Dan Rather Is a Good Ol’ Boy
Provided, that is, he’s in Texas and not on TV.
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Though Rather insists he harbored no gnawing ambition to be the Evening News anchorman, he fought for the job like a man possessed. As described in Peter Boyer’s Who Killed CBS?, the tide turned when Rather received an offer to anchor at ABC, prompting a dilemma for CBS executives: While they weren’t convinced that they wanted Dan Rather as their anchorman, by no means did they desire to see him anchoring for a competitor. Rather got what he wanted but quickly found himself contending with the looming memory of Uncle Walter. Cronkite possessed the two essential components of anchoring, credibility and likability. And though it was understood that no one else in the business embodied both traits, it was the opinion of many—including CBS founder William Paley—that, yes, credibility was nice and all, but likability was imperative. Even during Rather’s first five years, when the CBS Evening News stayed at or near the top of the ratings, enormous effort was devoted to “softening” the veteran reporter: adjusting his sitting position, using tighter camera angles, having him wear sweaters, and above all else, keeping him at arm’s length from the part of the game he has loved the most—reporting.
“When I got the job,” says Rather, “there were people who said, ‘Okay, now’s the time to start making the transition, to stop thinking of yourself as a reporter and start thinking of yourself as an anchorperson.’ I did not do that—it was a conscious decision. But the characteristics that make one a good reporter sometimes come in direct conflict with those things that are at least perceived to make one a good anchorperson. For example, a good anchorperson doesn’t ask the tough question. Also, a consistency of look is important. When viewers turn on their television sets, they do not expect to see a guy who appears to be a fugitive from a destruction derby as their anchorperson. You can’t continue running around the world looking like a man with his shirttail untucked and expect to be seen as avuncular.”
But Rather can’t sit still. Why a man who earns a salary variously reported between $2 million and $3.5 million a year would continue to insist on “flogging myself into the desert or the jungle or earthquakes or hurricanes or what have you” is hard to fathom. It’s Rather’s belief that “the audience senses who knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t, and the only way you can know is to grab a pencil and get out of the office.” Yet his knack for finding the action inevitably leads to charges of grandstanding. In 1980, just after being named as Cronkite’s successor, Rather traveled to Afghanistan for a 60 Minutes story on the Afghan rebels. The assignment involved a fair amount of dangerous undercover work, but the critics ridiculed Rather’s Arab garb, labeled him Gunga Dan, and wrote off the mission as pure show biz—“Like I did it all on the back of a Hollywood lot,” Rather says.
In 1988, Rather and Vice President George Bush duked it out before an incredulous television audience. Though Bush was campaigning for the presidency, CBS had previously advertised the live interview as one in which the vice president would be asked about his role in the Iran-contra affair. Nonetheless, when Rather popped the Iran-contra question, Bush behaved as if the anchorman were trying to ambush him and replied angrily, “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. Would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? Would you like that?” It was Rather who had been ambushed: Despite getting his facts wrong, Bush embarrassed his interrogator and rid himself of the wimp image forever. Later, media critics would condemn Rather for his adversarial approach. Their message was plain: While a reporter is paid to mix things up, an anchorman does so at his peril.
A year later, in 1989, Rather and his Evening News crew went to Beijing and delivered arresting coverage of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. It was a proud moment for Rather but one that his detractors quickly forgot when, in the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Kuwait and Rather wasted no time booking his flight. “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and I gotta go,” he remembers thinking. So he went and promptly got labeled Bigfoot Rather.
The name-calling, coupled with Tom Bettag’s dismissal, inflicted a noticeable dent in Rather’s morale. He began to put in fewer hours and spent increasingly less time hanging around the fishbowl. Even when it appeared that Rather’s job was no longer in jeopardy, his detachment remained evident. The thrill was gone until the next hot story came along.
“The Gulf war was definitely Dan Rather at his worst,” says one longtime CBS staffer. “Moscow was Dan Rather at his best.” When the Soviet coup materialized this past August, CBS officials ordered Rather to stay behind his desk, and Rather made the most of it. Seeing that the coup wasn’t much of a visual phenomenon, Rather surrounded himself with Soviet experts like Jonathon Sanders and Stephen Cohen and ran analytical rings around the competition. Rather’s delivery was confident and at times even breezy: He noted dryly that the fleeing coup instigators had pulled a “Thelma and Louise,” which won him applause in USA Today. This time around, it was ABC’s Diane Sawyer who went overseas, microphone in hand, and got hammered back home for grandstanding. This time around, Dan Rather’s big feet were firmly planted.
