Wild Things

Maurice Sendak, with a few friends

The author Jean Craighead George has died, just days after Maurice Sendak’s passing, an event that provoked an outpouring of nostalgic tribute and critical appreciation. “Death comes in threes,” they say, and really, I’m not sure the world of children’s literature can stand another such loss. Again and again in their stories and pictures, Craighead George and Sendak evoked the call of the wild, and a child’s fascination with the kinds of danger that lie “outside over there.” Yet what strikes me is the reassurance that both writers offer, too. As Max learns, you can return home after a wild rumpus, and your soup will be waiting for you.

Jean Craighead George

Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain was a veritable pillar on which my childhood home was based, especially because my brother loved the book so much. The book recounts the adventures of Sam, a pre-pubescent Thoreau who goes off to live by himself in the woods. Craighead George writes beautifully of the natural world, and she details her protagonist’s ingenuity so carefully — yet so matter-of-factly — that even modern, mechanized, entirely mother-dependent suburbanites like us found ourselves wanting to follow him into the wild, and believing we were quite capable of doing so.

Reading My Side of the Mountain is something like watching Fred Astaire, whose grace appears so effortless that you think, “I could do that.” Whereas in reality, of course, you could not. Sam himself nearly dies on his mountain, and I daresay that neither Linc nor I would have lasted one paragraph out there. That didn’t stop us from dreaming, and it’s something of a miracle that Linc stayed home.

Portrait of my brother as a young bear

Part of Craighead George’s great achievement lies in her ability to make Sam’s survival seem so cosy: he doesn’t merely live in the woods, he makes a home for himself there. Maybe Craighead George — and Sendak — would have told their stories differently if they were writing for grownups, but the scary parts are always balanced by comfort. I found Higglety Pigglety Pop! absolutely terrifying when I was a boy, yet there it is: Jennie finds peril but also friends and a new kind of home with the World Mother Goose Theatre, and at the story’s end, she assures us she gets plenty to eat. (Granted, she’s eating mops, but what’s important is that she’s not hungry.) Sendak’s Max and Mickey get home safely, too, and so does Craighead George’s Sam.

Utterly terrifying: Jennie’s specialty act

In an exceedingly rare instance of my turning down a book because it was “too girly,” I never read Craighead George’s other masterpiece, Julie of the Wolves. This is especially ironic because there’s no doubt that Julie could have beaten the stuffing out of me — or perhaps my awareness of that fact is really what held me back. But there’s no question that she and Sendak both lent something mystical and exciting to our young lives: not least the prospect that my brother, who also identified so closely with Else Holmelund Minarik’s Little Bear (drawn by Sendak), might run off like Sam or Jennie, and that I’d have to go looking for him, outside over there.

We were very tame children, really, but we dreamed of wildness. Now you know two reasons why.

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Progress Report 13: Standing Up for Madeline

Robert Klein

Last night I attended the annual “Evening of Laughter,” a benefit for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund in honor of Madeline Kahn. Presented each year at Caroline’s Comedy Club in Times Square, the evening entails an auction — goods and services that range from the irresistible to the inexplicable — and a series of turns by stand-up comics. While Madeline herself wasn’t a stand-up and was remarkably uncomfortable in certain kinds of improvisational comedy,* she had a number of truly gifted friends in the field, and two of them typically rise to the occasion: Joy Behar and Robert Klein.

Klein is a noteworthy case, since he and Madeline appeared together in Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1968 (Madeline’s Broadway debut), dated briefly, and continued to work together for 30 years, through The Sisters Rosensweig, Mixed Nuts, and Cosby, right up to the end of Madeline’s career.

Behar and Madeline knew each other socially, becoming good friends over time, and most years it’s Joy who acts as master of ceremonies for the stand-up benefit. Last night, however, she had to back out, and now that I’ve seen the interview she conducted earlier in the day yesterday, I understand completely: even an experienced hand like Dan Rather gets tired after interviewing the President of the United States, and the women of The View ran a marathon with Barack Obama yesterday.**

Joy Behar

Because of the participation of these headliners and of Caroline Hirsch, the impresario of the eponymous comedy club,*** the “Evening of Laughter” benefits draw a pretty stellar lineup each year. Last night was no exception, and with Susie Essman taking over as MC, we enjoyed the company of Klein, Judy Gold, Colin Quinn, Kevin Meany, as well as two comics new to me, young Mark Norman and Drew Fraser; the charming (and francophile) Jenna Wolfe helped out during the auction.

Klein’s monologues are less routines than extended philosophical musings: if Socrates were Jewish, straight, and living today, he might well sound like Robert Klein. I’ve always admired his work, and it’s a treat to see him up close. While some other aspects of stand-up mystify this audience, and not only individual jokes but entire veins of humor seem directed at somebody other than me, I’m most impressed on these occasions with the generosity of the comics, the sincerity of their admiration for Madeline and of their desire to help to fight a terrible disease.

