Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

by Nora Ephron

  Cousin Arthur shook his head. “I should have done the ad,” he said. “It would have been a thrill to see myself on television. Let’s be honest about it. Everyone wants to be recognized.”

  “But you are recognized,” I said.

  “Only by family and friends,” said Cousin Arthur.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “My sister Delia’s cabdriver recognized you.”

  “What did he say?” said Cousin Arthur.

  “He said, ‘Isn’t that guy on TV?’ ”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Cousin Arthur. “That’s not really being recognized.”

  May, 1976

  Daniel Schorr

  At the CBS Washington bureau, they are trying to keep straight faces over what has happened to Daniel Schorr, but it’s not easy. Schorr is not a popular man, and there are a lot of people who are thrilled that he has been caught committing the journalistic sins of coyness, egomania and self-service. These sins are, of course, common to all journalists, which is no excuse for getting caught at them. Nonetheless, his colleagues might have gritted their teeth and supported Schorr but for one thing: he panicked and attempted to shift the blame for what he had done, tried to implicate one of his co-workers in the deed, and that gave everyone the excuse they needed to abandon him entirely.

  The issue of character probably should not intrude on a First Amendment case, but when it comes to Dan Schorr it’s difficult to leave it out. Schorr insists that his problem ought to be shared by the journalistic community, that we must all hang together or we will most assuredly hang separately. As he put it recently: “It serves CBS, and it serves me, and it serves you—because whatever happens to me will someday happen to you—that we preserve a united front now. I really feel a little bit like the alliance in World War Two, where De Gaulle and Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill sit down and say, You know, we’re going to have some problems, but let’s lick the Nazis first.…” This is an extremely peculiar metaphor, but the part that interests me is not the equation of Nazis with the House of Representatives but the phrase “whatever happens to me will someday happen to you.” It is quite probable that what happened to Dan Schorr happened to him precisely because he was Dan Schorr. There are elements of the story, in fact, that are reminiscent of Appointment in Samarra, or any novel the theme of which is that a man’s character is his fate (or, put another way, that the chickens always come home to roost). The plot is a simple one: a reporter whose obsession with scoops occasionally leads him to make mistakes develops an obsession about a secret document and makes several terrible blunders that lead to his downfall. What happened to Dan Schorr is a real tragedy, but only because he did so much of it himself.

  To recapitulate: Schorr, fifty-nine, a CBS reporter since 1953, managed to make a Xerox of the Pike Committee report on the CIA a few days before it was scheduled to be released. He broadcast several stories based on it. Then, a few days later, on January 29, the House of Representatives voted not to release the report. Schorr discovered he was the sole possessor of it, and set about getting it published, preferably in a paperback edition for which he would write an introduction. He asked his boss, CBS News head Richard Salant, whether any of CBS’s publishing subsidiaries were interested and sent Salant a Xerox of the report. After a few days, Schorr realized that CBS was dragging its feet, so he contacted the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The committee put him in touch with its lawyer, Peter Tufo, who was also a board member of New York Magazine Company, which owns The Village Voice. Tufo and Schorr’s business agent, Dick Leibner, struck out at two paperback houses—neither of CBS’s publishing subsidiaries was contacted by them or Salant—and Tufo then made a deal with New York editor Clay Felker to publish the report. Felker agreed to make a voluntary contribution to the Reporters Committee, which he subsequently failed to do. In any case, the Reporters Committee had reversed ground and said it would not accept payment.

  Schorr, meanwhile, had lost control. The report was about to be published in The Village Voice, which had recently printed an uncomplimentary article about Schorr. For that reason, and to protect his source and himself, Schorr decided to abandon the idea of doing an introduction. “Once you start down a certain line,” Schorr said later, “the steps by which one thing leads to another come very swiftly, and suddenly you’re totally wrapped up in it. You want your copy published and not somebody else’s. You find yourself saying, ‘By God, I don’t care if this appears in Pravda as long as it appears.’ In the end you’re amazed at how far you’ve come from what you originally wanted to do.”

