Dan Rather

Dan Rather

Dan Irvin Rather Jr. is an American journalist and former national evening news anchor. Rather began his career in Texas, becoming a national name after his reporting saved thousands of lives during Hurricane Carla in September 1961. In 1981, Rather was promoted to news anchor for the CBS Evening News, a role he occupied for 24 years. He left the anchor desk in 2005 following the Killian documents controversy in which he presented unauthenticated documents in a news report on President George W. Bush’s Vietnam War–era service in the National Guard. In 2007, Rather filed a USD 70 million lawsuit against CBS, its former parent company Viacom, and CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves.

About Dan Rather in brief

Summary Dan RatherDan Irvin Rather Jr. is an American journalist and former national evening news anchor. Rather began his career in Texas, becoming a national name after his reporting saved thousands of lives during Hurricane Carla in September 1961. In 1981, Rather was promoted to news anchor for the CBS Evening News, a role he occupied for 24 years. On the cable channel AXS TV, Rather hosted Dan Rather Reports, a 60 Minutes–style investigative news program, from 2006 to 2013. In January 2018, he began hosting an online newscast called The News with Dan Rather on The Young Turks’ YouTube channel. Rather was one of the \”Big Three\” nightly news anchors in the U.S. from the 1980s through the early 2000s. He left the anchor desk in 2005 following the Killian documents controversy in which he presented unauthenticated documents in a news report on President George W. Bush’s Vietnam War–era service in the National Guard. In 2007, Rather filed a USD 70 million lawsuit against CBS, its former parent company Viacom; CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves; Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News. On September 21, 2009, Rather’s lawyers claimed that Bush’s military service would be proven to be a sham and Rather would be vindicated. On May 18, 2012, Rather appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher and claimed he had been fired for reporting a story about Bush’s year of absence from the reserve unit he served with, and that the news corporations had been’very uncomfortable’ with running the story.

On January 12, 2010, New York’s court of last resort, the New York Court of Appeals, refused to reinstate Rather’s USD 70m breach-of-contract lawsuit againstCBS Corp. He was also a member of the Caballeros, the founding organization of the Epsilon Psi chapter of the Sigma Chi fraternity. He graduated in 1950 from John H. Reagan High School in Houston. In 1953, Rather earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville, where he was editor of the school newspaper, The Houstonian. He served as foreign correspondent in London and Vietnam over the next two years before returning to the White House correspondent position. In 1954, Rather enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to the San Diego Recruit Depot. He was soon discharged, because he was found to have rheumatic fever as a child. Later he was a reporter for several Texas radio stations. Around 1955, he tried a heroin dose of a drug he had omitted from a story on the Houston Police Department because he had a drug overdose. He also worked for KSAM-FM radio, calling junior high and high school football games, and calling junior college football games in college. In 1956, Rather briefly attended South Texas College of Law and the University of Texas at San Diego. In 1958, Rather joined the Associated Press as a reporter.