Our mistress of ceremonies, Susie Essman

Moreover, they unite to fight with laughter, and this is something I believe Madeline would approve. She understood — as well as anyone ever has — that laughter is a tool that has changed minds and lifted spirits. So it’s not surprising that the idea for the benefit originated with someone who understood Madeline: namely, John Hansbury, her boyfriend, whom she married shortly before her death.

In the way that caring for an ailing loved one makes any of us expert in a disease, so John became an expert in ovarian cancer; today he is co-president of the OCRF executive committee, and the stand-up benefits have brought in more than $1 million in 11 years. John will tell you (as he has told me, chapter and verse) of the need for effective early detection of ovarian cancer, and of the OCRF’s mission: testing, treatment, and some day, a cure. These were the goals Madeline herself endorsed, when she made her own illness public.

So much of Madeline’s legacy is the work she did herself — as we were reminded in the clips from her Oscar-nominated turn in Paper Moon that began last night’s show. But no legacy stands on its own entirely: it must be picked up by the rest of us and carried forward. That’s why I’m writing this book. That’s why John has linked Madeline’s name to the OCRF. And it’s why I’ll continue to contribute to the OCRF. I hope you’ll consider doing so, too.

Miss Trixie Delight

*NOTE: To corroborate my assertion, I point to Madeline’s ad-libbed conversation with Barry Humphries, making his first U.S. television appearance in the person of his celebrated character, Dame Edna Everage, during an episode of Saturday Night Live. Madeline’s discomfort is palpable, and I refuse to believe that’s merely because she was talking to a man in a dress. She liked a good script.

**It was suggested that Joy Behar may have injured herself yesterday, in addition to the workout she got while prepping for the interview. I guess we’ll know soon enough whether she emerged unscathed.

***John Hansbury tells me that Caroline Hirsch got to know Madeline when she hosted another fundraiser at the comedy club.

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Fort Worth Opera Festival 2013 to Include Me

In last year’s production of Ariadne at Houston Grand Opera,
Jon Kolbet (left) played the Major-Domo. Here, he’s joined by
Rodell Rosel as the Dancing Master and, as the Composer,
a certain Miss Susan Graham.

Fort Worth Opera begins its 2012 Festival this weekend with an exciting quartet of works both old and new — on which I’ll be reporting at the end of the month, when I fly to Texas for the final weekend of the Festival. But because the company’s general director, Darren Keith Woods, is a believer in strategic long-term planning, today also marks the official announcement of next year’s Festival offerings.

For 2013, Fort Worth Opera will present Puccini’s La Bohème, Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, and Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, as well as a contemporary work, Tom Cipullo’s Glory Denied, in keeping with the company’s commitment to the music of our time. And that commitment will be extended next year, as Fort Worth Opera inaugurates its Frontiers program, a showcase for short excerpts from larger works by emerging composers, to be selected by a panel of experts from a variety of fields related to opera. Frontiers performances will be free of charge, and — rather unusually, to say the least — an integral part of the program will be the opportunity for the public to offer feedback to the composers.

So often it seems to this observer that fledgling composers are left to their own devices: they have to figure out on their own (and sometimes very far from the opera house) what audiences will and won’t like, and once new work has been performed, composers are cut loose with little guidance or analysis of their successes and failures. Fort Worth Opera aims to change all that.

Joyce Castle as the Marquise, with John Stephens as Sulpice and Robert Gibby Brand as Hortensius, in Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s Daughter of the Regiment.
Who wouldn’t want to get in on the fun?
Photo by Cory Weaver.

For those of us who have been coming to Fort Worth repeatedly over the years, the casts for these works are a real treat, featuring many returning artists who are local favorites, as well as some distinguished first-timers in the area. Those of us who marveled at young baritone Wes Mason’s tour-de-force performance in Jorge Martín’s Before Night Falls will be eager to see him as the painter Marcello in Bohème, for example, and soprano Ava Pine will add to her radiant Fort Worth résumé the title role of Marie in Daughter of the Regiment, opposite no less than the great Joyce Castle as the Marquise of Berkenfeld and Darren Woods himself, making a rare return to the stage as Hortensius, the Marquise’s butler.

Other returning favorites include soprano Marjorie Owens as Ariadne and baritone Michael Mayes, taking the lead in Glory Denied. Among the company debutants are star soprano Mary Dunleavy as Mimì and rising tenor Sean Panikkar as Rodolfo in Bohème — and I’m eager to hear the always impressive soprano Caroline Worra once more (in Glory Denied).

There’s one name you won’t find in the season announcement, though it’s of immense potential interest. It’s mine.

