Staying Tuned

"My first job at NPR was as Dan’s assistant. It was toward the end of his career, his last 13 years as a working journalist. He worked right up to the day he died last summer [age 93]. I had this incredible opportunity to learn from this guy, who was a living legend. Dan was not the kind of boss who would take people aside and offer bits of wisdom. He was the kind of person who probably thought that would be presumptuous. The way he taught you was by making demands for excellence. His standards were very high. They weren’t always pleasant demands, but they were important. He was uncompromising in the best way. I had skimmed through it before, but I only fully read Dan’s autobiography after attending his memorial service last summer. I already knew the contours of his life – that he’d opened up the first American TV news bureau in Moscow, about his interview with Khrushchev, how he was eventually kicked out of Russia. What I didn’t know were the personal details. A lot of people thought of him as the consummate insider, always with a seat in the inner circle, always going to the White House and meeting with the presidents and getting background briefings. He wasn’t at all. He was the opposite of that. He was an outsider in almost every way. Even at CBS. Many of the guys he worked with at CBS were Ivy League patricians. Dan was a scrappy, Bronx-born, poor Jewish kid, who didn’t have a dad. Many of the other Jewish reporters he worked around at CBS in the 1950s did everything they could to hide it. Dan didn’t. He was who he was. I think that’s probably why he was so effective at finding out the truth and getting it from people. Dan wasn’t the kind of journalist who called people up asking for favours. He didn’t cultivate sources by schmoozing and going to cocktail parties. He wasn’t good at small talk, and he didn’t suffer fools. He was just a really serious and honest reporter, committed to exposing wrongs and falsehoods. People went to Dan to tell him things because they knew he could understand the gravity of what they had to say. Dan had this amazing ability – he outlines it a little bit in the book – of being able to discern how important a truth was. People also knew he wouldn’t betray them as a source. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Another part of Dan – and this really goes to the core of who he was as a journalist, and what all of us should aspire to be – is a very short story he tells towards the end of the book. He was working for CNN and in 1984 they asked him to be a commentator for the Democratic and Republican conventions. He was told he would be paired with John Connolly, the former Texas governor and Treasury Secretary under Richard Nixon. Dan said, ‘I’d be happy to interview John Connolly, but there isn’t a chance in hell that I’m going to sit on the same side of the table as Connolly.’ He says he told his bosses at CNN that ‘putting a journalist with a politician is like mixing apples and oranges.’ If you think, when you turn on television today, how many ex-politicians and political operatives have rebranded themselves as news analysts and sit on the same side of the table as working journalists, it seems almost quaint to read Dan’s objections. But he was right. He was right then. He was right now. It cost him his job. CNN didn’t renew his contract a year later, but Dan wasn’t willing to play that game."