Dan Rather Biography
Dan Rather (Full name- Dan Irvin Rather Jr.) is an American journalist who was born on October 31, 1931, Wharton, Texas, U.S. His Surname is pronounced as (/ˈræðər/). Rather began his career in Texas and was on the scene of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas in 1963 with his reporting elevating his position in CBS News.
Starting in 1964, he was made White House correspondent. Dan Rather later worked as foreign correspondent in London and Vietnam over the next two years before returning to the White House correspondent position. During his second stint at the White House, Rather covered the Nixon presidency, including the trip to China, Watergate scandal and ultimate resignation.
Rather was promoted to news anchor for the CBS Evening News when Walter Cronkite retired in 1981. He held that position for 24 years. Rather became one of the “Big Three” nightly news anchors in the U.S. from the 1980s through the early 2000s along with Peter Jennings at ABC News and Tom Brokaw at NBC News. He was also a frequent contributor to CBS’s weekly news magazine 60 Minutes.
Rather was caught up in controversy in 2005 when he presented unauthenticated documents in a news report on President George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the National Guard. This incident forced him to leave the news anchor desk in the same year. Rather continued to work with CBS until 2006, after leaving CBS Evening News.
Rather was hired by the cable channel AXS TV (then called HDNet), until 2013. While there he hosted a 60 Minutes-style investigative news program, Dan Rather Reports. He still hosts Dan Rather Presents, which does in-depth reporting on broad topics such as mental health care or adoption, and The Big Interview with Dan Rather, which features Rather conducting long-form interviews with musicians and entertainers among several other projects for AXS TV. Rather started hosting The News with Dan Rather, an online newscast on The Young Turks YouTube channel from January, 2018.
Dan Rather Family
Dan Rather was born on October 31, 1931, in Wharton County, Texas, to Daniel Irvin Rather Sr., a ditch digger and pipe layer, and Byrl Veda Page. Dan Rather attended Love Elementary School and Hamilton Middle School When the Rathers moved to Houston. He graduated from John H. Reagan High School in Houston in 1950. Dan Rather earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Sam Houston State University in 1953, where he was editor of The Houstonian, the school newspaper.
At Sam Houston, he was a member of the Caballeros, the founding organization of the Epsilon Psi chapter of the Sigma Chi fraternity. Dan Rather briefly attended South Texas College of Law in Houston after obtaining his undergraduate degree. The University would later award him an honorary Juris Doctor in 1990. Dan Rather enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego in January 1954, but was soon discharged for omitting to disclose that he had rheumatic fever as a child.
Dan Rather Wife
Dan rather enjoys a happy married life with wife Jean Goebel. Dan first met Jean in 1956 when Dan was working as a news director for KTRH, where Jean was working as a secretary.
Without sparing more time in dating, Dan married Jean in 1957. The couple later welcomed their first child, the daughter named Robin in 1958 and a son named Danjack a couple of years later in 1960.
As of now, the long-term married couple happily resides in Texas. During an interview with The Washington Post back on 12 November 2017, Dan affirmed that her wife Jean is very health-conscious and is the reason he remains healthy even at his age.
Dan Rather Age
Dan Rather was born in a middle-class family, on 31st October 1931 in Wharton, Texas to parents Byrl Veda and Daniel Irvin Rather. He is 87 years old as of 2018. Dan Rather is not only physically healthy but also professionally, even at his age, he is still running quite a few shows. He still hosts The Big Interview, The News With Dan Rather, and remains very vocal about political affairs of the country. Its evident that nothing short of death can stop Dan Rather.
Dan Rather Jfk | Cbs News
Dan Rather was in Dallas on the fateful, dark day that President J.F Kennedy was assassinated, on November 22, 1963. Dan Rather wrote that he was in Dallas to return film from an interview that morning in Uvalde at the ranch of former Vice President John Nance Garner, in his autobiography. Rather had only recently moved from Dallas to New Orleans in November and had ot been assigned any reporting duties by CBS in Dallas except that he needed to get film to Dallas CBS affiliate KRLD-TV (now KDFW) to feed to New York.
“Within an hour of the arrest the police disclosed that a paraffin test of Oswald’s hands and face showed that he had fired a gun.” This was one of the significant errors in Rather’s 1976 book among other inaccuracies: The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist, with Mickey Hershkowitz. The paraffin test was not administered until 8:55 CST, according to expert Pat Speer, who has explained the tests done and their results after Lee Harvey Oswald (the shooter) had been arrested in Oak Cliff at 1:50 p.m. Texas time.
Dan Rather The Big Interview
Dan Rather has hosted and produced the hour-long series The Big Interview on AXS TV since 2013. He conducts in-depth interviews with influential figures in music and entertainment, such as Quentin Tarantino, Simon Cowell, John Fogerty, Aaron Sorkin and Sammy Hagar. He has also produced several documentary specials for the network under the banner Dan Rather Presents, including specials about the United States Secret Service, America’s Mental Health Crisis and The Shameful Side of International Adoption.
Dan Rather Reports
Dan Rather hosted Dan Rather Reports, a weekly news television which aired on AXS TV from 2006 until 2013. The show premiered when Rather was 75 years old on November 14, 2006. Rather had been given full creative and editorial control over the new program as was the host, correspondent, and narrator.
Dan Rather focused the show on field correspondence news, politics and investigative journalism. The show initially attracted criticism from The New York Times, the paper commented that the show; “seems to favor Democrats who love America”. Dan Rather Reports was awarded a News and Documentary Emmy and also nominated for Emmy awards in 2007 and 2009.
