Mark Knoller: Archivist of the American Presidency

CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller has long been famous among the White House press corps and his colleagues here at CBS News for his fastidious, almost obsessive attention to detail.

In a front page story today, The Wall Street Journal exposed to the wider world the dedication that Knoller has brought for two decades to his unofficial position as the keeper of Presidential data.

"The National Archives, the Smithsonian, the White House itself--none hold the cache of detail that Mr. Knoller has squirreled into his crumb-littered cubby in the White House briefing room," the newspaper writes.

Knoller's database catalogues both the "milestones and minutaie of the American presidency," the paper notes. Knoller tabulates speeches, executive orders, bill signings, foreign trips, social functions, even the amount of the times a president vows that he "will not rest" until a goal is achieved.

(President Obama, by the way, has said "he will not rest" 11 times already during his first term in office, according to Knoller.)

Without somebody counting, "a lot of this vaporizes," Knoller told the Journal.

Knoller, 58, began covering the presidency as an Associated Press radio reporter during Jimmy Carter's rise to prominence in 1975, and has been with CBS News since 1988. "He began cataloging details during the early Clinton administration, after it took him hours to find the number of times Bill Clinton had visited California," the Journal notes.

His mastery of particulars can result in perceptions about a particular president taking hold. According to the Journal, President George W. Bush's oft-cited reputation for making frequent trips outside of the Capital is partly attributable to Knoller's commitment to keeping track of them.

"When Mr. Knoller noted that Mr. Clinton had visited every state but Nebraska by the end of his tenure, the White House jammed in a trip to Omaha," the newspaper noted.

"Mark is the unofficial historian of the White House," White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told the newspaper. "When our numbers don't match his, it usually turns out that he is right."

Every evening, after spending 12 hours in the West Wing briefing room and tweeting the latest White House news, Knoller "updates his log of presidential activity, using White House transcripts, press releases, computer and handwritten notes (which he stores by date)," the Journal writes.

Asked for comment on the story, Knoller referred to a quip by CBS Radio colleague Charlie Kaye: "It's unusual to be the subject of a profile on the front page of the journal if you haven't been indicted."

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