During his 24 years as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather and the program’s leadership team gathered most days in a glass-walled section of the newsroom known as the fishbowl to hash out the rundown of that night’s broadcast.
Twenty years after he signed off from his anchor desk for the last time and two months shy of his 94th birthday — Mr. Rather was at it again. On a recent Wednesday, he was leading a 30-minute video call about the headlines of the day with a former CBS News colleague, Wayne Nelson, and Alice Maggin, a former ABC News producer.
And this was no idle chitchat. It was an editorial planning call for a newsletter that they publish three times a week.
The newsletter is called Steady — a word Mr. Rather said his father used to soothe him whenever he was ill as a child — and it has more than a half million subscribers.
That is a small fraction of the estimated 18 million households that watched Mr. Rather’s broadcast at its peak after he succeeded the vaunted Walter Cronkite on March 9, 1981, or even the roughly eight million households that tuned in to his final “CBS Evening News” broadcast on March 9, 2005.
But one thing has remained constant: Dan Rather continues to relish chasing the news.
“As Popeye used to say, ‘I am what I am,’” Mr. Rather said in one of several interviews for this article, including a lengthy talk at his sun-splashed home in Austin, Texas, which has a panoramic view of the State Capitol.
“I’m one of those people who love to work,” he said. His bearing and his voice remain strong, if a bit raspy, and his Texas twang is now more pronounced than during his 44 years at CBS News. “And I love the work that became my life’s work,” he added.
Mr. Rather’s journalism career began more than 70 years ago, when he did play-by-play on a radio station in Huntsville, Texas, the site of Sam Houston Teachers College (now Sam Houston State University). He went on to cover the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the civil rights movement — and later the Watergate hearings and the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, among other major events.
Mr. Rather said he felt a sense of obligation to shine a light on the second Trump administration.
“I remind myself of one of the basics of journalism: that my job is to hold the powerful accountable,” he said.
On Aug. 18, for example, Mr. Rather and his team published a 1,065-word essay with the headline “Democrats Have Finally Found the Fight” and the subhead “It was gifted to them by a rattled Donald Trump.” The essay was on the efforts by Democratic governors to counter President Trump’s charge to Texas to redraw its legislative districts with the goal of picking up five Republican seats in Congress.
“Trump is scared — scared for his majority and scared for how a Democratic Congress could at least slow some of his dangerous doings,” Mr. Rather wrote.
A week earlier, under the headline “Capital Punishment” and the subhead “Trump manufactures a non-crisis,” Mr. Rather’s essay focused on the president’s dispatching of F.B.I. agents and National Guard troops across Washington, D.C. Mr. Rather described the president as “acting all gruff and tough” in announcing those moves.
If lines like those are less subtle than the “on the one hand, on the other hand” pillars of objective journalism on which Mr. Rather’s evening news broadcast stood in its day, he said these times demanded a different journalistic voice.
“I like to be as subtle as I can,” he said. “But let’s face it, Trump is as subtle as a punch in the nose.”
The job of running a newsletter is time-consuming. Mr. Rather said he met with Ms. Maggin and Mr. Nelson seven days a week, including on holidays, almost always on videoconference.
Mr. Rather said the meetings provided a ray of sunshine amid some dark personal moments. Last year, two days before Thanksgiving, his wife, Jean, died at age 89 after a long illness. The couple had been married for 67 years. He has also faced a series of health and medical challenges in recent months and years, requiring extensive hospitalization. While he was recovering, it was not unusual for him to log onto the daily Steady news meeting from his hospital bed.
Mr. Rather and his team typically publish an essay each Monday or Tuesday, and Thursday or Friday. On Sundays, Steady offers lighter fare through a standing feature titled “Reason to Smile.”
Steady reports more than 530,000 subscribers. Mr. Rather declined to break down how many of those readers receive his essays and other content free via email, and how many pay $5 a month for a more enhanced package.
The process of assembling an essay begins with brainstorming with Ms. Maggin and Mr. Nelson, who are married. During the recent Wednesday meeting, that discussion included Mr. Trump’s efforts to settle the war in Ukraine, influence displays at the Smithsonian and “change the culture of the country,” as Mr. Rather put it.
Mr. Nelson was lobbying for a different idea: how Mr. Trump has seeded the White House press pool with representatives from news organizations typically supportive of his administration. Mr. Rather said he was open to the idea.
Mr. Nelson said that after he and Ms. Maggin rough out a piece, Mr. Rather comes in behind them to edit, often heavily. At other times, Mr. Rather picks up the pen first.
Tom Bettag, executive producer of Mr. Rather’s CBS broadcast from 1986 to 1991, said Mr. Rather “prides himself on working harder than anyone else” and viewed his work as “a public service.”
Mr. Rather left his CBS anchor chair under pressure. In a segment on “60 Minutes II” in 2004, he and colleagues had raised fresh questions about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War.
They did so using memorandums that attracted the ire of Republican bloggers — and that the network, and later a panel of outside investigators it convened, said it could not authenticate.
In a final report in January 2005, the panel cited a breakdown in standards by CBS in rushing the Bush segment onto the air. But it found no evidence of liberal bias — a frequent knock against Mr. Rather by his conservative critics — in the show’s preparation of the segment.
Mr. Rather said he still watched the network newscasts each evening — toggling among ABC, NBC and CBS. Of David Muir, anchor of the top-rated “ABC World News Tonight,” he said: “I give Muir credit. He goes to where the work is.” He also praised Tom Llamas, the new anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” calling him “a real talent.”
But he said he was ultimately rooting for John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, who were named co-anchors in January of the perennially third-place “CBS Evening News.”
He said he also worried about CBS’s future. The network’s parent company, Paramount, was recently sold to Skydance Media. Before the deal closed, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the company for editing an interview on “60 Minutes.” The settlement caused considerable consternation in the newsroom. Later the same month, the Federal Communications Commission approved the deal after receiving assurances from the network that it would appoint an ombudsman and commit to unbiased journalism.
“Donald Trump might as well be C.E.O. of CBS,” Mr. Rather wrote on Steady on July 31.
“I’m always pulling for CBS News,” he said in an interview. “I have great admiration for the men and women who work there. In some ways, in my own mind and heart, I never left.”
Among those who say they can relate to Mr. Rather’s continued work is a longtime friend, the musician Willie Nelson. Mr. Nelson, who turned 92 in April, was also born and raised in Texas. And like Mr. Rather, Mr. Nelson continues to practice his craft on a national stage, albeit on a current tour with a name that is more jarring than Steady. It is called “Outlaw Music Festival.”
“I like to work because I enjoy the crowd,” Mr. Nelson, who is not related to Wayne Nelson, said in a recent phone interview. “They come to hear music. That’s what I do.”
“With Dan Rather,” Mr. Nelson added, “they can follow him and basically do the same thing: Appreciate what he’s doing.”
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