Dan Rather turns 95 today, Saturday, October 31. He was born in 1931 in Wharton, Texas, and he spent the week leading up to his birthday talking straight about the news business.
“I’ll soon be 95 years old, and I’ve spent my entire life in news,” he told USA Today on October 26, the day Frank Marshall’s documentary Rather began streaming free on YouTube.
If you grew up with the CBS Evening News, you remember the chair he filled. Rather took over from Walter Cronkite on March 9, 1981, and he left it on March 9, 2005, 24 years to the day. How that ending came about is still the question people ask most about him, and two decades later he has a blunt new answer about what became of the network he gave 44 years.
What Really Happened With The Story That Cost Him The Anchor Chair?
On September 8, 2004, in the middle of a presidential campaign, Rather presented a 60 Minutes II story on George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. It leaned on memos that critics quickly said were fakes, and CBS could never authenticate them. On September 20, Rather apologized in a statement. “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired,” he said, though he never conceded that the memos were forgeries.
His wife, Jean, saw the fallout coming before he did. In the documentary, he recalls her telling him, “You got into a fight with the president of the United States during his reelection campaign.”
The Associated Press reported that his feud with network boss Les Moonves left him a nonperson at CBS. Rather signed off as anchor on March 9, 2005, and closed by bringing back a word viewers had laughed at almost 20 years earlier. “And, to each of you,” he said, “Courage.” His contract ran out about 15 months later, and he was gone from CBS in 2006.
He did not go quietly, and the fight that followed went all the way to New York’s highest court.
Why Did He Sue CBS For $70 Million?
On September 19, 2007, Rather filed suit in Manhattan against CBS, its former parent Viacom, Moonves, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and former CBS News president Andrew Heyward. According to ABC News, he asked for $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages. His complaint said the network had made him a “scapegoat” for the Guard story to pacify the White House. A CBS spokesman answered that “these complaints are old news, and this lawsuit is without merit.”
The courts sided with the network. On September 29, 2009, a unanimous appeals panel threw out the entire case, finding that CBS had kept paying him as his contract required, and the network called it “a total victory,” the ABA Journal reported. In January 2010, New York’s Court of Appeals refused to bring the case back.
That ended the legal fight, but it was hardly the first time something strange had happened to Dan Rather in public.
The Strange Nights Viewers Still Remember
Rather had been in the middle of history since his early days at CBS. On November 22, 1963, he was in Dallas when President Kennedy was shot, and he ran to the local station, KRLD, to report. He told KERA in 2013 that calls to Parkland Hospital helped CBS go on the air with Kennedy’s death before the official announcement. That reporting made him a White House correspondent, and in 1966 CBS sent him to Vietnam. On March 19, 1974, at a broadcasters’ meeting in Houston at the height of Watergate, President Nixon looked at him at the microphone and asked, “Are you running for something?” Rather shot back, “No, sir, Mr. President. Are you?”
Then came 1986. That September he started ending the newscast with the single word “Courage,” and the ribbing was so fierce he dropped it after about a week. A few weeks later, late on the night of October 4, a man walked up to him on Park Avenue, asked “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?” and knocked him to the ground and kicked him, the Deseret News reported. R.E.M. turned the line into its 1994 hit “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and on June 22, 1995, Rather joined the band at a soundcheck at Madison Square Garden. A clip aired the next night on Late Show with David Letterman.
The mystery was solved in 1997, and the answer was a sad one. The New York Daily News showed Rather photos of William Tager, then in prison for fatally shooting an NBC stagehand outside the Today studios in 1994. Tager believed the networks were beaming signals into his head. “There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the person,” Rather said at the time. So how does a man who lived through all of that feel about CBS today?
What Dan Rather Says About His Old Network Now
For 18 years, the answer was silence on CBS airwaves. Then on April 28, 2024, he sat down with Lee Cowan for CBS Sunday Morning at his home in Texas, his first appearance on the network since he left. “Without apology or explanation, I miss CBS,” he said, as NY1 and the AP reported. “I’ve missed it since the day I left.” In that long-awaited return to CBS News, he sounded almost wistful.
He doesn’t sound wistful now. Since Skydance merged with Paramount, CBS’s parent company, in 2025, Bari Weiss has become editor-in-chief of CBS News, and 60 Minutes has lost Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alfonsi. “What’s happened at CBS News is sad,” Rather told Variety this week. “The wreckage of CBS News is everywhere, and continues to this moment. I don’t see how to stop it.” He said of Pelley, “you’ve got to admire his guts because somebody needed to stand up, speak out, and start challenging the power.”
He still writes every few days in his Substack newsletter, Steady. “I have help writing, but it allows me to live with at least the illusion that I’m still contributing,” he told USA Today, admitting he is “a little hard of hearing” these days. He marks this birthday without Jean, who died of cancer in Austin on November 26, 2024, at 89, after 67 years of marriage. “I’m gathering family and friends, and I’m very grateful that I’ve lived as long as I have and have as much of my health as I have,” he said. Then the old newsman added the line that might have been his sign-off all along: “Family and friends always bring me the most joy, but my work still brings me joy, too.”
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