Dan Departs: Schieffer Doesn’t Have Answers

Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz recently sat down for an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer, but he couldn’t get the CBS Evening News anchor to say much new about Dan Rather‘s departure. This didn’t work:

KURTZ: …Is it sad to see him end his CBS career like this? SCHIEFFER: Well, I don’t know quite how to answer that, Howie…

And this didn’t work:

KURTZ: …Why couldn’t some kind of role be found for him after a 44-year career? SCHIEFFER: Well, I don’t do the hiring and firing there, so I would leave that question to others, Howie. I really don’t know the answer to that.

And this didn’t work, either:

KURTZ: …So do you think that the corporate brass made just a cold calculation that he had become some sort of liability? SCHIEFFER: Well, I don’t know the answer to that. These were not decisions that I was a part of. I didn’t have any part of it, and I don’t know what the final decision was and why it was made…

Schieffer did budge a little bit, saying that “I think all of us wish that it had not ended in quite the way that it did.” Here’s the transcript…