What Unites Us

by Dan Rather

  Steady

  It was a winter night in late 1973 and, as was common during those days, I was coming home well after my children had gone to bed. My wife, Jean, was waiting for me at the small kitchen table in our town house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. She’d set out a late dinner for me (to the best of my recollection, her famous Mexican salad). I sat down, and she sat down across from me. Looking me straight in the eye, she asked, “Are we going to be okay?”

  It was a fair and honest question, and one for which I could not offer any of the assurances that I wished I had. She had heard the concern from neighbors and friends, whisperings that CBS News and, in particular, I, as the chief White House correspondent, were out on a limb on this Watergate story. “We have everything on the table,” I said. I told her there was no place for us to run. “Either history is going to prove us right, or I will be looking for a new line of work.”

  This concern was not limited to the home front. The Washington bureau chief for CBS News, Bill Small, had alerted me that some very big names in the division, correspondents and executives, had come to him and said something to the effect of, “Rather may be a good reporter, but we think he bought a bad one here.” I must stress that in the newsroom this was not the prevailing belief. My fellow White House correspondent Bob Pierpoint and I felt we had most of our colleagues’ and superiors’ support. And none more than Small himself. He was a rock of steadiness in our corner. As was the president of CBS News, Richard Salant. So we pressed forward.

  But you couldn’t be human and not worry. The Washington Post had led the story from the beginning, and we were following up. At least at first, there weren’t many news organizations as invested as we were. I worried that the New York Times, which had excellent reporters, was being circumspect. What did they know that I didn’t? It was pretty clear that the Nixon White House had a strategy of convincing the public that we were making far too much of a minor story. They tried to destabilize us. But in the end they failed, as they would eventually fail with the country at large.

  At first, most of America wasn’t paying very much attention to Watergate, but as developments began to tumble forth, the public became transfixed. What is so remarkable is how steady the nation remained during this constitutional crisis. In many other societies, a commander in chief so weakened would have destabilized the entire country, leading to riots, unrest in the streets, and maybe even the risk of a coup with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. None of that happened, and I think most people were not surprised that our checks and balances remained resilient. I felt a supreme belief among the citizenry that we were a nation of laws and not of men. If President Richard Nixon had committed a crime, he would have to face the consequences, and our institutions of government would hold. We got refresher courses on the legal intricacies of impeachment, and when the end finally came, it was a remarkably peaceful transfer of power from President Nixon to President Gerald Ford.

  The steadiness of the nation contrasted sharply with the increasing unsteadiness of President Nixon—the full measure of which we would not comprehend until after he’d left office. Later revelations would expose the frightening extent to which he was fueled by paranoia and lurched from rash decision to imprudent action. It was a stunning fall for an intelligent and accomplished politician, a former congressman, senator, and two-term vice president. Nixon, it turned out, had a fundamental unsteadiness in his character—a tragic flaw befitting a Shakespearean character that would ultimately prove his undoing.

  When a nation sits atop the world order—and no nation in modern history has grown to become as powerful as the United States—that position comes with great responsibility. Yet danger lies where, as with Watergate, there is a reckless and impetuous hand at the helm. While we have a reputation as a young and sometimes brash republic, our greatest leaders have been men and women of prudence, wisdom, and composure. They have not been afraid to act boldly, but in most cases they have done so with discipline. They have been able to absorb shock and disappointment with resolution, steadfastness, and endurance. Our United States would never have survived against the incredible odds facing its birth and maturation without this sense of equilibrium, this steadiness.

  As schoolchildren we learn of how George Washington held together his ragged army in the cold and forbidding Valley Forge on the road to independence. The grace and poise with which he established the precedents of the American presidency are equally remarkable. Without the brilliant determination of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, could have ended the American experiment forever. And while Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often remembered for his passion and the soaring rhetoric of his speeches, in covering him I was always struck by his calm and strategic mind as he carefully planned out his campaign for justice.

  Don’t get me wrong. Our nation must also embrace volatile voices. Some of our greatest artists and thinkers were men and women of turbulent and explosive minds and temperament. These are the cauldrons in which new ideas are formed. We need to be a society that hears the sometimes uncomfortable notes of radicalism. We need entrepreneurs who are willing to risk everything on wild dreams. But those risks must not be allowed to engulf the whole in chaos, especially in the governance of our country.

  It will come as no surprise to those who have worked with me that one of my favorite words is “steady.” It is the word I reached for when I had heard that President Kennedy had been shot. It was the word that I cautioned the world to heed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as we were recoiling in a state of shock and horror. Many times I felt anxiety closing in, when my heartbeat quickened and my world began to wobble, and I repeated to myself, “Steady.”

