Dan Rather

Daniel Irvin Rather Jr., born on Halloween in 1931, is an American journalist and former anchor of the national evening news. He got his start in Texas and first gained national recognition in September 1961, when his reporting on Hurricane Carla helped prompt an evacuation that saved thousands of lives. Over his career, he covered major global events including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the September 11 attacks, the Iraq War, and the war on terror. He was also on the ground in Dallas in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

That work earned him a promotion at CBS News, where he became White House correspondent in 1964. He later served as a foreign correspondent in London and Vietnam before returning to the White House beat. He covered Richard Nixon’s presidency, including the president’s trip to China, the Watergate scandal, and Nixon’s resignation.

In 1981, Rather took over as anchor of the CBS Evening News, a role he held for 24 years. Alongside Peter Jennings at ABC and Tom Brokaw at NBC, he was part of the “Big Three” nightly news anchors from the 1980s into the early 2000s. He also regularly contributed to 60 Minutes.

Dismissal from CBS News

Rather left the anchor desk in 2005 after the Killian documents controversy, where he aired unauthenticated documents in a report about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. He stayed with CBS until 2006, when he was let go. In September 2007, he filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS and its former parent company Viacom, claiming he was made a scapegoat for the story. A New York state appeals court dismissed the suit in September 2009, and the state’s highest court refused to revive it in January 2010.

Post-CBS career

From 2006 to 2013, Rather hosted Dan Rather Reports on AXS TV (then called HDNet), a 60 Minutes-style investigative program. He also hosted other AXS TV projects, including Dan Rather Presents, which offers in-depth reporting on broad topics like mental health and adoption, and The Big Interview with Dan Rather, featuring long-form conversations with musicians and entertainers. In January 2018, he began hosting an online newscast, The News with Dan Rather, on the Young Turks YouTube channel. Since 2021, he has written the Substack newsletter “Steady,” which published 170 posts in 2024.

Early life

Rather was born on October 31, 1931, in Wharton County, Texas, to Daniel Irvin Rather Sr., a ditch digger and pipe layer, and Byrl Veda Page. Neither parent finished high school, but both were avid readers. The family moved to Houston when he was a child, and he attended Lovett Elementary School and Hamilton Middle School.

He graduated from John H. Reagan High School in Houston in 1950, where he played football. Aspiring to be a reporter, his mother encouraged him to go to college and become the first in the family to earn a degree. He hitchhiked to Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville, Texas, and walked onto the football team.

When he didn’t get an athletic scholarship, he shifted to journalism and worked part-time jobs to pay tuition. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1953 and was editor of the school newspaper, The Houstonian. He was also a member of the Caballeros, the founding group of the Epsilon Psi chapter of the Sigma Chi fraternity.

While in college, he called junior high, high school, and Sam Houston State football games for KSAM-FM radio in Huntsville. After graduating, he briefly attended South Texas College of Law in Houston. In January 1954, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and was sent to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, but was soon discharged because he had rheumatic fever as a child, a fact he had omitted during enlistment.

Early career

Rather began his journalism career in 1950 as an Associated Press reporter in Huntsville, Texas. He later worked for United Press (1950–1952), several Texas radio stations, and the Houston Chronicle (1954–1955). Around 1955, he wrote a piece on heroin; with the Houston Police’s help, he tried a dose of the drug, calling it “a special kind of hell.” He spent four seasons as the play-by-play announcer for the University of Houston football team and, during the 1959 minor league baseball season, called games for the Texas League Houston Buffs.

In 1959, he began his television career on a weekly Coaches Show for the University of Houston on KTRK-TV, the ABC affiliate in Houston. In 1960, he was hired as the 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. news anchor and director of news for KHOU-TV, the local CBS affiliate. In September 1961, he covered Hurricane Carla for KHOU-TV, broadcasting from the National Weather Center in Galveston and showing the first radar image of a hurricane on TV. He came up with the idea of overlaying a transparent map on the radar screen to show the storm’s size.

Convinced of the danger, more than 350,000 people evacuated—the largest evacuation to that time—believed to have saved thousands of lives compared to a previous hurricane that killed 6,000 to 12,000. His live coverage was picked up by New York and national stations. Ray Miller, news director of KPRC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Houston, also mentored him early on. On February 28, 1962, Rather left Houston.