The Education of Dan Rather
From the golden age of network TV to the end of its hegemony.
Thursday, December 2, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Life is complicated, people are complicated, and most of us are a jumble of virtues, flaws and contradictions. I like to try to understand the past, try to put it together in a way that makes sense to me. This can involve judging not only your own actions and decisions but those of others, which can be hard. I have a friend who once said in the middle of a conversation, "Don't understand me too quickly." Don't categorize me; don't decide you broke the code. Sit back and watch; it's more interesting than you may know.
Which gets me to Dan Rather, who was once my boss, and who of course has announced his retirement from the anchor chair at CBS News. Everyone I know is asking me what I think of it. I think a lot of things.
I'm going to use the past tense in speaking of him because I'm speaking of his career, and speaking of when I knew him in the past.
My first thought: It is a hard world. We all know this in the abstract, but it can take you aback in the particular. In public life the entire body of your work--an entire career of almost 50 years--can now essentially be summed up and dismissed by the last headline on your career, which in this case is "Rather Retires Under Cloud After Forged Documents Story." If Dan had retired of his own volition a year ago, that would not be the headline. "Long Career Reflected Stunning Rise of U.S. Media" would be more like it.
I am not saying timing is everything, although it can be rather a lot. I'm thinking of . . . well, Richard Nixon. Nixon had one of the great gutsy careers in American political history, and on the greatest issue of his lifetime--the ugliness and destructiveness of communism here and abroad--he was right, and put his career on the line. He did much good. But his headline is Watergate.
I think the bitterness of Nixon's presidential years, the personal darkness he seemed to display, was in part a product of simple human pain, and the pain was the result of this: He had been right and brave and done the right thing in the 1950s, and the American left and its cousin the American establishment would never forgive him for it. And he couldn't stop wanting their approval. He put a traitor named Alger Hiss in jail. The left would make him pay. He paid the price in terms of his personal peace. He handed his enemies a sword.
One of those who picked it up and used it against him was Dan Rather. There is an amazing and unseen circularity to life. And wanting approval can make you do strange things.
Dan was a great boss. He was appreciative of good work and sympathetic when it wasn't good. He was one of the men--Douglas Edwards and Dallas Townsend were two others--to whom I am indebted, for they taught me how to write for the ear, how to write for people who are listening as opposed to reading. He was generous with praise. Someone who did a good job on a story got flowers and a note. Someone in the newsroom once knocked Dan in a magazine profile, saying he was insecure, always sending too many flowers. Dan thought, Really? Life's tough, you can't send too many flowers! He was open to ideas, he was democratic and not hierarchical in his management style, and he tried to be fair in his dealings with people in spite of a personal emotionalism that was deep, ever present and not entirely predictable.
For three years, from 1981 through 1984, I wrote his daily radio commentary, a four-minute essay with a one-minute spot that went out to all the CBS affiliates and network-owned stations. It was a great job. We did some good work. Here's how it got done: When I had been doing the show for a few weeks I could see that my work was not good--uneven, without voice, without a clear point of view. I thought I knew the reason. I had become increasingly a political conservative. Dan, it was obvious to me, was a sort of establishment liberal--not a wild leftist and not an ideologue, but whatever smart liberals thought was more or less what he wound up thinking, and saying. I couldn't write his views well, because I didn't buy them and didn't fully understand them. I couldn't write my views, because the show had to reflect his thinking. So I went to him and told him my problem. He was great. He said: On any given issue that we discuss, give the liberal point of view fairly and give the conservative point of view fairly, and then we'll end it with my opinion, because it's my show. I thought that sounded good.
And it worked. "Dan Rather Reporting" actually got something of a conservative following, not because it was a conservative show--it wasn't--but because it actually put forward the conservative point of view in what might be called a fair and balanced way. At CBS News in those days that was surprising.
CBS then was full of people who liked to argue about who opposed the Vietnam war first, this producer or that reporter. It was a matter of pride who was antiwar first. On the night in 1980 when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in a landslide, and brought with him a Republican Senate, CBS News, a busy hive full of people charged with telling America the news at a dramatic moment, was like a morgue. I was happy, and the blue-collar workers--the cameramen who were bringing up families on Long Island, the secretaries from Queens--were delirious. Finally someone would lower their taxes--payroll taxes on overtime were killing them--and stop the humiliation in Iran. But the white-collar workers, the producers and writers and on-air talent--oh what a sad and depressed lot they were. The forces of evil had won.
Two things to be said here. One is that CBS News hasn't changed that much, and the other is that the media world in which it operates has changed completely. The whole context has changed. No one has to accept the enforced corporate liberalism of the networks anymore, as they did from 1950 through 1990. They have options, from cable to Fox to the Internet to hundreds and thousands of radio shows, newspapers, magazines. The old network hegemony is over. That's why network news viewership is down, that's why the evening news isn't appointment TV anymore. America didn't turn crazily right, Americans just finally got political options in how they'd get the news, and took advantage of them.
Dan Rather's career traces all this. He rose as network TV rose, rose in the age of Cronkite, and when he took Mr. Cronkite's chair it was front-page news. He was one of the three men in America who'd tell the entire country the news. It was big stuff.
Along the way, on the way, he had his dramas. He was the young reporter at Parkland Memorial Hospital who got word from a priest that JFK was dead. He had it first. He covered the civil rights era down South in the 1960s--an insufficiently appreciated shaper of the views of young reporters of Dan's generation. They saw white men in uniforms use fire hoses on young blacks; they saw black people trying to get a cup of coffee at the counter at Woolworth's punched and dragged away; they covered the bombing of the Birmingham church, and the funerals of the little girls who died there. (Nine-year-old Condi Rice, who lived nearby, could have been one of them.) The civil rights struggle seared everyone, but few more than the young reporters who covered it, and few, I think, more than Dan.
So did Vietnam, from which Dan reported, again at personal risk. Another perhaps insufficiently appreciated fact: Part of the bitterness of Vietnam was the bitterness of those who were risking their lives in the fight on the ground only to perceive, day by day, that their government, and its Clark Cliffords and other shrewd operators, were pulling the plug on the war and not fighting to win. In Washington they were trying to escape with their careers and reputations intact. On the ground in country, as they used to say, they were trying to escape with their lives. Imagine how you'd feel if you were a grunt losing your friends as all this became clearer day by day. And imagine what it was like to be young Dan, listening to those grunts each day.
And then Watergate. More and more I think that scandal will be remembered as a kind of hysteria, a virus that jumped from reporter to reporter, newsroom to newsroom, raising temperatures to fever pitch. Dan was one of the reporters who went after Nixon, et al., with a vengeance. Looking back one might ask: Why?
