By Mr. Curmudgeon
One day, while walking down Manhattan’s Park Avenue, CBS News anchorman Dan Rather was pummeled by two assailants. One mugger repeatedly asked, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” The incident remains one of America's great unsolved mysteries.
In another bazaar episode in the life of Rather, Gene Phillips, a Chicago cab driver, refused to let Rather out of his cab and continued driving. Rather, hanging out the window, waved his arms wildly and screamed, “I’m being kidnapped.” A police car eventually pulled along side the cab and motioned the driver to pull over. Cabbie Phillips told the Associated Press that after driving the newsman to his Chicago destination, Rather refused to pay his cab fair because Phillips could not produce his hack license. Enraged, Phillips hit the gas, taking Rather on an impromptu tour through the streets of the Windy City. Rather, who at the time was earning millions of dollars a year, tried to get out of paying a $12.55 fair. Much to Rather’s credit, he successfully kept his carnival existence far from the vaunted CBS newsroom and the eyes of his long-suffering viewers. That is, until President George W. Bush sought reelection in 2004. That’s when the wheels finally popped off the wagon.
Rather, then reporting for CBS’s Sunday news program 60 Minutes, and his producer Mary Mapes, thought they had a story that would destroy Bush’s reelection hopes and put their man (at least I think he’s a man) Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry in the White House.
The story concerned a long floated rumor that the young Bush received preferential treatment getting out of combat duty during the Vietnam War by skating his way into the Texas Air National Guard. His father, then a congressman, supposedly pulled a few strings. Rather and Mapes got their hands on documents that purportedly substantiated the claim that Bush was a war wimp. That was until the documents were posted on the CBS News website. Document expert Peter Tytell found that the type font on the documents were not produced on a typewriter but created using Microsoft Word and outputted on a modern printer. The “unimpeachable source” that provided the clumsy forgeries was one Bill Burkett, a troubled man with a history of mental illness and an unhinged grudge, like Rather's, against Bush.
Rather and his 60 Minutes producer never thought they would get caught in their lie. But the Internet proved their undoing. It was the guys at Powerline.com that uncovered the fraud and released their findings to the world. At first, CBS boldly denied any wrong doing and stood by Rather and his story. When every network examined the documents, they too were convinced the story was the product of disturbed minds. CBS eventually handed Rather and producer Mapes their walking papers. But that didn’t stop old Dan. He filed a $70 million lawsuit against his old network, claiming he never had a chance to properly defend his actions to the CBS top brass. He further claimed that CBS’s parent company, Viacom, fired him as a means of kowtowing to the Bush administration in order to protect its business interests.
The panel of judges on the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division not only dismissed Rather’s case against CBS but admonished the lower court for furthering Dan’s descent into madness by allowing the case to proceed up the legal food chain.
No one better described the interesting and colorful life of Dan Rather than Dan himself:
I've tried everything. I can say to you with confidence, I know a fair amount about LSD. I've never been a social user of any of these things, but my curiosity has carried me into a lot of interesting areas.
The next area of interest for Dan may very well be a padded cell.
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