November 1991
Dan Rather Is a Good Ol’ Boy
Provided, that is, he’s in Texas and not on TV.
Dan Rather eases his father-in-law’s GMC Pickup along the roads of Buescher State Park, just outside of Smithville. He seems to know every bend, and every acre seems to prompt a small memory. Some forty years ago, the young newsman from Houston spent his weekends strolling these pathways, holding hands with a local girl he was courting, Jean Goebel from Winchester. When the water in the park’s lake was high enough, they would spend the afternoons swimming together, or Rather would fish for perch while, back home, Jean and her mother prepared a Goebel specialty, squirrel with cream gravy.
When Rather returns to Houston from New York, he seldom spends much time in his old neighborhood, which is adjacent to the Heights. Aside from the house his father built (which has long since left the family), there is nothing in that economically and racially diverse neighborhood to recall the Depression-era community that gave Rather his core values. But the past still greets him at Buescher State Park. These days he fishes at Lake Buescher whenever he can, and Jean’s family—Rather’s in-laws for the past 34 years—throw reunions on the park’s campground, where the Goebels swim and fish and eat squirrel with cream gravy. Considering that Rather’s workplace is CBS News, where every tradition—including the ten-year tradition of Rather as Evening News anchorman—must be justified by the latest television ratings, it’s easy to see why he cherishes these moments at Buescher. They are the part of Dan Rather’s life that is in no danger of changing overnight.
He takes these roads slowly, lovingly. (Among the many books Rather would like to write is one about the hidden pleasures of dirt roads—along the lines of William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, he says, “except only unpaved roads and only in Texas.”) At a certain point, he brings the truck to a halt. As the engine idles, he gestures at the thicket surrounding us and says, “The Indians who lived out here called ’em Lost Pines. They figured that since the trees didn’t look like they came from around here, they must be lost.”
He smiles at the simplicity of the logic. In Manhattan Dan Rather may qualify as a Lost Pine, but here in his father-in-law’s pickup he could pass for a Buescher State Park custodian. Rather is wearing a denim work shirt with blue jeans, a simple pair of black cowboy boots, and a gimme cap that advertises a Smithville welding shop. A chaw of Beechnut tobacco bulges beneath his cheek. When he spits, he opens the door while driving and leans his head out so that the juice doesn’t spray against the truck. Then he closes the door and wipes his lips with the back of his hand. The whole process takes about as much time as it does to say, “Good evening. I’m Dan Rather.” It’s two-thirty in the afternoon, and if Dan Rather were at work today, he would just now be concluding the daily story-lineup meeting, which takes place in the “fishbowl,” the CBS Evening News nerve center. It’s common knowledge that when Rather is fighting for a particular story during those meetings, he is often given to fits of anger. Some of his colleagues walk away convinced that the true Dan Rather is an arrogant hothead, while the Dan Rather who spews out folksy Texas aphorisms to a credulous TV audience is pure invention. As to his arrogance, even Rather will admit, “I don’t take the bridle well.” But anyone who thinks of Dan Rather as a phony Texan hasn’t seen him expel a mouthful of tobacco juice from a moving pickup.
Pointing out the window, he says, “If you ever have time, you really ought to take this road that goes out toward Bastrop.” He shakes his head solemnly. “Great little dirt road!” But instead, Rather maneuvers the pickup out of the park and east down Ranch Road 153, which, though paved, he takes at a respectful 25 miles per hour as we pass through the land of his in-laws, a lush expanse of meadows that was settled by Wendish-speaking Germans in the 1850’s. On the outskirts of Winchester, Rather points to a drab little building and says, “That’s the local bar. Now, if you want to see a part of America that’s disappearing, you come out here on a Friday night. And you’d damn sure better bring your hard hat.”
But the bar where we finally settle in for beers is a few miles away, in Serbin—“Home of Serbin Jackrabbits” says a sign adjacent to a baseball field where, Rather tells me, “It’s 334-feet down the left-field line,” and how the hell he knows that is beyond me. The bar in Serbin is quiet on a Wednesday afternoon: There’s one other customer, a somber soul whose spirits lift when Rather buys him a beer. As Rather and I move toward the dining area, the man seated at the bar sips at the beer that’s been bought for him and fixes his drowsy eyes on us. He’s wondering where he’s seen that guy with the chaw of tobacco in his cheek.
