|
|
|
This week I’ve only had time for one idea. What is going to happen to Dan
Rather? Is he going to join Martha Stewart in the Celebrity Cellblock (male
division)? Is he going to become another PeeWee Herman, a disgraced celebrity
who gets a TV guest spot now and then provided he enters the studio by the back
door? Or will he…what? Or maybe…? It’s really another Nixon case. Nobody
knew what to do with him either.
The comparison to Nixon won’t seem overblown, I’m sure. Nixon was a ruler,
and so was Dan. Dan could do things that Nixon couldn’t. He could, for
instance, make facts disappear. In 2001 when the hottest news in town was the
connection between Congressman Gary Condit and the disappearance of his intern
Chandra Levy, Dan refused to mention it in all the months that went by before the
girl’s body was finally found, with Condit stonewalling the investigation
every step of the way. Condit was a fellow Democrat like Dan and his activist
daughter Robin and the whole thing became a non-event on CBS, even though the
rest of the world knew all about it. The Emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes on
this one.
Dan’s lack of curiosity about Condit was more than atoned for by his bulldog
approach to the question of George Bush’s Air National Guard service. He
couldn’t get enough of it. It never seemed to bother him that nobody really gave
a damn about what Bush did or didn’t do in the 60’s. He joined a Silk
Stocking regiment of the Texas Air National Guard and gambled on the Guard not being
called up for Vietnam duty. An electorate that had overlooked Bill Clinton’s
maneuvers to take the risk out of this whole process wasn’t about to get
uptight about W.’s more conventional approach to the problem. It wasn’t all that
bad, after all. 366 hours flying jets should have enabled him to fly a plane
inside Yankee Stadium. It was something that people got killed doing too,
like Dean Martin’s son. Not riskless, in other words.
However Dan and his friends were in a rage over the reaction to John Kerry’s
swaggering about his mighty deeds of valor in cleaning up the Mekong Delta.
He seemed to be singing an endless series of choruses from “The Impossible Dream
”, “to go where the brave dare not venture” “to fight for the right without
question or pause”, “to…march into hell for that heavenly cause”, and all
like that. This was Bombastes Furioso from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way
to the Forum” turned loose and it was more than people could take. They rose
up from his past to refute his tales of heroism, and by the time they were
through, he was beginning to look more like The Sad Sack than Audie Murphy.
Dan and his fellow Democrats swore revenge for the destruction of their hero
and went to work on Bush’s record, which he had never claimed was outstanding,
just respectable. Not satisfied with what they could find in the actual
files, they went to work to embellish them, calling in the aid of Jim the Penman,
it seems. It’s always a temptation in these cases. Howard Hunt and Gordon
Liddy succumbed to it in the Watergate case, cooking up a few phony diplomatic
messages to implicate the Kennedy administration in the murder of Ngo Dinh
Diem in 1963. The thinking was the same: If they didn’t write them, they should
have, because they fitted.
I confess I’ve had my investigative instincts aroused by all those funny
little pieces of paper that are being fought over with such fury. It reminds me
so much of my bank days contending with the Nigerian wiseguys and their dubious
documents. If they’d been retained, the memos would have sailed through like
gilt-edged bonds. They knew how to do a signature right.
With that background you can imagine that I seized on the memos like a hungry
puppy and began worrying them to pieces. I looked at them right side up and
wrong side up. I compared them to the huge stack of my own 70’s reports, of
which I had kept copies for my memoirs. I took some of the Bush memos and
re-typed them, first on my typewriter and then on my PC. I learned a lot about
them.
The most instinctive reaction I had, just from looking at the memos, was the
little jolt I got from seeing the superscripts. I could have predicted it. I
was so unused to this refinement that I had gone to some pains to remove it
from the PC, for the simple reason that to a guy who grew up with typewriters
it didn’t look right even if my own computer was doing it. Our police
typewriters didn’t have superscripts, the Army didn’t have them in my day, and I was
convinced the Texas Air National Guard didn’t have them in George Bush’s day.
But computers had them.
The curly apostrophes appearing in the memos are also not to be found in the
hundreds of typewritten 70’s pages in my file. When I typed the memos on my
typewriter, which happens to be a new model, the lines ended at about 75% of
the length they ran in the CBS copies. This of course was due to lack of
kerning, or squeezing letters together, which enabled a computer to get more words
into a ten-pitch line of type than a typewriter could with the same typeface
and the same margins. When I typed the memos on my computer the lines matched
up exactly with those I was copying.
Setting aside the Nigerians, who actually were pretty adept, the bank forgers
I encountered were often quite capable of making similar silly mistakes, so I
wasn’t shocked when I found that someone had tried to produce a 70’s
document using 21st Century equipment. It wasn’t quite as bad as selling Columbus’
letter to Queen Isabella announcing the discovery of America, in English, but
it was close enough. Note: I just had a raised “st” appear two lines up. I
went to Auto Format on the Tools menu and, again, unchecked the superscript
box.
Rather has reacted with arrogance to the suggestion that he was engaged in a
frameup that went wrong. His new line is that the memos aren’t important, it’
s Bush’s Guard career that’s the real issue. Forgery doesn’t count, in
other words. He wants Bush to answer his questions, but he isn’t answering any.
I once saw a reference in print to the trial which brought down “the towering
…edifice known as Oscar Wilde” and it has stayed in my mind. Not that I
would compare Dan Rather to Oscar Wilde in any other way, but if he was a
towering edifice, then Dan is even more of one. Wilde was important to literature,
but Dan creates, or at least shapes, the opinions of millions of people who
have never met him. It’s unlikely he’ll ever stand trial in a court, but a
trial is taking place now in millions of conversations and meditations around the
country. He is being found guilty of bearing false witness and not only
that, his whole faction, that is, the liberal grouping in the U.S., is being found
guilty with him. I’ve said there’ll be no legal consequences of this, but
looking at the Martha Stewart case, that gives me a twinge of regret. Martha
only lied to a handful of investigators and got jail time, but Dan lied to a
whole world and all he’ll get will be early retirement. Could I replace him, I
wonder? I could read a teleprompter as good as he can.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