When Rather wants personal solace, he comes to Texas. When he feels the tug of his professional roots, he hits the streets for 48 Hours, where his reporter ethic is deeply appreciated. “By having Dan Rather anchor the program,” says 48 Hours executive producer Andrew Heyward, “we’re saying to the viewers, ‘This is not sleazy. This is not tabloid. This is not exploitative.’ He brings enormous credibility, and that’s very important to us.”
On a Wednesday morning at seven-twenty, Rather and 48 Hours senior producer Steve Glauber meet at the corner of Seventy-fifth and Madison, where a vehicle picks them up and ferries them to Central Park. There Rather will interview a group of Upper West Side pet owners who were friends with Alexis Welsh, a woman who took her dogs out walking early one morning, as always, and was murdered, allegedly by a paranoid schizophrenic. Rather wears jeans, tennis shoes, and a safari jacket. He’s in a sullen mood, barely responding to Glauber’s pre-interview coaching. The ride is a tense one until Rather finally mumbles, “I was with a source last night. An Iraqi gentleman. I counted on him to be a good Muslim and not drink.”
He rumbles a sigh. “We began at the restaurant of the Westbury Hotel,” he says. “And then to many other places.”
As we enter Central Park, we see the 48 Hours camera crew at the bottom of a small hill. Surrounding the crew are about twenty men and women and at least as many unleashed canines. Dazed and sag-faced, Rather regards the scene. “Oh, my God,” he murmurs. “Not the f—ing dog people.”
Yet Rather is on the moment he enters the fray. His questions to Alexis Welsh’s fellow dog-walkers are alert and informed, as if he were up all night pondering the Welsh tragedy instead of guzzling whiskey with an Iraqi Deep Throat. He has not lost his chops. While Rather interviews Welsh’s friends, I notice that two feet away from where he’s standing, a German shepherd is digging what is becoming a large hole. My heart skips a beat. Is another Rather mishap about to unfold? But no: As soon as the final question is answered, Dan Rather thanks his sources, then steps neatly to the side of the hole, then over a pile of dog manure, and past a bench crowded with homeless men who stare at the anchorman with glazed wonder.
Why 48 Hours is so important to Dan Rather is evident during the next interview for the Alexis Welsh segment. The interviewee is a woman who had once been attacked by the same paranoid schizophrenic who allegedly killed Welsh. The woman is sitting on the steps of her apartment. Her face looks hollow, her frame is underfed, she is plainly braless, and she has scars up and down her arms. An empty wine cooler bottle sits on one side of her. Rather sits on the other side of her, shakes her hand, and begins to ask questions. As he does, and as the woman responds, Glauber, his crew, and I stand nearby, gaping. The rapport between interviewer and interviewee is astounding. Watching the anchorman draw answers out of the indigent woman, I try to imagine Rather’s unflappable counterparts at NBC and ABC sitting on these steps. But the image will not come. For all their gab and savvy, Jennings and Brokaw are as removed from the stoop as Ronald Reagan. Having succeeded at detaching themselves from the news, they are, in a sense, strangers to the news. Rather, by contrast, lunges wherever the news can be found. He’s grubby with it.
Later he tells me, “Reporters get to see a Dickensian side of life—at the police station, after midnight, in the emergency room, talking on the stoop. You see a part of the world a hell of a lot of people don’t get to see. It’s one of the ways in which one gets addicted to the craft.”
A CBS executive who liked Dan Rather once told the anchorman, “I respect the fact that you’re a reporter. But it will be your epitaph.”
“I’ll trade for that,” replied Dan Rather.
There have been moments, Rather tells me as we lean against the pickup and survey Buescher State Park a final time, when he has considered the “Ted Williams exit.” He explains, “Hit a home run, circle the bases, come back to the dugout, don’t even stop to take a shower, just go to the parking lot and get in your car and get away. There have been a few times when I thought at least for a fleeting second, ‘If you want a Ted Williams exit, this, Dan, is as close as you’re gonna get.’”
The Soviet coup was one of those moments. On Thursday, August 22, as Gorbachev’s captors pulled a “Thelma and Louise,” Dan Rather performed what he regards as one of his finest broadcasts ever, 22 minutes when everything clicked. At the stroke of seven, he could very well have removed his earpiece, wiped off the makeup, and exited the fishbowl to wild, genuinely affectionate applause. He and Jean could have taken a CBS limo to La Guardia Airport and traveled first-class to any one of the Texas regions the Rathers consider worthy retirement sites: the Gulf Coast, Austin’s Lake Travis, or Winchester. Rather could make a clean break of it, leaving the rest of us to say, “That son of a bitch could hit the long ball, couldn’t he?”
For a silent moment, Rather luxuriates in the fantasy. Then he says with a smile that comes easily to his strong face, “But this ain’t baseball, and I ain’t Ted Williams.” He spits a little tobacco juice, and soon he’s back in the pickup, driving slowly along dirt roads, through the land that changes least.
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