Discussing His Lawsuit Against CBS, Dan Rather Is Sticking to His Story

He said Andrew Heyward, then the CBS News president, pressured him by saying that he and his colleagues were a team and that an apology was important for the news division and for Rather's own reputation.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Rather insisted to reporters on Nov. 23, 2004, that his decision to step down as anchor the following spring was entirely voluntary. But yesterday he said Heyward and Moonves, the CBS chairman, had called his agent 20 days earlier -- the morning after Bush's reelection -- and said that he had to relinquish the chair immediately. Rather wound up staying until March 2005, which he says is close to the time he had planned to step down anyway.

CBS has limited its response this week to a one-sentence statement saying the suit has no merit, frustrating some staffers who would like to challenge parts of Rather's account that they see as fiction.

Rather disputed the notion that he was portraying himself as a mere newsreader on the National Guard story, uninvolved in the key decisions that were made. Still, he says top CBS executives bore responsibility for the piece.

"Anybody who knows me knows I love to report," he said. "I did what I could on this story." But he said he was busy at the time covering a hurricane, the Republican convention and Bill Clinton's heart ailment, along with his anchoring duties.

"Andrew Heyward took over the supervising of this piece," Rather said. "They didn't invite me, ask me, inform me when the final screening took place. I wasn't as deeply involved as I normally am." He said he had warned Heyward that "reaction to it could be thermonuclear."

But Josh Howard, the former executive producer of "60 Minutes II," said Wednesday that Rather was deeply involved in the story, to the point of arguing over every line in the script.

Across the television industry, executives are asking: Why now? Why, when memories of the botched story are finally fading and Rather is trying to build a second career, would he declare legal war on his former bosses and dredge up the worst moment of his career?

Here Rather wades deep into the weeds, talking about how a private investigator he hired dug up information on a "mystery man" -- an ex-FBI agent retained by CBS to look into the story once it came under fire. Rather said the network ignored this consultant's allegedly supportive findings and more recently, accused the former anchor of "harassing" the man.

In the aftermath of the 2004 segment, Rather said, he wanted to keep investigating the Guard story himself, but CBS executives "shut it down." CBS, for its part, was trying to obtain an independent assessment at a time when Rather's reporting was under attack. CBS subsequently named an outside panel, co-chaired by former attorney general Dick Thornburgh, which found the story badly flawed and blamed several top executives, including Heyward and Rather, for rushing the piece to air.

As a graduate of Sam Houston State University who battled his way to the top of the television business, Rather has long cast himself as the tough-talking Texan who took on the powers that be. In that vein, he is portraying the lawsuit as a challenge to the corrosive influence of conglomerates, including the one that paid him millions over the years. "I think we're going to find out just how much interference at the corporate level there is in national news stories," he said.

Industry speculation has it that CBS might seek a quick financial settlement to avoid the spectacle of its former star taking depositions from its top brass. But Rather dismissed that notion.

"I'm in this by myself," he said. "It's my money. I am prepared to take it all the way to trial."