Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 9, 1991 TAG: 9102090529
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT WILLIAMS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It seems like yesterday. The Cold War was declared officially over. The check for your "peace dividend" was in the mail. And Wolf Blitzer was the Washington correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, unknown outside the Beltway.
Today, the bearded, affable Blitzer is CNN's ace Pentagon reporter. He's hailed as one of TV's best beat reporters.
And how does it feel to be recognized on the street?
"I haven't been on the street!" he said, laughing. "I don't know what it feels like because I've been working. The story will have to wind down a little bit before that happens."
And he has the good grace to be amused by the national punchlines evoked by what he calls "the name like a linebacker."
Heard about Kevin Costner's movie on the Middle East? "Dances with Wolf Blitzer"? "Saturday Night Live" and "Tonight" contend he's taken a stage name - changed from "Howitzer Tank Explosion" or "Shark Divebomber."
"Believe me, I've been laughing at all the jokes," he said in a telephone interview from CNN's Pentagon office.
A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Blitzer, 42, explained that his naming follows Jewish tradition, honoring his maternal grandfather from the village of Suchedniew - pronounced "sookt-NYEFF" - near Kielce, Poland.
"I didn't have a lot of problems with the name as I was growing up," he said. Buffalo, he said, has a fairly large Polish population, where a name like Wolf Blitzer isn't that conspicuous.
He followed his undergraduate degree in history at his hometown State University of New York with a master's in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Married, the father of a 9-year-old girl, he makes his home in Bethesda, Md., and has written two books, including "Territory of Lies," an account of the Jonathan J. Pollard spy case.
Blitzer had been with the Post for 15 years when the paper changed hands and he started thinking that it might be time for a change, even though he liked his job.
"It was good because it was a one-man bureau and all the editors were 6,000 miles away," he said. "I did it for such a long time, though, I could see that I was writing the same old stories with different names."
Blitzer, a frequent guest on CNN talk shows since the network began in 1980, was asked by a producer whether the paper's ownership change was affecting him. He jokingly asked whether CNN was hiring.
"`Are you serious?' he said. I could see he wasn't laughing," Blitzer recalled. Two weeks later, he accepted the Pentagon job.
"I thought the Pentagon was going to be a quiet little beat," he said. "I really thought it was going to be two or three times a week that I'd get on the air."
History proved him wrong about 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 1, when his desk paged him to check on reports of an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. "We'd been hearing these rumors of an invasion for days," he said. "So I told my desk I checked on that at 6:30, it's baloney, but I'll make a few calls."
One call went to a longtime Pentagon source Blitzer knew would be at his desk if the reports were true. To Blitzer's surprise, his source answered the phone. Blitzer asked if Iraq had attacked.
"He said, `Wolf, it's worse than that.' I said, `What do you mean?' He said, `They're in Kuwait City.'"
Blitzer called his desk, and CNN immediately went on the air with the Pentagon confirmation. Blitzer found himself talking to CNN's Washington bureau chief, Bill Headline - yes, that's his real name.
"He said, `Take a shower, put on a clean shirt. You're going to go live at midnight.' And I went live every half hour until around midnight the next night," Blitzer said.
"That was my longest day."
by CNB