Interview: Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist

What was it like growing up in Texas in the 1930s and '40s?

Dan Rather: I was born in Wharton, Texas, which is just below Houston on the coast, but I have no memory of it at my early childhood, because my father was a pipeliner, which is to say he dug ditches in which pipe was laid from the oil fields of South Texas to port cities such as Houston and New Orleans. And I probably was conceived in Victoria, Texas, and by the time I was born, my mother and father were living in Wharton and I was there for the first year-and-a-half of my life. Then the pipeline crew moved on to the outskirts of Houston so I actually grew up in the Houston Heights. And my earliest memories are of our house at 1432 Prince Street in the Houston Heights. The Heights has improved a great deal since I lived there. When I lived there it's what would now be called euphemistically a "transition neighborhood." It was then described as a tough neighborhood, wrong side of the tracks.

I had no sense of that when I was growing up there. I had a wonderful mother and father, a younger brother and sister. We were a tight family. Money was tight. It was the Depression, but looking back on it we were poor but not the poorest people in our neighborhood. And while we wanted for a lot of things, we didn't want for any necessities, and in that sense we were better off than most people during the Depression.

I went to William G. Love elementary school, Alexander Hamilton junior high school, John H. Reagan high school, all in the Heights, all public schools. I was mightily blessed, and remain so to this day, because I had an extraordinary large number of teachers who cared.

Mrs. Simmons, who was my elementary school principal, was a tremendous influence on my life and the lives of every child who passed through that school because she gave you a sense that you could do anything that you dreamed hard enough and worked hard enough to accomplish. Her basic teaching manual began with, "You are not better than anybody else, but you are as good as anybody." And she created an atmosphere and attitude and aura at that little elementary school which has stayed with me a life time.

I had a difficult time in junior high school because I was ill a great deal of the time. I had rheumatic fever which -- for a long time it was not diagnosed as anything, and then when it was diagnosed it was incorrectly diagnosed -- but at any rate I had to stay home, once for an eight or nine month period, then I got up and I was back down in bed, bedridden, for another five or six months, so I studied at home a great deal.

Among other things, I thought this was the end of my football career. As was the case with every other able-bodied male child in Texas of my generation, you were raised with the idea that you had absolutely positively had to be a football hero. It was not anything you had a choice about. When I was down with rheumatic fever, I thought that might have finished my football career. As it turned out, I played in high school, thank heaven, and a little bit in college.

Work was the measure of a person in our household, adult or child. My father was very strong in the belief that you -- one may be excused if you're not as smart as somebody else but there's no excuse for not working as hard as anybody. And in fact, God rest his soul, because it has stood me in good stead, those lessons he taught me. But he basically taught you should never let anybody outwork you. So that's the atmosphere in which I grew up. My mother worked outside of the home some. She worked as a waitress. She worked sacking groceries at the local Weingarten's supermarket. She was a very good seamstress and she sewed clothes, which she sewed to supplement our income. And I grew up with parents who were models of very hard working people, but they also were models of caring about their children, so it was a home of great love and that -- especially about that -- I know how lucky and blessed I was.

How would you describe yourself as a kid? What kind of kid were you?

Dan Rather: First of all, I was skinny. I tended to be taller than average, much skinnier than average, energetic, enthusiastic, not bright but not dumb.

I had extremely poor handwriting and was not a good speller. And for one who dreamed of being a journalist from a very early age, you could imagine how many times my teachers told me, "Danny, if you want to be a newspaper man..." which is what I aspired to be because being a journalist in that time and place was to be a newspaper person. "If you want to be a newspaper man," you would have to learn to spell a whole lot better than you do now, which I never did.

I had an optimistic outlook about things. Confidence, as my parents gave me, but I could be shy about some things. I remember the William G. Love elementary school rhythm band. It became clear quite early on that I was not musically inclined and they started me on several instruments at which I immediately failed, and I wound up with , and this did things to my confidence. Even at that early age, I recognized that the wood block was about as low as you could go in the Love school band.

What kinds of things were you interested in as a child growing up?

Dan Rather: I was interested in sports, especially football. Basketball was not that big until I got in high school. I was interested in anything that was in the air, kites. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother and sometimes my father helping me build kites and sail them in the very large pasture behind Prince Street. It's all built up with houses now but then it was a great pasture. Birds, and then later airplanes. I was fascinated by airplanes.

I was always interested in newspapers. I can't remember a time when I wasn't. I believe that comes from the fact that my father -- who worked with his back and his hands, as well as his heart, but he was basically a laborer, and who had not finished high school -- considered newspapers as the poor man's university, and he was an avid reader of newspapers, along with my Uncle John, who is now deceased, but my father's younger brother. And they would read the newspapers and then argue, debate, discuss way into the night such things as the rise of Nazism, Hitler's Mein Kampf, the book that Hitler wrote. They discussed world affairs, national affairs. They had almost a knock-down, drag-out fight over whether Franklin Roosevelt should run for a third term. I remember that very well. So I was interested in newspapers because my father, I think, was interested in newspapers. And my mother read as well, but my father really devoured newspapers.

Newspapers would be stacked up in places. My mother would say, "Irvin, can I throw away some of these papers?" And he'd say, "No, I think there's an editorial..." or "There was that article I wanted to read." He--we subscribed to every newspaper available at least once. My father had a temper. It wasn't a foul temper. He just had a temper, particularly when he'd read things in the paper. Some of my fondest early memories are of my father reading something and jabbing the paper saying, "Byrl -- " (my mother's name) " -- this blankety blank paper, I'm finished with it! Cancel our subscription! I'm not going to read it again!"

