4 October this year is the 37th anniversary of a strange and slightly unpleasant anniversary: the attack on Dan Rather by a man who wanted to shut off the signals being broadcast into his head and who consequently kept shouting “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”
According to the most detailed version of the story I’ve found, it happened at about 11pm on Park Avenue, where the CBS anchorman lived. Two well-dressed men approached him with their apparently inexplicable question.
Rather reported it, but the police couldn’t find the attackers — and, according to the New York Times, people started to think he’d made it up:
As the months passed, and the attacker was never apprehended, skepticism about Mr. Rather’s version only increased.
Famously, the most significant outcome of the whole thing was the REM song (which changed the word order), What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? — but that’s actually the second song inspired by the incident. There was another, earlier song by a band called Game Theory, whose work is to REM’s what Valmont is to Dangerous Liaisons:
The mystery of who attacked Rather was only solved years later – just days before REM released their single (a few weeks before the album it came from). Sadly, this solution arrived in the form of another violent incident, altogether more tragic than the first.
On 31 August 1994, William Tager tried to get into the Today show studio with a weapon, and shot and killed NBC employee Campbell Montgomery, who prevented him getting in. Tager, convinced the network was beaming messages into his head, wanted to stop them.
REM’s single was released on 5 September, the album, Monster, on 27th.
When he was arrested, Tager said he’d attacked Rather, too, but the five-year statute of limitations had expired, so it wasn’t investigated. In 1996, though, a psychiatrist compared their accounts of the attack and found that several details matched.
Rather was shown a photo of Tager, and “identified him as his assailant” — but one thing people seem to have forgotten in the intervening years is that he was apparently attacked by two men.
Mind you, the oddest thing I discovered when researching this is that in 1995 Dan Rather joined REM to perform the song with them on the Letterman show. I can’t find footage of that, but you can see what looks like a rehearsal:
Also intriguing (although it’s frankly a bit of a reach) is the fact that one writer found “a recurring character named Kenneth and the phrase “What’s the frequency?”” in the short stories of Donald Barthelme:
Rather is still working at the age of 91. Tager got a 15–25 year sentence in 1996, was paroled in 2010, and lives (closely supervised) in New York. What happened to the other attacker is anyone’s guess.
