http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15157
Who Is Dan Rather?
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 20, 2004
DAN RATHER HAS ALWAYS BEEN STRANGE. But as the veteran CBS Evening News anchor approaches his 73rd birthday this Halloween and the sunset of his career, the lengthening shadows cast by his latest controversy have begun to expose how eccentric, megalomaniacal and devoid of ethics and judgment he for decades has been.
In 1953, Rather graduated with a degree in journalism from Sam Houston State Teachers College. He had already been working for Associated Press and then United Press International and a few radio stations as a “stringer” reporting stories that happened in Huntsville north of Houston. But being in college gave Rather a semester-by-semester student deferment from being drafted into the Korean War.
After Rather graduated, “the way he got around being eligible for the draft was he joined a reserve unit – Army reserve,” wrote B.G. Burkett, co-author of the book Stolen Valor. Rather dropped out of the reserves as soon as the Korean War ended in armistice. Whether Rather used journalist or related politician connections to get into the Army reserves, as he would later accuse President George W. Bush of doing in the Texas Air National Guard, is unknown.
Former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg in his 2002 best-seller Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News described a confrontation with the anchorman: “Rather’s voice started quivering, and he told me how in his young days, he had signed up with the Marines – not once, but twice!”
This was inaccurate. Rather signed up once with the Army reserves and once with the U.S. Marines. Rather, wrote Burkett after studying his military record, “was discharged less than four months later on May 11, 1954 for being medically unfit… He couldn’t do the physical activity.” As a boy, Rather “had suffered from rheumatic fever,” reported veteran UPI journalist Wes Vernon.
Ever since Dan Rather has described himself as a former U.S. Marine, after spending roughly the same amount of time in Marine Corps training before being rejected that now-Senator John F. Kerry spent in Vietnam. “This,” wrote Burkett, “is like a guy who flunks out of Harvard running around saying he went to Harvard.”
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The above is an exerpt. Article describes a long history of questionable/outright unethical, behavior.
Ever wonder how he got the CBS anchor job?