Morley Safer, Correspondent 
Dan Rather Retorting
Ever since his Bush-bashing 60 Minutes report, the CBS icon has been the right wing’s favorite whipping boy (well, they weren’t exactly fans before then, either). But when he leaves the anchor’s chair on March 9, he has no intention of giving up the fight.
(Page 2 of 4)
When Rather was growing up in the Heights section of Houston, a career in television news wasn’t on his radar screen. “We didn’t own a TV set, and we didn’t know anybody who did,” he told me that morning. “My dream was to be a byline reporter on either the Houston Chronicle or the Houston Post.” Remarking on that dream, Hugh Cunningham, his journalism professor at Sam Houston State Teachers College, in Huntsville, told him, “It’ll be a long way from here to there.” A degree from Sam Houston State hardly forecast great accomplishments, although syndicated columnist Molly Ivins told me that after she held a teaching fellowship there some years ago, she got a new insight on Rather. “None of the students read a daily newspaper,” Ivins said. “The best ones maybe read a newsweekly. None could write well. None were prepared to go out and meet the world. But I thought they would turn out to be good reporters because they knew they’d have to work their asses off to get anywhere.”
And so Rather did. After graduating, in 1953, he headed back to Houston to find a job. “I cut my beat-reporter teeth at radio station KTRH, which was a fifty-thousand-watt station that covered the Gulf Coast,” he said. “I came in at four in the morning and read the pork belly futures out of Chicago. Then I’d grab this clumsy old wet-cell tape recorder and go to city hall. I slept through more zoning hearings than any anchor in history. I’d move on to the police station and then the commissioner’s court. I was green as money, but I knew already that this was what I was born to do.” To supplement his income, he broadcast play-by-play accounts of University of Houston football games, which taught him the anchor’s essential art of ad-libbing—“how to take and hold air,” he said. Poor spelling nixed his chances of getting a job at the Chronicle, but it didn’t stop him from covering major stories. When KTRH refused to pay his way to a news conference at Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in 1956, Rather hitchhiked. LBJ was the Senate majority leader at the time and was recovering at the ranch from a recent heart attack. Rumor had it that he was about to announce his candidacy for president. When Rather tried to use a phone in Johnson’s office to call in a report that the great man might indeed be thinking of higher office, LBJ grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and kicked him off the ranch.
He made his bones five years later doing his famous coverage of Hurricane Carla for KHOU-TV. Remember that image of him clinging to a palm tree, up to his waist in snakes, the wind howling around him? I could swear it’s in my memory bank, and I know I’ve read about it dozens of times. But I learned talking to Rather that it never happened. What did happen is far more revealing of the brand of reporter he’d become. TV stations back then didn’t have weather radars, much less computers. When Carla was approaching Texas, Rather persuaded his station manager to send him and a camera crew to Galveston. Then he persuaded the man in charge of the weather station there to let him position a camera in front of the radar console. That day, viewers saw something they had never seen on live television: the image of a four-hundred-mile-wide hurricane superimposed over a map of the Texas Gulf Coast. The coverage spurred a mass evacuation of the coast and probably saved thousands of lives. A few months later Rather was hired by CBS News in Dallas, where, in 1963, he became the first television journalist to report the death of President John F. Kennedy.
Rather is still fond of those early years at CBS. Across the hall from his current office is a small room with a fifties-era microphone, some radio equipment, and a few old photographs and books. A plaque that Rather attached to the door identifies it as the Eric Sevareid Radio Room. “Sevareid was one of Edward R. Murrow’s guys,” Rather said. “He did the last broadcast from Paris just before the Nazis got there.” Having always been a bit embarrassed of his education, Rather idolized Sevareid, who was known as the network’s “intellectual.” One day in the early stages of the Vietnam War, having a drink with Rather at the Caravelle Hotel, in Saigon, Sevareid made some crack about “that cow college where you got your degree,” then began to draw up a reading list for his young colleague. The list was similar to the University of Chicago Great Books series that Hugh Cunningham had once suggested back at Sam Houston State—Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Herodotus, all the heavyweights. Even if he’d had the maturity to slog through such heavy reading as a student, Rather couldn’t have afforded all those books back then. “By now I was married, had two children, and was making $29,000 a year,” Rather told me. “So I took Sevareid’s advice and read every book cover to cover.”
