Dan Rather Is a Good Ol’ Boy
Provided, that is, he’s in Texas and not on TV.
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Of course, in the world of television, fortunes change in as little time as it takes to change a channel. So it was for Dan Rather. The pace in the Gulf picked up, and so did Rather: His authoritative handling of Operation Desert Storm’s final days played well. By the end of the war, CBS Evening News had supplanted NBC in the number two ratings spot. Rather’s other program, the underappreciated weekly newsmagazine 48 Hours, was extended for another year. Connie Chung took pregnancy leave. Barbara Walters stayed with ABC.
We know more about Dan Rather than we know about Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Bernard Shaw combined. Texans remember the sight of the 29-year-old KHOU-TV reporter clinging to a tree in 75-mile-per-hour winds, describing the murderous path of hurricane Carla in 1961. We remember Rather as the first journalist to report that John Kennedy was dead and as the reporter who was pummeled by security guards at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the while assuring then-anchorman Walter Cronkite on the air, “Don’t worry about it, Walter. I’ll answer the bell.” We saw Rather in the rice paddies of Vietnam. We watched him square off against President Richard Nixon, who asked, “Are you running for something?” and received the reply, “No, sir, Mr. President, are you?”
We know Dan Rather. Yet it’s Rather, not his rival anchormen, about whom we have questions and suspicions. Today’s preferred model, ABC’s Peter Jennings, spent several years in the trenches and appears to have gotten through those years without so much as a scratch. But when we see Dan Rather on our television screens, we see in his wrinkled forehead and his fleshly lower eyelids and his charcoal-ash hair the travails of a media lifer, and we hear in his voice the echoes of American conflict. “For better or for worse,” he says, “I’m someone who has had to put it on the line in a time when that was considered possibly injurious to an anchorman’s career.” Rather’s history of accomplishments got him the top job at CBS, and that history has been held against him ever since.
The turbulence of Dan Rather’s past still roils through his life as anchorman. It’s true that Rather was mugged on Park Avenue by assailants who asked him, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” And it’s true that on September 11, 1987, the anchorman walked out of CBS’s Miami studio just before going on the air in protest of the decision to allot some of the Evening News’s time to a tennis match—thus causing the screen to go black for six full minutes. (Today, Rather refers to that event simply as “Miami”—like Pearl Harbor, another day of infamy.) There are several such instances of Rather inviting trouble and just as many of trouble catching Rather unawares. He is out of the hurricane, but the hurricane within him still rages. And it seems to be the case that when we watch him read his 22 minutes’ worth of news every weekday evening, the hurricane flickers across his face like fuzzy reception and disturbs us.
We know Dan Rather, but understanding him is another matter. It’s a partial acknowledgment of this that, fourteen years after the publication of his autobiography (The Camera Never Blinks), Rather is writing about himself again. Perhaps, as Rather insists, I Remember was undertaken as an innocent reminisce about his childhood in Houston’s Heights during the Depression. Perhaps along the way it became, in his words, “a book about values—how one gets values, maybe something on the level of how one loses values.” But Rather has also used the book as an opportunity to address a world that still isn’t sure what to make of him.
Above all, he defends his sincerity, since Rather’s earnest, sentimental side has often been perceived as a contrivance designed to offset his native aggressiveness. Rather explains in I Remember that the open Bible that sits on a lectern in his office is not merely the sanctimonious prop some reporters have implied it to be but instead an old family tradition. Similarly, Rather responds to critics who have derided his frequent use of maps and models during the Evening News as a patronizing gesture: The tendency, he writes, is a throwback to his father, a self-styled teacher “who would rather have me explain too much than too little.” And the Dan Rather who caught flak for appearing to be on the brink of tears while reporting on the Challenger explosion and the death of the Marines in Beirut now defends his watery eyes thusly in I Remember: “My acceptance of openly reflecting authentic emotion on appropriate occasions is rooted in the values of that special country called Texas . . . A true Texan, never mind the transplanted kind, was permitted to show red rims around his eyes in case of hostilities against Mama, the flag, or God in Heaven.”