  It is a word that I learned from my father, on account of its being one of his favorite words as well. When I was a child, I was stricken with rheumatic fever, and my parents feared that it would prove debilitating or even fatal. I was confined to my bed under doctor’s orders and I have distinct memories of my mother weeping for my fate. She tried to cry as quietly as possible and out of earshot, but I heard her and it was frightening. The doctor suggested I keep my physical movement to a minimum, for fear that the disease would engulf my heart. It is difficult for a young boy to remain still in bed when the sun is shining and the world seems to be passing him by outside his bedroom window. I sometimes whimpered at the injustice of my fate, and my father would come into my room to stand over me, lovingly but firmly. “Steady, Danny,” he would say. “Steady.” The words were clear and deliberate, and they were soothing. At the time, I was too young to fully absorb his simple lesson.

  To keep me occupied, my parents moved a radio into my bedroom, and it is there that I met my childhood hero, the great CBS News war reporter Edward R. Murrow. I listened to him for hours as he broadcast from London during the Blitz. These were very frightening times when it seemed that the world would succumb to the forces of evil. But the urgency of Murrow’s voice, his signature opening—“This is London”—distracted my fevered mind and transported me from my small room in working-class Houston to the rooftops of Great Britain, where the stakes were bigger than my own. As the punishing sounds of a German aerial attack echoed in the background, Murrow described one of the most admirable features of the British character, the ability to stay steady. He told of thousands of people queuing up to enter the bomb shelters with order and a spirit of purpose. Murrow painted the picture with calmness and care. He was pretty darn steady himself.

  I listened to Murrow and many others throughout the entire war, as I was slowed by another bout of rheumatic fever. In the early years of the war, the news was often grim. The dispatches were largely of setbacks, in Europe and then, after Pearl Harbor, in the Pacific. But slowly, the tides of war shifted. My lessons in world geography still consisted of obscure European towns and far-flung Pacific archipelagoes, but instead of datelines of Allied defeats, they became locations of stirring if bloody victories. I eme
rged from my illness with no long-term consequences to my health, and the United States emerged victorious at war. I had witnessed the great pendulum of personal and national fortune swing in the right direction, and I was armed with the lesson of my father, my hero Murrow, and my country: Stay “steady.”

  Even as I was growing up amid turmoil, I had a sense that a very different era had preceded my birth. The Roaring Twenties were related to me in stories that seemed to be of a distant time, although they were but a few years earlier. It was nicknamed the “decade of normalcy” and it had been anything but. It was a time of heady, giddy confidence. A Great War won (hailed at the time as the war to end all wars), and a stock market that only went up. And then it all crashed, leaving my parents and their generation knowing far too well the meaning of another important lesson in the human condition: the cost of arrogance.

  Luckily the United States found itself under President Franklin Roosevelt, one of the most unwavering leaders in our history. In his first inaugural address, he exhorted his fellow citizens to respond to the despair of the Great Depression with steadiness and courage: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is . . . fear itself.” But there is more to the quote. Roosevelt went on to link the action of that moment in history with the American tradition of resolve in the face of crisis. He called this fear “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.” President Roosevelt’s steadiness gave the nation the confidence it needed to overcome the twin challenges of economic hardship and war.

  The very structure of our national government was conceived with steadiness in mind. Our Constitution was the product of the havoc that had beset the country under the weaker structure of the Articles of Confederation. But our founders, who had chafed under a monarchy, also worried about arrogance, and thus built a steady government with checks and balances on power to protect against malignant recklessness. Our House of Representatives—big, boisterous, and elected frequently—was set up to channel the changing passions of the populace, whereas the Senate was to be a place of deliberation. Our president was to be independently elected, but accountable to the other branches of government. An independent judiciary was to be able to rise above the pettiness of politics. Furthermore, through the federal system, the states would serve as their own “laboratories of democracy,” to quote the great Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis.

  It has worked remarkably well, but we have sometimes, over the course of our history, lost our way into arrogance and unsteadiness. These are the flip sides of what is often referred to as American exceptionalism. It is true that we are a unique nation with a unique history. However, that does not bestow on us a birthright of superiority. When we have believed in our own invincibility, we have gotten into trouble.

  I can vividly remember how, with the end of World War II, the national psyche of the United States brimmed with an unbridled confidence. Yes, the world was deeply damaged, the rise of communism loomed as an existential threat, and there were economic and social concerns here at home. But there was also a belief that the United States could solve any problem and conquer any challenge. In that confidence were the seeds of a looming conceit.

  The Korean War, the war of my young adult life—called “the forgotten war” for a reason—is one to which we should all pay closer attention. Stuck between the glorious retellings of World War II and the contentious debate over Vietnam, the Korean conflict is often seen as tangential. I see it as transformative—for me personally, but also for the country because it changed the United States in fundamental ways.

  Up until that point, when it came to war, America won. It always won (the Southern states in the Civil War being a notable exception). And why, at that time, would the country think otherwise? We had just fought a global two-ocean conflict and vanquished our enemies. In the years that followed, we continued to win everywhere—militarily, economically, socially, culturally. We were on a roll. Unstoppable. And then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, came the North Korean invasion. Our allies in South Korea were driven within a hairsbreadth of being pushed off the peninsula. And our armed forces were of little help at first. No one had realized how hollowed out and unprepared our military was.

