Dan Rather: Absurd until the bitter end
TV CRITIC
GLENN GARVIN
It should have seemed appropriate for Dan Rather to sign off his final edition of The CBS Evening News Wednesday by wishing his audience ''courage.'' After all, Rather has shared some of the most traumatic moments of the past 44 years with us, from the John F. Kennedy assassination to Vietnam to Watergate to Sept. 11; love him or hate him, we share an undeniable survivors' bond.
But as always, Rather's eccentricities overwhelmed his earnest intentions. His farewell statement came across not as a hearty farewell embrace or even a firm handshake, but simply a reminder of another of his weird tics, the week in 1986 when he inexplicably ended every newscast with the command, ''Courage!'' (For variety, one night he said it in twangy East Texas Spanish, ''Coraje!'') For a moment it seemed as if he might even add the barking phrase that will surely be his cultural epitaph, ''What's the frequency, Kenneth?''
Instead, CBS cut away for a commercial, and when the news returned Rather had removed his microphone for the last time as two dozen Evening News staffers applauded -- whether in admiration or simply relief that his long, painful goodbye had finally ended without major catastrophe, it was impossible to tell.
That a career spanning four decades, including 24 years as anchor, should end in the public jeers and backbiting that have marked the final months of Rather's tenure is unquestionably sad. But it also is unquestionably his own doing.
He wielded the power of his anchor desk -- within CBS to crush rivals and outside it to avoid accountability for his mistakes -- never understanding that he was undermining not only his personal credibility, but the network's, too.
His legendary refusal to admit mistakes or to concede that the story might be bigger than him has never been so apparent as in the hourlong special, Dan Rather: A Reporter Remembers, which CBS aired Wednesday night after the news. There he was, sneering at Richard Nixon, arguing with George H.W. Bush, then chalking it up, unapologetically, to ''passion.'' And when Nixon left the White House for the final time, his presidency in ruins, the camera lingered not on his departing helicopter, but on Rather, sitting back on the landing pad.
But even A Reporter Remembers shied away from showing some other notorious Rather moments: the night he stormed off the Evening News set in a tantrum, leaving the network dark for six minutes; or his appearance as an honored guest at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Texas.
The most prominent omission of all was that of Rather's recent absurd claims that an independent panel's brutally critical report on his story last year about President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service was actually an exoneration.
The panel couldn't find a single expert who believed in the validity of the documents on which Rather's story was based. Rather nonetheless declared victory: ''Although they had four months and millions of dollars, they could not demonstrate that the documents were not authentic,'' he bragged during an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman last month. The New York Times' motto is all the news that's fit to print; Rather was suggesting that that CBS prefers the more flexible all the news that is not proven false beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Rather's sad, shabby defense reminded me of The Amazing Criswell, a popular psychic of the 1950s whose predictions included Fidel Castro would be assassinated in 1970, New Mexico would be given back to the Indians in 1976, and the Atlantic Ocean would swallow most of Florida by 1979. Most infamously, he appeared at the end of a god-awful science-fiction flick about an alien takeover of the Earth called Plan 9 From Outer Space and demanded of the audience: ''Can you prove that it didn't happen?'' The final chapter of Dan Rather's anchor career was to turn his network into the Criswell Broadcasting System.
© 2005 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
miami.com.
miami.com |
