Once upon a time, in a weird country called the United States, there lived a devious, a paranoid president named Richard Nixon, who nobody really liked and who really never liked anybody, and who was so criminally insane that kept a secret list of “enemies”—those he felt were out to get him and his administration.
And, once upon a time, being a journalist on such a list was considered a badge of honor because it meant that you had the fortitude and integrity to stand up to a man who would practically stop at nothing to control the flow or shape of information, and did things like threaten to jail journalists and sent burglars to ransack a psychiatrist’s office to defame an “enemy” or the rooms of his political opponents at Washington D.C.’s Watergate Hotel and whose National Guard troops blew away students at Kent State with M-16s.
One of those guys sufficiently fearless and fierce to land themselves on Nixon’s enemies list was Daniel Schorr, who never let up, and pretty much always called them as he saw them. Today, he filed his last dispatch at age 93. That’s a pretty good run for anybody, but especially for a tough old guy in a witheringly tough business.
We’ll miss him.
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