We had three local papers: The Houston Chronicle, The Houston Post, The Houston Press. We cancelled our subscription to all three of them at least five times. People think this story is apocryphal but it is not. We wound up to be the only people in our neighborhood who subscribed only to the Christian Science Monitor and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The St. Louis paper didn't arrive for days after it was printed, but my father had taken every other Texas paper and had become disgusted with it at one time or another. My point is my father was very passionate about what he was reading and I think in the early mists of my childhood this impressed me to the point that it led me to want to be a newspaper reporter.

Were you a good student?

Dan Rather: In elementary school I was a good student. I made very good grades in elementary school except in handwriting. Elementary school was one through six, there was no kindergarten; junior high was seven, eight and nine; senior high school was ten, eleven, twelfth. Looking back on it, the transition from elementary school to junior high school is often a difficult transition for children, and it was for me.

Alexander Hamilton was a bigger school. It had so many more students there wasn't the kind of nurturing I was accustomed to with Mrs. Simmons (the principal at Love), Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Spencer or the other teachers at Love. Dealing with a smaller group of students, one had a sense of great nurturing and personal attention. In junior high school you move from classroom to classroom. I had trouble making that transition. I also got ill. None of these are by way of excuse, it is by way of saying in junior high school I didn't do so well. I passed but I went from being one of the better students in elementary school to being just another student in junior high school. That continued.

I recovered from rheumatic fever about the time I went to senior high school. I was determined to play football. I had this absolute -- fixation would not be too strong -- but I had to letter in football in high school. And to this day, one of the more exciting times for me was when I did letter in high school. The John H. Reagan senior high school was a big, big city high school, over 3,000 students.

I began to come back as a student in senior high school. I certainly wasn't a class leader, but my grades began to come back and my study habits had come back. I think one reason was that in the tenth grade I took Spanish and I wasn't very good at it. I was also beginning to reach that stage boys do where you think you know everything and you think you're invincible.

I made a bad grade in Spanish and it was the first and only time I had brought home a really bad grade, and that was a shocker. We had a family council. My mother and father were big on councils, family councils. We had a family council with my mother, father, and my brother, sister and myself, about what we're going to do about Danny's D in Spanish. And what we were going to do about it, as it turned out, on the orders of my father and mother, we were going to go to summer school. "We" were not going to summer school, I was going to summer school. And so in addition to working that summer I went to summer school to make up the grade. That was a shocker for me and from then on out I studied harder.

I don't know where I finished in my high school class. My graduating class in high school was like 393 and I have no idea where I finished. But by the time I was a senior I was beginning to learn how to study, and I was beginning to realize that some things you can't fake in school. Some answers you either know it or you don't, and that was a revelation to me. I caught on later than most. So my grades in the 11th and 12th grade were better than they had been for the preceding four or five grades.

Were there books that inspired you or influenced you when you were growing up?

Dan Rather: Yes. I was very lucky about books.

In addition to being avid readers of newspapers, my parents were also book readers. They didn't read every night, except from the Bible. My mother read every night from the Bible. And I think, by way of looking back on it, that made me, even in my infancy, an acquaintance with books. Someone might scoff and say, "Well, infants don't really have it." But my maternal grandmother in Bloomington, Texas had two books in the house. One was the Bible and the other was the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. And when we visited Grandma Paige on the farm down near Bloomington, by kerosene lamp -- this is not an Abe Lincoln story but electricity had not come to rural -- my grandmother would read first from the Bible, and then read me to sleep by reading wonderful things in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. But in my mother and father's house, my mother read the Bible, if not every night, practically so, but they read books and they would discuss books. This was not part of the New York Review of Books crowd, believe me, but they were eager to improve themselves and they were very eager to have their children lead better lives than they led, and they believed that books were a kind of magic carpet for that.

Now in addition, I was extremely lucky.

One summer -- I can't remember my age but I couldn't have been more than seven or eight -- at the local park -- we called her "the lady in the park." Looking back on it, she was a social worker hired by the city, and she was just "the lady at the park." She came around and talked to you and tried to find out what you were interested in. The lady in the park talked to me one day about books. She read me something out of a children's book and then asked me if I'd like to go to the library. Now at that age, and that time, at that place, she may as well have been talking about Xanadu. I don't think I'd heard of a library, although my parents had books somehow or another, but I said, "Well yes. I'd like to go to the library." And she organized a little trip for two or three of us to the Heights Library on Heights Boulevard, which was indeed a magic place, and that was lucky for me. I loved it. It was obvious to the lady in the park that I loved it and she took me back there a number of times that summer, and near the end of the summer asked me if I would like to go to the main library downtown. And we took the 8th Street shuttle bus up Heights Boulevard to Washington Avenue and then transferred to the big bus and went to the main library. Such a place I had never seen. It seemed a kind of combination castle out of King Arthur's time and about as close as a child could imagine heaven to be. I remember we checked out Paul Bunyan. I had a library card by this time from the Houston Heights Library and I was allowed to check out one book from the main library and I checked out Paul Bunyan. Looking back on it, it was a decisive time for me, because it really turned me on to books and a lifetime of reading.

Was there a decisive moment when you knew what you wanted to do with your life?

Dan Rather: I've always known how lucky I am and how blessed I am in that I knew very early on what I wanted to do. I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to be a reporter. I repeat for emphasis, at that time and place being a reporter meant being a newspaper person. Why this is I've never quite known, but as far back as I can remember in the mists of my childhood, when somebody asked me what I wanted to be, I always said, "I want to be a reporter. I want to work for a newspaper." And when we played those children's games where some people wanted to be a pilot, a butcher, an Indian chief, I always said, you know, "I want to be a newspaper person. I want to be a reporter." I think that's because of my father's passion for newspapers and the fact that newspapers were such a part of our family life.

