Rather’s Journey in Print and Broadcasting

Dan Rather went back to the future two years ago. He started writing a syndicated column, embarking on the newspaper career that had eluded him as a young man in his native Texas.

The evidence is available in “Deadlines & Datelines,” newly published by William Morrow & Co. The book collects Rather’s more rewarding columns, along with some of his daily CBS radio commentaries and longer pieces he’s done for the Los Angeles Times and national magazines. There are takes on Washington politics, foreign affairs and the passing scene, including one summertime column that insists air-conditioning has made possible not only the development of Sun Belt cities but also the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton. “These politicians didn’t spring from the sweltering backwoods.”

There also are tight portraits of Al Gore and Myrna Loy, Charles Kuralt and Don Imus, Mother Teresa and the Rather family’s indomitable Granny. She was then living out on remote Pin Oak Creek in Texas and had “a wagon-train face with the kind of steady gaze that tells you in an instant that she doesn’t lie and doesn’t tolerate those who do.”

While studying journalism at Sam Houston State Teachers College and after graduating in 1953, Rather had looked to the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle as the big time. “In my part of the country, newspapers were still dominant,” the CBS anchorman recalled the other day. “I don’t think my family owned a TV set until the mid-’50s.”

After a brief stint in the Marines, he got a tryout at the Chronicle. “The city room was right out of ‘The Front Page,’ ” he went on. “There were cigarette burns on every table.” Rewrite men, who appeared none the worse for their periodic tilts of a flask, were sure and fast at their typewriters. “I was in awe of them.”

But Rather, a hopeless speller known to have worked previously on a small radio station in the college town of Huntsville, was pointed after a few ink-stained months to the Chronicle’s radio outlet.

“At KTRH, I could write quick and my spelling didn’t matter,” he said. His career as a broadcast journalist took flight, though not without a longing look back at the newspaper life he had aspired to.

So when Frank A. Bennack Jr., president of the Hearst Corp., proposed in 1997 that Rather write a weekly column for the company’s King Features syndicate, the anchor thought it would be fun to do and a way to take a fresh view of stories outside the imperatives of his nightly newscast. “There was also a sense of coming full circle,” he added.

After all, only now has Rather really made it: The Chronicle is among the 63 papers that carry his column.

Rather, who is 67 and has been anchoring the “CBS Evening News” since 1981, is well served by what’s known in the business as an institutional memory.

For example, anyone who ever warmed to the champagne-bubbly swing of “The Lawrence Welk Show,” or anyone who remembers a parent whose cares vanished when the smiley host presented the wunnaful Lennon Sisters, will love Rather’s take on that ABC fixture of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. The folks on Welk’s show “are sometimes remembered as bland, but they weren’t really,” Rather writes. “They were aggressive, almost violent in their wholesomeness.”

In contrast to the tight, often clipped copy that Rather broadcasts, his columns are looser, though one can hear his familiar cadence while reading them. “I tend to write and rewrite. Along the way I also read them aloud to myself. . . . My column is 600 words. Which seems such a luxury when, in broadcasting, someone will say, ‘Give me 20 seconds on that story.’ ”

He warmed up for his own column by indulging himself in those written by two of his favorites--Bob Considine, the prolific newsman and columnist for the Hearst papers who died in 1975, and Jim Bishop, also syndicated by Hearst, until a few years before his death in 1987.

“I had somebody pull 200 Jim Bishop columns for me,” Rather said. “He could tell a really powerful story and give it a great dramatic ending.”

Rather’s “Deadlines & Datelines” has come out as books by his two competitors, Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” and Peter Jennings’ “The Century” (co-written with Todd Brewster), each have spent seven months and counting on the New York Times’ national bestseller list. This is the sixth book to carry Rather’s name.

Afterwords: Ernest Hemingway’s “True at First Light,” described as a fictional memoir and his last unpublished work to see print, will go on sale from Scribner on July 6. Meanwhile, as the July 21 centennial of the writer’s birth approaches, various magazines have been offering their own looks back at his life and times. Cigar Aficionado’s August issue (“100 Years of Hemingway”) nicely reviews the man and the myth and includes that famous, wistful portrait of a sweatered Hemingway taken by Jousuf Karsh in 1957, five years before the writer’s suicide. Despite the sadness of the image, Karsh tells the magazine, “our conversation during the sitting, punctuated by Chianti, was lighthearted and genial.”

For more reviews, read Book Review

* This Sunday: Don Waldie on “Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream”; James Longenbach on “The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place”; and Stephen Schwartz on “Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915.”

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Paul Colford’s e-mail address is paul.colford@)newsday.com.