Dan, done

THANKS to a lengthy "farewell" profile of Dan Rather in The New Yorker, we've now learned that Rather keeps an ancient Royal typewriter smack-dab in the middle of his desk because, "It reminds me of what I aspire to be--I want to be a great reporter." One wonders whether the irony of this has dawned on Rather. After all, it was another typewriter--or the lack of one--that essentially brought his career as a great reporter to an end.

Now, bear with me through what will seem like an unrelated story. At the outset of World War II, Britain was still scrounging for any weapons it could get its hands on, and so de-mothballed a piece of light field artillery from the Boer War. The five-man crew it rounded up had a curious system for firing the armament: Precisely three seconds prior to discharging the gun, two of the men would snap to attention until all was silent again. None of the experts or young officers consulted could deduce the point of the exercise. Finally, they brought in a wizened retired artillery colonel. He watched the exercise for a moment, then, jarred by an old memory, recognition flickered in his eyes: "I have it. They are holding the horses." You see, in the past those two men would have physically held the horses to prevent them from running off with the sound of the cannon. But in a war without horses, they had become mere place-holders.

What do the two stories have in common? Well, the moral of the second, according to the late Robert Nisbet, is that the pull of habit and institutional inertia were so powerful that for years no one thought to question the fact that there were no longer any horses to hold. Dan Rather's typewriter is a bit like that British artillery piece. Rather grew up in an era when manual typewriters were already kitschy. But he was determined to stay in denial about that. He was an honorary member of Murrow's boys as far as he was concerned.

Denial--or, as countless bloggers call it, "Dan-ial"--is the Rosetta stone of Rather's personality. When JFK was assassinated, Rather refused to believe that a story of cheering kids in Dallas (the "city of hate," after all) wasn't true, and he ran with it anyway. He couldn't accept that even CBS News had to abide by the schedule of the U.S. Open when he walked off the set for those famous six minutes. And of course, Rather wouldn't believe that millions of Americans didn't buy his "objective journalist" act. Throughout his career, he insisted that liberal bias was a myth concocted by partisans to prevent him and his kind from "telling it straight."

Thus his departure from the center ring is fitting, albeit more than a little pathetic. During the onslaught he insisted that he'd love to be the one to "break" the story that the memos were fake. At the time it made him seem like Norma Desmond announcing she was ready for her close-up. We've moved on, but he hasn't. He explained to David Letterman that the memos were real but just couldn't be verified to his standards. As for these strange new creatures called bloggers, they just had to be Karl Rove's hatchet men because anyone who ever questioned Dan Rather was by definition a partisan. Like the crew holding onto horses that were no longer necessary, CBS will hold onto Dan Rather for a while longer. He will be their Royal typewriter--a kitschy reminder of days long past. Until one day some whippersnapper won't be able to figure out why he's there at all.

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