Donovan Singletary as Figaro, Andrea Carroll as Susanna.
Fort Worth Opera Festival 2012.
Photo by Ellen Appel.

Meine gnädige Damen und Herren, it is my great pleasure to announce that I’ll be returning to the stage after an inexplicable absence of 30 years, to play the speaking role of the Major-Domo in Ariadne auf Naxos. Mine is the responsibility to tell the young Composer (mezzo Cecelia Hall) that his dead-serious opera must be performed at the same time as a boisterous commedia dell’arte routine, because the wealthy patron (inspired by Molière’s Bourgeois Gentleman) wants to hurry up and get to the fireworks display he’s planned for the end of the evening.

Oh, and one more thing — I will be saying all of this in German.*

As Anna Russell would say, I’m not making this up, you know.

Fort Worth’s Three Decembers cast: Janice Hall (seated),
Emily Pulley, and Matt Worth.
Fort Worth Opera Festival 2012.
Photo by Ellen Appel.

While I’m trying not to throw the tempo off the track, everybody else will be singing, of course, including tenor Corey Bix in the heroic role of Bacchus and soprano Audrey Luna as the singing acrobat Zerbinetta (both making their company debuts), under the baton of Fort Worth Opera Music Director Joe Illick. Stage director David Gately, who’s guided some of the company’s most memorable productions, will tell me where to go.

Technically, this isn’t my opera debut, since I played a soldier in the firing squad in Providence Opera Theatre’s production of Puccini’s Tosca, many years ago. This new assignment is a good deal more demanding, however: the entire plot hinges on what I say, and I have to remember not to shoot the tenor this time.

E avanti a lei — tremo! Carter Scott as Floria Tosca.
(Really. She doesn’t usually dress like this.)
Fort Worth Opera Festival 2012.
Photo by Ellen Appel.

No less an Ariadne authority than Susan Graham has warned me to waste no time in learning my lines. I’ve already gotten in touch with Terry Quon, an estimable opera buff herself and my German teacher back at J.J. Pearce High School in Richardson, just down the road from Bass Hall.

I have also bluntly and without shame asked Darren to find money in the costume budget that would allow for an extra supernumerary in Daughter of the Regiment. Really. I could be a soldier, a valet, a villager, an ottoman or an end table. I’m not choosy. I’m not even greedy. I just want to be part of the fun when Joyce and Darren reunite.

Thus far, Darren has demurred most politely, but perhaps if some of my faithful readers make a contribution to Fort Worth Opera, he will move beyond this highly uncharacteristic indecision and embrace my participation in a second production next season.

Houston Grand Opera’s world premiere of Adamo’s Lysistrata.
Not sure who everybody is, but the great Myrna Paris is at left.
Photo from FWO, courtesy of Brett Coomer.

But even if that dream goes unfulfilled, this will be an extraordinary opportunity. Since my first sampling of Fort Worth Opera’s work — a performance of Britten’s Turn of the Screw starring Janice Hall and Joyce Castle, in 2003 — I’ve been captivated by the company’s dynamic approach, wide-ranging repertory, and outstanding musical and theatrical values. Over time, Darren and I have grown to be close friends, not because he was trying to co-opt a critic but because he spotted that I care about what he cares about.

Through him, I’ve gotten to know some other remarkable artists, and I’ve attended some of the most thrilling performances of my career as an audience. Now I’m going to be able to see, up close, how Darren and Joe and David make their magic. You can expect me to write quite a lot about this experience.

Beyond that, I’m grateful to Darren for taking a chance on me. He put something out into the universe when he offered me this gig, and it’s no coincidence that, shortly thereafter, the long wait ended and I found a publisher for the Madeline Kahn biography. That’s powerful friendship — and I thank him.

Darren.
Photo by Ellen Appel.

So as not to confuse you, I’ll stop talking about the 2013 season now and remind you of this year’s operas. Evening performances are at 7:30, matinées at 2:00. Three Decembers plays at the Scott Theater, the rest at Bass Hall in downtown Fort Worth. Go to www.fwopera.org now to order your tickets!

Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro
Featuring Donovan Singletary, mezzo Wallis Giunta, and other fresh young singers.
May 19, 27 matinée; June 1.

Puccini’s Tosca
Starring soprano Carter Scott, who blew me away as Fort Worth’s Turandot a few seasons ago, alongside tenor Roger Honeywell and baritone Michael Chioldi, who is guaranteed to take the tedium out of the Te Deum.
May 12, 20 matinée, 25; June 2.

Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata
A comedy written by another friend of mine, reuniting native Texans Ava Pine and tenor Scott Scully (Angels in America).
May 26; June 3 matinée.

Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers
A chamber opera about love and tensions in one family, starring my beloved Janice Hall.
May 13 matinée, 18, 20, 26 matinée, 31; June 2 matinée.
(At the Scott Theater, Fort Worth Community Arts Center.)



