Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 24, 1994 TAG: 9412010033
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRAZIER MOORE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Down-home Dan Rather tells of life in small-town Texas, where ``proper young ladies would blush at the word `intersection.' ''
And smokeless Dan Rather pays tongue-in-cheek tribute to the thing ``your wife and your mother would sooner shoot you than let you do'': chew tobacco.
That last topic arose during his recent appearance on ``Late Show with David Letterman.'' Thus did talk of Rather's just-published ``The Camera Never Blinks Twice: The Further Adventures of a Television Journalist'' lead, as night leads into day, to a tobacco-spitting demonstration by the CBS News anchor.
``You make that Tom Brokaw look like a little girl!'' crowed Letterman as Rather's Beechnut missile straight-lined into the spittoon. Moments earlier, he himself had sampled a few strands of Redman, which he had promptly swallowed.
``I thought to myself: God almighty!'' Rather reported the next day. ``He began to turn green.''
But Rather addresses weightier issues than rats and tobacco in his companion memoir to the 1977 bestseller, ``The Camera Never Blinks.''
In ``Twice'' (for which lifelong friend Mickey Herskowitz returned as collaborator), Rather tells of his secret journey in 1980 to cover the war in Afghanistan. Of camping in the desert during the Persian Gulf War a decade later. Of being on hand for the student revolt in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the U.S. military operation in Somalia.
``The book is made up of stories I tell friends and relatives,'' Rather said over lunch in a favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, his bold anchorman's voice dropping almost to a whisper for dramatic effect - ``when you've had a couple of sarsaparillas and you're talking in the shank of the evening.''
It was evenings, between 10 and 2, when Rather put the stories down, he said, ``although a few times I started writing and the next thing I knew, Jean was up fixing coffee and turning on the morning news. You get zoned and the hours fly by.''
Rather means for his book to give an inside look at the world of TV news.
It also lets him get a few things off his chest, such as his side of what happened during the ``Evening News'' blackout in September 1987 when (as he writes) ``six minutes of my life disappeared forever.''
And in a chapter entitled ``Whose Ambush Was It?'' Rather returns to the explosive 1988 interview with George Bush, when, on live TV, either (A) our hostile anchor spent nine long minutes badgering the vice president of the United States, or (B) a newsman doing his job tried to get a straight answer from a presidential candidate whose evasive tactics included crying foul and hurling his own cheap shots back at the interviewer.
So who was rude to whom? Rather makes a persuasive case for (B), and, as with the rest of the book, does so with unfailing courtesy.
``Good manners may seem an archaic approach for a journalist,'' said this man who still says ``ma'am.'' ``But I can recommend it - and do.''
If that's the prevailing lesson of ``The Camera Never Blinks Twice,'' its author is glad to get the word out.
``A friend called me when he saw the first copies on sale,'' Rather said. ``I went right away to the bookstore to take a look. It's a very special thing to see it. I felt like a child.
``But right behind that comes a sense of vulnerability,'' he confided. ``To have the book out there becomes a scary prospect.''
Nonsense. This is a book that anyone, even George Bush, can enjoy. And maybe even learn something from.
by CNB