  But what did Schorr originally want to do? These days, he says that his sole concern was getting the report out in public. “I had to consider whether I was going to cast the final decisive vote to suppress that report.… I would have been the one who prevented the American people from seeing a report that had been paid for with four hundred fifty thousand of their tax dollars.” But that is only part of the story: Schorr was also concerned with getting the credit for his scoop. And he got his wish. On Wednesday, February 11, the report appeared in The Village Voice, with an introduction by New York writer Aaron Latham. On Thursday, February 12, Laurence Stern of the Washington Post published an article linking the report to Schorr. The New York Times denounced Schorr in an editorial, the House Committee on Ethics announced it would investigate him, and CBS suspended Schorr from his reporting duties.

  The story so far is an exercise in bad judgment and bad form—neither of which ought to have cost Schorr the support of his colleagues. But it gets worse.

  On January 29, the night the House voted to suppress the report, Schorr was at a reception at the Israeli embassy, where he saw his friend Harry Rosenfeld, the Washington Post national editor. Rosenfeld, whose paper had not been able to obtain access to the report, good-naturedly approached Schorr, grabbed him by the lapels and said, “I want that report.” A conversation ensued. Schorr volunteered to write a series of articles for the Post based on the report. Rosenfeld said he was not interested, that he wanted his own reporters to see it. Schorr said he wanted the Post to print the entire text. Rosenfeld said he could make no such guarantee. Schorr said he could not do anything without consulting CBS. “Of course,” said Rosenfeld. “The question is, are you through with it?” If Schorr and CBS were, said Rosenfeld, he would be glad to pay the cost of Xeroxing.

  The next morning, Schorr saw Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus and told him that Rosenfeld had offered him money for the Pike report. Pincus reported the conversation to Rosenfeld, who had already talked with two other Post editors, who thought any sort of arrangement with Schorr was a bad idea. He called Schorr and withdrew the request for the report; he also told Schorr he was outraged at what Schorr had told Pincus. “Schorr is a fucking liar,” Rosenfeld said later. “We don’t pay for news.” For his part, Schorr claims he misunderstood Rosenfeld. “Somehow money was mentioned,” he says. “Harry says he was only talking about the cost of Xeroxing the report. I don’t know what that is supposed to mean. I had a Xerox machine and he has a Xerox machine.”

  The day The Village Voice appeared, Laurence Stern of the Post called Schorr and asked if he was the source of the report. Schorr was unprepared for the call. On the record, he denied that he had any connection with the Voice. Off the record, he conceded that he did have a copy of the report and had tried to get it published through the Reporters Committee, but he continued to deny responsibility for the Voice leak. “The last thought I would have would be Clay Felker,” he said. Stern had independent confirmation that Schorr had provided the report to the Voice and went with his story. A few days later, though, when he was going through his notes of his telephone conversation with Schorr, he noticed a remark of Schorr’s he had not paid much attention to at the time: “I thought I had the only copy,” Schorr had told Stern, “but someone must have stolen it from under me.”

  The “someone” Daniel Schorr was trying to implicate at that shabby point was Lesley Stahl, a CB
S reporter who is one of several CBS employees (along with Eric Sevareid, Phil Jones and Dan Rather) who do not get along with Schorr. The morning The Village Voice appeared, Schorr took it into the office of Washington bureau chief Sandy Socolow. This is Schorr’s version of the story:

  “The Village Voice came in on Wednesday. So I go into Sandy Socolow’s office with it. I’m still in this funny in-between stage. How do I tell CBS about my partners? How do I tell the Washington Post about my involvement? So here you have a day when CBS does not know it’s me who’s done this, and there is the Aaron Latham by-line. You have to understand that Aaron Latham is a boyfriend of Lesley Stahl’s; he’s a familiar figure around the office. Sandy looks at the by-line and says, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ I shrugged. I did not say to him, ‘You’re off on a wrong tangent.’ I did not at this point disabuse him. Then I heard Sandy asking one of the producers if he had been in the office when the thing was Xeroxed. I could see him formulating a theory that Lesley or Aaron had gotten hold of it in that way. None of this was said explicitly. The point is that there were a couple of hours when I did not dispel the suspicion. I couldn’t have without saying it was me.” Schorr paused.

