Lone Star

Alan Weisman

Description

"Alan Weisman has come as close as anyone to unraveling one of the big mysteries of the television age: who is the real Dan Rather? Weisman has devoted much time, energy, and talent to that question, and this book is a fascinating read."
--Robert Pierpoint, former CBS News correspondent

"There is no career in modern television journalism that is more fascinating, complicated, controversial, or accomplished than that of Dan Rather, and there is no one who has focused the attention of colleagues, TV writers, competitors, and, of course, critics to a similar degree over the last twenty-five years. Alan Weisman's lively account of this remarkable life explains why the quest to understand Rather has remained so vital and important."
--Verne Gay, television critic, Newsday

"This book is an attempt to take a few steps back from Memogate and examine the whole picture -- the scope and breadth of Dan Rather's life, career, and times. If he mattered enough to be watched by untold millions of people for fifty years on television, then his story matters enough to be told as fully as possible."
--From Lone Star: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather
Acknowledgments.

Prologue.

1 Thanks for the Memories.

2 Never Stay Down and Never Quit.

3 From Big D to D.C. to the VC.

4 Nixon and Gunga Dan.

5 Life without Walter.

6 Seduced and Abandoned.

7 What Is the Frequency?

8 Live Fire.

9 Surviving.

10 Blinded by the Light.

11 Edward R. Murrow Is Dead.

Epilogue: Picking Up the Pieces.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Credits.

Index.

Sujets

• Journalists
• Publishers
• Biography
• List of American journalists
• Lone Star
• Alan Weisman
• Autobiography
• Editors
• CBS

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470364253
• Langue: English

Extrait

LONE STAR
The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather
Alan Weisman