Rather is the last of his breed, a junkyard dog in anchor’s clothing, hard-charging and afraid of nothing except maybe getting caught behind the desk while the town is burning. Dogged determination became his hallmark, both as a reporter and as an anchor at CBS. Houston writer Mickey Herskowitz, who has known Rather for thirty years and co-authored two of Rather’s six books, wrote the best line I’ve read about him: “He was the type of reporter who ran toward the bomb blast, the better to see the light.” He’s covered more than a dozen wars on five continents. He moved into the anchor spot in 1981, replacing another of his idols, Walter Cronkite. Though he’s now known to a whole generation as the face of the Evening News, it was never a perfect fit. Rather is considered “hot,” unlike his cool, younger, and more reserved competitors, Brokaw and ABC’s Peter Jennings, whom he has trailed in the ratings for years. But while those two have reported from the field, it has never been anything as dramatic and daring as going behind the lines in a war zone. Bob Schieffer remembered a conversation he had with Brokaw in which the NBC star compared today’s young anchors to “hothouse plants that have grown up under studio lights instead of out in the sun, like us old guys.” Schieffer added, “Dan didn’t get that tan in the studio.” When I read the “hothouse plants” quote to Rather, he almost choked on his coffee. “That’s my line,” he sputtered. “I told that to Brokaw. I can’t believe he’s repeating it without attribution.”
Staying behind the desk was never enough for Rather. By the nineties he was involved in nearly every facet of CBS News. When I asked Schieffer about Memogate, he suggested that Rather’s inability to say no may have ultimately played a part. “They had him doing three full-time jobs—anchor, 60 Minutes, and 48 Hours. What made Walter [Cronkite] so great was he let other people handle the little stuff. If Walter covered a story, you knew it was big. They made Dan the logo of CBS. They wore him out. But Dan liked it that way. He wanted to cover every car wreck himself.”
CBS NEWS HAD LAGGED behind its competition for years, and in the election year of 2004, the pressure on reporters to break big, sensational stories was enormous. Rather was the face out in front of many big stories on 60 Minutes, but for a long time Mary Mapes, a standout producer at the show, was the reporter and the force behind Rather’s success. Rather had become too famous and too overburdened with responsibility to be an effective investigative reporter, so Mapes did much of it for him, often with great results. Last spring Mapes broke the story of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and also landed an exclusive interview with the illegitimate black daughter of South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. Those feats, however, seemed destined to be eclipsed when Mapes obtained the Bush National Guard memos in September.
The memos, which every major news organization had tried desperately to get its hands on, filled the gaps in Bush’s early-seventies service record and were supposedly from the personnel files of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Bush’s commander in 1972. Mapes’s Deep Throat turned out to be another former Air National Guard officer, Bill Burkett. Burkett told conflicting stories about where he had obtained the memos, which should have raised red flags, even more so when he revealed that a mystery woman had sent him to a livestock show, where a stranger handed him an envelope containing photocopies of the documents. Burkett claimed that he had copied the memos and then burned the original photocopies, a very strange move indeed and one that made them impossible to authenticate. When Mapes collected the last of the documents on Sunday night, September 5, she should have had three weeks to vet them. It turned out she had only three days.
When executive producer Josh Howard got wind of how big the story could be, with the blessing of CBS News president Andrew Heyward, he ordered the 60 Minutes team to “crash” the segment on Bush—which included Rather’s interview with former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes, who claimed he’d pulled strings for Bush to get into the Guard and avoid Vietnam—and air it the following Wednesday. Mapes agreed with the decision and did her best. In the meantime, Rather had traveled to Texas to do an interview for the National Guard segment, returning to New York the day before the program aired. Except for a couple of interviews and the narration, Rather had hardly any input on the memo segment but read multiple drafts of the script.
My Library
