ADI News Story: Rather Caught Beating Around the Bush

Introduction: Reviewing the stories from this fourth issue of Air, Dirt & Ink, I was going to pass on sharing this particular story. On the surface it’s not particularly funny and didn’t seem to be really newsworthy. Why would I have chosen to use this story, out of all the news stories that were popping up at the time? There’s no reference to where I saw the story (my usual source being the LA Times) and I can’t imagine that I would have read about this interview/event in the LA Times. In 1988 there was no Internet to search for recorded interviews or other means of seeing a news broadcast after the fact. I must have seen this exchange live between CBS reporter, Dan Rather and Vice-President (and Presidential candidate), George H.W. Bush. So, the following story is my mildly cheeky rendition of the interview/event. And as an added bonus, below the printed story is a video of the actual interview that readers of ADI in 1988 wouldn’t have been able to see, if they didn’t see it live, like I apparently did. Enjoy. 2024-03-05.

ADI News Story: Rather Caught Beating Around the Bush

January-February 1988 ADI Vol. 1, Issue 4. An angered George Bush took exception to how CBS Anchorman, Dan Rather was conducting his “political profile” interview of the Republican Presidential candidate during the January 25th broadcast of the “CBS Evening News.”

When Rather continued to ask Bush accusing questions with regards to his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal, the Vice President made a personal slap of his own. Referring to an incident last September when the anchorman walked off the set of the “CBS Evening News,” upset over having his news broadcast cut short by the network’s coverage of a tennis match, and leaving the network with several minutes of embarrassing dead air time. Bush demanded, “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? Would you like that?”

1988-01-25 Dan Rather interviews George HW Bush

“Mr. Vice President,” Rather said, “I think you will agree that your qualifications for President and what kind of leadership you’d bring the country and what kind of government you’d have . . . is much more important than what you just referred to.”

Bush’s political advisers were delighted that, if anything, the incident gave the Presidential candidate a chance to beat back the image that he is a wimp.

A spokesman for the “CBS Evening News,” Donna Dees had no estimates of the number of calls that had poured into CBS headquarters in New York following the incident, but she said a sampling of some of the them indicated that “some people think we ambushed the vice president.”

Information regarding when Rather would be ambushing the other candidates was not available at press time. [ADI]