Dan Rather thought he'd seen it all. But then came President Trump.

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2017

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan Rather has covered the most momentous events of the modern era. He was in Dallas, Texas, during President Kennedy's assassination. He was in Vietnam, embedded with US troops, in 1965 and 1966. He reported on Watergate, stood at the Berlin Wall as it fell, and interviewed young Chinese dissidents as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. Rather has seen it all. So when I sat down with him a few weeks back, I wanted to know how he compared our current political climate to all of the contentious moments he's covered. "I am an optimist by experience and by nature," he told me. And yet, he continued, "this is a very difficult period. This is a test of our whole democratic system." Rather and I discuss the Trump presidency and what it means for the Republican Party's future, our fractured media landscape, and Rather's own evolving career in media. Books: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I am an optimist by experience and by nature,
0:05.2	but this is a very difficult period.
0:08.3	This is the test of our whole democratic system,
0:12.4	and this is a test of whether our system of checks and balances
0:16.7	can and will hold and assert itself.
0:31.0	Hello and welcome to the Ezra Klein Show
0:33.0	on the Box Media Podcast Network.
0:35.0	I grew up watching the evening news of my dad on the couch,
0:38.0	and there were quite a few nights I listened to Dan rather.
0:41.0	He was one of those three nightly newscasters.
0:44.0	He ran the CBS evening news as the anchor for 24 years.
0:48.0	When people talk about that era, when there were these gatekeepers,
0:51.0	when there were only a couple nightly newscasters,
0:53.0	you had a paper in your town, a couple radio programs to listen to,
0:57.0	he was one of those gatekeepers.
0:58.0	He saw that era, he lived it, he drove it in many ways,
1:01.0	pushed it forward.
1:03.0	He covered the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War,
1:05.0	the vast criminal conspiracy known as Watergate.
1:09.0	And then his role at CBS ended in tough circumstances.
1:12.0	He did a report on George W. Bush's service in the National Guard.
1:16.0	It was based in part on documents that later came under quite
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