CBS News veteran Dan Raviv covered stories in more than 35 countries and hosted the national radio magazine Weekend Roundup. He reported on President Ronald Reagan’s meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin Wall and broadcasted from the top of the Berlin Wall when it was announced that East Germans were planning to tear it down.
Raviv retired from broadcasting in early 2020 after 40 years as a national correspondent for CBS News. He has co-authored several books, with the most recent being “The Quest for Significance.”
In addition to a longtime career in journalism, Raviv donates to the Jewish Federation and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. He enjoys moderating panels and participating in discussions, especially about various challenges faced by Israel. Raviv’s lecturing allowed him to visit synagogues and Jewish community centers across the nation.
The author and podcaster lives with his wife in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where they belong to Adas Israel Congregation. They have two adult children and are grandparents to two grandsons in D.C. and one granddaughter in New York.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I’m the son of two Israelis. My mother was a young teacher in British-ruled Tel Aviv; my father was a secretive soldier in the Palmach, [the pre-state Jewish defense force]. My parents came to America in the summer of 1950 because my father wanted to study for an engineering degree. I was born in September of 1954 in Yonkers, New York. My parents continued to speak Hebrew in the home. After six years, my parents moved from New York City to Great Neck on Long Island, where I grew up and went to school all the way until college.
You were a longtime correspondent for CBS News. How did you get to where you are today?
For college, I was lucky enough to go to Harvard [University], which was considered a positive thing by all back then. My favorite activity was the Harvard radio station, so I covered news around the Boston area. When the local CBS radio station in Boston decided to imitate WCBS 880 radio station and be an all-news radio station, I applied to be a writer. After a pretty short time, I had the opportunity to move to the CBS-owned news radio station in New York, then from there, after six months, I got a job at the national news desk. I was a writer and then on air for CBS national radio in New York.
Here’s the big break: in late 1977, I was 23 years old; [Anwar] Sadat, the president of Egypt, decided he wanted to get along with Israel and talk peace. CBS asked its staff, “Does anybody want to move to Cairo or Tel Aviv? We really need to beef up our Middle East coverage.” I said I knew Hebrew and I was single and ready to go. So in July 1978, I moved from the CBS desk in New York, where I was a writer of scripts for other broadcasters, to Tel Aviv, where I became the radio correspondent.
Over my two years in the Tel Aviv bureau, I also was the fill-in for Bob Simon, the TV correspondent, while he was away or on assignment, so I learned TV skills too. Then I worked in London for 12 and a half years, then the Miami bureau for five years. Then at the end of that career, the Washington bureau from 1997 to 2017 and I did three years as the Washington correspondent from i24News, the satellite TV station headquartered in Israel. I was their senior correspondent doing television from early 2017 to March 2020, so it was a nice way to cap off my career.
What is the highlight of your journalism career?
One of my highlights is the Madrid peace conference in 1991, which meant an Israeli delegation and a Palestinian delegation, with delegates from many Middle Eastern and European countries, to encourage Israelis and Palestinians to bring peace. It didn’t lead to great things, but I always appreciated the efforts that were made.
What inspired your new book about the quest for significance?
My co-author, professor Arie Kruglanski has been a psychology professor at the University of Maryland in College Park for 37 years, and he’s considered one of the world experts on human motivation, how people make decisions. I noticed his work because he also explained terrorism; he’s been invited to speak to government agencies in many Western countries to explain why suicide bombers would do what they do.
The book covers the tragic consequences of being denied significance, and that could be on a political level — revolutions and movements have arisen because people feel like they’re left out. But on a personal level, if people again and again are denied significance, they could turn to crime, self-harm, suicide or terrorist groups. Their sense of significance was taken away from wherever it was that they grew up and however it was they were living.
Why have you continued to work post-retirement?
I suppose I do have a quest for significance, in which I still want to be relevant in the areas where I used to make a living. I still like discovering places. I do have two favorite countries. Over the years, we actually bought a small house in the middle of Italy and we have built a house on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. That’s where I started the podcast “The Mossad Files” because with good internet connections you can live absolutely anywhere, so that’s been great. In addition, I lecture on a cruise ship on U.S. foreign policy. I find audiences from all over the world who are interested. It’s fun to do on a cruise ship in some corner of the world, in different places every time.