  The myth of American invincibility after World War II had been pierced. And even though our military quickly re-formed itself with the draft and a bold amphibious landing at Inchon, that decisive battle descended into a bloody slog of a war that ended in stalemate. It was a far cry from the clarifying conclusion to World War II. Furthermore, the battles in Korea were playing out against a larger backdrop of overconfidence. The American commander, the conquering hero of World War II Douglas MacArthur, had wanted to take the war to China, but President Harry Truman disagreed. Relying on the constitutional principle of civilian control of the armed forces, Truman fired MacArthur. It is an action that has been praised by historians and legal scholars, but at the time it did not play well with large swaths of the public. Meanwhile, back on the home front, much of the public was also convinced that the country was crawling with Americans spying for the Soviet Union. It was a time of the frenzied witch hunts of McCarthyism. The unity of purpose that had existed just a few years earlier had dissolved into recriminations and suspicion.

  When the Korean War broke out, I was a student at the tiny Sam Houston State Teachers College, with a total enrollment of only about twenty-three hundred individuals. A large percentage of the male student body was either drafted or called up from the reserves, and I remember in particular a football teammate who left midseason. He returned, much faster than we expected, having been badly wounded. I was not eligible for the draft on account of my rheumatic fever as a child, but I felt the deep pull of a war that seemed to be my destiny to fight. It was how my friends felt as well. And I knew I was physically fit enough to serve, having started on my high school football team and even having had a brief stint on the squad in college. I was able-bodied and wanted to drop out of college to head to Asia to serve under the flag of my country. My mother would have none of it. Since I was the first in my family to attend college, she insisted, on familial pride, that a Rather would finish what he started.

  I enrolled and trained in the Army Reserve while hurrying to finish college. I took summer classes to speed up my graduation and then enlisted in the U.S. Marines. After failing to truthfully answer a question about my childhood illness, I was sent to boot camp. I had the damn fool idea I was going to go in as the lowest enlisted man and rise to the rank of officer. I dreamed of a glorious military career. I reported for duty in San Diego with the full confidence and swagger of a former high school athlete. I wince now to think back at my exaggerated sense of self-worth on account of having graduated from college. At boot camp, I was destined to crash into a wall of reality. The goal of the drill sergeants in basic training was to tear us down and rebuild us in their image. They pushed me so hard physically that I suddenly became aware of my limitations. They also worked us over psychologically—“You are nothing,” they would tell us. “You are insignificant” (although these sentiments were usually expressed in more colorful language).

  This was all much more difficult than I’d imagined, but I was determined to show my mettle. And slowly, I began doing well. Then, for the first time in eight years, I started to get severe aches in my lower extremities. I was sent to the Marine doctors on base. As one examined me, he asked as a matter of course if I had ever had rheumatic fever. I said yes. The examination stopped instantly, and he looked at me and asked, quite pointedly, “You had rheumatic fever?” I knew better than to lie. “Yes, sir. I did.” He walked away without uttering another word. I was pulled out of the ranks and sent to a “casual company”—“casual” being short for “casualty.” I was forbidden to train. But the Marines being the M
arines, no one sat around doing nothing. My job was to clean the noncommissioned officers’ latrine—for days on end.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but the Marines had sent a letter to my family doctor back in Houston, Louis Cope, asking about my medical record. He wrote back that I had indeed had rheumatic fever and he was appalled I had enlisted. I still have that letter. I was given a medical discharge, and one of the shortest and least distinguished careers in U.S. Marine history came to an end. I was humiliated and outraged. I knew I was fit to serve. I wanted to plead my case to the base commander. I got as far as an assistant who had no time or patience for my plight. I had never left Southern California. I would eventually see much war in my lifetime, far too much war. But I saw it carrying a reporter’s notebook instead of a rifle.

  So often when you feel most confident and most secure, you are in the greatest danger. After all, I had entered boot camp physically fit, having just graduated from college with good grades and a seemingly bright future. And I had found myself cleaning latrines. At the same time, my country, fresh off arguably the greatest military victory in history, was also bogged down in a land war in Asia and deep divisions at home. It was a kaleidoscope of events that was hard to handle and understand. I didn’t have the perspective then, but now I can see that the Korean War was the start of a significant change in the way the country felt about itself.

  We have never fully regained the confidence we felt at the end of World War II, or the unity. Korea led to a long and arduous path of questioning our place in the world. We did not always win wars, as we would soon have to relearn in Vietnam. We could not take our destiny for granted, as we began to realize under the shadow of the Cold War. There were deep ruptures and injustices within our nation, as we would see when the national spotlight shifted from the fissures of McCarthyism to the difficult struggle for civil rights.