In elementary school, my mother, with the help of one of the teachers, helped me to start a school newspaper, which was basically two pages, which my mother laboriously typed on a school typewriter and we sort of stapled together. I recognize that it's the rare person who can say, "Right from the start knew what I wanted to be and that never varied." I never changed off of that. The sponsor of our high school newspaper, Mrs. Wilkinson -- to whom I owe a great deal -- encouraged me, but she did explain to me how difficult it would be to make a living working for newspapers.

And my father, although he read newspapers all the time, he dismissed my wanting to be a newspaper person because he couldn't figure out why anybody would pay you very much to do that. His idea of a professional man was being an engineer because that's what he dreamed of being and what he studied to be. Engineering was very big in the '30s and '40s in what we call the back edge of the industrial revolution in our country. Particularly among people such as my father, who worked with their backs and hands, being an engineer -- where you used your head and you made things that could work -- was a high calling.

But the only question for me was whether I could make a living doing what I had always dreamed of wanting to do. There were few doubts in my mind but from time to time there were doubts. Even my high school teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson, encouraged me greatly and thought I should pursue the dream but was trying to shake me into the reality of what that meant, how hard it was going to be, and perhaps I should have some fall back, maybe get a teacher's certificate, which was a big thing in those days. If you had a teacher's certificate, you could get a job anywhere.

Once or twice when I was right out of college, sort of hanging by my fingernails financially, I had some doubts. But for whatever reason I've always known that I wanted to be a reporter. That was my dream, and after a certain point when I began to understand the dream, I was constantly driving to achieve it.

Did you have role models? Did you have heroes when you were young?

Dan Rather: I did. I had a lot of heroes when I was growing up, one of whom was Edward R. Murrow. He became a hero of mine because when I was bedridden with rheumatic fever there was no television. Television had been invented but it was just a rumor. Certainly in Texas at that time it was only a rumor. But radio was big and getting bigger in the build up to World War II, what Churchill has called "the gathering storm." There was no cure for rheumatic fever at that time. The question was whether it was going to hurt your heart. The doctor said, "The less you move, the better chance you have of never hurting your heart." So...

I was bed-ridden and radio broadcasts became very big for me. And Murrow's star was rising as a chronicler of World War II and he became a hero to me, the fact that he was a journalist, although he was a radio journalist. I cannot in truth say that I was dreaming at that time of being on the radio. I wasn't. My definition of reporting or journalism was still being a newspaper man. But the voices of Murrow, Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, Shirer, H.V. Kaltenborn, they spoke from faraway places with strange sounding names, from in the middle of big events, and Murrow was in a sense a star. He became a hero to me.

In the museum of my mind, I see these old mental photographs of my father and my Uncle John listening to the radio in the roll-up to the war. and then the war was underway. I remember as if it were yesterday. For reasons that I'm not sure of, Gabriel Heatter was never a favorite of my father. Gabriel Heatter had a stylized delivery and I think my father sort of felt, "Let's get on with it. Just give me the stuff, will you?"

Anyway we turned on the radio one night and the Battle of North Africa was hanging in the balance. I'll never forget it. I don't know what age I was. I might have been ten. Gabriel Heatter said, "The Desert Fox is seven miles from Cairo." At which my father picked up the little radio, yanked it out and slammed it against the wall. My mother quickly shooshed my little brother and sister and me into the back room, mumbling something about, "Father is not having a good night." He was so disgusted and furious. It looked like the Germans were going to prevail. But as it turned out, Rommel never took Cairo.

I can truly say my father was a hero to me almost from my earliest memory, for a lot of reasons. He was a man's man, a strong man, a good father, a good husband, and also a loving father, and he became a hero to me early on. I had my football heroes. One of the greatest running backs in Houston high school football history was a guy named Bobby Jones, a great broken field runner. He became a hero to me for a long time. I'm not sure I should admit this, but I used to walk by his house and salute.

How about Doak Walker and Kyle Rote?

Dan Rather: Doak Walker and Kyle Rote came later. They were latter day Bobby Joneses. In our neighborhood, football was big. It was a working man's neighborhood and Friday night football was big. In high school we regularly played before 25 to 26,000 people under the lights. Friday night, every week was a big game. For our city championship game we played in front of 27,500 people.

What position did you play?

Dan Rather: I was an end. The book on me was that I was slow but I had good hands.

Were you expected to go to college?

Dan Rather: No.

I wasn't expected to finish high school except in my mother's absolute determination. In this time and place, in Texas in the late '30s and on into the '40s, one was expected to contribute to the support of the family once you became a man. And the definition of being a man pretty much had to do with your physical size and strength, but beginning at about 14, certainly by the time you were 16, you were pretty much considered a man for a lot of practical purposes, including work. And nobody in our family had been to college. With the exception of my Aunt Marie, I don't think anybody had ever even been on a college campus at any time. And going to college just seemed a bridge too far for most of the people in our general neighborhood, and certainly for people in my family.

So the discussion from the time I was about maybe 14 on up was whether I would finish high school or at about 16 go to work in the oil fields, which a lot of boy-men at that time and place did.

My mother was absolutely determined that I not only would finish high school but that I would go to college. My father was not opposed to it but he was not nearly as fierce in his determination about it as my mother. In fairness to my father it was pretty hard for him to imagine how it was all going to happen. He didn't know anything about college except engineers came out of colleges. Where will the money come from? How would we do it? College seemed to be something that other people in other places might do. It wasn't very likely to happen.