John Wiley Sons, Inc.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 2006 by Dandi Productions, Inc. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Design and composition by Navta Associates, Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com . Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions .
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Weisman, Alan, date.
Lone Star: The extraordinary life and times of Dan Rather / Alan Weisman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13 978-0-471-79217-8 (cloth)
ISBN-10 0-471-79217-9 (cloth)
1. Rather, Dan. 2. Television journalists-United States-Biography. I. Title.
PN4874.R28W45 2006
070 .92-dc22
[B]
2006009366
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Diana, Daniel, and Jeanne, For their love and their infinite patience
When I got them north Texas blues
Thought I d paid all my dues.
Then them south Texas blues
Told me, son, you ain t through.
Had them east Texas blues
And them west Texas blues too.
I ve done all I know to do
Tryin to lose, tryin to lose
These Lone Star blues.
-Delbert McClinton,
Lone Star Blues
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 Thanks for the Memories
2 Never Stay Down and Never Quit
3 From Big D to D.C. to the VC
4 Nixon and Gunga Dan
5 Life without Walter
6 Seduced and Abandoned
7 What Is the Frequency?
8 Live Fire
9 Surviving
10 Blinded by the Light
11 Edward R. Murrow Is Dead
Epilogue: Picking Up the Pieces
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Index
Illustrations follow on page 110.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to all of my former colleagues who gave me their time, their insights, and their encouragement throughout this process. A nod also to those television beat writers who willingly went back through their files and their memories to provide their unique perspectives.
To my lifelong friends Don Ryan and Steve Friedman (the great photographer, not the former NBC News executive), my thanks for your help and support.
To executive editor Tom Miller and his colleagues at Wiley, a thumbs-up for their time, effort, patience, and skill.
And a special thanks to my agent, Sharlene Martin, for taking on a first-time author and tolerating (barely) all the nonsense that goes with him.
Prologue
By all accounts, the memorial service for Peter Jennings at New York City s Carnegie Hall on the morning of September 20, 2005, was an elegant and moving affair. Yo-Yo Ma and Wynton Marsalis performed, along with a corps of bagpipers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in a nod to Jennings s roots.
The guests were the elite of the broadcast journalism business; they included Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and a cortege of corporate heavies and movie stars. Jennings s longtime friend the actor Alan Alda described the former ABC anchorman as a mix of graciousness and candor: We re left now with just a little bit of snow at the bottom of the screen.
Also in attendance was Daniel Irvin Rather, the former CBS News anchorman, the former managing editor of the CBS Evening News , formerly one of the most powerful figures in broadcast journalism, and the former heir to the legacies of Murrow, Cronkite, Sevareid, Collingwood, and a long list of legends who had invented television news. He was now the former Dan Rather.
Twenty years earlier, at an equally somber event, Rather and many of his CBS News colleagues had milled about lamenting the sad state of affairs that had befallen their company and its once-mighty news organization. At the time, the company was in the throes of an ownership struggle, a tense if not hostile relationship between the News Division and management, and a change to a softer on-air product that rankled the hard-news veterans-with more layoffs on the horizon. There was an overwhelming sense that something unique and treasured had been lost for good. We weren t attending Charles Collingwood s funeral, said 60 Minutes s Don Hewitt at the time. We were at our own funeral. Now, with Peter Jennings gone, Tom Brokaw retired, Dan Rather banished to the sidelines, and Ted Koppel halfway to good-bye; with the Viacoms, Disneys, General Electrics, Time Warners, and News Corps controlling the airwaves, the satellites, and the cable systems; and with bloggers and podcasters expounding through the prism of their own political and social perceptions, Hewitt s remark covered an entire industry. Now, they were all at their own funeral.
After two hours, the audience filed out, some people to power lunches, others back to work. Rather returned to the office, which used to be known as the Ford building because it once housed a Ford dealership on the ground floor. Now it features a lavish BMW dealership with gleaming Beamers and their 75,000 stickers parked throughout, mocking the masses who can afford only Fords.
The building is home to 60 Minutes and what used to be 60 Minutes Wednesday , the spinoff of the venerable magazine show that had been canceled several months earlier. I had been a producer on the staff of 60 Minutes Wednesday and was among those let go, just a few weeks shy of my fifty-fifth birthday. Despite more than thirty years in the TV news business as an executive producer, a senior producer, and a producer, much of it at CBS, I was neither angry nor bitter. Given my age and salary level, I was not surprised to be among those terminated. Most companies that are cutting back prefer a younger and cheaper workforce-experience is simply not as valuable as it used to be.
I had anticipated the cancellation of 60 Minutes Wednesday (originally called 60 Minutes II ) even before the 2004-2005 TV season had begun. While the broadcast had been praised by most critics and had performed reasonably well in the ratings through its first five seasons, changes in management and much stiffer competition made it a likely target for elimination. The show was drawing the oldest audience of any program on the CBS prime-time lineup, and CBS s top programmer, Les Moonves, wanted what advertisers wanted-young and younger.
Although there were already nails in the coffin of 60 Minutes Wednesday , the final spike came pounding down on the evening of September 8, 2004, when the show opened with a report by Dan Rather alleging that some thirty years earlier, President George W. Bush had used his family s influence to avoid the Vietnam draft. When serious questions were raised about documents used to support the story, questions that could not be adequately answered, CBS was eventually forced to retract the story and publicly apologize to the president and to the viewers.
In the ugly fallout, the story s producer was fired and three top CBS executives were forced to resign. At least some people at CBS believed that Rather should have been fired as well, but in many respects he ended up taking the hardest hit of all: irreparable damage to a career that had lasted for fifty years. Not only would he be forced to give up his anchor chair on the CBS Evening News , a chair in which he had delivered the news for twenty-four years, he would be branded forever as at best a dupe and at worst dishonest and unethical.
When I thought about how Rather had come to CBS so many decades earlier, how far he had risen, how overwhelming the odds against his success were from the beginning, and the unprecedented power he had held for so long at CBS News, I realized that the Dan Rather story was one hell of a story. Many books have been written about CBS and CBS News, but none have been written about the man who was its standard-bearer for almost a quarter of a century. Rather himself, with the help of several different writers, has recounted parts of his life and career in several books, but the perspective, of course, was always his. To many of even his closest colleagues, he has always been an oddity, a puzzle-where did Dan Rather the person begin and Dan Rather the persona end?
To his legion of critics, both inside and outside CBS, Dan Rather is a phony-a man whose sincerity is contrived, whose motives are suspect, whose entire career has been more