Dan Rather, Still Wrong After All These Years The movie ‘Truth’ is as bogus as the original attempt to smear George W. Bush’s wartime service.By Dorothy Rabinowitz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/dan-rather-still-wrong-after-all-these-years-1445295792
Mr. Redford has come a long way since to his latest, namely the role of CBS’s Dan Rather, former network star and anchor of “60 Minutes II,” and the story of how Mr. Rather was ultimately forced out of the company thanks to the scandal in September 2004 after the airing of a segment called “For the Record.”
The creative minds behind “Truth”—based on a book by the CBS report’s producer, Mary Mapes—have wrapped Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes in a glow of heroic martyrdom so impenetrable there’s hardly a line not put to its service. When, toward the end, all involved in the report face firing, the film’s fatherly Dan Rather asks a young producer what made him want to go into journalism.
“You,” comes the answer.
The “60 Minutes II” report focused on the alleged special preferences that George W. Bush received as a member of the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s, not incidentally suggesting that he did his all to evade duty in Vietnam. The segment aired in the heat of the presidential-election contest between Democratic candidate John Kerry and George W. Bush.
As the exhaustive, and ultimately devastating, independent review of the affair that would become known as “Rathergate” showed, the segment had a way of ignoring facts that subverted its viewpoint. Among the luminaries interviewed was Ben Barnes, former speaker of the Texas House and Kerry supporter. Mr. Barnes said that he had tried, with a well-placed call, to secure a spot for Mr. Bush in the Texas Air National Guard, and that he regretted trying to arrange this preferential treatment because hundreds of people were on the Guard waiting list.
But Mr. Barnes, it turned out, had also said in his interview that he had no idea whether his phone call had any effect—such efforts weren’t always successful. That observation never made it on air. Neither did the fact—which came to light later—that producer Mary Mapes had heard testimony from authoritative sources that flat-out rebutted the claim that there was any list of candidates waiting for a place in the Guard.
All of this was as nothing compared with the now famous bombshell of the fabricated documents that the producers presented as part of their “For the Record” segment—material allegedly from Mr. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard superiors describing his dereliction of duty and official pressure to “sugarcoat” reports about his service.
The documents, which CBS posted online, were almost immediately exposed as forgeries. The final implosion came when Ms. Mapes’s chief source, Bill Burkett, provider of the documents—a retired Texas Air National Guard officer well-known for his bitter rants against the Bush family and for his efforts to discredit George W. Bush’s Guard service—later conceded on-air with Dan Rather in a follow-up report that he had misled the producers about the source of the documents. Documents that he nonetheless still maintained were genuine. Mr. Burkett had told producers that these papers had found their way to him from a range of providers—an anonymous overseas caller, and a mysterious woman, Lucy Ramirez, who had led him to a “dark skinned” stranger who had approached him at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Still, strange as this list may have seemed to producer Mapes and Dan Rather—a scene in “Truth” shows them rolling their eyes as Mr. Burkett recites his alleged real sources for the documents—both Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes would go on to assert their undeviating belief in the truth of those documents.
Mary Mapes after all had been thinking about Mr. Bush’s National Guard service since 1999. She had been interviewing, waiting, five long years to tell the world about her suspicions that George W. Bush received special treatment to avoid going to Vietnam.
Five years. What this says about the special zeal that drove this mission we can leave aside. Ms. Mapes would find her fateful opportunity, finally, with Mr. Burkett and his documents. To obtain them, she complied with Mr. Burkett’s special request that she connect him with the Kerry campaign so that he could provide advice on election strategy. Ms. Mapes promptly called Mr. Kerry’s top aide, Joe Lockhart, telling him about the important, unfriendly investigative story on George W. Bush that CBS was about to run, and about one of her chief sources, who could be of interest to the Kerry campaign—they might want to call him.
In the years since this affair, Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes have held fast to their regularly repeated assertions that whatever mistakes may have been made, they had reported a true story. “Truth”—starring Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes facing down the enemies of the good and the true—is the latest iteration of the Mapes-Rather claim that the validity of their story wasn’t compromised merely because the supporting testimony was fabricated.
It is a view evident in every aspect of “Truth,” in every sonorous speech about how freedom of inquiry and democracy itself were the real victims of the firings and resignations that ensued once the scandal broke. These recitals come with stupefying regularity, as do certain golden moments—not for the fainthearted—in which the characters of Ms. Mapes and Dan Rather profess their mutual love and trust in one another in their struggle for justice.
Despite its glamorization, this saga of a news investigation built on fabrications presented as important truth—truth that would have been accepted as such if only corrupt corporate types and conservative propagandists had not picked away at irrelevances like those lies—isn’t likely to persuade anyone with any knowledge of this history.
Throughout the speeches and hair-tearing and testaments to the undying integrity of Ms. Mapes and Mr. Rather, “Truth” reminds us at every turn of its mirror-image similarity to those documents derived from Mr. Burkett’s fabulous list of sources.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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