Booted from a chair that never really fit

I\o7'VE\f7 never quite understood all the fuss over Dan Rather, who was always a solid reporter but an embarrassing anchorman who never should have been. After almost 25 years in the anchor chair at CBS News, he still looked every night as though he had just taken over the job the day before -- or had been forced into it, staring into the camera like a terrified weekend news rookie. He never seemed at ease, unlike his silky rivals Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw.

Very much at home in a hurricane or in the trenches (where his tendency to showboat had its own problems), as anchorman Rather always had that slightly dazed "What am I doing here?" look, despite all his efforts to appear in command. He was never convincing; his rugged reporter's demeanor failed to transfer to a desk job.

For all those years, Rather was just the wrong man for the post, almost as if he'd been stuffed into a suit and tie when he really longed to be wrapped in a burqa or lashed to a lamppost, as he was in clips rerun yet again during CBS' farewell on the evening newscast this spring -- a macho legacy, much spoofed, that at the end was all he had left of his battered reputation.

And Rather was spoiling for a fight even in his noisy departure. He went out the door kicking and screaming, much as he'd entered, blasting CBS for not giving him more assignments on "60 Minutes" than the eight stories he'd had since leaving the anchor desk. It would've been plenty of work for most TV reporters, but Rather's swaggering ego refused to go quietly. He whined that the right stories had not been prominently enough promoted and were fewer than other "60 Minutes" correspondents had been given. That was Rather's feisty last word, not that far removed from his famous wisecrack to President Nixon at a press conference when Nixon kidded Rather after a tough question, "Are you running for something?" and Rather shot back, "No, Mr. President, are you?"

That was definitive Rather, but his two-fisted Texas manner made him ill-suited for anchorman duties, where viewers like a cool father figure behind the desk, not a guy who was always bucking to be the next Mike Wallace but somehow never got the needed traction. Instead, he was forever chafing in his anchorman seat, as miscast in the role as Wallace himself might have been, or Geraldo Rivera, whom he more closely resembled than his unruffled, genteel predecessor, Walter Cronkite.