If there’s one question that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer gets more than any other, it’s “What’s your real name?”

And the jokes are endless. Blitzer, in his office behind Union Station, pulls out a framed New Yorker cartoon in which three little pigs mull the presence of a menacing wolf with a microphone at the door and wonder, “Should we let him in? He says he’s Wolf Blitzer.”

Amazed at the TV man’s popularity during the first Gulf War, Johnny Carson joked that Kevin Costner was going to film a sequel to “Dances with Wolves” and call it “Dances with Wolf Blitzer.”

At one White House Correspondents Association dinner, former President Bill Clinton asked, “How can you take someone seriously whose name is Wolf?”

The affable correspondent who has been in the business for more than three decades takes the ribbing in stride and seems to take pride in it. In fact, Wolf was his maternal great grandfather’s name; “it wasn’t short for Wolfgang, either,” he notes.

Blitzer began his career in print journalism in 1972 in Reuters’s Tel Aviv bureau on a salary of less than $10,000. A few years later, he became the Washington correspondent for The Jerusalem Post. He began doing TV appearances as an expert on Israeli-Palestinian affairs on NBC and later on CNN.

In 1990, CNN hired him to cover the Pentagon. From there he moved to the White House. And now his full-time gig is “The Situation Room,” a show that airs each weekday between 3 and 6 p.m. It is a constantly updated show of world news.

Blitzer is less wolf than teddy bear. His thin, white, translucent beard and mustache, round, silver glasses and hair that moves make him seem approachable, even folksy.

He isn’t full of himself. Perhaps that is because his early journalism training involved ritualistic hazing by the British journalists at Reuters.

“They berated me, they taunted me, they cajoled,” he says. “They said things like, ‘Are you sure you want to be a journalist?’ It was a hazing experience. It was almost like joining a fraternity.”

Knowing that his father was in the building business back in his hometown of Buffalo, they needled him, “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Buffalo and go into the building business?” Blitzer recalls a 1,000-word story he wrote that he thought was thoughtful; his editor whittled it into a 70-word brief. “There were moments when I said maybe I should be thinking about law school,” Blitzer s ays.

His favorite interview? Nelson Mandela in 1998. As a White House correspondent, Blitzer was covering Clinton’s trip to South Africa, where he was taken into Mandela’s former prison cell and then to his presidential residence in Cape Town.

“He showed no bitterness. He was so kind and so moving. It was a powerfully emotional moment in my journalism career.”

Still, there are interviews that don’t go smoothly, such as with foreign leaders who can’t speak English but pretend they understand it. Or with children. “Usually it involves children who are annoying or who start crying,” he says.

Blitzer’s wife, Lynn, is a professional shopper at Saks Fifth Avenue in Chevy Chase, and their daughter, Ilana, is assistant beauty editor at Self magazine in New York. The couple lives in Bethesda, where Blitzer says he escapes his news-junkie mentality by playing tennis and having friends who have nothing to do with the news business. He also enjoys traveling to Aspen, Colo., and the Hamptons or visiting his mother in South Florida. She loves to watch her son on TV, he says, “except when I’m in Iraq. Then she goes crazy.”

But, he says, “I really love what I’m doing, and I feel privileged to have a front-row seat to history. There is nothing else I’d rather do.”