My father, being a very practical person, was very big on not raising false expectations. One of his favorite things was, "Let's be realistic." So no, I was not expected to go to college except that my mother just from a fairly early age would whisper to me about that. She had finished at Bloomington high school but it was a country school. She later went back and got a high school equivalency degree certificate to make sure that she was a qualified high school graduate.

My mother was extremely determined that I would go to college, and when I got old enough to understand it, she was very rational about why, and she had it right. You know, "Look, in your father's time and your grandfather's time going to college was not an important thing, but in your time it's going to be a really important thing. And besides that, if --" and this is almost word for word -- "If you go to college and you make it, then your brother is very likely to be able to go, and he's going to make it, and if he does then your sister will." Now she had this all figured out in her head, and there's no doubt in my mind if it had not been for her, I wouldn't have gone to college. I might not have finished high school. Although I would say in high school the critical thing was football, that if I hadn't made it in football, I probably would have been gone from high school maybe in the eleventh grade, possibly as early as the tenth. But I wanted to play football so badly and I was beginning to see I just might make it. That, plus my mother's determination, kept me in high school.

When I got out of high school, we had no idea how I was going to college. Coming out of the Depression, out of World War II, there were a lot of families who wanted their children to go to college, particularly the oldest child, for the reasons my mother had stated: If the oldest child goes, the others will likely go. But the infrastructure of scholarships and student aid didn't exist. Or if it did exist, the Rathers didn't know anything about it.

Have you ever reflected on how different your life might have been?

Dan Rather: Yes, I have a lot. I think I would have gone straight to the oil fields.

I worked in and around the oil fields every summer from 14 on up. I started cutting brush to clear a path for pipeline when I was 14. I was a roustabout when I was 15 and a half, 16. I was a roughneck by the time I was 17. This is the pecking order. You start with a survey crew. Then you get to be a roustabout. Then you get to be a roughneck. Then maybe later on you get to be a driller, tool pusher, and I probably would have worked my way up with that. But my mother had a very good saying, you know, she said, "About yesterday no tears, about tomorrow no fears." So while I have reflected on it sometimes, not very often. But I was reared by people who were very forward looking. You know, just keep looking forward.

How did you get your start as a reporter?

Dan Rather: Well, I had started this little newspaper (and that really overstates it) in elementary school. I had worked on the newspaper in junior high school, but not much because I was ill a lot of the time.

I worked on my high school newspaper. I hung around newspapers. I sometimes would take the bus downtown and just hang around the old Houston Press. I ran coffee there and sort of struck up friendships with newspaper people. And I wrote a lot and kept a journal. It was only years later when I read a Walker Percy essay on the difference between a journal and a diary that I even knew the difference between a journal and a diary, but it turns out I was actually keeping a journal, as crude as it was. A journal is you tell what happened and what you thought about it.

My break really came when I got to college. That I can't emphasize too much. I think this may be a lesson for parents even to this day. My mother did not have a clear plan about how I was going to get to college. She didn't know enough to lay out a plan but that didn't stop her from absolutely knowing that I was going. I was going because she was going to will it. She did not have a clue as to how this was going to happen, where I was going to go, but I was going to go to college.

As the day approached for me to graduate from high school, and I was either going to college or not, the only thing I could see was that maybe I'd get a football scholarship. I had started on our team my senior year and we had a good year. We played for the city championship. We lost, I'm sorry to say. I still remember the pass I almost got that might have won it for us.

But as the year was winding down and my graduation loomed and my mother is saying, "We're going to college," and I'm saying to myself, "I don't know where or how." I went to our head coach, Lamar Camp, and asked him if he'd give me a letter of recommendation to play. And he looked at me and he said, "Well, has anybody talked to you?" And I said, "No." And he didn't dismiss me, but he basically said, "Well, if somebody is interested in you, you tell them to contact me and I'll talk to them." Well excuse me, sir, that wasn't a heck of a lot of help!

I hitchhiked up to Sam Houston State Teacher's College, which was on the Dallas Highway, 70 some odd miles north of Houston. It was a small college and I thought, "Well, the University of Texas, SMU, Rice, A&M, our larger football factories have failed to recognize my prowess so I'd probably have a little better luck at a smaller place." And I hitchhiked to Sam Houston State Teacher's College. And I didn't know who the football coach was but I asked. It was a guy named Puny Wilson. I asked where he was and they said they thought he was in the gym watching basketball practice. I went to the gym and I sidled up to him and I introduced myself. He looked at me like I was a hitchhiker with pets. I told him I was a football player and that I'd appreciate it very much if he'd consider me for a scholarship. And he looked at me, and looking back on it, I think he was kind of amazed but I also think he kind of respected it. He had not heard of me, which was no surprise, but he basically said, "Well, when do you graduate?" I told him I was a midterm graduate. I said, "Well, I graduate in two weeks." It was just after Christmas in January. He said, "Well, spring practice starts (I've forgotten the date) sometime in March and I'll be glad to see you there." I left the gym absolutely walking on air because this to me was my ticket to get to college.

Foolish? Yes, but when you're young a lot of foolish things happen. And I hitchhiked back home. I recognize hitchhiking has gone out of fashion, but in that time it was very common for people to , and for people to give hitchhikers rides. A different era.

I proudly announced to my mother that I had a football scholarship to Sam Houston State Teacher's College. What I had was a try out, but I needed it so badly that I convinced myself I had a football scholarship.

