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.
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Only nineteen minutes into the September 8 broadcast, the blogosphere was already crackling with reports that the documents were produced on a computer, which, of course, would not have been possible in 1972. Bloggers began denouncing Rather while downloading the documents from the CBS Web site and from each other. Copies begot copies, which begot other copies. Like a prairie fire, rumor spread that the memos were forgeries. Critics pointed to the fact that the memos included the Times New Roman font and superscript, both of which were uncommon features on typewriters during the era in which the memos were supposedly produced. A do-it-yourself forgery experiment was posted on the conservative blog Little Green Footballs. Following the experiment’s instructions, a self-proclaimed typography expert named Joseph Newcomer typed the text of one of the documents into Microsoft Word and produced an exact copy of the seventies-era memo, which led him to “assert without any doubt . . . that this document is a modern forgery.” All Newcomer really proved was that Microsoft Word can make an exact replica of almost any document, but when it was soon revealed that Burkett, a known Bush hater, was Mapes’ source for the memos, the blogs had another line of attack. Overnight, the story had a life of its own, and Rather was its whipping boy. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan proclaimed that taking Rather and CBS down was “a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt.” Columbia Journalism Review editor Corey Pein wrote that, in the minds of bloggers, Memogate had become a “Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites” of the mainstream news.
Three and a half months later the Thornburgh-led independent investigation directed its harshest criticism toward Mapes, not Rather. The report said that she had ignored information that cast doubt on the story, continued to insist that the memos were authentic and that her source was “rock solid,” even as evidence to the contrary emerged, and stalled her superiors with “half truths.” The panel concluded that the great deference given to Mapes, the network’s most respected producer, had created “a zealous belief in the truth of the segment.” In the aftermath, Mapes was fired, while executive producer Howard, vice president of CBS’s newsmagazines Betsy West, and senior broadcast producer Mary Murphy were all asked to resign. What the panel failed to consider is that investigative reporting is a black art. Myopic zeal is a tool of the trade, as is the willingness to hide for hours in hedgerows, hoping a target will move or betray itself. In their exploration of the dark and dangerous netherworld of sources and confidences, investigative reporters play hunches all the time. “If they weren’t as resourceful at compromising reality,” media critic Jack Shafer wrote in Slate, “we’d have no investigative reporting at all.”
I talked to Mapes several times in the days before the report was released, and I know that she must have been stunned by both the verdict and the severity of the punishment. She thought that a reprimand for the staff would be appropriate. She still believes the documents are factual. Sure, she had failed to authenticate the documents, but the panel had failed to prove they were forgeries, and it had had three months instead of three days, not to mention the assistance of four document experts and at least one private-detective agency. In a way, her performance reflected the standards of our current government: On the same day Mapes was fired, a story broke that conservative columnist Armstrong Williams was being paid to shill for the White House’s education program, and the White House announced that it had abandoned the search for weapons of mass destruction. But Les Moonves’s reaction was swift and brutal. “For the first time in my life, I am unemployed,” Mapes told me from her home in Dallas. “My son thinks I should get a job in an ice cream store.”
Mapes refuses to bad-mouth Rather about the incident, but the fact that he and Heyward were almost entirely absolved by the report, ostensibly because neither of them was aware of any reason to question the documents, must have been hard to swallow. Talking to people at CBS News, I learned that, contrary to the panel’s findings, Heyward was very much in the loop and had been warned that the show could cause problems. “Dan told Andrew Heyward on Sunday night that this story could be dynamite but that it was also potentially radioactive,” one veteran journalist told me. “Heyward recognized the risks and put Betsy West in charge. Normally, she doesn’t see the project until it’s edited and ready to air. In this case, she was there, in the screening room and all over things.” When Howard made the decision to crash the Bush segment, West approved. At that point, only Heyward had the power to delay it. When they were working on the equally sensitive piece about Abu Ghraib last spring, General Richard B. Myers had personally telephoned Rather, a friend, and asked CBS News to hold the piece “in the national interest.” Heyward had decided to delay it two weeks. “We almost lost it,” the source told me. Apparently Heyward believed that in West’s hands, the Bush report was solid, and he made no effort to return the segment to its original air date of September 29. “If he had,” the source said, “none of this might have happened.”
The same conclusion could be drawn about Rather’s behavior after the episode aired. His blind defense of the memos in the face of mounting evidence that they were, at the very least, seriously flawed, only fueled accusations among the bloggers that he was biased. Many bloggers are faceless lawn-chair pundits, unrestrained and often unprincipled, and they can ignore the traditional rules of fairness and accuracy while railing against their absence in the mainstream media. Last spring some of them picked up the buzz about John Kerry’s alleged marital infidelities, conveniently timed with his rise in the Democratic primaries. Nobody was held accountable, much less fired, when the story was proved false. Still, Rather’s defensive posture only exacerbated the perception that he did not comprehend the evidence against him and his colleagues or the power it had in the hands of journalism’s new breed of muckrakers. He only made matters worse by taking the offensive against his right-wing critics, using his platform on the Evening News to blast them as “partisan political operatives.” He told the Washington Post: “I don’t cave when the pressure gets too great from these partisan, political, ideological forces.” The reason bloggers were attacking the documents, he told the Wall Street Journal, was “because they can’t deny the fundamental truths of the analysis.” Eventually he had to back down, apologize, and admit that the fundamental truths could not be proved. It went without saying that such an admission was among the bitterest moments of his life.
RATHER HAS NEVER talked about his personal politics, other than to say that he voted twice for Dwight Eisenhower. Colleagues at CBS don’t recall Rather spouting ideology or showing much interest in things like Social Security reform, budget deficits, or defense spending as a percentage of the gross national product. Still, accusations of bias were trailing Rather long before 2004. Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, told me in an e-mail: “I suspect that he’s an old-fashioned East Texas populist in some visceral way. That, along with his ‘hot’ personality, gives him a reputation for being more ideological than he really is.”
When we resume our conversation in his office that afternoon, Rather responds by saying that he prides himself on playing no favorites and pulling no punches, that the record proves he is an equal-opportunity assailer of presidents and kings. He talks about covering the Johnson White House both before and after his time in Vietnam and says of LBJ: “He was as direct as a punch in the nose.” Johnson could never comprehend why Rather, a fellow Texan, couldn’t see things his way. “He seemed incapable of understanding my role as someone independent of the White House,” Rather says. The same went for Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, who all complained to CBS News that Rather was allowing his political bias to color his reporting. Rather’s politics are even the entire subject of a Web site, ratherbiased.com, which posts countless pages of statements he’s made over the years as evidence that he is “one of the most politicized journalists of our time.” Nonetheless, many of the accusations can be traced back to a couple of brief exchanges.
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