  “I think I went further,” he said. “I had lunch with a junior Cronkite producer that day. ‘What do you think of this report?’ I said. I kind of led him to think that Lesley had something to do with it. I realized later in the afternoon that I was playing games for no reason at all. I went to Sandy and said, ‘Before you start any investigation of the Xeroxing, I know Lesley had nothing to do with it.’ I don’t want to pretend I did anything particularly smart or wise. But if all this is blown up into a theory that I planned to blame Lesley or Aaron, it’s just not true.”

  Sandy Socolow says that Schorr’s version is “a fucking rearrangement of what happened of the worst sort. It is just an absolute rewrite of history. He came into my office that morning with The Village Voice. I had no reason to believe he was the source of the Voice story—he had hated the piece the Voice ran about him, and he’d stopped speaking to the woman who wrote it. He came in, and these aren’t specific quotes, but he said to me, Shouldn’t we check where Lesley and/or Aaron were while the Xeroxing was going on. The next morning the Washington Post article appeared, and Dan came in again and said, You have no reason to suspect Lesley or Aaron, and you can disregard everything I said to you yesterday.” Don Bowers, the producer Schorr lunched with, called Lesley Stahl a few days later and told her that Schorr had flatly accused her of stealing the report from him. (Stahl consulted a lawyer about the possibility of a slander suit.)

  There are a number of interesting peripheral issues here—the question of whether Schorr broke the ground rules in Xeroxing the report, the question of whether CBS or Schorr owned the report, the question of whether Peter Tufo informed Schorr of his conflict of interest—and I’m sorry I don’t have the space to go into them. In any case, whether he had a right to or not, Schorr went ahead and bargained away a copy of the Pike report he had obtained as a CBS employee; that is the situation we’re stuck with. I don’t think CBS had the right to suspend him because he is the subject of an inquiry; they may have had the right to suspend him for not fully informing his employer that he intended to act as an agent for the report.

  And so Dan Schorr is in what he calls “the full-time martyr business.” He sees his lawyer, he speaks to college audiences, he picks up awards from the American Civil Liberties Union. And underneath it all, underneath this squalid episode, there is one thing that is crystal clear, and that is the legal question: whether the House of Representatives, having passed a resolution prohibiting publication of one of its reports, can then hold a citizen in contempt for causing that report to be published. The answer, for anyone who believes in the First Amendment, is that it cannot. It is impossible not to be angry with Dan Schorr for having made it so difficult for the rest of us to march in his parade.

  June, 1976

  Upstairs, Downstairs

  My friend Kenny does not feel as bad about the death of Hazel as I do. My friend Ann has been upset about it for days. My friend Martha is actually glad Hazel is dead. I cried when Hazel died, but only for a few seconds, partly because I wasn’t at all surprised. About three months ago, someone told me she was going to die, and since then I have watched every show expecting it to be her last. Once she stuck her head into a dumbwaiter to get some food for James, who had finally recovered enough from his war injuries to have an appetite, and I was certain the dumbwaiter was going to crash onto her head and kill her instantly. Another time, when she and Lord Bellamy went to fetch James from a hospital in France (and Hazel and Georgina had a fight over whether he should be moved), I was sure the ambulance would crash on the way back. Hazel lived on, though, show after show, until there came the thirteenth episode. As soon as they mentioned the plague, I knew that would be it. It was. The particular plague Hazel died of was the Spanish influenza, which, according to Alistair Cooke, was the last true pandemic. I was sorry that Alistair Cooke had so much more to say about the plague than he did about the death of Hazel, but perhaps he has become wary of commenting on the show itself after everyone (including me) took offense at some of the things he had to say about George Sand.

