Daniel Schorr, news analyst for National Public Radio and a weekly columnist for the Monitor, delivered the second annual memorial address honoring Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent who was murdered in Pakistan two years ago. Excerpts of his address, given at UCLA on Feb. 4, follow.

In Ronald Reagan's time, America confronted what he called "The Evil Empire." In President Bush's time, the Evil Empire is no more, but there is something that Mr. Bush calls "the Axis of Evil." We knew the geographic location of the Evil Empire - the Soviet Union, China - and the subjects of the evil empire (called satellites).

The headquarters of today's terrorist threat we don't know. The great disaster of Sept. 11, 2001, unlike Pearl Harbor, left no return address. President Bush believed that terrorist headquarters was in Iraq, and so, in his "war on terrorism," he invaded, looking for Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. He didn't find either.

Indeed, it was only after the occupation that Al Qaeda made its presence known, part of a holy war against a non-Islamic secular power that dared violate sacred Islamic soil. It was like the war of the Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan two decades earlier.

The cold war was my war - that is to say I was one of the journalists who covered it. A generation later, the war against Islamic terror was Danny Pearl's war - that is to say he tried to learn its mystique and its methods so that we would better understand the menace we faced as people of the West.

Danny's assignment was more dangerous than mine because Islamic jihad, in the end, turned out to be more menacing than the cold war. Oh, yes, a half century ago there was much talk of an ideological conflict that might lead to nuclear annihilation. But we also believed in the nuclear stalemate: that our leaders, however much they growled and shook their fists, would not invite mutual destruction.

At times the nuclear menace seemed too close for comfort - as in 1962 when President Kennedy confronted Nikita Khrushchev, who had tried to sneak nuclear missiles into Cuba. And yet - again in retrospect - we felt that, despite some shivery feelings at the time, Khrushchev and Kennedy would not plunge the world into flames.

For a journalist seeking to learn and to understand, the challenge then was not like the challenge today. I was often tailed by the KGB. My telephone was monitored. In 1957 I was briefly arrested and charged with photographing forbidden objects. It was the KGB's way of telling me it was time to leave the country. But I never felt physically imperiled, in part because of an unusual relationship I had with Khrushchev, which was a sort of metaphor for East-West relations in the cold war.

In the early post-Stalin days in 1955, I opened the CBS-TV bureau in Moscow. I arrived just in time for the 20th Communist Party Congress, where Khrushchev made his famous secret speech denouncing Stalin. It was a tense time as Khrushchev, opposed by hard-liners in the Politburo, sought to loosen the shackles of Stalinism without losing control of his people and the Soviet satellites. There were demonstrations in Poland for "bread and freedom," and, in Hungary, a full-scale anti-Communist revolt. Adding crisis to crisis, France, Britain, and Israel started a war to seize control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, a Soviet client.

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