'DAN RATHER: A REPORTER REMEMBERS' Hourlong goodbye a bit distorted

The longtime CBS news anchor will host his last show tonight.
By VERNE GAY
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
Everyone already knows how the Dan Rather story ends, or at least this particular stretch of it, so there's no harm in relaying the last line of tonight's career valedictory, "Dan Rather: A Reporter Remembers," which airs an hour after his final broadcast as "CBS Evening News" anchor.
Condensing a long, colorful, bizarre, improbable and indisputably extraordinary public life into something that sounds suspiciously like a made-for-TV epitaph, Rather tells viewers: "I want people to say when I walk down the street, 'There goes a real reporter.'"
Now, as comedians, TV critics and other assorted troublemakers will tell you, never leave yourself wide open for a punch line, but Dan's given us one that an 18-wheeler could drive through. "There goes a real reporter?" Do you know anyone who'll say that when they see Dan walking down Madison Avenue on the way to his favorite coffee shop? More likely, they'll mutter, "There goes Dan Rather, that [insert, here, your favorite compliment]." Or "There goes that [favorite expletive]."
Anyway, being a reporter does not make a legacy, unless one happens to be named Bob Woodward. That's probably too bad because Rather, as the special establishes, was a whale of a reporter. Zelig-like, there's Dan outside the motorcade in 1963 ... in Birmingham ... in Tam Ky, Vietnam ... Chicago, '68 ... Watergate ... Iraq ... 9/11 ... Phew: It's an exhausting headlong rush through the mileposts of our collective lives, and Rather's, too.
But some of his reporting was often of the wire service sort as opposed to the deep, sustained variety that yields weighty books, Pulitzers, or duPont Gold Batons. The former type tends to be ephemeral. So instead, viewers -- you and me -- are left to sort through our emotional responses to this amazing fellow, and that's what the special attempts to do as well.
Love and hate
Only two Rather camps are out there -- Those Who Love Him and Those Who Don't, a subset of which actively disdains him for presumed liberal biases. And from the very beginning of "A Reporter Remembers," our anchorman-as-pinata attempts to explain why he was so controversial, while sprinkling in a little Journalism 101 for good measure.
A reporter will be judged, he calmly says, "by how well he or she stands up to the pressures of intimidation." The reporter "should just ask the damn question ..." Or, a reporter "can have too much passion, and I wished I'd reined my passion in, but that's in my DNA ..."
The only other voice in this belongs to Howard Stringer, once Dan's producer (and boss) who this week was named global head of Sony. He riffs on the passion thing, too. "An anchor in some ways feels like a more passive role [than what Rather did]. The very word means stuck at the bottom of the sea."
But Rather weighed his anchor, got out of the studio, mixed it up and occasionally got in trouble along the way.
OK, you get the picture. "Dan Rather: A Reporter Remembers" is the last act in a play that stretches back nearly 50 years; Rather is effectively stage-managing his own exit. (Although he's leaving "Evening News" tonight, he is scheduled to still do occasional pieces for "60 Minutes Wednesday.")
Misleading
The hour is almost all spin control -- fascinating spin, but spin nonetheless. One -- or at least one from another planet -- would be left with the impression that other anchormen never left the studio; that's silly considering that Peter Jennings spent many years covering the Middle East. Or that Rather was the only one who bled passion; silly too, when you think about Tom Brokaw's work on World War II veterans.
And weren't there other reporters in the field? "A Rather Remembers" sometimes feels like an exercise in solipsism, as if Rather were the only one to bring us news, for example, of Tiananmen Square. That overlooks the contribution of CBS' own Richard Roth, who was nearly killed while covering that story.
OK, we're being churlish on the man's last day, and clearly he needs an epitaph. Let's see: Dan Rather was a fine anchorman who gave the job 150 percent every single day for 24 years. Or he was an honest reporter who occasionally let his personal opinions sneak in (but -- hey! -- what reporter doesn't?). Or he was also an incredibly generous fellow, who helped his colleagues in countless ways large and small over the years. (Roth, by the way, was credited in Dan's written memoirs.)
Or Dan worried obsessively -- and genuinely -- about the legacy of CBS News.
Or how about this?
"Dan Rather, great newsman."
Not perfect, but that'll have to do.