  Of course, Hazel should never have married James Bellamy in the first place. James is a big baby. Hazel should have married Lord Bellamy, which was impossible since Lady Marjorie had just gone down on the Titanic. Or she should have run off with the upwardly mobile air ace, which was impossible since he was killed on the very next show after she met him, along with Rose’s fiancé, Gregory. (I never laid eyes on Gregory, but Kenny tells me he was a very interesting man, a natural radical, who met Rose by sitting on her cake.) Hazel’s finest moment was the show when she met the ace, and they went dancing, and she wore a dress with tiny, delicate beaded straps, and turned out to have the most beautiful back I have ever seen. But other than her back, and her fling with the ace, and her occasional success in telling Hudson off, and her premature death, Hazel left something to be desired. Not as far as Ann is concerned, but certainly as far as Martha is concerned. “Let’s face it,” said Martha. “Hazel was a pill.” In fairness, we might all be pills if we had had to spend our lives sitting on a chesterfield couch pouring tea, but that’s no excuse, I suppose. Hazel was a pill (though not nearly as terrible a pill as Abigail Adams and her entire family), and she really ought to have married an older man who wanted nothing more than to go to bed early. Still, James had no cause to treat her so badly. Kenny is the only person I know who has a kind word to say for James, and here it is: “Somewhere there must be something good about him that we’ll find out about eventually.” Actually, James did have a couple of good weeks there, when he returned from the front to report the army was dropping like flies, but I am told by a reliable source that his behavior was derivative of Siegfried Sassoon, and in any case, he shortly thereafter reverted to type. The worst James ever treated Hazel—aside from when she was sick and dying of the plague and he was playing rummy with his father’s new fiancée, the Scottish widow—was when she had her miscarriage, and he totally ignored her, and went off dancing with Cousin Georgina.

  Which brings us to Cousin Georgina. Martha doesn’t much like Georgina either. This puzzles me. I can understand not liking Hazel and liking Georgina, or not liking Georgina and liking Hazel, but not liking both of them? Georgina was a true ninny when she arrived in the Bellamy household, and she hung around with Daisy, who is the most unrelenting ninny in television history. (For example, when Rose found out that Gregory had left her twelve hundred pounds, Daisy said: “Some people have all the luck.” I rest my case.) But Georgina has become a wonderful nurse, and I’m proud of her. Also, her face is even more beautiful than Hazel’s back. As for the burning question preoccupying us all—will Georgina marry James now that Hazel is dead?—I say no. (Martha says yes.) Georgina sees through James. I know it. I see her marrying the one-armed officer she went off to Paris with,
if only because she is the only person on the show saintly enough to marry a man with one arm. Ann, on the other hand, does not trust Georgina as far as she can spit. “I know she was a great nurse,” says Ann, “but she reminds me of those bitchy women you went to college with who were great biology students. She has no heart.” There is indeed some recent evidence pointing to Georgina’s heartlessness: when Hazel died, she went off to a party. But the war was over, and who could blame her? I was far more shocked at the la-di-da way Lord Bellamy behaved; he got off an Alistair Cooke-like remark about the plague itself, and that was that. Only Rose was magnificent about it. Ann thinks the reason everyone (except Rose) behaved so unemotionally about Hazel’s death was that she was a petit bourgeois and they had never accepted her. I disagree. I think it’s possible that the same person who tipped me off about Hazel’s death tipped off the Bellamy household, and they just weren’t all that surprised when it finally happened.

  Even Martha loves Rose. Rose reminds me, in some metaphysical way, of Loretta Haggers. She is so good, so honest, so pure, so straight and so plucky. Kenny worries that Rose is going to leave the show now that she has come into all this money, but I say she’ll never leave: the actress who plays Rose created the show itself, so she’ll never be got rid of. I sometimes wonder how they do get rid of people at that show. They sank Lady Marjorie, I read somewhere, because the actress playing her wanted to take a vacation in Europe. But what about Hazel? Did they know all along? Did they hire her in the beginning and say, “Look here, Hazel, we’ll carry you through World War One, but then you’re through”? Or did they hire her planning to use her straight through the Depression? Did she do something to antagonize them? Did she know she was going to die, and if so, when?