journalists Union named Boris, sets the tone. Boris showed up with a bottle of vodka and proclaimed: "Well, Mr. Schorr, here's mud down your hatch!" In his jousting with the censors, Schorr relied on his superior acquaintance with the American idiom. He slipped in his skepticism about the size of an announced Kremlin troop cutback by reporting "Tell that to the soldiers, tell it to the sailors and above all, tell it to the marines." When the Soviets cancelled a trip to Siberia because of a series of nuclear bomb tests, it gave American correspondents an opportunity to crack in private that they were probably "the first people to be exiled from Siberia."

After a while, Schorr managed to master the rules of the game. He explains: "One could quote speeches calling Stalin 'arbitrary,' but not 'tyrannical.' One could quote a Russian worker who said, ' I still think Stalin was a great man,' but not a taxi driver who said, 'They talk about him that way because he is dead, but if he were alive . . . .' When I referred to the people under Stalin as 'the long-suffering Russians,' the long-suffering was deleted. When I wrote of Stalin's victims being 'posthumously rehabilitated,' the word posthumously was excised."

Given the shaky Soviet-American relations and his changing assignments, Schorr became by turns a leading Khrushchev watcher, an Adenauer watcher, a Kissinger watcher and, later, a Gorbachev watcher (which gives him an excuse to tell of the Russian who exploded, after waiting on line for hours for a bottle of vodka: "I'm not taking this anymore; I'm going to go and kill Gorbachev." Two hours later, he returned and was asked what happened to his idea to kill Gorbachev. He reported, "Oh, that line was much longer").

When he wasn't being frustrated in Moscow, Schorr knocked around Europe, covering The Netherlands, the Iron Curtain countries and Germany, where he produced vivid accounts of the building of the Berlin wall. He described for listeners to CBS Radio a confrontation of Soviet and American tanks: "So here is this incredible picture of these war machines pointing flower-festooned guns at each other while cameras grind and Berliners eat pretzels."

In an interview with the East German Communist party boss, Walter Ulbricht, Schorr's questions about Stalinism drove Ulbricht to stalk from the room, a grand made-for-television moment. For his work in Germany, Schorr was awarded West Germany's Grand Cross of Merit. When years later, this gaudy adornment caught the eye of Vice President Bush at a white-tie, "full-decorations" Gridiron affair, Bush turned to his wife and asked, "Barbara, why don't I have any of those?"

It was Schorr's return to Washington in the 1960s that elevated him into the nation's most renowned Nixon watcher. He attributes that accomplishment to his dissent from the prevailingly soft CBS line on Nixon when he criticized the new president's scrapping of President Johnson's war on poverty.

Schorr gives himself high marks for irritating residents of the White House: ". . . my penchant for probing beneath the surface of things and my visibility on television seemed to generate irritation all the way up to the Oval Office." A clash with Nixon -- "this media-hating, paranoid control freak" -- may have been inevitable, but he only belatedly realized that his reporting attracted the "hostile monitoring" of the administration and its hatchet man, Patrick J. Buchanan.

Along the way, Schorr reminds us that he was responsible for eliciting one of the great quotes of the age from an interview with Roman Hruska, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who defended Harrold Carswell, a rejected Nixon Supreme Court nominee, from the charge of mediocrity. Hruska put it this way: "There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?"

As Schorr recounts his big run-in with the Nixon White House, the FBI was assigned to digging up dirt on him on the highly unlikely pretext that he was being considered for an administration appointment. The story made page one of The Washington Post: fbi probes newsman critical of president.

Schorr found himself on an "eyes only" list of twenty Nixon "enemies." The list's purpose, as John Dean elegantly elaborated, was to use the federal machinery "to screw our political enemies." Schorr, who became CBS's chief Watergate correspondent, calls the episode a precursor to Watergate, "sharing the pattern of illegality, cover-up and eventual unraveling that became the hallmark of the larger White House conspiracy."

This flurry of fame apparently put him on a collision course with his masters at CBS, ending his career there after almost a quarter century. Details of the final confrontation remain controversial. Schorr charges that he was under pressure from the network higher-ups who had reached a deal with the White House to be kinder to Nixon as his resignation approached. He writes that he was turned down for several juicy assignments, only to find himself at the center of a new dispute over the leak to The Village Voice of a classified House Intelligence Committee report about C.I.A. activities. When he declined to reveal the source of the leak, he was accused of endangering secret operations and, some critics asserted, of selling an official document for profit. For a time he had reason to fear winding up in jail for contempt of Congress. CBS fudged about coming to his defense.

Whether Schorr was defending the First Amendment or endangering the national security remains an unsettled question, since readers get only his side of the story. His not implausible explanation for the failure of his bosses and colleagues to stand up for him goes like this: "I learned what I should have long since known -- that a television network, operating in a regulated environment, concerned about its local affiliates and advertisers, does not display the same First Amendment courage as a major newspaper." He adds that he was fired "in a weird star-chamber proceeding that clearly reflected fear of Congress and the CBS affiliates."

What he calls the "the anti-Schorr faction in CBS" -- prominently abetted by Mike Wallace, whose 60 Minutes report on the leaked-report episode put Schorr in an unfavorable light -- carried the day. His consolation, along with a generous buy-out, was finding his name as the definition for "TV reporter" in The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle.

It is understandable that Daniel Schorr should use his book to support his positions in the controversies to which he seems to have been prone, and it is tempting for a reader to cheer him on as the voice of journalistic independence against political and commercial assaults. But in his role of advocate rather than analyst, Schorr deprives the reader of the sort of cool assessments of chronic issues that ought to be high among a journalist's responsibilities. As for his lapses into self-appreciation, they are not becoming, as when he writes about his tendency to make enemies: "It must mean something that, unable to accept the dictates of my bosses, I ended up in confrontations with Bill Paley after a quarter century at CBS and with Ted Turner after six years with CNN." Let others write such blurbs, Dan.

It is all very well for a reporter to shield himself with claims to upholding the First Amendment, but there are other claims, whether of individual privacy or national security, that warrant some solicitude. And there is a temptation for on-screen personalities to stretch their franchises and indulge in editorial writing, polemic and opinion-mongering of various sorts. By wrapping himself in proclamations of superior virtue and attacking the motives of others ("Unable to adapt myself to corporate tugs on the reins"), Schorr ducks issues on which his experience and intelligence might have cast more light.

Still, as things go in television journalism, Schorr takes the high ground in holding out against pressures and temptations to play the corporate game. His periodic troubles, although framed self-defensively, attest to a constitutional independence, much to be valued as network news keeps getting softer and cable keeps getting ever stupider and more strident.

Staying Tuned, like the Schorr career, ends on a somewhat anticlimactic note. There he is, at CNN, once again attributing his falling out with authority to ulterior considerations. (He reports learning that Ted Turner was playing up to conservatives to raise money for an attempt to take over CBS.) Anyhow, after a few years, he was fired, and CNN asked him to give back his satellite dish.

Now in his eighties, Schorr does weekly commentaries for National Public Radio. (For some reason, he neglects to mention that he also writes regularly for The New Leader.) He announces, "I have found the promised land." Good luck, but don't bet on how long this happy relationship will last.

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Walter Goodman is a critic for The New York Times.