Anyway, when it came time to enroll, my mother took me to Sam Houston, and this was the first college campus she had ever been on. She went with me to the registrar's office and asked what it cost to get in. I explained to her, the "scholarship" didn't start until football practice started. I guessed that's the way it worked. She cashed a $25 war bond that we had left over from World War II. Went to the bank in Huntsville and cashed the $25 war bond to put 20 some odd dollars into the $40 tuition and fees that it took to enroll. And I enrolled. They carried the rest of it.

The story gets long from there. I did go out for football practice and I did reasonably well. They just couldn't run me off. They ran over me a lot because defense was never my strong suit but I did what I could and I stayed out. They didn't want to have to tell you that you weren't going to make it. If you were number nine on an eight-depth chart that ought to tell you something. It didn't tell me anything.

Did that experience of trying to make it on the football team in college teach you any kind of a lesson?

Dan Rather: Tremendously. That was something my father taught us, playing sports and coming up. Before I got to Sam Houston I had a lot of faults and some flaws, but there wasn't any "give up" in me. I stayed out for football and at the end of spring practice, football players on scholarship lived at the Bearcat Den. We were the Sam Houston State Teacher's College Bearcats, and I was not invited to come to the Bearcat Den. I was having a very hard time staying in school.

The journalism professor --they only had one, Hugh Cunningham -- was keeping me afloat in school. I stayed with him some. He kept my head just above water. He kept telling me, "This football thing is..." First of all, he thought it was ridiculous. He didn't want to tell me I was no damn good, but he pretty much knew it. But I clung to this idea that the scholarship was just around the corner.

What I learned from it is that there is tremendous value in persistence. Now my persistence in football did not ever get me on scholarship, much less get me much playing time, much less ever being a star at football. But I stayed out that spring, I stayed out to the end of spring practice. At the end of spring , I was the only nonscholarship player still out. When football practice took up before school started in the summer, I was there. I got there a day-and-a-half early. I was the last person before the first game that was still out there without a scholarship. I eventually got to suit out a time or two, but I never got to play.

It's hard to explain. They did have to tell me, finally. Coach Puny himself. Coach Puny Wilson, All-American Texas A&M in the '20s, when all the pickers for All-American were in the Ivy League, he was a bona fide All-American. I finally was ushered into his office, and it was his job to tell me that I would not be on scholarship for the fall. They had to tell me because I just kept coming out. And looking back on it, I think the equipment people just said, "Well coach, what do we do with this guy?" I think the assistant coaches probably said, "I'll say this for him, he's stuck in there, but we don't have a place for him."

Anyway, Coach Puny told me -- he was kind about it but he was also forceful about it --that not only was I not getting a scholarship but he made it pretty clear that I wasn't likely to have one in the future. If I was a project, I was too big of a project for Coach Puny. And I left his office and it was raining, and I walked in the rain, and I cried about it, which I'm not proud of. I shouldn't have, because I was already grown, but it meant a lot to me. But in I guess kind of a perverse way, I had some pride that I really had stuck it out. And you know, you never know when you're a teacher, you may say something to a child or even a young man who is a student, that you have no idea it's going to stick with him for a long time. But Puny, who was a kind of idol, partly because he was a coach, also because he'd been All-American -- you know, big, raw-boned country guy. The only thing he gave me -- he didn't give me a scholarship, he didn't give me any hope, he didn't give me any phony expectations, but he shook my hand. He says, "You didn't quit." And so in my disappointment, in my --I think it's not too strong a statement -- my crushed state, I had that. Now my journalism teacher, Hugh Cunningham, when I went to him, he said, "Well thank God! Thank heaven. That foolishness is over. You know, you're not a football player. You're weren't going to be a football player. It's not compatible with my making a journalist of you. So let's suck it up here and let's have some supper and let's talk about how you're going to be a great journalist."

Was it important to have someone tell you that?

Dan Rather: I don't know what would have happened. I couldn't have stayed in school without Cunningham. He arranged for me to stay in school, partly out of his own pocket, partly out of borrowed money. He drummed up all kinds of jobs, some of them cockamamie jobs to keep me in school.

What do you think he saw in you?

Dan Rather: I think he saw determination. I also think he saw that I wanted it badly. Those two things are related but not exactly the same. He also saw that I could write a little bit. Looking back on it, I was really a clumsy bad writer. But remember, he's at Sam Houston State Teacher's College. He's not at the University of Texas or the University of Missouri where he graduated. This was an average cow college, a backward school. I'm not denigrating it in any way because I owe it a great deal.

But he saw it in me. "This kid has wanted it for as long as he can remember, worked on his high school paper." When he sat me down to write a news story, I at least knew the rudiments and he knew I wanted it badly. I think those are the things he saw in me. He also saw that whatever talent I had was pretty raw, but he knew he was a good enough teacher. I think what he had seen in the football is, "He'll stick with it," and "If you stick with it for four years at Sam Houston, under my tutelage, I think I might be able to make something out of you." Or as Hugh would probably say it, "I think I can help him make something of himself."

And you stuck it out.

Dan Rather: Yes, absolutely. I took off after that. Once the football was out, he arranged for a job at the local radio station.

Was that how you got your first job?

Dan Rather: Yes.

This was not a college radio station. It was a commercial radio station, 250 watt AM station, lowest wattage allowed by the FCC. KSAN, run by the late Pastor Ted Lott. He was the whole thing, but he needed somebody part-time to help him, and Hugh got me the job at the radio station. I wrote ads. I tried to sell ads. I wasn't any good at selling. And it was great for me. For one: it helped keep me in school. Two: there was so much to do you didn't have time to think about it, and so you just did it. Three: it was such a small environment that I was allowed to make mistakes, and you learn by making mistakes.

