Truth or Consequences - Dan Rather / G.W. Bush's Air guard service
Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the Air National Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be the legendary newsman’s finest hour. Instead, it blew up in his face, tarnishing his career forever and casting a dark cloud of doubt and suspicion over his reporting—and that of every other journalist on the case. This month, as Rather returns with a new memoir, Joe Hagan finally gets to the bottom of the greatest untold story in modern Texas politics, with exclusive, never-before-seen details that shed fresh light on who was right, who was wrong, and what really happened.
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Here it is, on a coat hook in midtown Manhattan: the Army-issue green shirt, with “CBS NEWS” written in white letters on the ID tag, that Dan Rather wore in 1966 while hunkered down in rice paddies along the Cambodian border. It would be one of the legendary network anchor’s most famous assignments: dispatching dramatic reports on the Vietnam conflict for millions of Americans sitting down to the evening news. In 16mm films you can see him, young and square-jawed, hair thick and black, barking into a microphone and recoiling from machine guns that rat-a-tat-tat behind him.
“It’s a little tighter than it used to be,” says Rather, considering the shirt now.
He’s sitting under a still-life painting of a fishing rod and tackle in his modest, somewhat shabby little office on Forty-second Street, a place hidden at the far end of a long hallway where you’d least expect to find the former anchor. His lower lip bulges, as if swollen from a punch to the mouth, with a pinch of tobacco, a vestigial habit from his teenage years working on Texas oil rigs. Craggy, gray-haired, and in need of hearing aids, Rather is still animated by his glory days, the details of which have long since solidified into a personal mythology. It’s the epic story of the hustling correspondent from Wharton who reported the death of President John F. Kennedy as a young CBS correspondent, who brought Vietnam into American living rooms, who stood
toe-to-toe with Richard Nixon during Watergate, and who nudged aside Walter Cronkite to become one of the most trusted and iconic voices of his day.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2012-05-01/feature.php
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