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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The first resulted from his relentless questioning of Nixon at a press conference at the height of Watergate. “That wasn’t a press conference,” Rather says, remembering the event clearly. “It was a pep rally. They had papered the house [with conservatives], and when I started asking my question, there was some applause but a lot more jeers.” Rather questioned Nixon about how his statements didn’t square with transcripts being released by the special prosecutor. Nixon tried to wisecrack his way out of trouble: “Are you running for something?” he asked Rather. To which Rather replied politely, “No, sir, Mr. President. Are you?” Afterward, the Nixon White House put enormous pressure on CBS News to transfer Rather off the presidential beat and, once Nixon resigned, it apparently succeeded. Rather was told that he was being “promoted” from Washington to New York. “I thought they were yielding to pressure, but you pay your money, you take your chances,” he says. “I did come back to New York. They did increase my pay.” But his new office wasn’t at CBS News headquarters; it was at a different location downtown. And his new job wasn’t to report the news but to produce documentaries. “Out of sight, out of mind,” Rather says offhandedly as Allison appears with fresh drinks. He put all his energy into a documentary linking cancer and pollution, and the network rewarded his hard work by scheduling it against the sixth game of the World Series. “Test patterns had better ratings than our documentary did,” he says. “Afterwards, I sat for a long time in the dark, a glass of Wild Turkey in hand, asking myself, ‘What in the hell am I into here?’”
If there was any lesson to be learned from the episode, Rather had forgotten it by 1988, when he had an equally controversial run-in with Vice President George H. W. Bush during a live interview. Frustrated with Bush’s evasive answers to his pointed questions about the Iran-Contra affair, Rather told the vice president, “You’ve made us hypocrites in the face of the world.” Bush lashed back, making a crack about the time Rather had protested the network’s decision to stay with a tennis tournament by walking off the set of the broadcast and allowing the screen to go dark for several minutes. Afterward, Bush’s people immediately mobilized phone banks and a letter-writing campaign, claiming that Rather had been disrespectful of the vice president and was trying to ruin his run for the Republican party nomination.
When I ask Rather why he’s become such a target for the right, he claims he doesn’t know, preferring to believe it’s less about him than the organization he works for. “There is a line running back to Murrow’s coverage of Joe McCarthy,” he says of the history of CBS. Even the beloved Cronkite was ridiculed as a lefty when he belatedly opposed the war in Vietnam. Rather was the network’s lead correspondent in civil rights coverage: People in the South renamed CBS the “Colored Broadcast System” and North Carolina senator Jesse Helms raised money by making Rather his bogeyman. “I was the point man, too, on Watergate, which we jumped on early and effectively,” he says. “I’ve always prided myself in being fiercely independent, maybe too independent. I don’t back up; I don’t back down; I’m hard to herd and impossible to stampede. But because I wouldn’t adopt other people’s biases, in their minds that made me biased.”
In the wake of the panel report, conservatives have hardly retreated from their criticisms. Several columnists have already declared the report a whitewash and its conclusion that the broadcast reflected no political bias on the part of Rather or CBS News laughable. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer called the National Guard story “the most blindingly partisan bungle in recent journalism history” and added, “This is not an isolated case. In fact the case is a perfect illustration of an utterly commonplace phenomenon: the mainstream media’s obliviousness to its own liberal bias.” CBS and Rather had been pursuing the story for five years, he pointed out, which was two years longer than the U.S. government spent on the Manhattan Project. Jonathan V. Last, of the Weekly Standard, made the same point: “It seems unlikely that either Rather or Mapes would even perceive their own political bias.”
I ask Rather if he thinks his “hot” personality, rather than any personal ideology, has caused him all the trouble. “You have said many times that a good reporter never allows his emotions or personality to show,” I tell him. “But I’d argue that of all the anchors, past and present, you’re the only one not afraid to wear your heart on your sleeve. Reporting the Challenger explosion, and again reporting the death of Marines in Beirut, you were on the brink of tears. Doing Letterman’s Late Show a few nights after 9/11, the tears were painfully real.”
Rather nods in agreement: “When you’re on television as often as I am, you realize there is no place to hide. The worst was Letterman after 9/11. For whatever reason, I couldn’t hold it in. I don’t apologize. You can’t apologize for grief.”