After the football scholarship business went, Hugh said, "Look, you should start writing about sports," and at that time I was pretty good at writing sports, and quickly became the sports editor of the paper, and later became the editor of the paper. And so once I got under this gifted, caring teacher's wing, and once he got out of me this football madness, things began to turn really good for me in college. With a combination of working in the oil fields in the summer and the part-time jobs during the school year (I never had fewer than three) there wasn't any money to spare, but it kept me in college.

Did you want to be a sports writer?

Dan Rather: I wanted to be any kind of newspaper man. Did I want to be a sportswriter? Yes. Did I want to be an obituary writer? Yes. Did I want to do Martha Stewart Living columns? Yes. You know, my whole goal was to get on a newspaper and get a newspaper job and be a newspaper man.

Before you were 25, if I read correctly, you had worked for AP and UPI and radio stations. You really went after it the same way you went after a football scholarship.

Dan Rather: I did. I went after it hard. One, because I was driving for my dream, and by this time I was very much aware of it. I was only 19 or 20 years old. I think I graduated from college when I was 21. Number two, I needed the money to stay in school.

I worked for AP, and worked for UP, and worked with the old INS, the International News Service. Later I worked at a radio station. I was the sports information director at the college, which paid, I think, eight dollars a week. I did the statistics for the college teams. But this was a very strong learning curve period for me that I didn't realize at the time, but I was really soaking up a lot of education, skills that I could later use at the radio station. I did everything at the radio station. I was a disk jockey. I did live programs at night for the local funeral home. I sang with them when they sang the gospel choir. I did play-by-play football, basketball, baseball, track. Whoever heard of doing play by play track? I did it. And I did it all. Football? I did junior high school football on Wednesday. I did the black high school football games on Thursday. This was a segregated society in the 1940s. I did the high school football games -- white high school games -- on Friday, and I did the college games on Saturday. That's a lot of air time. A lot of time to be ad libbing. And I didn't realize at the time but I was in the process of making myself a very strong ad libber. I don't mean that in any conceited way but just -- you can't do that much live broadcasting and not develop the ability to ad lib. And under Hugh Cunningham's tutelage I was reading great books because he demanded that we do that, and also putting a newspaper together. So this was a busy time. It was a tremendous learning curve for me.

Did you ever have any self-doubts?

Dan Rather: Oh sure. I had all kinds of self-doubts. I had a lot of doubts about how I was going to make it, but I never doubted I was going to make it. I think I got that from my mother. I knew I was going to make it if there was a way to make it, and I thought there was but I didn't exactly know how.

At what point did you realize your calling might be broadcasting and not newspapers?

Dan Rather: That came late. All through college my intention was to be a newspaper man, and that was my dream. I was at the radio station but I wasn't thinking of a career in radio. Radio and radio broadcasting was a way to keep myself in school. It was kind of fun after I got the hang of it, but I didn't think of being in radio.

The Korean War started in the winter of 1950, and I got to Sam Houston at just about that time. I wasn't smart enough to realize what was happening to tell you the truth. We had no ROTC, there was no reserve unit, and our campus fairly quickly got decimated with young men who were either in reserve units in their hometowns or were being drafted. I'm a child of World War II and I was at the most impressionable age during World War II. Partly because of that, I had a strong sense of patriotism that had to do with military service. That was very common then. It was very real to me. It sounds crazy now, but I was afraid the Korean War would end and I wouldn't get into it, that I wouldn't have a chance to serve.

I talked to my mother about going to the service and I do not exaggerate that with great tears she just said, "Look, you got into college. You've got to finish." I said, "Listen, I'll go to the service and I'll come back and-- " but she wouldn't hear of it. She just said, "Look, you got there, you've got to finish." And she also said, "The war will go on forever if that's what you're worried about. It'll go on forever." I talked about it the first year I was at college. I talked about it with Hugh Cunningham. The war dragged on. I wasn't scheduled to graduate until 1954 but graduated in the summer of '53 and volunteered for the Marines. I graduated early because I wanted to go in the service.

The Korean War was at that stage where they were having peace talks. It was on and off, on and off, and the Marines didn't take me until the start of 1954, although I had graduated in '53 from college. I taught journalism in college that semester while I was waiting. I had already volunteered for the Marines but I was waiting to actually go. I went in the Marines, had one of the shortest and least distinguished careers in the whole history of the Marine Corps and came out.

There was a kind of recession on and I had a very hard time finding a job. In answer to your question, you know, when did I know broadcasting was going to be the way, I interviewed for a lot of jobs when I came out of the Marines and got none, and I was beginning to get desperate. You know, I was working odd jobs to keep my head above water. I got what -- looking back on it -- amounted to a tryout with the Houston Chronicle. This was the big thing. The Chronicle was the biggest newspaper. And here I was within spitting distance of the dream at the Chronicle, but the Chronicle owned a radio station, a big 50,000 watt radio station. Looking back on it, they quickly figured out -- I think partly because I was such a poor speller -- that I wasn't going to be a newsroom star at the Houston Chronicle. But I had worked at the radio station in Huntsville for three years so I went to work, if you will, at the Chronicle's radio station. And when I got to the radio station -- this was not my dream job, it was just -- it was a full-time job, full-time work. A guy named Bob Hart was the news director there, and he gave me a break. He put me on and I loved it from the second I got into it. I mean, this was a real reporting job! I covered city hall, police beat, local courts. It was real reporting. Real beat reporting.

