Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (112 page)

And in case after case, by demanding notes and files and sending reporters to jail for not revealing sources, courts in effect have ruled that they have the power to enforce publication of what reporters and editors feel should
not
be published, because the information is either confidential or simply inaccurate, untrustworthy, or damaging to innocent people, just raw material.

In totality, courts now have ruled themselves overseers of essential decision-making processes of the free press that the First Amendment was designed to safeguard from government encroachment—what to publish, when to publish, how to operate, what to think….

I do not think there is a plot against the press on the part of the courts. I
do
think that there is a resentment against the press that comes from many things. I do feel that most of that resentment comes from the virtues rather than the failures of the press, the unpleasant virtues of telling the people the truth about Vietnam, Watergate, corruption in government or in business, the aggressiveness and cantankerousness which are part of our makeup and function.

We annoy the hell out of people. And we have our faults, by God, we have our faults. There are scores of publications I wouldn’t read, let alone work for. And there are a few for which I have loathing and contempt.

But there is a difference between resenting the press or even loathing it and trying to control it.

The First Amendment was written not to protect the press from the
admiration of government but from the loathing of government, all branches of government.

Courts and the press are involved, it seems to me, in two philosophic differences. One is that some judges feel that it is incumbent upon them to protect what the government says for the national security of the United States. National security usually turns out to be a matter of political or diplomatic interest or plain embarrassment. The price of prior restraint, a fancy way of saying judicial censorship, strikes me as a very expensive price indeed to pay to save government face.

Remember what the government said would happen if we published the Pentagon Papers? National calamity, revelation of state secrets, disaster upon disaster. The government position was a fraud, and the government, I believe, knew it….

As Judge Harold Medina once put it, any judge who knows his business and who has a stiff backbone can afford a fair trial without any invasion of the freedom of the press.

In that speech of his, Judge Medina laid it pretty heavily on judges who he thought violated the First Amendment. He also laid it pretty heavily on reporters and editors and publishers who were too quick to compromise. He gave them a piece of advice: “Fight like hell every inch of the way.”

Well, we are fighting, and it seems that almost every time we turn around there is a new battle to be fought.

One had to do with the seizure of the telephone records of our Atlanta bureau by the Department of Justice. They were not investigating us; they were investigating the Ku Klux Klan, which we also had been investigating, without informing us or giving us a chance to fight. Southern Bell bowed to a subpoena of the Department of Justice and turned over all the records from our Atlanta bureau and from the home of our bureau chief. The purpose of the subpoena was to find out who our reporters were talking to.

This clandestine investigation of a reporter’s work is a clear violation of the spirit of the First Amendment. I’m happy to say that that particular threat has been considerably eased. Because of complaints from the press and the bar, the Justice Department issued new guidelines that made unnotified seizure much less likely….

The press is not asking for privilege. That word implies some special gift to be bestowed upon the press or withheld from the press at somebody’s discretion, a judge’s or a legislator’s or a policeman’s. No, we are not talking about the privilege of the press, but the right and ability and duty of the press to function in any meaningful sense.

Yes, this all concerns editors, reporters, and publishers, but I beseech you to consider that this concerns each of you as citizens of a country based on freedom of thought and expression.

Every individual American has to ask herself or himself some questions:

Please think about it. If your answer is “No, I don’t want that kind of society,” then fight like hell every inch of the way.

Dan Schorr became famous as a CBS television correspondent, a member of the team Edward R. Murrow assembled, which is remembered by broadcast journalists with the awe that Yankee fans show in recalling their “Murderers’ Row.” Schorr was never a go-along, get-along type, even within his company: his uncompromising integrity led to clashes with CBS boss William Paley and later with CNN boss Ted Turner. What he called his “inescapable decision of journalistic conscience” led him to broadcast and publish a report by the House Intelligence Committee that the House had voted to suppress; in a dramatic confrontation that affected press freedom in Washington, he faced down the irate committee, which decided not to pursue him for contempt of Congress.

On October 3, 1991, in celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday a month before, National Public Radio—proud to have him as its senior commentator—gave a party at the Smithsonian Institution’s “castle.” To an audience of politicians, friends, and fellow journalists, Schorr proceeded to reminisce, as if off the cuff; as the structure of the speech shows, however, the extemporaneous remarks were thought through in advance. The combination of a startling fact about his early career and a surprising ambivalence about what seemed to be such clear-cut judgments in his later career gripped the audience; it was one of those speeches, excerpted here from a transcript of the tape, that offer food for thought to both sources and broadcasters long after it is delivered.

***

…LET ME MAKE
to you a couple of confessions, and maybe you’ll learn a little bit about how I view a profession that is very, very dear to me, but part of an industry about which I’ve learned to have a great many reservations.

First confession: I actually never really intended to go into broadcasting at all. All my young life what I wanted was to be a newspaper reporter, especially a foreign correspondent, and most especially, a correspondent for the
New York Times
. Back in the very early 1950s, I was a stringer for the
New York Times
, in Holland, writing assiduously. Finally, I went to New York and said, “You know, I really want to be a staff correspondent for the
New York Times
.” The managing editor asked me to go through a trial period in New York to see whether I could cover local news as well as foreign news, and I did. Finally he said, “Go back to Holland. I think we’re going to do it. It’ll take a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, and then we’ll appoint you to our staff.”