Once seated, Rather takes a swig of his Shiner and begins to talk about Serbin, CBS, and the vast world in between. His natural speaking voice is so quiet that I have to lean over the table to hear him. He is an unfailingly polite fellow and amiable once he has decided you’re not his enemy, but physically he remains slightly on edge: His movements are stiff and uneasy, and he is unable to smile on command. It has been observed that Rather is not a deep thinker. (Was Cronkite? Is Brokaw?) Whether or not that is true, his mind is active to the extreme. He listens intently to every word, and he remembers everything—including the unflattering things that have been written about him, some of which he can quote verbatim. He’s an engaging conversationalist, but at times you can sense the effort. There’s an uncontrollable side to him that can be charming or alarming, depending on whether you own shares of CBS stock. He is prone to wearing baseball caps and safari hats, for example, and his hair is often a mess. Lately Rather’s locks have darkened, provoking the usual round of speculation. Is management abandoning the softer, grayer look for a more youthful Dan Rather? Or is Rather willfully defying his imagemakers? Apparently it’s neither: Rather’s new hairstylist (whose name now appears on the CBS Evening News credits) asked the anchorman one day if he’d like a little color, and Rather said why not. Perhaps he should have consulted with the CBS executives and publicists. Then again, it was only a little color.
And then again, the Nielsen ratings may rise or fall, and millions of dollars may be won or lost for the sake of a little color. Rather says he hears it all the time: “What the public wants is somebody who spends time concerning himself with dress, grooming, and appearance and who gets into the station at four-thirty and concentrates, as a singer or dancer would, on the performance.” Some of Rather’s best friends in the business have advised him to pay a little more attention to his performance and a little less to being a reporter. They’ve also suggested that he let go of his other passion, which is Texas: They tell him to project a “national” image, meaning no image at all. Over the years, Rather has given some ground. But when he comes home, he drives dirt roads and chews his Beechnut and buys beers for someone who doesn’t know who Dan Rather is—and here, no one tells him to let go of what he loves.
While we’re talking we look up to see that the man at the bar stands before us, wearing a humble sort of grin. “I appreciate the beers,” he says, “but I’d sorta like to know who’s buying ’em for me. You from around here?”
Dan Rather’s youthful face now looks almost childlike. “Yes,” he says, beaming. “I sure am.”
These are not the best of times for Dan Rather. But in this year of Rather milestones—his sixtieth birthday this Halloween, his tenth anniversary as anchorman of the CBS Evening News, and the year marking the publication of his memoirs, I Remember—things could be a great deal worse. The year began dismally, with the once-preeminent news network languishing in the ratings cellar, and with media analysts taking potshots at CBS’s Persian Gulf war coverage—specifically, at Rather’s foray into the desert, which struck the critics as a transparent act of anchor showmanship, emblematic of what has come to be known in the trade as bigfoot journalism. While the Americans dropped bombs on Baghdad, the Wall Street Journal published what Rather calls “a very hurtful piece” that quoted unnamed CBS sources to the effect that Dan Rather’s anchoring days were numbered.
On February 13, CBS News president Eric Ober fired Rather’s close friend Tom Bettag, once described by the anchorman as “my last executive producer.” The new executive producer was Erik Sorenson, an Ober crony who lacked, in Rather’s estimation, “big game experience.” All of this seemed calculated to provoke Rather, especially in light of a clause in Rather’s contract stating that the executive producer must meet with Rather’s approval. “Ober made it very clear that I could nominate a hundred people, but he’d made his decision,” says Rather. “Tom was gonna go, and Erik Sorenson was gonna come in.”
It looked for all the world like a symbolic castration. Perhaps, insiders suggested, CBS executives were hopeful that Rather would blow his stack and storm out, right in the middle of the war in the Persian Gulf. That didn’t happen—“I have a reputation for doing things that are not too good, but leaving a big story is not one of them, no matter what storms may be brewing inside of me,” Rather says. Still, the possibility lingered that he might be dumped or made to suffer the humiliation of sharing his anchor desk. Connie Chung was the obvious choice, though CBS’s overture to Barbara Walters of ABC raised a few eyebrows.