I basically wrote newscasts for Bob Hart, the news director, but he also let me do some on-the-air work. Looking back on it, he shouldn't have done that because I was terrible. Yes, I had all this radio experience and I thought I was good, but I had worked at a 250 watt radio station. Now I was in big time radio -- certainly for Texas. But frankly, I loved it so and Bob Hart gave me enough leeway that I became pretty good at it. So I thought I'd found my home. No longer did I dream of being a newspaper person. Once in a while I'd say, "I'm going to hitchhike to San Francisco. I'm going to work in San Francisco." But in my heart of hearts I knew I wasn't. I had a good, steady job. It didn't pay much but it was a good job. From that time on, this would have been about 1954-55, 55-56, I was hooked on radio and I loved it. I broke stories about hurricanes, did murder cases. It was pretty exciting stuff. I became the news director at the radio station.

That led eventually to being offered a job, which I almost did not take, at the television station in Houston, KHOU. I had been at the radio station five or six years. I was making, I think, $9,200 a year, which was not good but I was making it. The television job paid about the same but it was guaranteed. The radio wasn't guaranteed so I shifted to television more or less by accident. The television station in Houston that I went to work for was the third station in the market but it was trying to build a news reputation. It was a team effort. We took the station from third to first in the ratings, which even then was a big deal. We covered the big hurricane fairly well. Somebody at CBS saw and heard it and they hired me at CBS.

Do you remember what they saw and heard?

Dan Rather: This was the largest hurricane on record, Hurricane Carla in the fall of 1961. I had taken our operation to Galveston Island, which was in the path of the hurricane and we eventually became marooned on Galveston Island, and we broadcast around the clock from there. We were a CBS affiliate and because it was such a huge hurricane, CBS began monitoring what we were doing. That's about as much as I know about it. The hurricane was my great break. It was the break from a local affiliated station to coming to the network.

After this long journey through school, through college, radio stations, television stations, in 1961 you showed up at CBS News in New York. What went through your mind the first time you stepped into CBS News at 420 Lexington Avenue? What were you thinking?

Dan Rather: As corny as it may sound, I was really excited and I had a big sense of being honored to be there. I didn't know anybody there. I knew the names. Charles Collingwood was still there, Eric Sevareid was there, Winston Burdett, all the big names were there, but I didn't know anybody. But I was thrilled to be there. I wasn't scared, but one look around and just a half day there told me that I was going to have to work harder than I'd ever worked, and I considered myself a pretty hard worker. I was going to have to work smarter than I'd ever worked, and I was going to have to raise my whole game in ways that I hadn't even imagined before I got there. But as it was with first getting into college, once there I was determined to make it. I had no idea how I was going to make it, but I didn't come this far not to stick.

There are a lot of smart people out there with a lot of potential who get opportunities and still don't make it. You got that opportunity. You made it. Why do you think so?

Dan Rather: I always come back to persistence

Somebody once said, you know, "It's good to be smart, brilliance is even better, but persistence will trump them both if it comes down to that." My whole professional life has taught me of the importance of "if you have a goal don't give up on it. If you have a dream, don't let the dream die." That what's absolutely essential is a fierce blinding determination to make it, and it doesn't always have to manifest itself in aggressive ways. But the persistence of just putting one foot in front of the other and just keep on keeping on no matter what the odds, no matter how dark it looks, just say, "Well listen, if I can make one more minute, I can make one more hour, I can make one more day, make one more week, make one more month." It's impossible to overestimate the importance of that in my opinion and based on my experience. Somebody half jokingly said, you know, "Ninety percent of life is just showing up." I think there's something to that. I think if you show up, that's a lot of it. And then if you stick to it, those are, I think, the two biggest things. Go for it, stick to it. Listen, God's grace and luck plays a lot, timing, all of those things come into it, but I think they're infinitesimal compared to sticking to it.

What makes a good reporter, Dan?

Dan Rather: Curiosity and love of the story. What makes a reporter is being curious, wanting to know what's going on, wanting to know how things work, how they really work as opposed to how they may appear to work. You have to be curious to be a good reporter. And I think you have to have a love of stories and story telling. That's one reason why I think an early introduction to books and making yourself a lifetime reader is essential to being a good reporter.

What is the responsibility? What is the burden that goes with being a reporter?

Dan Rather: I never feel it's a burden.

The responsibility is to be accurate and fair. The twin pillars on which good -- never mind great -- reporting, are built: accuracy and fairness. They work together. I pause to say this because I don't want to be misinterpreted. If one aspires to daily journalism, which was always my aspiration, and it's still my first love -- I do a lot of different kinds of reporting, including trying to write books now, but daily journalism is my biggest -- speed is also important. You have to be able to think fast, write fast. But that does remind me, speaking of writing, the bedrock of the craft is writing. Anything in journalism, that's where it begins. And that's pretty much what it's about. That's the bedrock of the craft. A lot of people who aspire to jobs, or careers, lifetimes in radio or television, tend to overlook that fact, and it is a fact. The best producers in television, almost without exception, are good writers.

You are in a profession with absolute deadlines, speaking to millions of people who sometimes are hanging on your every word. How do you handle the stress of that situation?

