A colleague who was with O'Reilly in Buenos Aries speaks out

[MohRokTah]

18. This comment by Sam Roberts was awesome!

Thank you Eric. But there's more. When O'Reilly got back to NY, Ed Joyce, the president of CBS News and O'Reilly's rabbi, came into my office. I was then the National editor. Joyce told me that O'Reilly was to report directly to me and that I was to "turn him into a real CBS News Correspondent." Not two minutes later, Dan Rather walked into my office and shut the door. He said "under no circumstances is O'Reilly to be assigned any story for the Evening News." I sat O'Reilly down and said something to the effect that he was like the All-American football player who got drafted by the Dallass Cowboys and brought all his press clippings to training camp. "Nobody gives a shit," I said. "You've got to do it here." O'Reilly said he couldn't work with producers in the field so I worked out a deal with the Weekend News allowing him to work alone. That lasted for about two stories. A few weeks later, his agent, Richard Leibner called. "How's O'Reilly doing?" he asked. I hemmed and hawed a little and Richard then said he had a job offer in Boston for O'Reilly and wondered oif he should take it. "He'll never make it here," I said. Take that job in Boston before it goes away." And that was the end of O'Reilly's career at CBS News.