The Houston Hurricane

Dan Rather is a country boy in a hurry

For all the hours he has logged on the air and on the road, Dan Rather made his most celebrated TV appearance so far in the space of some ten seconds. The date was March 19,1974, the place Houston, where Richard Nixon was holding a news conference at a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters. Those were the dying days of Watergate, and everyone in the hall anticipated excitement if Nixon's least favorite television reporter asked a question. Sure enough, up stood Rather--to an outbreak of applause and jeers from the onlooking broadcasters. When the noise died down, Nixon asked, "Are you running for something?" Rather answered quickly, "No, sir, Mr. President. Are you?"

Not long afterward CBS yanked Rather from the White House, then occupied by Gerald Ford, and the speculation surrounding that move centered on the propriety of Rather's Houston response: Had he stood up to the President or had he sassed him? Yet Nixon's question was oddly on target. Rather was indeed running for something that night, had been running for it all of his adult life, and would continue to do so long after Nixon resigned. He made his goal perfectly clear to the network executives bidding for his services: "I'd like to lead, and I want to be the best reporter of my time." Rather does not claim to be there yet, but when he takes over for Walter Cronkite next year, an immense audience will be on hand to watch him try.

Someone else in this spotlight might be daunted by the big bucks and the pressures they will generate, but evidently not Rather: "I believe I am as good as anybody." That self-confidence worked admirably for him during his more than 18 years at CBS. He rose through the ranks simply by being more aggressive and tenacious than the competition, working as many hours a day as his assignment called for and then adding a few more for good measure. Rather's ascent was also aided by his craggy good looks--no handicap in a visual medium--and by a canny sense of what the tube could do for him. He left nothing about his on-camera appearances to chance, including apparently spur-of-the-moment remarks. "We all give prior thought to our ad libs," says CBS News Correspondent Robert Pierpoint, "but Dan even writes down the colloquialisms in his ad libs. He thinks them through, and they give his stuff a quality." Indeed, Rather's Lone Star tropes have become something of a trademark. Interviewing G.O.P. Presidential Contender George Bush last month on 60 Minutes, Rather remarked. "To use a Texas phrase, there are people who say that George Bush is a nice fellow but that he's all hat and no cattle." Translation: some people think that Bush has no constituency.

"You're talking about the creation of an image," says one colleague and longtime Rather watcher. "It wasn't exactly bad for Dan Rather to have Richard Nixon after him. He was the perfect image of the tough reporter covering the Nixon White House. He's a guy who psyched out the networks, and particularly his own, a long time ago. He built Dan Rather."

If so, the product exists both on and off the screen: a soft-spoken Texan in a Savile Row suit, easygoing in a down-home country way and clearly in a big hurry, an adopted Easterner who has polished his background instead of forgetting it. The son of a pipeline worker and a waitress, Rather grew up in Houston and played end on his high school football team, hoping to win an athletic scholarship when he graduated. The only place interested enough to take a look was Sam Houston State Teachers College. Rather's mother cashed in two $25 savings bonds, and he became the first member of his family in anyone's memory to attend college. The scholarship never materialized, but a dedicated journalism teacher named Hugh Cunningham virtually adopted Rather, found him odd jobs (he made 40-c- an hour doing various chores, including announcing, at a local radio station) and drilled him constantly on the fundamentals of newsgathering. "He had the ambition to go to the top," says Cunningham, now an assistant to the president of the University of Florida. "I always felt he'd go as far as he wanted to go."

To Rather that was Houston, at least for a while. A part-time stint at the Houston Chronicle reminded him that he was a poor speller; when a better paying broadcasting job beckoned, he jumped. Once on the air, he managed to mispronounce words like heroin (her-oyne), variable (var'ble) and miniature (minichoor). Radio station KTRH gave him time to improve, and while there, he met his future wife, Jean Goebel, who also worked for the station, as a secretary. In 1960 Rather joined KHOU-TV, the CBS affiliate in Houston, and a short time later literally reaped the whirlwind. As Hurricane Carla moved toward the Texas coast in September 1961, Rather took a remote unit to Galveston, where he organized the transmission of radar pictures of the huge storm to home screens and kept talking throughout three days of high wind and water. His derring-do and endurance caught the eye of CBS. Walter Cronkite remarked admiringly, if incorrectly, that Rather "was up to his ass in water moccasins." The network offered Rather a correspondent's job at $17,500 a year. Happily settled in his Houston post, he thought twice and then accepted.

