Rather Quitting as CBS Anchor in Abrupt Move

Dan Rather announced yesterday that he would step down next year as anchor and managing editor of "CBS Evening News." The move came two months after he acknowledged fundamental flaws in a broadcast report that raised questions about President Bush's National Guard service.

Mr. Rather's last broadcast will be on March 9, the 24th anniversary of the night he succeeded Walter Cronkite. He plans to continue to work full time at CBS News, as a correspondent for the Sunday and Wednesday editions of "60 Minutes."

The network has yet to select a successor to Mr. Rather, who is 73, but two CBS executives said that the front-runner was John Roberts, 48, CBS News's chief White House correspondent, who also serves as anchor of the network's Sunday evening news program.

Though Mr. Rather and senior CBS executives had begun last summer to discuss a possible departure date within the next couple of years, Mr. Rather's announcement yesterday signaled an abrupt end to the nearly quarter-century that he spent in one of the most visible jobs in broadcast journalism. [Page C1.]

Both he and Leslie Moonves, CBS's chairman and co-president of its parent company, Viacom, emphasized that the timing of the announcement was dictated by events largely out of their control.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Rather said that he and Mr. Moonves believed that it was important that he make his announcement well before the forthcoming release of a report by an independent panel investigating the journalistic breakdowns that led CBS News to broadcast and then vigorously defend the National Guard news segment.

"I wish it were not happening while this panel is looking into the '60 Minutes' weekday story," Mr. Rather said at his office at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street in Manhattan. "One reason I wanted to do this now was to make the truth clear - this is separated from that."

Mr. Rather said the most intense round of conversations among himself; his agent, Richard Leibner; and Mr. Moonves began about 10 days ago at Mr. Moonves's office at Viacom's headquarters in Times Square. At a certain point, Mr. Leibner excused himself and Mr. Rather spoke alone to Mr. Moonves.

"Dan was very emotional," Mr. Moonves recalled yesterday. "Clearly, this job and CBS News mean a lot to him. It was a very hard decision for him. Dan said to me, 'I'd like to do this on my own terms.' We totally supported him."

Mr. Rather - after a series of conversations last weekend with his wife, Jean, and his grown son and daughter - said he called Mr. Moonves, who was in California, on Monday afternoon and told him that he had made up his mind to go. In a measure of the awkward predicament in which CBS finds itself, Mr. Moonves said he felt compelled to inform the investigative panel of Mr. Rather's plans.

The volatile endgame surrounding Mr. Rather's announcement of his departure was in many ways true to the ups and downs of his career. He vaulted to fame, in part, as a CBS correspondent who was stationed along President John F. Kennedy's motorcade route in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the day the president was assassinated. But the dogged reporting he demonstrated that day also played a role in his most highly publicized confrontations.

These included a clash with President Richard M. Nixon during a White House news conference at the height of the Watergate scandal and a tense live interview in 1988 with George H. W. Bush, who was then vice president, where Mr. Rather observed, "You've made us hypocrites in the face of the world."

Such comments, and others, made Mr. Rather a lightning rod for conservative critics who complained that the mainstream news media were too liberal. But it was not just conservatives who sometimes found Mr. Rather too hot for the medium of television.

While often folksy and gentlemanly, his frequently tense on-air bearing was cast as a turnoff by some television critics. Many of them gave him little chance in 1981 of holding on to Mr. Cronkite's dominance in the ratings. Initially they were wrong: Mr. Rather proceeded to finish first for the next seven seasons, ending in 1989. But his broadcast's ratings have dropped fairly steadily ever since.

Mr. Rather is departing at a moment of generational transition at the top of the network news divisions, as their audiences age steadily and their flagship programs continue to lose viewers. Next Wednesday, Tom Brokaw, 64, will deliver his last broadcast as anchor of "NBC Nightly News," the highest rated of the three evening newscasts. He will be succeeded the next night by Brian Williams, 45.

Both Mr. Rather and Mr. Moonves said in separate interviews that they went out of their way to time the announcement so it would not distract from Mr. Brokaw's departure.

