Like a heretic defending himself before the Inquisition, Schorr was summoned to testify before a hostile Congressional investigatory committee, armed with questions tailored to trap him into revealing his source. Schorr withstood the pressures of the committee inquiry, braving threats of prosecution for contempt. He told the committee:

..for a journalist, the most crucial kind of confidence is the identity of a source of information. To betray a confidential source would mean to dry up many future sources for many reporters. The reporter and news organization would be the immediate losers, but I would submit to you that the ultimate losers would be the American people and their free institutions.

As a defender of both the reporter's right to report and the public's "right to know," Schorr emerged from the hearing room victorious. His own market value, which had plummeted to an unprecedented low in February 1976, soared once again. The CBS brass offered to take him back--but Schorr had had enough. Demoralized by the lack of support shown him during the controversy by the network and some of his colleagues, Schorr could not bring himself to return to CBS.

"Paley ordered me fired, but when he saw a turn in my fortunes he switched as he would on a program if its ratings suddenly rose," Schorr said.

He continued, "They wanted me because they didn't dare to fire me, but I had no future left there."

Eventually, Schorr believes, CBS would have found a way to fire him, after the furor had died down. "They would have offered me a `great' post in Luxembourg," he specualted sarcastically, "and when I wasn't producing many stories from Luxembourg they would have said, `Schorr, you just don't have it anymore. All that attention went to your head."

So Schorr left CBS and the life of a reporter he had led since the age of 12. He has spent the past year lecturing and working on his book, which tries to treat his turbulent career with rigorous, journalistic objectivity (see accompanying book review). At the age of 61, he probably will not return to the hectic pace of a daily reporter, although he appears vigorous and much younger than his age.

In retrospect, Schorr's career involved him directly in more controversies than most journalists. Although he always considered himself a a reporter, one who tells people the news but does not himself make it, somehow he frequently managed to become news himself.

This involvement was not always of his own doing. He did not place himself on former President Nixon's enemies list, but his name appeared there nevertheless. His reporting provoked that administration's ire, more so than that of most of his colleagues, and so there he was, in the "top 20--Number 17, to be precise."

Schorr discovered his name on the list while on-the-air, covering the Senate Watergate hearings. When the list's existence was disclosed, Schorr grabbed a copy and, unaware of its contents, began reading it to his audience. When he reached his own name, he hesitated for a second and then continued to read. Schorr said that if he had found his name on such a list in 1971, he would have "collapsed," but by that time "it was a joke and couldn't be taken seriously."

The Nixon administration, however, always took Schorr seriously. In 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a "background check" on Schorr, ostensibly for security reasons prior to his appointment to a post in the administration. No appointment was ever made, or even mentioned to Schorr, and most observers have since concluded the check was intended to intimidate the aggressive reporter.

Schorr maintains that the national media harbored little bias or animosity toward Nixon at the beginning of his administration. "The press only wanted to cover them [the Nixon administration] as we had covered other administrations," he said. This relationship was altered, Schorr added, when the White House "acted as if they were going to go after us. They created hostility and turned us against them. By declaring some of us their enemies, they made us enemies."

Schorr's statements indicate that he retains little respect for the man who resigned the presidency in disgrace. "There was a terrible immaturity in that administration called paranoia."

He describes Nixon's recent appearance on television, when he answered questions posed by British interviewer David Frost, as "pure, vintage Nixon... self-deluding, frequently factually wrong." Schorr feels Nixon must delude himself to survive, that he would not survive "if he had to live with the truth."

Living with the truth, never an easy task, presents unusual moral dilemmas for investigative reporters as well as presidents. The reporter's entire occupational orientation compels him to make public all the information that can be unearthed. Ordinarily such disclosures merely embarrass public figures, but occasionally the release of certain information could endanger the national security. In such instances, the reporter must weigh the risks of exposing sensitive information against his professional obligation to report all that he knows.

Schorr faced such a choice when he obtained a copy of the Intelligence Committee reportfl but he said he had little doubt which way to decide. Noting that a government report "has no copyright and is the people's property," Schorr maintained that it was his responsibility to make the report available to the public. Too often people in the government expect reporters to help them keep their secrets, he said. They fail to realize that once a reporter knows something, that information ceases to be a secret. He added.

Schorr can imagine few cases where a reporter should cooperate with the government and squelch a story in the national interest. "If I were to have information where I could tell that disclosure would kill somebody, then I would run the story but bypass that information," Schorr said, but he added that he had never had to worry about that problem because such "life-or-death" information seldom reaches the press.

"Leaking is a form of whistle-blowing," Schorr explained. People leak information that will embarrass public figures, or implicate them in crimes or scandals; they do not expose "atomic secrets." "The real secrets are pretty goddamn well kept," Schorr insisted.

He should know. After spending a lifetime trying to uncover those secrets, he should know