Rather looks away for a moment. Then he tells me: “My hope has always been, for all my flaws and weaknesses, that people will say this: ‘He wanted to be a reporter and he is.’ I think they know that I love this country.”
REFLECTING ON HIS retirement, Rather speaks of a Ted Williams exit: Hit a homer, circle the bases, trot back to the dugout, don’t stop to shower but go directly to the parking lot, climb in your car, and zoom away. Maybe this is still possible. Though he’ll give up his spot behind the desk in March and he just bought a condo near Sixth and Lamar, in Austin, he has no plans to go away quietly. He’ll continue living mainly in Manhattan and will likely work as a correspondent for 60 Minutes, where he’ll have great leeway in picking his own stories. He’ll be aiming for the fences, and sooner or later he could still slam one out of the park. Who knows, maybe he’ll even answer the question that got lost in the chaos of Memogate: Did Bush really get a free ride in the National Guard? But even if that’s not possible—how Memogate will affect Rather’s credibility as a reporter is anyone’s guess—most of his peers don’t believe his legacy will suffer if his last years more closely resemble Michael Jordan’s. “Even his critics,” Brokaw told me in an e-mail, “have to agree his long résumé as one of the leading reporters of his time has many more wins than losses.” In the meantime, Rather is still hugely popular among the rank and file at CBS News. Unfailingly polite, even courtly, he calls fellow employees by name and usually asks about their families. It’s a testament to this popularity that no one I talked with at CBS blamed Rather for the Memogate fallout.
One thing is for sure: His permanent replacement will be nothing like him. CBS chief Moonves is already talking about using the network’s multianchor morning program, The Early Show (one of the anchors on that show is his new bride, Julie Chen), as a possible model for restructuring CBS Evening News. He didn’t go into detail, but what these remarks conjure up in my mind is a steady drift—or maybe a gallop—toward the frivolous and tawdry. The culture of the media has obviously swung in that direction. More American reporters were in California covering the Scott Peterson murder trial than were covering the war in Iraq. News organizations do far fewer investigative reports and much more gotcha journalism. The change is driven in part by consolidation in ownership: Moonves, for example, is also co-president and the chief operating officer of CBS’s parent company, Viacom, which owns other media entities, such as Comedy Central. General Electric owns NBC, and Disney owns ABC. One CBS insider was furious that “a failed actor” like Moonves dared to give the staff a lecture on journalism, but that’s the trend, and it’s not likely to change. Corporate profit trumps journalism up and down the line.
Rather has long railed on what he calls “the Hollywoodization of the news.” In one of his books, he blames Barbara Walters for advancing the celebrity syndrome in TV news, “the feeling that what counts is the name on the marquee, not the integrity of your news.” He thinks it’s only going to get worse. “Part of the reason is the size and the velocity of the competition,” he tells me as he changes for a late-afternoon photo shoot. “That, along with the insistence that news be a profit center as opposed to public service. That makes it tempting for a managing editor to dumb it down and sleaze it up. Murrow was complaining about it back in the fifties, that the entertainment value was overwhelming news value. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All it takes is a few good people who own enterprises to make it happen, but right now that’s not the way the tide runs.”
Rather just hopes his replacement won’t be a hothouse plant. He tells me about an encounter with an old-time journalist years ago, when Rather took the job of London bureau chief that Murrow had once occupied. The gnarled old veteran called Rather “a child of television.” When Rather protested that he had worked his way through the radio ranks, the man said, “Nonetheless, you are the next wave, and you are here partly because you have a pretty face. What I will be interested to see is whether you have any goddam sense.” Rather smiles at the memory, but then turns serious and says, “When you are a high-profile anchor constantly sniffing rocket fuel for ego, if it gets deep in your lungs, then you probably won’t have any goddam sense. There’s a powerful undertow in this job. If you know what an emergency room at the charity hospital looks like after midnight on a Saturday night, if you’ve seen soldiers in combat, brave and heroic beyond comprehension, then maybe you can deal with those undertows.”
It’s the same undertow that very nearly pulled Rather under—and may yet. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
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