Time passed, and I wasn’t appointed to the staff. In the midst of my waiting, there came this cable from this man, Edward R. Murrow, of CBS, for which I had done a few broadcasts. A cable I can remember as though it were yesterday. It said, “Would you at all consider joining the staff of CBS News with an initial assignment in Washington?”

Flattered though I was to be asked, I thought, well, this is radio, television. This is entertainment stuff. This isn’t really for me. So I sent a cable to the
Times
, to Turner Catledge, the managing editor, and said I was wondering when this appointment was going to take place, because I’d had another offer, which I might have difficulty refusing unless we could sort of settle a date. And, to my surprise, a cable came back saying, “We suggest you take this other offer.”

So I said okay. And I joined the staff of CBS. A year or so later, visiting New York, I was invited to dinner by two editors of the
New York Times
: Emanuel Friedman, the foreign editor, and Ted Bernstein. assistant managing editor. They said they had a confession to make to me. “You probably wonder why you didn’t get the job on the
Times
that was promised to you.” And I said yes, in fact, I did wonder what had happened there. “Well, it’s been weighing heavily on our consciences, and we’ve decided to tell you. What happened was that, just about the time you were to be appointed, the
Times
decided to freeze the hiring of Jews because, in case it became necessary to cover a Middle Eastern war, they had too many Jewish correspondents. That freeze lasted about six months, and during that time, your appointment came up. That is why you were not appointed to the
New York Times
.”

And so that was how my career was shaped….

That leads to my second confession. Having looked with the disdain that real newspaper people had for this entertainment thing called radio and television, I began to enjoy it in part. And that bothered me. I recall asking a CBS producer for advice. I said, “Tell me, I can write a story, all right, but what is the secret of success for a journalist in television? I mean, how do you do it on television to make it work?” And he said, “The secret of success in television is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made….”

But I haven’t told you my gravest confession of all. You will understand that I have the reporter’s ethic—perhaps mystique—that I cannot stand in the way of information getting to the public. People can keep secrets, and, certainly, governments. But once I know, it’s not a secret any more. And then I cannot be the arbiter of what the public is allowed to know. In principle, I do not suppress news.

On one occasion, during Watergate, when I was getting a lot of exposure on CBS, a taxi driver taking me to the airport in New York turned around to me and said, “Mr. Schorr, I’ve seen you on television. Why don’t you tell us what’s going on in Washington, what’s really going on?” I said, “How do you mean? I really do my best.” And he said, “Nah, but you people know things, you know all these big shots, and you’re all in bed together, and there are things you don’t tell us.” I said, “Believe me, I’m not an insider, some people call me a quintessential outsider.” (You might not think that looking at this audience tonight.) But it always has been important to me that I don’t decide what the public should know. If I know, then the public should know.

I acted on that premise in 1976, when I had a copy of a report that the House Intelligence Committee had drafted, but which the House of Representatives, in its wisdom, decided to suppress. It developed that I now had the only copy of this report in the “free world.” I not only divulged its contents in stories on CBS but then felt it was my duty to see that the whole report was published. I got into a lot of trouble—and at one point faced the threat of being cited for contempt of Congress—because of my principle that I don’t suppress news.

Yet, a couple of times in my life I did. I’m not sure yet that I did right, but I did it. I’ll tell you one of those episodes.

In 1957, I was in Poland working on a documentary for the CBS “See It Now” program. In the course of wandering around Poland for a couple of months, I came to a place in eastern Poland, a small town, where I saw an amazing sight. A bunch of people with horse-drawn carts on which their possessions were piled, like a scene from
Fiddler on the Roof
. I went up to them, and soon realized that they were Jews. I didn’t speak Polish,
so I spoke to them in Yiddish, and they addressed me in Yiddish, and they explained to me that they were going to Israel. That was quite remarkable, because in 1957, Jews were not being allowed to leave Soviet bloc countries to go to Israel. So I did interviews with them on film in Yiddish—nice little vignettes to go in this documentary of Poland today after Stalin. But I needed to know how this had been arranged.

Returning to Warsaw, I asked the Israeli minister how Jews were getting out of Poland to go to Israel. He asked, “How do know about that?” I said, “Well, I met some. I interviewed them.” “Where?” he said. And I said, “Well in this town. In eastern Poland.” He said, “Well, if you know that much, I’ll tell you more, and then you can decide what you will do.”

You see, the Soviet Union, at the end of the war, had occupied a part of Poland containing many Jews. They didn’t want to stay there. And an arrangement was worked out among Israel, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Jews there could be “repatriated” to Poland, with the understanding that they would almost immediately leave for Israel, because Poland didn’t want them. The Soviets, worried about reactions among their Arab friends, had stipulated that if the arrangement became known, it would stop immediately. “So,” said my Israeli minister friend, “that’s the story. If you want to go ahead, go ahead. But if you do, that’s the end of Jews getting out of the Soviet Union.” I said well, I’d have to see what I’d do about that.

This was all on 16-mm film, and we were shipping rolls of film every day to New York as part of this program that we would structure later. And I kept this roll of film there on my desk. I thought to call Murrow and see what he thought—couldn’t call on an open telephone. And so the film remained with me in Poland. I didn’t ship it. We finished the program; it went on the air. I came back to New York and saw Murrow, and said to him, “I think I’ve got to tell you something.” And I told him that story. And he said, “I understand.” Not quite approving. Not quite disapproving. Just saying, “I understand.”