CBS signs off with Dan Rather: Good night, and good luck

Dan Rather is a free man. After an appropriately acrimonious final round of legal wrangling, his 44 years with CBS News...

Dan Rather is a free man. After an appropriately acrimonious final round of legal wrangling, his 44 years with CBS News came to an end or will come to an end. There8217;s a bit of confusion on that point.

Those who have followed the awkward exit of Rather from his position first as anchor of the CBS Evening News last year, then as a CBS News employee this year, often ask a simple question: How could a network for which Rather has done so much and served so loyally treat him so shabbily as the curtain falls? Some think there is a strange personal grudge against Rather by CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves, who was quoted diplomatically in a CBS news release yesterday as saying of Rather, 8216;8216;The unique mark he has left on his craft is indelible.8217;8217; Others think there is intense pressure on CBS News President Sean McManus to clear Rather and all remnants of him from the premises in preparation for the arrival of Katie Couric, the former Today show host who will anchor the Evening News this fall and has a growing reputation in the business.

An explanation from one of Rather8217;s many supporters inside the company: 8216;8216;We8217;re dealing with a bunch of classic idiots.8217;8217;

Reached at his home in New York, Rather did not sound rattled. It is unlikely he will make an appearance at the fly-infested CBS News building on New York8217;s West 57th Street this week; the contents of his office8212;including the family Bible that was always opened to a different verse8212;have been removed and will be sent to him. As of today, officially, Dan Rather and CBS News will no longer be one.

November, when his contract is officially up. Since he makes 12 million a year, that was worth arguing about, and CBS executives did argue until Monday.

Rather was removed as anchor of the CBS Evening News a year short of his 25th anniversary after the airing of an apparently flawed 60 Minutes II report on George W Bush8217;s alleged special treatment while in the Texas National Guard. Rather was the correspondent on that report. One producer lost her job, others are suing.

Don Hewitt, executive producer of 60 Minutes, and Mike Wallace, its most famous correspondent, declared that Rather should resign. Dan Rather is not the resigning type. Wallace has since apologised.

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Rather was reassigned after the Bush report to join the correspondents on 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II, a then-successful spinoff of the original classic news programme. If 60 Minutes II went off the air, the agreement said and it did go off the air8212;Rather was to join 60 Minutes, where he8217;d earlier made a mark as an investigative reporter, full time. But Rather discovered in fairly short order that he was a correspondent in only a token, perfunctory way.

Some of his detractors claimed this was poetic justice because Rather, on ascending to the anchor chair March 9, 1981, supposedly banished his predecessor, Walter Cronkite, from appearing on the programme and from doing other reporting work for CBS News. But one of Rather8217;s supporters said yesterday that, first of all, Rather would hardly have had the authority to 8220;ban8221; Cronkite, second, Cronkite hosted a series, 8220;Universe,8221; in prime time on the network. That his last days at CBS should be marked by turbulence seems somehow appropriate for Rather, although through the years he has been among the most ferociously loyal of company men. As with such illustrious predecessors as Edward R Murrow, Rather8217;s in-house enemies were up in the corporate stratosphere, not down in the trenches with the hard-working journalists.

8211;Tom Shales