Books

BOOK REVIEW

10:40 AM CST on Wednesday, November 9, 2005

By ED BARK / The Dallas Morning News

All of that red-blue polarity running through this great country of ours makes this a no-win review of what in these times passes for a radioactive book.

Praise for Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power makes one a card-carrying leftist elitist in the mind-set of many. Panning the same book is a clear sign that the reviewer is a shameless apologist for President Bush and the far right.

So let it be said, with fear of contradiction, that Mary Mapes succeeds in telling her story fearlessly, humorously and compellingly – whether you believe her or not.

The principal producer of Dan Rather's 60 Minutes Wednesday "Memogate" report on President Bush's National Guard service has been all but underground since being fired in January by CBS News. Her book lets it be known that she's unbowed although certainly bruised by the experience. It's not a screed, though. Ms. Mapes details her rise and fall with a considerable amount of flair and self-deprecating humor.

While in limbo between Sept. 8, 2004, and her Jan. 5 "termination," Ms. Mapes recounts turning to wine, Xanax and knitting while hunkered down in her East Dallas home.

The latter particularly "became an obsession," she writes. "I regularly drove half an hour to my favorite yarn store and staggered in like a crack addict, moving from counter to counter, fondling yarns. The saturated colors, the fantastic textures, the richness of the strands, the yarns were everything that my existence was not."

Ms. Mapes, who joined CBS News in 1989 after a decade at a Seattle TV station, also makes a spirited defense of her reporting skills while going on the offense against a blog-triggered "political jihad" that she blames for her downfall.

The ins and outs of document authentication are a major part of the book, but not a mind-numbing one. More readable, however, is the up-close look at the inner sanctum of CBS News, which she says knuckled under to its corporate parent, Viacom, rather than putting up a strong fight.

"I felt I had arrived at the oncologist's office and was about to hear terrible test results," she says of appearing for the first time before a CBS-commissioned panel hired to investigate how and why the Bush-National Guard report got on the air.

Ms. Mapes also wants readers to know her as a multidimensional person whose parents were farmers and whose political bent isn't twisted.

"Like most elitist liberals, I learned to drive a tractor, disc fields, rake hay, and harrow pastures long before I sat behind the wheel of a car," she writes.

Simply put, she is woman, hear her roar – on behalf of both her instilled patriotism and her journalistic integrity. It's a free country, so you don't have to buy her life story – or her CBS story – for a second. But Truth and Duty is a good read from start to finish. Give it a try. You might even like it.

E-mail ebark@dallasnews.com

The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power