That's when Rather realized he'd better spend some more time with his kids. And he went to great lengths to do so by their teens. But even now, after three decades, he's determined to stay on the move. As the venerable $6 million-a-year anchorman of the CBS Evening News (next March, he'll surpass the nearly 19 years logged by his predecessor, Walter Cronkite), Rather, 67, refuses to chain himself to a TelePrompTer. "I'm chasing my dream of trying to be a great reporter," he says. "If I can't be the smartest or the most affable person in television news, I can be the hardest-working."
He very well might be. When he's not flying off to interview Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic's wife or First Lady Hillary Clinton, Rather can be found jaywalking back and forth across Manhattan's West 57th Street between his three offices—even on weekends. On July 17, the Saturday that JFK Jr.'s plane was reported missing, Rather beat NBC's Tom Brokaw and ABC's Peter Jennings on the air to begin marathon coverage of the tragedy. In his other two offices, he'll work on reports he has filed for CBS's two newsmagazines, 60 Minutes II and 48 Hours (where he's now the thrice-weekly host). After hours he has been turning up on talk shows to tout his sixth book, Deadlines & Datelines, a bestselling collection of his weekly syndicated newspaper columns and daily radio commentaries. "I'm sure there are days when he must say to himself, 'I'm crazy. Why am I working this hard?' " says his boss, CBS Television head Les Moonves. "But he loves it." Mike Wallace, Rather's old 60 Minutes colleague, agrees: "He's utterly content when he's working."
And yet, to quote one of the arcane Texanisms that pepper his speech, Rather can get "hotter than a Cadillac bumper in July." "The number of times he has exploded all over me," says former Evening News executive producer Tom Bettag, who now oversees Nightline, "reasonably or unreasonably, are incalculable. But never once has he not come back and said, 'I'm sorry. I overreacted. Are you okay?' "
"Intense" rather than "temperamental" is how colleagues describe him. "I think Dan's intensity as a journalist has always been the hallmark of his work," says Jennings, a friend since the mid-'60s. "If there was a way to measure intensity, Dan's would be way off the scale," says Philadelphia Inquirer TV columnist Gail Shister. But, she adds, "off the air he is one of the funniest human beings I have ever known. That man, when he's had a couple of Wild Turkeys in him, can tell a yarn and have people on the floor laughing."
By all accounts, the anchorman's emotional rudder is Jean, 63, his wife of 42 years and a talented painter whose abstract acrylics hang in his office. "Mom is the one person who will tell my dad what is what and not sugarcoat a thing," says daughter Robin Rather Murray, now 40 and president of her own high-tech research firm in Austin. (Danjack, 39, is a New York City assistant D.A.) And the bloom isn't off their romance. Out of the blue, Rather will send Jean a dozen red or yellow roses, and she will make him cheese sandwiches when he gets home—often around 11 p.m.—to their co-op apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Both tend to shun the Manhattan party scene in favor of frequent visits to their airy, three-bedroom stucco-and-limestone house overlooking Lake Travis, outside Austin, Texas, where they fish and visit with old friends. "No matter where we've lived," says Jean, "Washington, London or New York—our hearts are in Texas."
Which is where they fell in love. In 1956, Dan, the oldest of three children of Houston oil-pipeliner Irvin Rather and his wife, Byrl, a seamstress, was working as news director for KTRH, the CBS radio affiliate in Houston. That's where he met Jean Goebel, a secretary whose sister Jo worked at the station and had touted Rather to her one day as "this really attractive, smart, nice guy," recalls Jean. Rather asked her out the following day, and in April 1957 they married. Robin arrived in 1958 and Danjack some two years later.
Rather gives his wife full credit for "holding the family together" as he built his TV career. "Thanks to Jean, we managed. The children managed. You do what you have to do," he says. "Jean was trying to create an environment in which I could pursue my dream and at the same time meet my responsibilities to the family. It wasn't always easy." Indeed, says Robin, who attended several different schools as a first grader, "we were lonely a lot because we'd move, and he wouldn't be there."
Instead he'd be someplace improbably dangerous—like the eye of a devastating tropical storm. Impressed by his vivid reporting from Galveston of Hurricane Carla, in 1961 CBS assigned him to take on an even stormier beat: the civil rights movement. In Dallas in 1963, he reported JFK's death ("It was a hammer to the heart," he says). A year later he moved to Washington, D.C., to cover Lyndon Johnson, one of several Presidents he would rile with aggressive reporting. ("Ah'm disappointed in yew as a Texan, boh," Rather recalls LBJ telling him.) Then, after a stint in London (1965) and a year in Vietnam (1966), he returned as White House correspondent and, at a 1974 press conference, clashed with a Watergate-besieged Richard Nixon. "Are you running for something?" Nixon asked after a prodding Rather question was greeted with a mix of jeers and applause. "No, sir, Mr. President," he shot back testily. "Are you?" Recalls Rather: "I wish [that exchange] had not happened." But as for his comeback line: "I wouldn't change a thing," he says.
Controversy dogged Rather even after he succeeded Cronkite as anchor in 1981. Critics swarmed over him "like ravens on roadkill" (to quote another Ratherism) for storming off the set in 1987 to protest a tennis match that had delayed his newscast. For six minutes, viewers saw a black screen until Rather returned. "That was not a good moment," he says. In fact it was one that came back to haunt him a year later when, during a heated interview with George Bush over Iran-Contra, the then-Presidential candidate said, "How would you like it if I judged your career by those [six] minutes?"
Many observers had already judged Rather to be a bit daft when he reported being mugged outside his apartment in 1986 by a stranger who asked, incomprehensibly, "What is the frequency, Kenneth?" But in 1997, the psychiatrist for a man who had been convicted of killing an NBC stagehand said he was almost certain that his patient had also assaulted Rather. "I was even luckier than I thought at the time," Rather says.
His good fortune, in more ways than one, hasn't changed. His current Evening News contract guarantees him the anchor chair through 2000. And after that? "I like anchoring," says Rather, who has no plans to retire, "but if tomorrow someone said, 'Dan, we'd like to have somebody else,' I'd say, 'Fine.' Make me the AP bureau chief in Alpine, Texas, and I'll be very happy."
At least he'd be closer to his house on Lake Travis. There, he and Jean squeeze onto a little bench in the garden and watch the sunset. "They call it their blessing bench," says Rather's fishing buddy Perry Smith. "I have frequently seen Dan and Jean sitting there looking over the lake. And it is obvious that they are counting their blessings."
Michael A. Upton
Eve Heyn in New York City and Laurel Calkins on Lake Travis
- Contributors:
- Eve Heyn,
- Laurel Calkins.
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