Dan Rather Wall
“I didn’t need to do this” is something I occasionally say after ordering dessert, not after ordering national emergencies.
Dan Rather What’s The Frequency Kenneth
When Dan Rather was walking along Park Avenue to his apartment in Manhattan, on October 4, 1986, he was attacked and punched from behind by a man who demanded to know Kenneth, what is the frequency? while a second assailant chased and beat him. As the assailant pummeled and kicked Rather, he kept repeating the question.
The phrase What’s the frequency, Kenneth? became a popular-culture reference over the years, as the assault remained unsolved for some time. Rather later sang with R.E.M. during a sound check prior to a gig at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
A TV critic writing in the New York Daily News published a photo of the alleged assailant, William Tager, who received a 12½-to-25-year prison sentence for killing NBC stagehand Campbell Montgomery outside The Today Show studio in 1994 effectively solving the mystery in 1797.
Dan Rather What Unites Us
What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism, written with journalist Elliot Kirschner, is profoundly topical. Dan Rather explores widely on topics ranging from voting rights, to the arts bear the tone of a gentle lecture, to immigration. He has covered the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate and the war in Vietnam, and these are on vivid display as he backs up his point of view with bits of history, and occasionally seeks to shed light on perspectives that might be different from his own.
Dan Rather Facebook
Dan Rather Started actively posting on Facebook in 2015, . He was pushed to try out social media for which he credits young staffers at News and Guts Media. Dan Rather’s posts resonate with the audience, which grew to more than two million followers even though his posts are considerably longer than typical social media posts. Dan Rather’s unusual but effective Facebook presence was noticed even by late night TV. Subject matter ranges from journalism, to current political events, to, childhood memories.
Dan Rather Books | List of Books
- The Palace Guard, with Gary Paul Gates, 1977.
- The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist, with Mickey Hershkowitz, 1977.
- I Remember, with Peter Wyden, 1991.
- The Camera Never Blinks Twice: The Further Adventures of a Television Journalist, with Mickey Hershkowitz, 1994.
- Deadlines and Datelines: Essays at the Turn of the Century., 1999.
- “The American Dream: Stories from the Heart of Our Nation”, 2001.
- Rather Outspoken : My Life in the News., with Digby Diehl, 2013.
- What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism, with Elliot Kirschner, 2017.
Dan Rather Quotes
- Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.
- The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ‘truth’.
- Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.
- A tough lesson in life that one has to learn is that not everybody wishes you well.
- Don’t taunt the alligator until after you’ve crossed the creek.
- If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.
- An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.
- And now the sequence of events in no particular order.
- To err is human but to really foul up requires a computer.
- Performing doesn’t turn me on. It’s an egomaniac business, filled with prima donnas – including this one.
Dan Rather Net Worth
Dan Rather is an American journalist and the former anchor for the CBS Evening News from 1981 to 2005. His career has spanned over six decades from which he has earned quite an astounding amount of money. Dan Rather has an estimated net worth of $70 million dollars.
Dan Rather Interview
On patriotism being used as a political bludgeon, and if he thinks that can be changed
I do, though we need to look to our history at least a little. We’ve been through some really difficult times before as a country — and now we find ourselves in a period of, seemingly, chaos and havoc at the very top of the government, particularly in the executive branch. So what we’ve done is we’ve descended into extreme partisan politics and set-in concrete ideologies. But we’re better than that.
And I remind myself and try to remind others that, you know, the country as a whole is stronger than any president, and that if we just lower the volume and say, ‘Let’s have civil discourse,’ and to return, yes, to our core American values, take an attitude of, ‘Listen, we agree on so much — we agree on the right to vote, we agree on the need for empathy.’ There are fundamental things that we agree on, so concentrate on those things — and where we have disagreements, say, ‘OK, we disagree about these things. Let’s discuss them in a very civil manner, lower the temperature and talk to one another.’
On his mix of optimism and alarm about the nation
I do worry about that quite a bit. I recognize that my time to shape the world in even a small way is receding, but I keep coming back to one of my father’s favorite words: ‘Steady. Just hold steady. Do what you can.’ You know, President John Kennedy asked, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.’ And if we just hold ourselves steady and say to ourselves, ‘Let me do something today that helps my community, that helps my country,’ we’ll begin to crawl and claw ourselves back to a more reasonable state, and that way, going forward in the 21st century, we can have a better country than we have had, and let’s face it — we have had a very good country.
On the impact he’s had via Facebook that he could not have had at CBS
That’s absolutely true, totally unexpected, and one of the great surprises of my life. Look, I was at CBS News for 44 years, 24 of them in the anchor chair. CBS News was part of my identity — I mean, “Dan Rather, CBS News” was just, in my own mind, almost my name. And when I left there, under those circumstances, I said to myself, when it was finally over, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I still want to work, I have a passion for reporting news, but is anybody going to hire me? Can I find anything to do?”
But to have this social media phenomenon happen — I do find it amazing and humbling. Granted, humbling is not a word usually associated with present or past television anchorpeople, but I do feel that way. I don’t profess to understand it, but I am very grateful for it.
You know, one of the things has happened to me with age — I think it may happen to quite a few people — is that I’m deeper into gratitude, humility and modesty than I’ve ever been. That may be damning with faint praise, but I have really learned the value of it. And I will say that, you know, part of what made this book possible was the, to me, still incredible response that we’ve seen on social media. And I see this book What Unites Us as an extension of that spirit, but one that’s broader in its mandate.