Rather Strikes Back

After serving as "CBS Evening News" anchor for a quarter-century, Rather agreed to relinquish the chair in November 2004, weeks before an outside panel criticized him and top network executives for airing a badly flawed story charging that Bush had received favorable treatment from the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. He said at the time that he was stepping down voluntarily, but says in the lawsuit that CBS had "terminated" his anchor duties the day after Bush was reelected.

Rather was shifted to "60 Minutes," where he had a part-time workload. When CBS refused to renew his contract last year, Rather accused the network of failing to live up to its contractual obligations and offering him little more than an office if he were to continue.

CBS brushed off the suit, which alleges fraud and breach of contract, with a single sentence. "These complaints are old news, and this lawsuit is without merit," spokesman Dana McClintock said.

Rather, 75, who now hosts a weekly program on HDNet, a high-definition channel owned by Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban, says in the suit that CBS's actions "have cost him significant financial loss and seriously damaged his reputation."

The debacle over the National Guard story, which the suit says became known as "Rathergate," turned on 30-year-old memos said to have been written by Bush's late squadron commander. Several newspapers, including The Washington Post, and conservative bloggers gathered evidence that the documents were unlikely to have been typed on government typewriters of that era.

Several document experts hired by CBS said later that they had not authenticated the memos, as the network originally claimed, and the commander's former secretary said she did not type them. The source who gave CBS the documents, Bill Burkett, initially said he got them from a fellow National Guardsman. But Burkett later admitted he had lied to the network and could not establish that the papers came from the commander's files.

CBS aired the story on Sept. 8, 2004, at the height of the presidential campaign, hours after White House official Dan Bartlett did not challenge the authenticity of the memos when asked about them by CBS. Bartlett said later that he had no way of knowing on such short notice whether the memos were real.

Gold, Rather's lawyer, maintained that "nobody's proved the documents were forgeries. The way we look at it, it's more than likely the documents are authentic."

An outside panel, appointed by CBS and headed by former attorney general Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief executive Lou Boccardi, accused the network of having "failed miserably" to authenticate the memos and of making false and misleading statements in defending the story afterward. Three top executives resigned under pressure, and Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, was fired.

The uproar hastened the end of Rather's remarkable 44-year career at CBS, which stretched from covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy to conducting the last Western interview with Saddam Hussein. It also revived criticism that he was a liberal who was biased against Republican presidents dating back to Richard M. Nixon.

Bernard Goldberg, a former CBS correspondent and a sharp critic of Rather, said yesterday that the former anchor is a great reporter, "but the dark side is that he's unwilling or incapable of accepting responsibility. . . . This is the man who signed off his newscast with 'courage,' and now he's alleging 'they made me do it, they just put the words in front of me.' This is ridiculous on so many levels."

In the suit, Rather says he "played largely a supervisory role" in producing and vetting the story because he had been instructed to concentrate on his anchoring duties and covering a Florida hurricane and the Republican National Convention in New York.