*NOTE: How German is it? Well, my character is most often called not a “Major-Domo,” but a “Haushofmeister.” Try saying that with a mouth full of Saltines.

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Les Zélections, Part Deux

Le bling, c’est moi.

Socialist candidate François Hollande was widely predicted to prevail in Sunday’s runoff election for the French presidency, and now that the predictions held true, we may not remember just how volatile the race was or how close the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, came to victory. If Sarkozy had been able to pick off more voters from the political center and far right, he could have done much more than narrow Hollande’s already-slim lead.

In the event, the endorsements Sarkozy desired simply did not come. Centrist François Bayrou stopped short of endorsing Hollande — and even characterized the Socialist platform as dangerous — yet announced that, while his supporters should vote their consciences, he would vote for Hollande himself. Bayrou is the sort of middle-of-the-road politician whom everybody respects and yet whom very few actually follow to the polls. Nevertheless, I suspect that most French voters saw the part about “I’m voting for Hollande,” skipped over the part about “His program is dangerous,” and as a result found it difficult if not impossible to believe Sarkozy’s attempts to paint Hollande as an extremist.

The far-right, as represented by Marine Le Pen of the Front National, proved even more challenging for Sarkozy’s campaign. Le Pen refused to endorse or to vote for Sarkozy — she announced that she’d cast a blank ballot rather than support him. Emboldened by an unexpectedly strong showing in the first-round elections, on April 22, she has been thoroughly enjoying her new position as kingmaker/spoiler/insurgent, and it’s hard to find a picture of her anymore where she is not striking a “Don’t cry for me” pose (even though she’s more likely singing the Marseillaise than the score to Evita). French pundits now assert that the FN will fare well in the upcoming legislative elections, and that Sarkozy’s party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, will have to strike all sorts of deals and accommodations with the FN in order to hold onto any kind of power or influence.

One reason Le Pen’s (relative) success was unexpected, is that her partisans historically don’t cooperate with public-opinion surveys. Why would they? Most of the country looks down on the FN, and besides, survey-takers are exactly the sort of establishment drones that the party is fed up with. As he has throughout so much of his career, Sarkozy tried to appeal to the FN, more and more overtly, but in the end he failed to meet his goal.

Co-co-ri-co!
We haven’t heard the last of Marine Le Pen.

What’s interesting is how often Sarkozy has seemed to think he was using a sort of dog whistle in order to communicate with Front voters, as if only they — and nobody else — could hear him when he addressed their favorite issues, notably immigration and nationalism. Yet again and again, even members of his party and high-profile members of his government balked, as they did when the much-vaunted “debate over French identity” threatened to devolve into an orgy of state-sponsored immigrant-bashing.

Sarkozy’s fixation on halal meat, a recurring theme in this campaign, is another example of his attempts to reach out to the FN. If anybody can explain to me why I’m threatened by eating meat that’s been prepared according to Islamic rules, or why it would be so terrible to do so without being told first that I was eating halal, I’m eager to hear it. Otherwise it seems no less healthy than eating Kosher meat — and as for the religious blessings, well, I don’t freak out when Christian friends say grace over dinner, either.

Sarkozy’s campaign made it seem as if there were something insidious about the rising sales of halal food, as if Muslims were somehow stealthily corrupting their neighbors through their meals. When even this tactic didn’t attract sufficient numbers of FN voters, Sarkozy went further, eventually declaring that there are “too many immigrants in France” and calling for changes in border policies and immigration law.

These were hardly the first such appeals he’s made in the course of his career, and to me they’ve always seemed calculated in a way that has less to do with electoral politics and more to do with anticipated but unspoken concerns about Sarkozy himself. After all, his own father was an immigrant from Hungary, and his own wife is an immigrant from Italy. And while Marine Le Pen has steered the FN away from the explicitly anti-Semitic position of her father, Jean-Marie, Sarkozy must have seen some benefit in distancing himself from questions about his own family’s Jewish heritage. Again and again, he strove to make clear that his own background afforded him no special sympathy for families currently in similar circumstances in France.

Paradoxically, however, Sarkozy’s position served more to legitimize what might otherwise have been considered a fringe party. He, as much as Marine Le Pen, made the Front National respectable. By echoing the FN line so often for so long, he made it easier for French voters to side with her — and against himself.

The campaign has provided first-rate political theater, not least including the debate between Sarkozy and Hollande on May 2, in which the candidates’ positions amounted to “You’re a liar!” and “You never take responsibility for anything!”