Dan Rather: I don't consider that I have a stressful job. I've had stressful jobs and this is not one of them. And I say this with humility. I have worked stripped to my waist in 100-degree temperature working for 12, 14 hours a day for below minimum wage with no benefits, thank you very much. That's stress! And I've worked a derrick floor with slippery equipment all around you, and back-breaking work that you can only do about four hours at a stretch. That's stress! This job, I don't have stress. But I think I know the spirit in which you asked the question. There is a responsibility of being as accurate, being as far as you can be, and there is the responsibility of people listening and watching, and depending on you to be trustworthy, and to deliver work of integrity. That's pressure. Maybe that's synonymous with stress. And sometimes you feel that pressure. It's the pressure to deliver for people who are depending on you. But the way it translates to me, it's also the pressure of that voice within you, and I have this voice, and it speaks to me continuously. "Listen, this is what you dreamed of doing, now you're able to do it, and you've been able to do it for a long time" What a tremendous lesson that is. So you have to do it to the best of your ability. Just pretty good is not good enough. I'm a perfectionist without apology. I've never achieved perfection but I'm always trying, always striving for perfection. I do think that I owe that to the audience, but I don't see any stress.

Journalism is a joy for me, and why wouldn't it be?

I think the pressure is greatest when it's a big, breaking news story, an important story, and have a deadline every nanosecond, you're live, you don't have time to write it out. You don't have time to think it out most of the time. And if you're at the anchor desk, the way it works for me is you're sitting there at an anchor desk with a camera in front of you, a microphone in front of you, an ear piece in each ear. You have a director in one ear and a producer in the other ear with a constant flow of information. Where the job is to absorb this incoming information and continue to talk at the same time. You usually have people at your side who may get the information. Now it sounds crazy. In some ways it is crazy, but that's the job and you compartmentalize. One part of your head is listening to the director when you have to. Part of it is listening to the producer when you have to. Part of it is taking the card off your side if you have to and at the same time keeping your focus sharp enough to continue to talk and don't see yourself talking to millions of people. You see yourself talking to one person in their living room, who says, "Okay, the embassy in East Africa has been blown up. I want to know what's happening. I've tuned in to CBS. I've tuned in to Dan Rather and his team and I'm here in my living room. I want to know what's going on."

The pressure is that responsibility to deliver all of this information coming into you. If there's someone who says, "I just don't see how that works, how can you do that," I can only say, "It's not that hard. Like anything else, it comes from practice and experience and it's a whole lot easier than some things I've done." But you do feel the pressure. You also feel the pressure in one other way, which is maybe worth mentioning.

There are people who take the position that they want you to report the news the way they want you to report it and if you don't report it the way they want you to report it, then they're going to make you pay a price. They're going to mentally, symbolically, hang a sign around you that you're something bad. And that pressure comes from a lot of directions and a lot of different ways. And I would say at the network level at least, resisting that pressure, having enough experience and enough sense to know the pressure is there, and to have the courage (and I think that is the word) to resist it when it's inappropriate, is a very special kind pressure, a unique kind of pressure that works on you, both your mind and heart, in rather insidious ways. And I found over the years that among the biggest challenges in my job is to resist that kind of pressure.

Inevitably, doing what you have done over so many years, there's going to be criticism and controversy. How do you handle that?

Dan Rather: When it comes to criticism I don't handle it very well. I don't know anybody who does. I have had enough experience over the years that at this age and stage I think I have it in reasonably good perspective. The kind of criticism that gives me the most difficulty is the kind of reasoned, well-intentioned criticism that I know is right. I say, "You know, I deserved that criticism." That's the toughest for me to handle, but you can't do this anywhere at or near the top and not get a lot of criticism. If you have any sense at all, you'll realize that a lot of the criticism is justified. What takes some thought is to separate criticism that has a special political, ideological, or some other special pleading from the rank and file viewers and listeners who register a criticism that you need to take seriously.

Controversy? You can't be any kind of reporter worthy of the name and avoid controversy completely. You can't be a good reporter and not be fairly regularly involved in some kind of controversy. And I don't think you can be a great reporter and avoid controversy very often, because one of the roles a good journalist plays is to tell the tough truths as well as the easy truths. And the tough truths will lead you to controversy, and even a search for the tough truths will cost you something. Please don't make this play or read as any complaint, it's trying to explain this goes with the territory if you're a journalist of integrity. That if you start out a journalist or if you reach a point in journalism where you say, "Listen, I'm just not going not touch anything that could possibly be controversial," then you ought to get out.

What's most important to you and why?

Dan Rather: My family is important to me, and the longer I go, the more I know that's important to me. My friends are important to me and my country is important to me. Those are the really important things, and the longer I go the more I know that that's true, and the less reluctant I am to say it straightforwardly. Beyond those fundamental things, what's important to me is my work. I have a passion for my work. I love my work. And I wouldn't argue with anyone who put forth the case that maybe my work is too important to me, but I answer you honestly when I say my work is important to me.

Finally, what does the American Dream mean to you?

Dan Rather: The American Dream to me is freedom. It begins with freedom. It's the freedom to dream. The American Dream is the freedom to dream. The American Dream is being free to pursue the life you want to pursue. Not what somebody else may have in mind for you. Now once you go beyond the fundamental fact of the American Dream is freedom, it's the freedom to be, to dream, to pursue whatever you want to pursue. It takes different forms. It begins with sweet liberty, dreams of freedom, but it continues with such things as work and wealth, dream to pursue a career, to dream to be a journalist, be one. It's also to dream of fame and fortune if that's what you want to do, to dream of service, to be of service to other people. The point is that what makes America a new thing in history is the dedication to both the idea and the ideal that we can have a constitutional republic based on the principle of democracy. It's multi-religious, multi-ethnic, there's tremendous diversity, at the same time have enough unity to ensure that to the maximum degree humanly possible everyone has the freedom to pursue their own dreams. That's the American Dream.

I've got to go folks.

It was terrific. Thank you.