"My feeling was that Tom should have his moment leaving the chair," Mr. Rather said. "Insofar as it's possible to do so, don't take any of that light; don't mix it up with that."

"I would say if Tom were not leaving next week," he added, "we'd probably have waited until next week to do it."

Among the emotions that had long kept the fiercely competitive Mr. Rather from announcing his own retirement in recent years was his hope that he might pick up a substantial share of Mr. Brokaw's viewers after his departure, enabling "CBS Evening News" to pull up out of third place, where it has lagged behind "World News Tonight" on ABC for nearly a decade.

Until recently, Mr. Rather had told colleagues that he hoped to remain behind the CBS anchor desk until March 2006 and the 25th anniversary of the day he succeeded Walter Cronkite. But for Mr. Rather, that calculus was apparently complicated by the strain and scrutiny of the investigation.

The inquiry's two panelists, Louis D. Boccardi, a former chief executive of The Associated Press, and Dick Thornburgh, a former United States attorney general, have interviewed dozens of people - from the highest echelons of CBS News to its rank and file, as well as outside it. They are expected to submit their report to senior network executives in the first two weeks of December.

Among the central questions they are examining is why Mr. Rather, who was anchor for the segment, and Mary Mapes, its producer, were so convinced of the authenticity of four memorandums purportedly drawn from the personal files of Mr. Bush's Vietnam-era squadron commander.

In the documents, which were dated in the early 1970's, Mr. Bush's commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who has since died, appeared to describe the pressure he was under to "sugar coat" the record of Mr. Bush, then a young lieutenant.

Coming to attention less than two months before the presidential election, the documents were presented by CBS as filling gaps in Mr. Bush's official record, including questions about why he had failed to take his annual pilot's physical.

Right after the report was first broadcast, on Sept. 8, Mr. Rather drew intense criticism from Internet bloggers, who produce online commentary, and from other commentators who contended that the documents, all apparently copies, appeared to have been typed on a modern computer, not a typewriter typically in use in the early 1970's.

For nearly two weeks, Mr. Rather - sometimes speaking from behind the anchor desk - asserted that the questioning of the records was coming, in large measure, from Republican partisans.

But on Sept. 20, Mr. Rather and his bosses reversed course. Speaking again from the anchor desk, Mr. Rather told his viewers that a former Texas National Guard officer had misled him and his producers about how the officer had obtained the documents. Relying on them to buttress the report, he said, had been a "mistake in judgment."

"I want to say personally and directly I'm sorry," Mr. Rather said, before adding, "This was an error made in good faith."

His apology represented a low point in a year when he had recorded some of the more memorable achievements in his more than four decades at CBS News.

A few months before the Guard report, he joined forces with Ms. Mapes, one of the most respected producers at the network and one who is still working there, for a segment on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," then known as "60 Minutes II," which reported in detail on the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Earlier, he landed the first broadcast interview with former President Bill Clinton discussing his memoir, "My Life."

In a statement from CBS News yesterday, senior executives made no mention of the controversy over the documents and instead hailed Mr. Rather's longevity at the anchor desk and the record he has compiled throughout his career.

"Dan's 24 years at the 'CBS Evening News' is the longest run of any evening news anchor in history and is a singular achievement in broadcast journalism," Mr. Moonves said.

Though CBS announced Mr. Rather's plans in a statement sent by e-mail to other news organizations just after noon yesterday, Mr. Rather also chose to say a few words to his viewers, some 16 minutes into last night's broadcast.

"It has been and remains an honor to be welcomed into your home each evening," he said. "And I thank you for the trust you've given me."

Mr. Rather has appeared tense and drawn to colleagues in recent weeks, perhaps no more so than about a month ago, after he spent almost a full day answering questions before the investigative panel in a conference room at Black Rock, the CBS corporate headquarters.

But yesterday, sitting in a cowhide-covered easy chair from his native Texas, Mr. Rather appeared at peace. Cradling a cup of coffee and wearing a crew-neck cashmere sweater, he spoke more of the assignments yet to come than those long since passed.