Others of Sarkozy’s political calculations had an impact on voters across the spectrum, and now that he’s lost the election, it will be easier and more urgently necessary to assess them. What strikes me is that Sarkozy, a Gaullist, shared Charles de Gaulle’s “certaine idée de la France,” one that goes beyond mere patriotism to insist on the country’s role on the world stage. De Gaulle opted to assert France’s influence and exceptionalism by going it alone: breaking ties with NATO and playing the U.S. and the Soviet Union off of each other. But Sarkozy, in a vastly changed environment, seems to have followed a page from Tony Blair’s playbook instead.

According to such analyses, for a smaller power to look like a winner, you must ally yourself with those greater powers who are going to win in any case, with you or without you. And just as Blair tied himself to George W. Bush, so Sarkozy tied himself militarily to NATO (and by extension to the United States) — and economically to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The latter strategy in particular cost him dearly.

Even now that Merkel’s single-minded campaign for austerity has been rebuked by voters across Europe (and in the pages of The New York Times, thanks to relentless criticism from that newspaper’s Nobel Prize-winning columnist, Paul Krugman), she refuses to back down. I daresay that, from the start, Sarkozy spotted Merkel’s intransigence, recognized that he couldn’t win by opposing her, and thus hoped to win by joining her. Never mind that French voters historically have a hard time swallowing ideas they find too “Saxon,” whether the subject is pasteurized-milk cheese or economic policy, whether the ideas come from Germany or from Britain or from the United States: Sarkozy took an exceptional risk.

For a time, the gambit seemed to pay off, and with both of Europe’s largest economies in lockstep, the other nations fell in line — for a while. But Sarkozy’s strategy also made it much easier for Hollande to tap into popular frustration (on both the right and the left) and to call for a break with austerity and a new embrace of growth.

As many American pundits are writing today, Hollande’s policies are thus the antithesis of those promoted by the Republican Party here and in the budget put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Hollande will become Barack Obama’s closest ally, particularly since Hollande explicitly rejects U.S. military policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but it does mean that there will be a certain amount of common diplomatic ground in coming months, despite the departure of Sarkozy, who yearned so poignantly to become Obama’s BFF.

I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about Hollande, and soon, but for now Sarkozy strikes me as the central character in this drama: after all, it was not least by being “anyone but Sarkozy” that Hollande sailed to victory. In temperament especially, Sarkozy always seemed precisely the wrong person to manage the kinds of reforms that France needs (as he acknowledged, sometimes) and that Hollande will probably duck; the great curiosity is that both Sarkozy’s victories and his failures are so dubious. There will be a lot of mess to clean up in Sarkozy’s absence, and the newly empowered FN is just one of the outgoing President’s legacies with which the nation and much of the rest of Europe will find it difficult to cope.

And the winner is … François Hollande!
Who may soon learn to be more careful what he wishes.

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‘Rather Outspoken,’ Part II

Dan Rather Reports … from Afghanistan, 2009.

At first glance, the beating heart of Dan Rather’s new memoir, Rather Outspoken, is its account of his Götterdämmerung at CBS News: the uproar over his report on George W. Bush’s service in the Air Force National Guard during the Vietnam War, the network’s subsequent mishandling of the controversy and Dan’s departure from the News Division, and the lawsuit Dan brought to try to shed light on what happened and why.

But these chapters are not the whole story: the rest of Rather Outspoken is given over to a résumé of Dan’s earlier career, an update on his current career as anchor of the weekly news-documentary program Dan Rather Reports on HDNet, and a blazing assessment of the state of journalism today. This includes a manifesto, no less, setting forth Dan’s principles.

As I say, some of the recollections here of Dan’s early years have been dealt with at greater length in Dan’s previous books. Indeed, veteran Ratherologists like me will miss a few punch lines in some of the anecdotes he’s recounted before, and it took me a little while to understand what, precisely, Dan was up to when he included such seemingly familiar material in his new book.

Yes, it’s true that the earlier books are out of print now, and that — in the accelerated pace of public consciousness and unconsciousness in contemporary American society — there are in fact people who don’t remember the most brilliant highlights of Dan’s career. Every now and then I even run across people who have never heard of him, which is quite a shock when one considers how long he was one of the best-known men in America, behind only Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, and the President of the United States. But Dan’s purpose here is not merely to remind readers of his accomplishments — far from it.

Welcome to the Hot Seat:
I thought I understood the pressures on Dan at CBS and how much they cost him, but I didn’t calculate their full measure until he broke free of them.

Because, again and again as Dan tells the story of his departure from CBS News, he insists that, not so long ago, the network stood behind its reporters, and valued good reporting; when it came to the National Guard story, he says, the network threw him to the wolves, in a way that William S. Paley, Fred Friendly, Richard Salant, and other CBS titans never would have done. And in the “historical” chapters, Dan sets forth evidence to support this view.

