DAN RATHER took the best seat in the house that Murrow built and then left the place a ruin. Now he has returned to torch the rubble.
The former "CBS Evening News" anchor has a filed a $70-million suit against the network where he worked for 44 years, alleging that the network breached his contract when it asked him to step out of the anchor's chair and pushed him into broadcast obscurity. CBS did this, the suit contends, because of his role in producing what turned out to be a wholly unsubstantiated "60 Minutes II" segment alleging that a young George W. Bush used family connections to obtain favorable treatment that allowed him to evade service in the Texas Air National Guard.
Rather's suit further alleges that CBS' internal investigation -- directed by two outsiders, former U.S. Atty. Gen. and Pennsylvania Gov. Richard Thornburg and ex-Associated Press chief Louis Boccardi -- was a "fraud." According to Rather, Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, the network's corporate owner, along with then-CBS news President Andrew Heyward and Les Moonves, CBS' chief executive, sacked Rather and four other journalists to get the Bush administration off their backs.
"Central to the defendants' play to pacify the White House," the suit contends, "was to offer Mr. Rather as the public face of the story and as a scapegoat for CBS management's bungling of the entire episode -- which, as a direct result, became known publicly as 'Rathergate.' "
Oh, that's how that happened.
Here we thought that trite "Rathergate" business came about because a lot of conservative commentators gleefully pounced on a self-evidently shoddy piece of journalism served up by a newsman they'd long suspected of bias and because he and his network then obligingly confirmed their suspicions by arrogantly defending the indefensible -- bad work.
Now, if you once had thought of yourself as situated at the heart of the journalistic universe for nearly half a century, and suddenly found yourself 75 and toiling for an obscure cable operation that seemed to generate more press releases than viewers, it probably would be much more satisfying to see yourself as the victim of an intricate, high-level conspiracy than as someone undone by the kind of personal screw-up that would make a first-year reporter blush.
