Mark Knoller, a White House radio correspondent for CBS News who meticulously tallied the activities of presidents, including how many times they played golf, read from a teleprompter and declared that they “will not rest” until finishing the job for the American people, died on Saturday in Washington. He was 73.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by CBS News, which said he had diabetes and had been in poor health.
Robust in size, with a booming voice and a married-to-the-job work ethic, Mr. Knoller was a beloved fixture on the White House beat for more than 40 years. He was known not just for his tough questions but also for his voluminous records of presidential minutiae, which he shared freely with other reporters.
“He was a stickler for fact and clarity and fairness,” Ann Compton, a former White House correspondent for ABC News, said in an interview. “When you cover the president, you cover everything from global crises to whether the president hates broccoli, and Mark relished all of that.”
Called “the savant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” by one admirer, Mr. Knoller began keeping track of presidential statistics during Bill Clinton’s administration.
“He was about to make a trip to California, and I said, ‘Gee, he’s been there a few times already. I wish I knew how many times he had been there,’” Mr. Knoller told The Columbia Journalism Review in 2009. “And it took me forever to go back and put together those numbers. So I started keeping a record.”
One record begot another, then another, and soon Mr. Knoller was spending 90 minutes a day conducting a near-forensic analysis of presidential transcripts, calendars, travel records, pool reports and executive orders. He stored the information in stacks of notebooks and in his laptop computer.
At any moment, he could cite how many times a president visited Camp David, flew on Air Force One, hosted championship sports teams, met with foreign heads of state, went on date nights and promised to not rest for the American people. (George W. Bush made 40 such stipulations, including “until the dream of health care reform is finally achieved” and “until anybody who’s looking for a job can find one.”)
To other reporters, Mr. Knoller was Google in human form.
“Mark, when was President Obama’s last full news conference?” a Reuters reporter asked him one afternoon in the White House press room, according to a 2013 article about Mr. Knoller in Washingtonian magazine.
“March 6, 2012,” he responded. “It was 44 minutes long. It was in the briefing room.”
Presidents closely followed his calculations — especially of their vacation days, which are wielded like political swords between current and former commanders in chief.
A 2010 profile of Mr. Knoller in The Wall Street Journal recounted how Mr. Bush, who has a ranch in Texas, once needled him about his vacation statistics at a White House holiday party.
“Hey, Laura,” the president said to the first lady, “this is the guy who counts it as a vacation day when we get to Texas on a Friday night.”
“No, Mr. President,” Mr. Knoller responded, according to the paper. “I would have noted that as a partial day.”
Mark Nathan Knoller was born on Feb. 20, 1952, in Brooklyn, to Otto and Lotte Knoller. His father was a physician.
Growing up, Mark knew he wanted to be a reporter. After graduating from New York University, he worked at WNEW radio as a copy boy and was soon promoted to weekend reporter. In 1975, he joined The Associated Press Radio Network as a reporter.
Thirteen years later, Mr. Knoller was covering Secretary of State George P. Shultz on a trip to Helsinki and Moscow when he had breakfast with Susan Zirinsky, a producer for CBS News. She told him that there was an opening for an assignment editor in the Washington bureau.
“It took some arm-twisting, but Mark took the plunge,” Ms. Zirinsky wrote on the CBS News website after his death. “He did a great job, but there was a hole in his heart: He didn’t want to send others to cover stories he wanted to report on. He needed to be back reporting, writing, broadcasting.”
Mr. Knoller became a White House correspondent, joining other reporters in a tight work space in the White House press room.
“Here comes Mark Knoller — a man of some size,” Ms. Zirinsky wrote. “But it didn’t matter — Mark with his sources, helping everyone, size didn’t matter. Mark, with his editorial intuitive sensibility and his distinctive radio voice, was right where he was supposed to be.”
Even press secretaries liked him.
“Mark never betrayed any bias, any personal views,” Ari Fleischer, who was President Bush’s press secretary from 2001 to 2003, told The Associated Press. “He was probably of the last generation of reporters who viewed their job as just telling the news with no inkling at all of their personal thoughts.”
Mr. Knoller left CBS News in 2020. He told The Washington Examiner that he had been laid off, prompting dismay on social media, where Mr. Knoller was a popular figure.
He is survived by his mother.
Though he kept detailed records on the vacations of presidents, Mr. Knoller almost never took one himself, nor did he ever marry.
In 2010, Katie Couric interviewed him about his career.
“Do you have a life?” she asked.
Looking around his work space and smiling, Mr. Knoller said, “This is it.”
“It’s certainly very satisfying,” he added. “And so it’s not as though I feel I’m giving anything up on the outside.”
Ms. Couric asked what he did on his days off.
“I enjoy sleeping late like some people might enjoy a dinner at a great restaurant,” Mr. Knoller said. “And I like having a leisurely lunch and not eating over my keyboard making crumbs.”
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