For example, Dan’s coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s elicited all manner of outrage (and death threats), but CBS stood by him. During the Watergate crisis, members of the Nixon Administration lobbied behind the scenes to get Dan removed from the White House beat, partisans deluged the network with phone calls and letters of protest, and Nixon himself went after Dan, both surreptitiously (enemies’ list, otherwise inexplicable IRS audits, a suspiciously timed break-in) and overtly. But CBS stood by Dan. And so on.

Reading Rather Outspoken you may not get quite the sense that I had already in 1987, when I began to work in Dan’s office, namely that the network’s loyal protection of its journalists was neither automatic nor taken for granted. The famous “Miami blackout,” an orgy of miscommunication, disorganization, and conflicting priorities within the same professional institution, might easily have resulted in Dan’s dismissal, as he acknowledged in The Camera Never Blinks Twice*; the so-called “ambush” interview with George H.W. Bush in 1988 likewise might have led to Dan’s firing. Read The Camera Never Blinks Twice and you’ll see just how grateful Dan was that management backed him up in these and other crises.

By 2004, that kind of support never materialized. It was as if it never existed at all, and Dan’s purpose here, I think, is not so much to set the record straight and least of all to bolster his own reputation. It is to document that things were done differently once, and to assert — ardently — that the old system permitted the fair reporting of important stories to a wide audience. The words “public service” occur frequently as Dan writes about journalism and the way CBS used to conduct its business; I can tell you from direct experience that these words hold special and lasting meaning for Dan, and there are few ideals to which he aspires more sincerely or more relentlessly.

To the extent that the narrative of Rather Outspoken contains a happy ending, it is this: he tells us that at HDNet he has found others who share his idealism, and that it is applied as he believes it should be: to report freely those stories which are most significant.

Here again, Dan sets forth the evidence to support his claim, primarily in summaries of representative reports that, for all that he’s proud of them, are not mere advertisements for his new show. Virtually none of these stories would be considered “commercial,” in any newsroom and least of all in any boardroom.** Yet all of these stories have demonstrated the power to affect public health, safety, economy, and policy. The message here is, “This is how the system is supposed to work” — the system of independent journalism, that is.

It occurs to me that Dan’s stormy last days at CBS News may have this one lasting, bright benefit: the long ordeal helped him to focus on what really matters to him as a journalist — and as a man. It turns out that, much though I saw Dan enjoy the perks of global celebrity, he has discovered that he can do perfectly well without them. And all the anxieties that came with the CBS anchor chair, from ratings to corporate politics to competing ambitions among colleagues, were never important to him at all.

What counts in the long run is not the size of the audience but the quality of the reporting and his ability to stick to his own integrity and core values. Dan always wanted to believe these things, but he knows them now, more purely than ever. And with a team (and a boss, Mark Cuban) that’s less interested in jockeying for supremacy than in helping him to do good work, Dan can practice what he’s preached for so long — his way.




*NOTE: The “Miami blackout” occurred just hours after I received the call to tell me I’d been hired to work with Dan. Because New York took the later feed of the Evening News in those days, I didn’t see the blackout or hear anything about it until it hit the front page of the New York Post the next Monday, whereupon my immediate reaction was, “Oh, great. I just got the coolest job in the world, only to lose it before I even start.” Several years later, when I helped Dan to prepare The Camera Never Blinks Twice, I learned just how right that perception was, and how close it came to reality.

**It’s easy to imagine that Dan would’ve had to fight tooth and nail to get these stories on the air at CBS, and he’d have had to fight harder still to devote a full hour to any of them.

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‘Rather Outspoken,’ Part I

I once asked Dan Rather whether it was necessary for him to write down whatever happened to him in order for him to experience it fully. He thought about this, his lips pursed and his brow furrowed in a way that any television viewer of the past half century would recognize on the spot, before he answered, “Yes, I believe that’s true.” For a time, he adopted the observation almost as a warning, to people who talked to him about his books and most especially to those people who wondered why a man best known for broadcasting would even bother picking up a pen.

But Dan cut his teeth in print journalism, and books were both his first friends and also his ticket out of the anonymous oil patch that seemed, in his youth, to be his destiny. Moreover, his mother’s maiden name was Page: books are in his DNA. For all of these reasons, I believe, he is never, ever without a pen and notepad. Sometimes he writes in cool reflection, in the dark of the plane on the long ride home from the exotic dateline, but often, even as his life rushes forward, crowded now as ever with passion and incident, he is already writing it down.

His fourth memoir, Rather Outspoken (co-written with Digby Diehl), has been published today; I obtained a copy slightly in advance and began reading immediately. Many of the tales he spins are ones that figure in previous memoirs: his childhood and family background are the subject of I Remember; the Kennedy Assassination and Vietnam are covered in The Camera Never Blinks. While I’m interested to see how his perspectives have evolved, and I expect to address them in a subsequent essay, I began reading as most people — and assuredly most journalists — will begin, by leapfrogging to the chapters that treat Dan’s report on George W. Bush’s service (and lack thereof) in the Air Force National Guard and CBS’s reaction to the firestorm that ensued, resulting in Dan’s untimely departure from the network, his fruitless lawsuit against CBS, and his redemption at the helm of his own news-and-documentary series on HDNet.