Also in Rather’s new book, we finally learn that “Courage,” the curious sign-off that Rather employed during five consecutive broadcasts in September 1986, wasn’t just a flaky improvisation but a word often used by his father to buoy flagging spirits. The magnitude of the public’s reaction—and Rather’s bewildered reaction to that reaction—suggests that Rather and his viewers still operate on different wavelengths. “A single word.” He says, shaking his head. “In more recent years I’ve worked pretty hard to understand it but have mentally said: ‘This is a part of the business that I don’t think God put me on this earth to understand.’ I don’t understand it at all.”
The CBS fishbowl is a telling reminder of what anchoring has become. At the edge of the quiet, cavernous studio sit a handful of diligent individuals behind computer monitors. They make up the 24-hour-a-day news center; everything happening in the world, up to the minute, comes through them. As Rather sits at his anchor desk, reading his notes and flexing his jaws and lips in preparation for the evening broadcast, he is surrounded by cameras, lights, backdrops, TelePrompTers, technicians, a woman who circles him and dabs makeup on his jowls, and a senior producer who buzzes about barefooted with three felt-tip markers dangling from a string around her neck. The earpiece Rather wears connects him to the control room, where Erik Sorenson and his production legions furiously package the news: Ready, back to one, then we’ll rip back to Washington . . . Will somebody help Dan? He’s unplugged his earphone. Come on, will you hurry? Are these rhetorical questions or is this live? . . . Erik, the front office is wondering if the camera isn’t a little soft on Dan . . . Nicely read, Dan. Kill his mike. Okay, no more sitting on the edge of the desk for “Eye on America.” We’re going back to the normal position.
When Rather is reading the news, two distinct burdens bear down on him—and at times, pull him in opposite directions. One is the building at Vanderbilt University where every news broadcast is stored. “I’m almost constantly thinking to myself, ‘What’s going in that Vanderbilt archive?’” he says. “I always say about anchoring that there’s no place to hide. And from Vanderbilt, there’s no escape.”
The other burden, of course, is the ratings. If Vanderbilt represents the burden of Rather’s pride, the ratings represent reality. No network employee can ignore them. When Rather took the helm in 1981 the three major networks controlled about a 90 percent share of the audience. Ten years later, that figure hovers around 60 percent. Back in 1981, no one in his right mind would have suggested that one of the networks might someday terminate its evening news broadcast. Today everyone, including Rather, acknowledges the likelihood that one of the networks will bail out of the news business. An obvious candidate would be NBC, which already has drastically curtailed its foreign coverage. But CBS, with all of its highly publicized corporate turmoil, could just as easily shut down the program that brought us Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid—and Dan Rather.
“A large part of why people watch a certain broadcast is still based on the anchor,” says Erik Sorenson. “But it’s become less and less so. It might have been ninety percent of the issue fifteen years ago; it may be only sixty-five percent or seventy percent now. What precedes the broadcast is a big factor. Station allegiance is an issue. And then there is the issue of when affiliate stations choose to play our broadcast.”
Yet it’s an irony of the business that as the influence of anchors on ratings has declined, the obsession with audience share has increased. “Walter Cronkite, up to the day he left, didn’t look at the ratings every week,” says Rather. ”Through most of their careers, Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Chancellor—if they looked at the ratings three or four times a year, I’d be surprised. Now it’s overnight. They talk about the overnight ratings.”
While Rather avoids public displays of self-pity, insisting, “I love the game,” he has surely spent days wondering whether the aggravations have been worth it. As a CBS reporter and a 60 Minutes crusader in 1979 making reportedly $225,000 a year, Dan Rather was at the top of his game when it became clear that he was a dark horse candidate to succeed the retiring Walter Cronkite . . . but that the winner would almost certainly be Roger Mudd. Rather, who thrives on adversity every bit as much as his old foe Nixon, felt the familiar churning when he was informed of the odds against him. “I did believe, almost until the last hour, that it probably would be Mudd,” he says. “When someone said, you are in the race, then I said to myself, ‘Well, then I damn sure intend to win it.’ If you want to see me try my hardest, you tell me there’s something I’m not capable of doing.”
My Library
