Be they for network actor or factory worker, most retirement celebrations are convivial roasts — light-hearted remembrances of the honoree’s greatest workplace hits. The special in honor of the departing Dan Rather — who gives up his CBS Evening News anchor chair on Wednesday under the dark cloud of a bankrupt piece of political reportage during the 2004 presidential campaign — is a very different beast.
It is an intensely emotional apologia disguised as a career retrospective.
The bottom line of “Dan Rather: A Reporter Remembers”? Rather wants his newsman’s tombstone — and not his anchorman’s tombstone — to read “too intense,” not “too liberal.” He can live with the first. Demonstrably, he cannot easily live with the second.
The aim of Wednesday’s (7 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2) peculiar prime time CBS News special is an 11th hour reconstruction of Rather’s lost professional dignity. The format of the show is both striking and revelatory — not least for the way it relies almost entirely on Rather’s own voice.
It is a voice so underpinned with a palpable sadness, you often wonder if its owner will make it through the hour without succumbing to tears.
As Rather tells the story of his professional rise from Texas to the hot seat — from chronicling the coming of hurricanes in Galveston to confirming for Walter Cronkite that John F. Kennedy was, in fact, dead — his interlocutor is unseen. Aside from former CBS News President Howard Stringer, now the chairman and CEO of Sony America (and who was named Monday by Sony’s board to run the company), tributes to Rather from colleagues and network brass are lacking in profusion.
What’s on offer here is Rather unplugged. He’s here to explain the life and work of Rather, here to re-establish his patriotic bona fides by giving his critics a little history lesson. But one wonders at times if he’s really speaking to the longtime viewers of the CBS Evening News, to his detractors, or to his therapist. Or maybe to his maker, in preparation for judgment day.
Fairly or not, the departing CBS anchor now is widely viewed as a semitragic figure whose recurrent flaw was allowing personal ideology to intrude on journalistic objectivity. That’s especially the view — on the Republican side of the aisle at least — of the infamous National Guard piece of CBS Evening News reportage last fall that would have sent Rather into a forced retirement if he had not decided to go voluntarily. The assumption is that Rather, like his staffers, allowed their desire to undermine Bush to lead to the overly rapid broadcast of documents that could not be authenticated.
But conservatives found earlier evidence to support their suspicions — Rather insulting Richard Nixon, for example, or screeching at an ill-prepared George H. W. Bush for answers on the Iran-Contra business.
Given the circumstances of his apologetic departure, Rather had no choice but to admit a flaw. But his preferred view of himself is something entirely different from the picture painted by conservatives.
Passionate reporter
Rather tells us, time and time again, that he was a passionate “field reporter” who was always chafing in the anchor chair. He argues it was his status as an “outsider” from Texas and his ongoing resistance to the conventional notion of anchor as “potted-plant” that got him “into trouble” from time to time. In other words, he admits to inappropriate intensity (in the service of getting the story, of course), but never for a moment to journalistic malfeasance.
He has a decent case. Especially when he’s the one picking the clips. To its credit, this broadcast features most of the notorious Rather moments (Nixon, Bush 41, Bush 43), along with his version of the notorious “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” incident. Rather says that he heard “What’s the Frequency” and “Kenneth” as separate sounds from his attacker or attackers and that the sensationalist media shoved them into a single phrase to make Rather look like a nut.
As with all shows of this type, we see the great newsman appear with Zelig-like timing at the pivotal events: the schoolhouse steps in Alabama, the combat zones of Vietnam, the fall of the Berlin wall, the chaos of Tiananmen Square, Saddam Hussein’s parlor, the rubble of Sept. 11. Fair enough. He was there. And he was doing some real reporting.
But real reporting now comes with a new set of rules and a newly empowered set of deconstructionist critics. Rather has never quite figured out how to handle them — which probably at least partly explains for the defensive nature of this tribute. In the face of the bloggers’ hostility, Rather looked (and still looks) mostly like a deer in the headlights, a dinosaur failing to understand the imperatives of natural selection.
No new information is forthcoming here on the infamous National Guard matter — Rather merely apologizes in an unspecific way: “I regret every nanosecond that I let the CBS audience down,” he says. Much more is to be said on that subject, but it is not said here. It will have to wait for the tell-all books from the fired staffers with less to lose from ex post facto revelation.
It’s impossible for a fair-minded person not to feel sympathy for Rather in the Guard fallout. He learned about the media’s diminished authority in the most personally painful of fashions. This was, after all, one mistake in a distinguished career. And many of the attacks on Rather were politically motivated.
But despite Rather’s seeming openness — and a demeanor far folksier than anything to be found on competing networks — you still are left with the sense that his career-long problem was that he lacked understanding of the ironies of his business and his role therein. Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Rather hath ever but slenderly known himself. Nor has he understood the dark side of a profession inherent suffused with paradox.
Take the moment in Wednesday’s show when we see Rather help carry an injured GI out of the Vietnam foliage — it’s here as an example of his willingness to put down the notebook and help his country.
But the cameras still roll and the report still was aired. He didn’t put down his notebook at all. What journalist could? What journalist should?
Similarly he tells us that the cold hard facts that he dug out about Kennedy’s medical condition were unimportant. “So what?” he says, dismissing its importance. It’s “where do we go from here [that] matters.”
“So what?” That was only one of Rather’s biggest journalistic scoops — as confirmed by its presence in this broadcast.
The truth of both of those moments is more complex than Rather can bring himself to believe. Therein, he was simultaneously generous and selfish, exploitational and deeply compassionate. Such are the inevitable, Faustian bargains of journalism.
On the defense
So what will be the final word on Rather’s career? There are those with political axes to grind against him and little hard evidence with which to do so. But these critics have got Rather’s goat — you can expect him to defend himself for the rest of his life. There will be no Cronkite-like, post-retirement confessions of liberalism.
And there are those who always loved (or hated) Rather because of his emotionalism and quirkiness. For sure, this was no Texas potted plant. But again like King Lear, Rather hath ever but slenderly known himself.
“I want the country to win,” he says at one point in the broadcast, eschewing true journalistic objectivity when it comes to American well-being. The fact that the man was and is a patriot is incontrovertible. But he cannot bring himself to stop there.
“Whatever the definition of win is . . . ,” he goes on. Ill-advisedly, perhaps.
That’s a very telling Rather moment. He wants it all ways, thus infuriating liberals, conservatives and journalistic ethicists. And he still cannot understand why anyone could have a problem with that.
In the good old days of the CBS Nightly News, didn’t field reporting stand outside petty political labels?
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cjones5@tribune.com
