In the mid to late 1960s Lyndon Johnson ran the White House like a Genghis Khan with cactus needles in his butt.

He was autocratic and nasty, terrorizing all bureaucrats, senators and reporters in sight. It came time to hold a news conference with the senior White House reporters for the three major TV networks. Dan Rather was the CBS representative.

It was a dialogue in prime time, 8 p.m. Frank Reynolds was there. I’ve forgotten the third. It might have been Roger Mudd. This was shortly before the deteriorating war in Viet Nam evolved into catastrophe and before the war and the street rallies drove Johnson into seclusion in the White House. For all of his leadership in building a better society in America, Johnson was a road hog of a politician and president. On this night, in full stride of his presidential power and his rarely concealed gifts for intimidation, Lyndon Johnson was taking no prisoners. If the president decided the question called for a glare of contempt, Johnson glared Texas-style lasers, long and personally, long past the timeframe when glares should have subsided into routine condescension.

None of the three panelists, including Dan Rather, made any noticeable stab at heroism. Rather then was no grandstander in the style that critics later draped on him. He was young and earnest and had not yet acquired his subsequent celebrity. He was a self-possessed and stubborn interrogator but, like the others, conscious of the proprieties. It wasn’t easy with all those millions watching, the president in control, the reporters under scrutiny of the viewers and the network presidents. The office of the president had to be respected. In case they forgot, it was carved in stone that Johnson was going to remind them publicly and embarrassingly. Watching at home, I thought most of the right questions were asked but not all of them. Rather lobbed up what I called a lollypop in my column in the Minneapolis newspaper the next day.

Johnson ate it up like a shark fielding a blowfish.

In my column I gave Dan Rather unflattering grades. It wasn’t one of those four-boxes-of-dynamite demolitions jobs. People who ask questions for a livelihood, which I did ultimately for more than 40 years, tend to have basic kinship with colleagues doing it under the pressure of live, national audiences and handling life and death issues.

I got a letter from Dan Rather four days later. It was written temperately but with a clear sense of injury. He said a columnist was entitled to his viewpoint, but he thought his questions were fair and pertinent and in tone with the importance of the issues involved. He said that although we’d never met he cared about what was said publicly when his work came up, that he took his performance seriously and above all he cared about doing it right.

I answered, thanking him for a thoughtful response. I was impressed that he would answer a criticism like that in the midst of a round the clock schedule. In some ways that small encounter seasoned my opinion of Rather’s work for the next 35 years.

I watched part of his valedictory as an anchor Wednesday night, and wished he hadn’t done it; not because it wasn’t a forceful catalogue of journalistic history in America—the Kennedy assassination, Viet Nam, Watergate, 9/ll, Iraq-- but because it inevitably invited more catcalls that bravos. Some of those were deserved. There was the Bush-National Guard fiasco that hastened his end as a network anchor. Increasingly over the years he became an actor in the news he was broadcasting, hauling his equipment and his uniform of the day around the world, imbedding himself, “we’re here on the scene.”

In this Rather became of industry lightening rod for that kind of generic complaint. But delivering today’s news is not how it was delivered in the 1940s. This is news instantly, in all colors, simultaneous with events, simulcasting events, 24-hour-a-day stuff, impacting millions of lives around the world, suddenly. The face in front of the camera may be giving you news and may be giving you opinion and often you’re not sure. TV news and TV entertainment and TV self-promotion are essentially locked into an incestuous embrace and it’s hard sometimes to disentangle them. Rather’s idiosyncrasies on election nights bothered a lot of people. But I liked them. He was a voluble guy from Texas with those camera-hogging suspenders, spouting down-home lingo to describe a tight race, to the point where some nights he sounded like Keith Jackson announcing a college football game.

When he anchored the news, I thought it was generally crisp and professional and I thought he did it with a personality that produced intimacy between viewer and the teller. But I suppose one of the reasons I feel some sympathy for Rather is this: for whatever his blemishes, he was a guy gradually vanishing from the television screens of America. Network news, the big broadcasters of so many decades, had built a trust. It is yielding now to a noisy menagerie of cable hawkers, some of whom, like Fox, warp the news, exploit it politically or commercially and turn it into a grab bag of gratuitous war-rattling and propaganda.

There was actually a time when television could honestly transform itself into the conscience of America because it had broadcasters of transcending professional bravery and insight. I remember hearing Edward R. Murrow when I was a young man listening to radio. I remembered him from the rooftops of London under incendiary bombing. I remember him better for a night on television in the 1950s. He looked into the camera and straight into the mind of America at the end of an hour long show. In it he assessed the damage done to the country by the rampaging charges of Sen. Joe McCarthy in the witch-hunt era of America’s communist scare.

He said: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. If we dig deep in our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibility for the result… (Sen. McCarthy) didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”

The McCarthy era ended not long after. It was when television news rose to greatness. Today it is owned by corporate and entertainment consortiums and public broadcasting has been neutered. Dan Rather was and is no Ed Murrow, but who is?

---Jim Klobuchar

Copyright (c) 2005 Jim Klobuchar