The headquarters of Dan Rather Reports is a small, disheveled space just off Times Square in Manhattan, cluttered with temporary office equipment and distinguished by a low drop ceiling that evokes the abode of an insurgency of pamphleteers. In a far corner is Rather’s office. Much of his old furniture has been transplanted from CBS, and a khaki trench coat from his globetrotting days hangs nostalgically in a nook. On a sea chest rests a plaque bearing advice from Benjamin Franklin: “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you were dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.” Rather is enmeshed in a $70 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against CBS that could help determine how he will be remembered, but the quote registers more as inspiration than epitaph. “I’m still trying to do great journalism,” he told me. “I don’t feel I’ve ever really done that. I keep hoping there’s the potential. Kennedy, Vietnam, Watergate, Afghanistan, any number of exposés for 60 Minutes, Tiananmen Square, 9/11—all of that is part of the record, which is not yet complete.”

Like a lot of things in Rather’s world, Reports was conceived as an ode to his “polar star,” Edward R. Murrow, and specifically as an update on See It Now, Murrow’s landmark television show from the 1950s. Notwithstanding the persistent attempts over the years to decipher Rather’s personality and the odd moments that have pocked his career, his allegiance to Murrow is often missed, or misunderstood. Rather, who turned seventy-seven in October, has been imitating Murrow ever since he was a child bedridden for months with rheumatic fever, inhabiting the universe of Murrow’s radio dispatches from Europe during World War II. When he took over the CBS anchor chair from Walter Cronkite in 1981,...

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