In March 2007, I interviewed the celebrated journalist Daniel Schorr. Then 90 years old, he displayed some of the

personal dynamism that marked his whole career. News of his death yesterday sends me back to what he 

felt most proud of.

From the highlights of our exchange, I excerpt his account of triumphing over a president:

"I won, he lost," boasts Daniel Schorr, summarizing the outcome of his collision with President Richard Nixon in 1974 over his covering of Watergate and its aftermath. "I had survived an attempt by the president of the United States to do God knows what to me." 

That happened after Nixon put the then CBS reporter on his now-infamous "Enemies List." Placing number 17th of 20 names, Schorr parlayed his notoriety into riches. 

As he now describes his victory, "It typified my whole career: I tried to investigate; people who were investigated got mad at me, and they never did anything to me. In the end, as it turned out, I got a lot of fame in being an enemy of Nixon; it netted me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lecture fees." 

The death of Dr. Robert Butler has stirred both my emotions and my thoughts. When word came that he had died on July fourth, it struck me as unlikely, even impossible. After all, I had spent the first full week of June with him as I took part in the Age Boom Academy for journalists conducted by his International Longevity Center in Manhattan.

Bob Butler seemed to be enjoying excellent health, as his active participation in the academy suggested. On the day we finished, I saw him emerging from the converted townhouse on East 86^th Street and walking briskly westward. There, I said to myself, is a 83-year-old who knows how to live and will surely live much longer.

Dr. Butler seemed too eminent to die. No one in the field of aging had as impressive a record as had he. Though not widely known to the general public, he was a household name among gerontologists. After all, he had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for his book “Why Survive?: Being Old in America” that launched the age movement in this country.He went on from there to found the National Institute On Aging and became its first director. And in 2008 he had published  “The Longevity Revolution,” a book that celebrated the extension of life for so many Americans.

In dying, Bob exemplified a by now well-established ideal in the field of aging. It’s called “the compression of morbidity” and suggests that the best model for dying is to live as long as possible without major disease and then to die suddenly, or after only a few days of being ill. Even more than most people, Bob, as a physician, would not have wanted to go through a long-drawn-out dying process.

A colleague recently asked me to explain the fact that people die. In particular he wondered how our friend Bob Butler could have encountered death so suddenly and surprisingly. In response, I told my colleague that I consider death the great mystery, a phenomenon that no human being will ever understand. We live and we die, both realities that lie outside our comprehension.

Because of Bob Butler’s death I now feel closer to my own. Mine will probably be quite different from his but we were near in age and shared some friends and many interests. I would hope to share Bob’s immunity from dementia, a disease currently afflicting more than five million Americans and in time likely to touch many more.

I feel thankful for having known this benefactor of the community. He was a person whom I considered a mentor. Besides that, he lived and worked to make life better for others, and thus offered a fine example that I will continue to value highly.

My spirits were buoyed up last week by reading about bar-tailed godwits. These small birds are based in southern Alaska in the warmer months there. When it turns cold, they take flight to New Zealand but not before they stuff themselves with food for the trip.

Then, almost incredibly, they fly 7,100 miles nonstop at 40 miles an hour and arrive at their destination in nine days. What a feat of navigation and endurance comes naturally to them!

These facts we know thanks to biologists who have been studying these birds for decades. The data about their migration comes thanks to the scientists surgically implanting satellite transmitters in their bodies. 

“ON JANUARY 17, 1985, NOT FAR FROM THIS SPOT, TWO PEOPLE MET AND FELL IN LOVE.”

An inscription engraved on a stone bench outside the entrance to the Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center at Harvard Law School.

A longtime Jesuit friend, Pat, shares a story about a wedding. It took place in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria where my friend used to serve as president of Loyola Jesuit College.

The bridegroom, Nicholas, is a friend of Pat; my Jesuit friend knows the bride, Amaka, less well.

Pat concelebrated the two-hour wedding Mass with another Jesuit who took the lead as celebrant. In his homily, the latter made a great deal of a passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians. “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.”

The celebrant then had the wife act it out. She gathered her wedding dress around her and knelt before her seated husband, placing her hands between his and promising due submission.

At this point my friend Pat was feeling uncomfortable, given the graphically   subordinate role being taken by the woman. But, to Pat’s surprise, the presiding priest soon reversed the situation.

He read the next verse: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water and the word.” Then the priest seated Amaka and had Nicholas kneel before her and  remove one of her shoes so he could wash her foot as Christ did at the Last Supper.

 My friend Pat adds his commentary on the event: “Somehow it transformed my understanding of that scriptural passage. I thought particularly of a good friend in America who has recently lost his wife to cancer, and how he cared for her so tenderly to the end. Marriage, as the same Epistle says, is a great mystery.”