Dan has always aspired to what he calls “play-no-favorites, pull-no-punches, independent journalism,” and by way of confirmation of what you will be reading in the papers for the rest of this week — and probably for several weeks to come — Dan pulls no punches here.

Dan writes that the trouble started with the Abu Ghraib report;
I think it started right here.

Almost before the original report on Bush’s National Guard record aired (on Sixty Minutes II), the controversy has been not over what was reported but how it was reported: most notably, of course, the “authenticity” of corroborating documents was attacked, while hoary presumptions about Dan’s politics were dusted off and trotted out again, this time coupled with allegations of bias on the part of the producer, Mary Mapes. Within hours, virtually everyone forgot that the documents in question were only a small part of a bigger story, and that outside reporting by the BBC and the Boston Globe (among others) supported the underlying truth of the story and the need to ask the questions that Dan and Mary raised.

Even at the time, the public focus on style over substance didn’t surprise me in the least, since I’d worked in Dan’s office at the time of his famous “ambush” interview with George H.W. Bush in 1988. In that instance, as here, Dan’s reporting was used to scare away other journalists from asking any further questions about potentially embarrassing incidents in the Bushes’ past. The idea that Bush père didn’t know Dan was going to ask about his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal is ludicrous on its face: the subject matter had been advertised during a promo spot on the network’s highest-rated program (to cite one example), and both Bush and his campaign adviser, Roger Ailes, were fully prepared for the questions.

There’s still a tremendous amount we don’t know about Iran-Contra, but instead of focusing on the sitting Vice-President’s complicity in what some might term treasonous activity, we as a nation debated whether Dan had behaved respectfully, appropriately, professionally. We ignored the fact that Bush had exploded exactly the same way with two other reporters in the week leading up to his interview with Dan; we hardly paid attention to the fact that, after that interview, only one reporter dared ask Bush again (Bryant Gumbel, on the Today show the next morning); and we hardly realize that, to this day, Bush has never yet answered the questions.

Dan is hunting bigger game in this book, seeking to establish a pernicious collusion among government, corporate interests, and press outlets, but nothing in Rather Outspoken, or in the Texas Monthly article this month that reexamines the National Guard story, dispels my suspicion that, in 2004 as in 1988, Dan was set up. As Dan notes in Rather Outspoken, it would have been deeply damaging to Bush fils to be exposed as a deserter, just weeks before an election in which he faced off against a decorated war hero, John Kerry. Republican operatives had done their best to cast aspersions on Kerry’s military record — “swift-boating” him — but renewed attention to the lapses in Dubya’s record would have been devastating and probably insurmountable.

We now know that many (or most, or possibly all) of those who first attacked Dan’s report were in fact Republican operatives; some evidently had been tipped off by the White House and thus were ready to unleash their accusations on the Internet within hours of the Sixty Minutes II broadcast. A real document expert wouldn’t have had time to examine the memos in question, but some of these supposedly neutral bloggers seem to have received copies of them directly from those given to Bush adviser Dan Bartlett (with Mary Mapes’ fax number attached), so that allegations about typeface and spacing were ready to take off faster than an Olympic sprinter at the starting gun. Nobody had much experience responding to “new media,” Dan recalls, so everyone was caught off-guard.* News organizations that should have known better — particularly the Washington Post, Dan says — took the allegations at face value, repeated them, didn’t attempt to identify the sources, and thereby legitimized the criticism. In effect, they piled on. And in their haste, they left behind all questions about Dubya’s service record.

As I say, this is exactly the playbook that Republicans used when trying to deflect attention from Iran-Contra in 1988. Like father’s campaign, like son’s. And so in 2004 the United States elected a man who was — at best — a draft-dodger to lead the country in the two wars he had started.

That’s disheartening enough, but worse is yet to come. Dan paints a lurid canvas in which the report itself; the careers of Dan, Mary Mapes, and several other CBS News colleagues; and the integrity of the News Division are sacrificed to political and corporate interests. He links this chain of events directly to his report (also produced by Mary Mapes) on the now-infamous abuses at Abu Ghraib: to hear Dan tell it, the National Guard story and its aftermath served as a kind of retribution for the prison story.

But I see this as part of an even bigger picture, namely the longstanding Republican practice of targeting Dan. This dates back at least to Richard Nixon (“Are you running for something?”) and has persisted through the careers of everybody from Jesse Helms to the Bushes, such that it grew increasingly easy to portray Dan as a liberal with an ideological bias against the Republican Party in general and against conservatives in particular.

