![]() ![]() Despite this bad fortune, his journalistic instincts kicked in and he was soon heavily involved in the coverage, becoming the first television journalist to see and describe the Zapruder film. Despite being so close to the assassination, Rather was unaware that anything untoward had happened until he saw the commotion caused by the shooting some minutes later. ![]() Kennedy, waiting on the President’s motorcade to appear at an overpass just a few hundred yards from Dealey Plaza. On November 22, 1963, Rather was in Dallas preparing to report on the visit of President John F. He would almost immediately find himself at the center of one of the biggest news stories of all time. (This did not in fact happen they rehearsed the idea but it proved impractical due to thousands of snakes flooding the area, seeking high ground.) Nonetheless, the legend of Hurricane Dan spread, and within a year Rather had secured a position for himself as a national reporter at arguably the most prestigious news organization of all, CBS News. Rather’s coverage of Clara brought him national notoriety, with a story even spreading that he had chained himself to a tree in order to get better live footage from the eye of the storm. Countless lives were saved just three years earlier, the substantially smaller Hurricane Audrey had killed 416 people in Louisiana and Texas, but Clara claimed just 46 lives in total, despite causing unprecedented property damage. Rather’s broadcasts were a huge factor in persuading over half a million people to evacuate the area, the largest evacuation in US history at that time. Meteorology had come a long way since 1900, and Galveston now had a state-of-the-art radar station Rather hit on the idea of superimposing a scale map of Texas over live radar images of the approaching storm, ably illustrating the enormous threat posed by Carla. When Hurricane Carla - one of the largest tropical storms in US history - arrived off the coast of Galveston in 1961, Rather used all the tools at his disposal to alert Texans to the impending danger. Rather’s grandmother had told him “being in the middle of a hurricane is about as close as you will get to God”, and she had lived through the deadliest hurricane in the history of the US, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 which killed more than 6,000 people. Rather had grown up in what was referred to in Texas as ‘Hurricane Country’, and his childhood was steeped in what he termed the “history, mystery, and lore of hurricanes”. It was here that he got his first big break as a journalist, albeit one that came from a highly unusual source: weather reporting. Instead, the Chronicle advised him to pursue a career in radio journalism and this was the start of an extraordinary life in broadcasting.ĭan Rather quickly made the leap from radio to the new world of television journalism, joining a small Houston channel, KHOU, in 1960. Fatefully, they rejected him because he was - by his own admission - “a remarkably poor speller”. After graduating, he applied to join the Houston Chronicle as a reporter. Rather loved baseball but his ambitions lay with newspapers. This provided him with a huge amount of experience of live broadcasting, which he has credited as one of the most important aspects of his journalistic education, giving him the ability to ad-lib confidently on air. Dan eventually recovered, and went on to obtain a degree in journalism while also making his first foray into the world of broadcast media, working throughout his college years as a baseball announcer for the local radio station. ![]()
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