Over the next thirteen years Rather seemed to turn up everywhere the news was biggest or the danger worst. He covered civil-rights violence throughout the South. He was in Dallas almost by accident on Nov. 22, 1963, and he coordinated nearly four days of the Kennedy assassination coverage from the scene. CBS rewarded him with the job of White House correspondent in the new L.B.J. Administration, then offered him the plum of a foreign assignment. With London as his base, Rather soon found himself dodging shells on the India-Pakistan border, watching the beginnings of a civil war in Greece, staring at armed and edgy Red Chinese soldiers down the Natu La pass in the Himalayas. He hounded the home office for an assignment in Viet Nam and spent nearly a year there. A different kind of combat duty awaited him back in the U.S. He was punched in the stomach by one of Mayor Daley's security guards on the floor of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Within a year or so, Rather realized that anchor positions were opening up on the CBS weekend news shows and that he was not getting them. He went to then News Vice President Gordon Manning to complain. "Manning said, 'We think you are as good a reporter as we've got, but we don't think you are as good leadership material as we've got,' " Rather recalls. "I found myself saying, 'Nuts to you, Johnny, I've been to hell and back for this organization, and I think I can do anything you've got to do.' " Rather finally got a weekend anchor assignment added to his duties as CBS man at the Nixon White House, but the feeling that he had arbitrarily been ruled out as ever being successor to Cronkite still rankled. His 1977 autobiography The Camera Never Blinks (written with Mickey Herskowitz) amounted to effective lobbying over the heads of the network brass and toward the public at large. The book was a bestseller in both hardback and paperback. Says Rather today: "I suddenly found myself in a very competitive race, not of my making. But if I am in this race, I intend to win it."

And so he did, but without acquiring the legion of enemies that often surround driven achievers. Competitors who have been steamrollered by Rather in pursuit of a story frequently remember how polite he was as he beat them out. Journalists who have traveled with him give him high marks for generosity and grace under pressure. TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis, who covered the Viet Nam War for NBC, recalls Rather as a friendly rival: "He consistently shared his ration of information, and if he had food, he'd share that too." Says one colleague: "Rather is the most courteous man I have ever met. I remember one time in Europe we had finished taping, and the sound man really did a terrible job. Dan wrote him a note and thanked him for a job well done anyway." Adds another coworker: "He genuinely likes people, and they respond to him. He is not uneasy about being among regular folk."

Rather possesses few of the trappings that are supposed to accompany celebrity and wealth. He has no sailboat, summer place, city town house or even a car. He keeps himself too busy to use them. Home is a comfortable six-room co-op apartment on Manhattan's East Side, furnished in a combination of modern and Early American styles. Daughter Robin, 21, attends Tufts University, where she is captain of the girls' basketball team; Son Danjack, 19, is a student at Columbia and frequently comes downtown to meet his father for lunch. Rather's schedule as a 60 Minutes regular keeps him in the air and on the road some eight months a year. Accustomed to long periods of time on her own, Jean Rather paints (several of her oils hang in the apartment), goes gallery and museum hopping and plays a fierce game of tennis (she can wipe her husband off the court).

Rather's tempo away from New York varies with the assignment. At home, he jogs up and down Park or Madison Avenue four days a week to unwind; when he finds time to read, he picks up books recommended by his wife or a work by a particular favorite, Novelist Walker Percy. He rarely attends parties, although he and Jean are enthusiastic theatergoers. When the Rathers entertain, the guest list is usually limited to a few friends; he and 60 Minutes colleague Mike Wallace are especially close. On a free evening, Rather is likely to spend hours on long-distance, chatting across time zones with acquaintances from his well-traveled past. He picks up and goes fishing occasionally, and he and Jean take periods off to vacation with her mother in Texas.

In The Camera Never Blinks Rather writes, "I am not, never have been, a natural smiler." In truth, he can slip into sobersided pomposity at the best of times. Phoning CBS News President William Leonard to announce his decision, Rather intoned, "I have decided to make a new covenant of excellence at CBS." Later that day, though, he seemed to have no difficulty beaming at the press conference announcing his appointment. Spectators had trouble deciding which was more photogenic, the wreaths of smoke from Cronkite's pipe or Rather's dazzling grin. "I would be a candidate for the funny farm if I claimed that this has been an agony for me," he says of the negotiations and their outcome. "It has been joyous." Why not? To take a page from Rather's notebook: he is in the tall cotton now, sitting in the catbird seat.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.