David Elliot of WHRB last week announced that old-time classic opera singer Maria Jeritza, appearing in Tosca,

at one point had been “supine” rather than “prone.” After hearing from a listener who corrected him by asserting

she was prone, Elliot took it upon himself to apologize promptly.

Watching Renée Fleming conduct a master class proved one of the great pleasures of last week. This renowned opera singer came to Harvard on a Tuesday afternoon to help four undergrads with their singing and to answer questions from the audience.  She was in the area to prepare for three Boston Symphony concerts later in the week. 

 Along with 400 other fans of this diva I came to hear and see her perform in a different setting from the opera or concert stage.  The experience turned out to be satisfying because Fleming showed herself such a superb teacher as well as a master of music.

 She treated each of the students with obvious appreciation of what they have accomplished thus far. At the same time, she gently suggested to them how they can improve. What could have been an intimidating experience for the three young women and one young man instead proved rewarding for each.

 Fleming placed much emphasis on proper breathing. As she told one: “This is opening up very nicely -  you’re getting more substance to your voice – once you get this whole breath opened up you’ll be surprised.” To another she said: “Muscle memory is everything – that’s why this training is so vital.” She advised another: “You have to pretend you’re the greatest singer.”

 Among the frank responses Fleming made in the question period was this confession: “I’ve had periods of horrible stage fright.” Her remedy for this fix is: “Preparation – to be so secure that you will sing it in spite of yourself.”

 Fleming seemed far removed from fright on the following Friday evening when she appeared on the stage at Symphony Hall. There, wearing a handsome green gown, she first sang the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss, songs that I consider the most beautiful of the twentieth century. Then, with a change to a black dress after the intermission, she sang the soprano part in the last movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.

 The double exposure of last week to the person and the singing of one of America’s finest musical artists has left me with memorable pleasure.

Along with students and others, I had the pleasure of gazing on a journalistic hero last week. David Rhode is the courageous New Times reporter who escaped from captivity after being held for seven months by Taliban militants in Pakistan. He did so by climbing down a 20-foot wall with another captive, an Afghan colleague.

 This feat involved tricking their guards into staying up late playing a game with them so that they would become sleepy.  They also took advantage of the noise from an electric generator to drown out sounds of their escaping. When they arrived at a Pakistan army outpost, it took them fifteen minutes to convince the guards there of their identity.

 Rhode, in his early 40s, is slight in build and does not look the part of a gymnast who could navigate down that high wall.  He also has a mild manner and, in his remarks, shows himself deeply respectful of Afghani and Pakistani people.

 As to progress by the Pakistani army in subduing the militants, he believes it has made some but he thinks they will not go all the way so long the army keeps so many more units on its border with India. But, partly because of this continuing tension with their huge neighbor, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal remains safe.

 About the aspirations of young militants, Rhode has discovered that the only thing that matters to them is their relationship to God.  That outranks family and everything else. “I want to be a suicide bomber,” youngsters tell him when he asks what they want to become when older. Pressed further, they will say: “I want to be a Muslim.”

“The Jesus tablet,” is what the wags are calling the iTab just unveiled by Steve Jobs. Other wits have dubbed it “an iPhone on steroids.”

 New Yorker writer on media, Ken Auletta, shared these descriptions during a discussion at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center this week. His book, “Googled: the End of the World As We Know It,” appeared last fall.

 For Auletta, it’s not yet clear whether the iPad will be a game changer. But Job’s introduction of it shows once again what a superb marketer the founder of Apple remains.

 As to Google, its huge workforce is one-half engineers. And they are the kings of the industry.  They are the people who are always asking “why not” However, they also lack emotional intelligence astoundingly. In Autletta’s experience, “they are blind to what they cannot measure.”

 Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page do value good information. That is why they welcome a connection with the New York Times. They also feel concern about privacy and copyrights.

 For simplicity, how about this Google motto?  -  “DON’T BE EVIL.”

The headline “Many Catholics react favorably to Brown’s election” occupied a front-page slot in the Boston Pilot of January 22, 2010.

I nominate it as among the most biased newspaper leads in recent history and one of the most banal.  Were a respectable secular newspaper to have published such a one-sided head, surely it would become the target of outraged protest. This official house organ for the Archdiocese of Boston, however, can expect to get away with pro-Republican propaganda.

The story could just as well have run “Many Catholics react unfavorably to Brown’s election,” an equally banal lead story. But that would have betrayed Democratic rather than Republican bias.

Has the Pilot not yet discovered how Scott Brown holds the same position on abortion as does Martha Coakley, his defeated Democratic candidate for U.S. senator?

Would not the Catholics of the Boston archdiocese be better served by an independent newspaper published by laypeople? That’s the way it was before the then archbishop of Boston, Cardinal O’Connell, bought the paper in 1908. Perhaps this journal would then avoid such clearly one-sided approaches to political life.