In this Opinion Journal piece, Peggy Noonan writes the best and most balanced epilogue on Dan Rather‘s career that I have read to date. Ms. Noonan, who used to write Mr. Rather’s daily radio commentary, has some particularly insightful personal observations about Mr. Rather, including the following:
Dan was a great boss. He was appreciative of good work and sympathetic when it wasn’t good. He was one of the men–Douglas Edwards and Dallas Townsend were two others–to whom I am indebted, for they taught me how to write for the ear, how to write for people who are listening as opposed to reading. He was generous with praise. Someone who did a good job on a story got flowers and a note. Someone in the newsroom once knocked Dan in a magazine profile, saying he was insecure, always sending too many flowers. Dan thought, Really? Life’s tough, you can’t send too many flowers! He was open to ideas, he was democratic and not hierarchical in his management style, and he tried to be fair in his dealings with people in spite of a personal emotionalism that was deep, ever present and not entirely predictable.
For three years, from 1981 through 1984, I wrote his daily radio commentary, a four-minute essay with a one-minute spot that went out to all the CBS affiliates and network-owned stations. It was a great job. We did some good work. Here’s how it got done: When I had been doing the show for a few weeks I could see that my work was not good–uneven, without voice, without a clear point of view. I thought I knew the reason. I had become increasingly a political conservative. Dan, it was obvious to me, was a sort of establishment liberal–not a wild leftist and not an ideologue, but whatever smart liberals thought was more or less what he wound up thinking, and saying. I couldn’t write his views well, because I didn’t buy them and didn’t fully understand them. I couldn’t write my views, because the show had to reflect his thinking. So I went to him and told him my problem. He was great. He said: On any given issue that we discuss, give the liberal point of view fairly and give the conservative point of view fairly, and then we’ll end it with my opinion, because it’s my show. I thought that sounded good.
And it worked. “Dan Rather Reporting” actually got something of a conservative following, not because it was a conservative show–it wasn’t–but because it actually put forward the conservative point of view in what might be called a fair and balanced way.