In time, Dan’s supposed liberalism became what we now call a “meme,” an idea disseminated widely, in this case spread by conservative activists and pundits, and ostensibly corroborated by people who had worked with Dan at CBS, including Bernard Goldberg and Peggy Noonan. Both of these folks had a personal stake in the propaganda and depended on it in some measure to advance their own careers.

The case of Noonan interests me, because, like her, I was Dan’s principal radio writer. Unlike her, I held the job longer and worked more closely with him than she did: his office was my office. I traveled where he did, slept where he slept, and ate what he ate throughout the 1990s. I was welcomed as family by his family. Why Dan would open up and confess his political leanings to Peggy and not to me is anybody’s guess, but by now it’s virtually part of her résumé that he did so, and this presumption fueled the attack she made on him after the National Guard story aired.**

Meanwhile, in the 12 years he and I worked together, Dan revealed only this much about his politics: that he voted for Eisenhower twice. And in the newsroom where I worked, it was considered the gravest possible professional lapse to talk about our own politics — gravest yet to do so within Dan’s presence.

What made the targeting of Dan so ideal, then, was that there was absolutely nothing he could say to defend himself properly whenever the hard-right wing started to impugn his integrity — because to defend himself would almost certainly have required him to state what his politics were. And so the tarnish became self-perpetuating over time. Whenever things weren’t going well for a Republican, or for all the Republicans, it was never because of any defect in the person or in the policy, it was because of Dan’s political bias.

Dubya’s team nevertheless took a gamble in 2004, because by knocking Dan out of the game altogether, they’d never again be able to play the Dan-Is-Biased card. I sometimes wonder whether, in the aftermath of Katrina or the economic crisis, Karl Rove wished he still had Dan Rather to kick around.

Dan attempted in his lawsuit to bring out the murky truth of what happened: whether the Bush Administration actively or explicitly sought his ouster; whether the parent company of CBS, Viacom, and its chief, Sumner Redstone (who publicly endorsed Bush in 2004), merely anticipated a need to remove Dan, or whether they did so in exchange for support in business matters then before Congress and the courts; whether News Division executives were pressured, and by whom; and so on.

Quite a lot of this stuff is exceedingly questionable, not least including the News Division’s pretty much unprecedented decision to turn to “an outside, independent panel” to investigate the National Guard story. That panel turned out to be headed by Richard Thornburgh, who had been attorney general under Bush père — and that’s only the first and most obvious of the ways in which the “investigation” proved compromised at best.

Gradually, by his own account, Dan was pushed out of the anchor chair at Evening News in 2004 and exiled across the street to Sixty Minutes II and then, when that program was cancelled, to Sixty Minutes proper. That program owed much of its success to Dan’s first stint there, in the 1970s, but in the 2000s, he could barely get on the air.

Other writers have warned of the dangers of corporate influence on journalism — especially as mergers and takeovers have consolidated all press and media in the hands of a very, very few corporations — and of collusion with government. Frank Rich, for one, turned such warnings into something like a cottage industry for a time. (It’s a curious twist of fate that Rich’s old college buddy, former News Division President Andrew Heyward, plays so prominent — and unflattering — a role in Dan’s story.)

But very few such writers have the stature of Dan Rather, or can write with the ardor he has generated in his recent experiences. His lawsuit yielded quite a lot of new information, virtually none of which was reported at the time, and in Rather Outspoken he assembles his evidence and arguments in a compelling case. Without the witness-stand confessions of several principal players, we may never hear a final verdict — but there’s more than enough reason here to make us all pay attention, and to make us question more closely the nature of and the relationships among this country’s most powerful legal and corporate institutions.

Mistreated and abandoned at CBS, Dan at last saw an exit sign, then bolted, though he most certainly did not go gentle. But even though his lawsuit didn’t resolve all his questions, it’s worth noting that, happily ensconced now at Mark Cuban’s HDNet with a hardworking, loyal team and the freedom to report any story he pleases, as he sees fit, Dan is at peace (or as near as he’ll ever come to it in this life) for the first time since I met him, 25 years ago.

From the start, I used to draw little caricatures of him, for his scrapbooks: as Clark Kent turning into Superman, for example, or as the prophet Jeremiah himself. Nowadays I’m beginning to think that his next portrait may be one you’d least expect: Occupying Wall Street. If he were really to take up a picket and demonstrate, I wouldn’t be surprised, because the only truly unsurprising thing about Dan Rather and his legendary career is just how full of surprises they are.

*NOTE: In 1988, it took about three minutes to figure out that most of the phone calls protesting the “ambush” were coming from Republican-sponsored phone banks.

**For argument’s sake, it’s possible, I suppose, that Dan learned better discretion after having worked with Peggy. But I doubt it.

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