Walk On
A Reason To Smile
From Dan:
It’s hard to believe, but this is the last Steady post of 2023. I want to wish all of you a healthy and happy New Year. I will see you back here in 2024. It promises to be an eventful year, and we will forge our way forward together. With steadiness.
Today also marks the last Steady piece for my longtime collaborator and friend Elliot Kirschner. Working with him has been a remarkable journey, and I wish Elliot all the best in his next adventures. I’m turning it over to him to finish the year with his well wishes.
From Elliot:
Dear Steady community,
Life unfolds in chapters we write in real time. We can try to play the role of author charting the narrative ahead, but the words and paragraphs that mark our journey are in large part shaped by forces beyond our control and shared by the people we meet along the way.
We are at a moment in history none of us could have predicted. A former president gleefully demolishes our democratic norms and corrodes our constitutional cohesion. Our capacity to contend with other challenges — like the climate crisis and our struggle for racial justice — is greatly diminished at a time when we need to redouble our efforts.
These disquieting truths define the era in which we are living. They have dominated our discourse and amplified our anxieties. And yet, when historians look back decades from now, perhaps they will see that these malevolent forces prodded our nation to confront its weaknesses and build a more empathetic, democratic, and resilient future.
Working at Steady, alongside Dan and with all of you, has only served to buttress this hope.
My main reason in writing today is to express my deep gratitude, first and foremost to Dan, and also to all of you. Being part of this Steady community has been a personal and professional joy far exceeding anything I could have imagined.
I met Dan like most people did — through the glass of a cathode ray television. My paternal grandfather loved watching the news, and I remember sitting in his book-lined den as a child, seeing him fiddle with a primitive remote control to snap on the TV at the appointed hour. And there was Dan Rather. Whether he was sitting behind the mighty desk in the New York studio or on location around the globe, he loomed large in my young mind. I knew I wanted to try to see and understand the world as he did. I couldn’t have ever imagined we would eventually travel the globe as reporters together.
When I came to CBS News out of college, I didn’t get to work with Dan directly for several years. But you couldn’t be anywhere near the broadcast center without feeling the gravitational pull of his stature. And then, one day, there I was in his office above the newsroom pitching stories. I was intimidated, especially after feeling the firmness of his handshake. But Dan put me at ease in that moment, and really all the moments that have followed. He was and is as he appears — the embodiment of steady.
Thinking back over 20+ years of working together, old newsreels flicker to life. Moments long gone shoot into focus.
We are standing on the corner of an intersection in Baghdad, and the mood is tense as we wait for a U.S. military escort that never comes. Apparently we were on daylight savings time, and they weren’t. On the way back to the CBS News compound, we speed toward a checkpoint as an American tank lowers its gun at us. Dan firmly requests that our driver stop, raising his urgency as the distance between us and annihilation narrows. Thankfully we hit the brakes just in time and pull up to young soldiers standing guard. They are star-struck when they see who it is. Dan in turn calmly thanks them for their service.
We are on a tarmac at an airbase in Thailand, and Dan is trying to calm me after we left half the tapes we shot of the Indian Ocean tsunami in a paper bag somewhere on a U.S. aircraft carrier floating hundreds of miles offshore. We radio the ship, hoping they can find the bag and hand it over to the one flight that will allow us to make air. I don’t remember much of what was said in that moment of crisis, but I do remember Dan repeating one phrase over and over again: “Steady, Elliot.”
We are staring silently at oil bubbling up from the hallowed wreckage of the U.S.S. Arizona. We are eating barbecue with the Blind Boys of Alabama. A young candidate for president, Barack Obama, stops a press conference at a truck stop in Pennsylvania and announces with a huge smile, “Hey, that’s Dan Rather!”
We are laughing at old jokes. Hopscotching cities on the book tour for What Unites Us. Bemoaning the misery of being a Mets fan. We are going back and forth on our text message chain, trying to find the right word or sentence to pull one of these newsletters together. We are munching on Fritos and swilling Diet Dr. Pepper. My phone rings, and there’s Dan smiling back at me on FaceTime.
How did I have the great fortune to find myself working with someone who has seen more of history being made than almost anyone else alive? It has been an honor to help bring his voice and a sense of calm to a world in desperate need of both. I think our collaboration has worked so well because we have helped keep each other steady.
When you work with a good friend, it really never is goodbye. Dan and I are noodling on some new projects; maybe another book? I am also looking forward to making more documentary films about science. And I am thinking of things I want to write on my own.
While I may have turned in my byline, I am still a proud member of the Steady community. I look forward to reading the posts in the year ahead. And that’s why I want to end by thanking all of you. When we started this, we weren’t sure if anyone would show up or care. Steady has grown far beyond our dreams into the vibrant, supportive, empathetic, and intellectually stimulating community it is today.
That is a credit to all of you. There have been many times when, beset by a creeping despair, I jump into the comments and feel better. America, in its best version of itself, has a fighting chance because of the spirit you represent.
Before I sign off, I want to share one last A Reason To Smile. It is a song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “Carousel,” brought to life by one of my favorite singers, Mahalia Jackson. In her powerful, tender voice, we hear perhaps the perfect exhortation for how to deal with the beauty and pain we call life:
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
Because of Dan, because of all of you, and because of all the goodness that there is in this world, I know wherever I go, I’ll never walk alone.
Thank you. Steady.
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Dear Elliot and Dan
With tenderness in my heart, thank you, Dear Elliot , for all you have done through the years, and Dear Dan, for being the model of holding steady, strong and with such great humanity, through all of the many profound tragedies, challenges and wars faced by our world.
With love and gratitude
Janet
What a beautiful way to say goodbye to each other and to a tumultuous year. We basically are staring into the face of even more tumult, but we are not going to walk alone through it. Let's hold that thought. We didn't come this far to give up now. We need to continuously remind each other of the need for Hope. Note to self: Nurture, maintain, sustain Hope in your heart!