Dan Rather

Dan Rather was born in Wharton, Texas, the son of a man who dug ditches and laid pipe for a living, and grew up in a working-class section of Houston. Rheumatic fever as a child nearly killed him and later got him discharged from the Marine Corps within months of enlisting. He earned a journalism degree from Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1953, edited the student paper, and called play-by-play for college football on local radio. Wire-service jobs and a stint at the Houston Chronicle led to a local CBS affiliate, KHOU-TV, where he became news director in 1959, still in his twenties and still unknown outside Houston.

Hurricane Carla, in September 1961, made him a name: Rather broadcast from the National Weather Center using one of television's first hurricane radar images, and the resulting coverage is credited with helping move more than 350,000 people out of the storm's path. CBS brought him to Dallas, and he was there when President Kennedy was shot in November 1963. A White House correspondent by 1964, he covered Vietnam, traveled to China with Nixon in 1972, and pressed Nixon so hard during Watergate that the president once asked him, "Are you running for something?" Rather anchored the CBS Evening News for 24 years, from 1981 to 2005, longer than anyone else in American network history, while also reporting for 60 Minutes and hosting 48 Hours.

On September 8, 2004, Rather reported on 60 Minutes II that memos from a Texas Guard officer criticized George W. Bush's military service. Examiners quickly doubted the typography, which looked more like word-processor output than 1970s typewriters could produce, and CBS's source later admitted he had misled the network about where the papers came from. What is documented: CBS could not authenticate the memos, and Rather retracted the story on air twelve days later, saying, "If I knew then what I know now, I would not have gone ahead." What remains disputed is whether the underlying claims about Bush's service were themselves false, or only the documents used to support them — a distinction Rather and Mary Mapes never conceded. CBS did not renew his contract; he sued for 70 million dollars and lost on appeal.

Rather is in his mid-nineties and still working, mostly outside the network that made him famous. He built a second career on AXS TV, launched an independent production company, and turned a newsletter called Steady into one of Substack's larger political followings after 2021. CBS Sunday Morning brought him back for an interview in 2024, his first appearance on the network since his departure, and a Netflix documentary about his life aired the same year. Whether history settles on Rather as the anchor who reported Hurricane Carla and challenged two presidents, or as the one who ran an unverifiable story and lost the chair over it, is not resolved — and he has spent twenty years arguing it should not be.

Dan Rather's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• CBS Evening News with Dan Rather television
  A 24-year anchor tenure, the longest in American network history 1981
• The Camera Never Blinks book
  His first memoir 1977
• Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News book 2012
• What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism book 2017
• Steady other
  Substack newsletter that rebuilt his public following after CBS 2021

• October 31, 1931 aged 0 Born in Wharton, Texas
• 1953 aged ~22 Graduates from Sam Houston State Teachers College
• 1959 aged ~28 Becomes news director at KHOU-TV in Houston
• September 1961 aged 29 Covers Hurricane Carla with early television radar imagery Helped drive the evacuation of more than 350,000 people.
• November 22, 1963 aged 32 Covers the assassination of President Kennedy from Dallas
• March 9, 1981 aged 49 Becomes anchor of the CBS Evening News
• September 8, 2004 aged 72 Reports the Killian documents story on 60 Minutes II Retracted the story on air twelve days later.
• March 9, 2005 aged 73 Anchors his final CBS Evening News broadcast
• 2024 aged ~93 Returns to CBS Sunday Morning for his first interview there since leaving

• George W. Bush b. 1946
  43rd president who led the country after the September 11 attacks and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. reported the story that ended his anchor tenure
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. sparred with
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. covered the assassination of
• Walter Cronkite 1916–2009
  CBS Evening News anchor known as the most trusted man in America during a pivotal era of broadcast journalism. succeeded as CBS Evening News anchor