Bernie's Time Machine: Rathergate Revisited

A lost fact in the story that effectively ended Dan Rather's career.

“She had an obligation to put that in the story.”

The year was 2004. There was just 55 days left before a very close presidential election between Republican incumbent, George W. Bush, and Democratic challenger, John Kerry.

Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes put a story on the weekday edition of 60 Minutes that brought on the media equivalent of World War III. There were accusations that Rather, Mapes, and maybe the entire CBS News Division had set out to deliberately destroy Bush, and get Kerry elected President of the United States — a charge everyone at CBS vehemently denied.

The story was about how Bush got preferential treatment during the Vietnam War; how he wangled his way into the Texas Air National Guard back in the 1960s to avoid service in Vietnam; and how he was able to do it because his father was a big-shot, a United States Congressman from Houston. The story portrayed the young Bush as a slacker. Others said it portrayed him as a “cowardly draft dodger.”

And to bolster their story, Rather and Mapes got their hands on “never-before-seen” documents (as Rather put it in his story) that supposedly backed up their months (and in Mapes’ case, years) of reporting. But in no time flat, the documents came under attack, mainly by conservatives on the web who examined the typeface of the memos and concluded they were fakes.