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If you face an interview with CBS News anchor Dan Rather, and in pursuit of your personal interest you want to lie your way through it, here’s a piece of advice: start the whole thing by firmly shaking hands with him as you look him in the eye and he will not only believe everything you say but won’t come back at you with tough questions.
"He was straightforward, firm handshake, looks you in the eye," said Rather last week to CNN’s talk-show host Larry King discussing his long interview with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian’s father. "I know there's a whole theory that, well, he's not his own man and he can't say what he really believes. Frankly, I don't know about that. I can only tell you that my impression at the time, he looked me right straight in the eye, and I thought he was speaking for the most part from his heart."
King asked the CBS anchorman if there was any part about his interview with Gonzalez in which he did not believe him.
"No. You know, reporters, including this one, get paid to be skeptical, and I had some questions about some of his answers. But did I believe him overall in the main? Yes, I did believe him," was Rather’s answer.
He admitted being skeptical about "his explanation of why he did not immediately come to Florida when he first heard his son had survived, he gave what I think was a fairly straightforward answer, which basically was, you know, he thought the child was in pretty good hands at that time, there's a lot of red tape on both sides, and he said he made his effort to begin making the trip, but then it got very complicated." (Sorry, Rather doesn’t parse his sentences very well.)
And when a caller to the King show returned to this topic asking, "if he's such a devoted parent, why did the grandmothers visit the child before the father did?", this was Rather’s reply: "Now, if the thrust of your question is why he didn't come at that time, why the father didn't come at that time, I don’t know, and I don't know that he’s ever given a solid answer to that."
Did Rather hound Elian’s father for a more "solid answer," as he once famously hounded George Bush on the air when he wasn’t satisfied with the answer the president had given him to a question? You bet he didn’t,
Because Rather had another strong reason for believing Gonzalez: "There were no other people in the room except CBS News personnel. Not even his lawyer was in the room. There were no Cuban government officials anywhere on the premises, not even in the building, much less in the room."
Are we to assume that the tape of the interview was to be buried in a time capsule to be opened 100 years in the future and that everybody in the room would be "terminated" as soon as it was in the can so that nothing of what Gonzalez said would become known to his minders from the Cuban Interests Section in Washington and the regime in Havana?
Not at all. By the time Rather was providing this additional explanation of why he though, "by any objective analysis, he by and large spoke his heart, spoke what he honestly believes," CBS had proudly aired the Gonzalez interview around the world. So much for the privacy that surrounded Gonzalez as he was lamely answering Rather’s questions as well as any certainty that he was speaking the truth.
Later on, a caller to the Larry King show asked, "if there were survivors on the raft, why haven't we heard from them, and what relationship do they have with Elian and his family, and are they in communication with each other? Why have we not heard from the other survivors?" and the following dialogue ensued:
RATHER: "I don't know the answer to that question. It's a good question. I wish I had the answer. I try to have the answers to everything, but I honestly don't know the answer to that."
KING: "Now I'm told by our producers there were two survivors. Have they surfaced?"
RATHER: "Well, there were two survivors. My understanding is there were 13 people on the boat. Elian and two others survived. But Larry, I don't know where those people are, to be perfectly honest with you. I don't recall anybody having spoken with them."
As he likes to remind us himself, Rather is not just a newsreader, but as managing editor presides over the vast resources of CBS Evening News which, apparently missed all the Associated Press and Reuter reports on the two other survivors, who were widely interviewed at the time and are at this time gainfully employed in Miami.
Furthermore, Rather himself could have learned about them and what they said from a major op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, one of the daily must-reads for anybody who claims to be in the news business.
Dan Rather is not the only one in the U.S. media who in the coverage of the Elian Gonzalez story displayed shallowness and ignorance; he just happens to be the one who chose to happily expose both in a one-hour interview.
Print was a little better than television, but everywhere one could see a lack of diligence in digging up facts and going beyond the political soap-opera script astutely written by Fidel Castro.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio_campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com