Everybody remembers the good old days. Time tends to filter out the rest. But after 91 years, 12 presidents and seven decades in the news business, Daniel Schorr doesn’t seem to have filtered out much.
The measured, confident voice with a touch of gravel that exudes confidence in his commentaries for National Public Radio transfer uncommonly well to the printed page.
It’s hard to read this essay collection — “Come to Think of It: Notes on the Turn of the Millennium” — without imagining his voice.
He doesn’t preach and he doesn’t thump a tub for a cause. But his observations, usually tightly summed up at the end of each short piece, give us pause to think about who we are, who we were and what we’re doing — especially what we’re doing. Schorr concludes with gentlemanly poise that, too often, people who should know this haven’t a clue.
“So why this book?” he asks. “It has to do with my sense that we threaten to be overwhelmed with information, and we frequently do not have the ability to understand what it means.”
A few snippets from Shorr, a longtime CBS News mainstay whom Edward R. Murrow hired:
Domestic issues: “Indeed, the old phrases like ‘guns versus butter’ and ‘belt-tightening’ have a faintly archaic ring when we’re talking about those who are often beltless as well as butterless.”
The government is a mess: “Americans seemed happy to support candidates from Jimmy Carter on, and especially Ronald Reagan, who ran on platforms of contempt for governments. So if the government turns out to be contemptible, who should be surprised?”
The status of Peace on Earth in 1992 (an annual fixture, often pessimistic): “Maybe skeletal children and bloated bellies are not the same as war. But certainly they are not peace.”
About Hillary Clinton’s White house role in the 1990s: “At most every Washington cocktail party, people ask knowingly, ‘So what about Hillary?’ and it comes out sounding like a Russian nobleman asking, ‘So what about Rasputin?’ “
Clinton and Bosnia: “His bold initiative in American moral as well as political leadership has put him out on a perilous limb. There is no easy way back from a commitment to American power.”
Scandal-mongering: “A news analyst has a professional obligation not to duck scandal when it involves the public interest … not just an interested public.”
Press freedom: “I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.”
Political flip-flopping: “Consistency is the hobgobin of little minds. Show me a politician who has stuck to his position through thick and thin and I’ll show you a politician who cannot be trusted to represent our interests in a changing world.”
In all, Shorr’s essays tend toward slight pessimism borne of experience. But Shorr is not a curmudgeon in the style of, say, H.L. Mencken, and he says there are some things he might change now.
He thinks the 17 years of essays, dating back to 1990, charted a new era of history and allowed him to make tangled events understandable.
So when the publishers approached him with an idea that might give his thoughts some posterity, he agreed to do it.
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