Before she went to work in the Reagan White House, Peggy Noonan worked for CBS and wrote radio commentaries for Dan Rather. This is what she wrote about him in her memoirs of the Reagan Years-- What I Saw at the Revolution (1990)
How to explain Rather. I knew him at a hard time, the early days when he first got the Cronkite job-- for a year after he was anchor they still called it the Cronkite Show in house-- and ratings were down. Then ratings went up and he expanded-- a sweetness came out, and a sensitivity, though there was still about him, I thought, a frustration, a bristling. I would think, This is the sadness of the man who got what he wanted. Now he's stuck with it. And is it enough, and was he right to want it all his life, and doesn't he really want to get back on the road and chase a lead and hustle a secretary for the sheriff's home number and get the story and get wrecked that night with the boy in the bar? Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants to be is what most reporters are, adult delinquents. That bristling quality-- it was restraint.
[pp. 27-28]
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I always found him to be open-minded and fair, and he became my friend and is to this day. He is, of course, the nemesis of the right, which is understandable given the history, but frustrating for his friends nonetheless. It sounds weak, or only sentimental, but i always want to say to them: he wouldn't be if you knew him. that he is a symbol of the Northeast liberal establishment is somewhat ironic. He was never of them-- i once asked one of the Bud Shads what Rather was like in Vietnam, and he sniffed, "He wore bright yellow socks."
Anyway, I think the real key is that Murrow is still the Everest of CBS, and Dan's a mountain climber. And Murrow didn't become Murrow by standing for nothing. It was Murrow who said, "Some stories don't have two sides."
[pp. 31-32]
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