Peggy Noonan on Dan Rather in today's Wall Street Journal:
My first thought: It is a hard world. We all know this in the abstract, but it can take you aback in the particular. In public life the entire body of your work--an entire career of almost 50 years--can now essentially be summed up and dismissed by the last headline on your career, which in this case is "Rather Retires Under Cloud After Forged Documents Story." If Dan had retired of his own volition a year ago, that would not be the headline. "Long Career Reflected Stunning Rise of U.S. Media" would be more like it.
I am not saying timing is everything, although it can be rather a lot. I'm thinking of . . . well, Richard Nixon. Nixon had one of the great gutsy careers in American political history, and on the greatest issue of his lifetime--the ugliness and destructiveness of communism here and abroad--he was right, and put his career on the line. He did much good. But his headline is Watergate.
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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.
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Probably the worst moment in his career, because it was arguably the one most obvious in showing bias and a political agenda, was the time Dan tried to beat up George H.W. Bush live, on the "CBS Evening News," over Iran-contra. Mr. Bush decked him instead, and with a question that reverberates: How would you like your whole career to be judged by one mistake? I do not doubt that CBS News that night thought it was going to take down a vice president, and wanted to. And was embittered by its failure. Which may have contributed to the years long, Ahab-like quest of producer Mary Mapes to bring down George W. Bush with documents it took bloggers less than 24 hours to reveal as fabrications.
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