"I'm just crazy enough to get up every morning saying to myself with great enthusiasm, 'I'm sure the next big story, the biggest story I'll ever cover, is right there around the corner,' " he said. "It might happen today. And, boy, do I want to be there covering it."

He added that a Bob Dylan lyric had been rattling around his head for the last few days that "he not busy being born is busy dying."

"I feel born again," Mr. Rather said. "Not in a religious sense. Born again because I see the path."

The title of the 1965 song, however, belied Mr. Rather's apparent calm: "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)."

How did the establishment media come to a place where as Lancey Howard wrote, it "tried to corrupt a Presidential election by using forged documents to support a one-sided hit-piece interview with a Kerry fundraiser just weeks before the election"?

Nor, as Theresawithanh pointed out, was this Rather's only sin. Even so, Rather was hardly alone in this mischief, CNN has had its share of phony Vietnam stories. The New York Times would shape any account to further its gay agenda.

How did the establishment media get to a place where plagiary (Goodwin,Barnicle), outright fabrication (New York Times, Washington Post), forgery(CBS), staged exploding trucks(NBC), and blatant agenda shopping have become bylines of these once revered media icons?

I think it goes back a half century to the civil rights struggle. There the cause was so righteous and so important that it was unthinkable not to shape the story to fully present the invidiousness of prejudice. Next came Vietnam, and again, the horror of the war, the apparent futility of so many deaths, created a temptation which could not be resisted by all to present a picture which would end the holocaust. Richard Nixon acted counter to this instinct to stop the war, at least in their eyes, so his destruction by the media was rationalized because audio tapes confirmed his guilt. Big media was once again confirmed in their notions of their own exceptionalism.

Since the 1950s media has seen itself as right on all the big issues and Republicans/conservatives wrong. Watergate ensured that Hubris would distort the media until a fall was inevitable because Watergate told the media that it had a role in the making as well as the reporting of the news.

They tried to unhorse Reagan with a synthetic recreation of Watergate called Iran-Contra but it fizzled. Undaunted, the media easily deconstructed a honorable but media challenged George H.W. Bush in favor of their flawed new paladin, Bill Clinton. Here, the media really had to hold its nose and work its bias for the peoples' greater good. Here, the Faustian compromises became harder to rationalize as audio tapes which scuttled Richard Nixon had to be dismissed when produced by Gennifer Flowers. The phase "knee pad media" had become commonplace by the time DNA left the sympathies of the media on the wrong side of this "gate."

Clinton's disgrace caused the nation to see what only some in the media like Bernie Goldberg who broke ranks and told truth to power could or would see, the Democrats were clearly not on the right side of the big issues. But old habits die hard and old convictions die even harder and self righteousness never dies in some. For Rather, now a septuagenarian, how hard it must have been to surrender to new realities.

Time enough for one last crusade. Mount up and ride to the sound of the guns. The world must be saved from Vietnam redux. Rather and his generation can smell a quagmire from a continent away. George W. Bush must be unhorsed as was his father but, alas, the son had gone to school on his father's media wreck and nothing seemed to work against his persona.

It was not enough to confect news on 60 minutes with Clarke and to smear Bush with Wilson, Bush held his position in the polls. Playing defense against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was not getting the job done. Bush himself, his character, his infuriating image of rectitude, must be destroyed so that the nation might be spared another disaster worse than Vietnam. Oh the glory, to save the nation once again, to be right once again on the biggest issue of the new generation, to bring truth and order to the world! Legacy thrice and forever secured!

But there is no time to lose, the election is only a few months away and against the resistance of talk radio and the likes of FreeRepublic, we are making no discernible headway. Our ratings are disintegrating to 50% of our glory days and our newscasts are disputed on the internet before the delayed broadcast reaches California. What to do? Here is the matter of Bush's Guard service....

Let us draw a charitable curtain and leave the speculation about the mechanics of how CBS succumbed this time to its Faustian temptations behind the drapes. Enough that it is obvious that CBS knew or should have known that it was inflicting a fraud on all of us. Enough that there is a word for this: Arrogance.

Dan Rather, Cromwell said it best: You have sitting here too long for the good you have been doing. Be gone, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

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