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The frequency: solving the riddle of the Dan Rather beating
Harper's Magazine, Dec, 2001 by Paul Limbert Allman
Dan Rather is the sphinx of our time, and his riddle is "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"
Who can forget our collective shock and bewilderment when we opened the New York Times and learned of the event? October 1986. A cool evening, upper Park Avenue, in the Eighties. Newsman and reservoir of trust, Dan Rather, dressed casually, walks home from dinner at a friend's house.
Two well-dressed white men in their thirties--one six feet tall, with dark hair and a mustache--accost Rather, one of them demanding to know, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"
"You have the wrong guy," Rather replies.
One of the men responds with a punch to the newsman's jaw, under his left ear. Rather flees into the lobby of a building on Park Avenue, and the thugs pursue him, punching, kicking, badgering Rather repeatedly with the strange query: "Kenneth, what is the frequency!"
A doorman rings for the super, the super bursts upon the scene of the cruel interrogation, and the attackers flee. Mr. Rather is briefly hospitalized. The attackers are not caught. Their motives are unknown. It is presumed a case of mistaken identity.
Mr. Rather returned to his news broadcast, unbowed, and made a statement about the incident. Who did it, and why? "Why and exactly by whom remains unclear," Mr. Rather announced to a television audience estimated to be 18 million households.
"And it may never be determined."
Dan Rather looks anxious on television. He needs the answer. The incident haunts him, and it shows. "For a while," he said, "I made it a point to hang out on the street corner opposite from where it happened and observe things." During these poignant forays, he disguised himself with sunglasses and a baseball cap.
I want Dan Rather to be free. I want my generation to be free, not trapped by conspiracy theories, like those who wrestle with the bloody puzzle of Dallas 1963. Our generation must have an answer to our riddle. And we will all know we have it when Dan Rather comes on the television and no longer looks anxious.
One day, Rather signed off a broadcast with the single word, "Courage." A noble gesture, at once commanding and empathetic. But it had no more effect than if he had said, "Porridge." Such is the great ineffable quality of Dan Rather.
Yes, there are those who would like to keep him anxious. The same people who jumped and pummeled him on Park Avenue, calling him "Kenneth," demanding the frequency.
Bastards.
I ask you: if the victim had been somebody named Kenneth, what would he have made of "what is the frequency?" Was this some intimate reference known only to Kenneth and his attackers? If so, how could the attackers--who knew their victim well enough to communicate with coded language--then stalk and attack the wrong man, especially when the "wrong man" was nationally famous?
They knew their victim. Rather's face was broadcast to millions of Americans, on network television, five days a week. Nothing was taken from the victim: watch, wallet, or souvenir. Park Avenue is hardly a hot spot for random violence. The attackers had one motive: to punch Dan Rather, to punish him. If they had said, "Go to hell!" or, "Take that!" the whole thing would have been dismissed as random criticism and forgotten.
Instead, they taunted him: "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"
The taunt was obviously some kind of code. We can assume that, knowing their victim, the attackers were intentionally identifying Rather as "Kenneth." Was he supposed to recognize the cipher? I think not. I think the riddle was designed for their pleasure alone, designed to further torture Dan Rather. The coded language was another implement of the punishment.
What of the second part of the taunt: "What is the frequency?" "Frequency" could refer to a radio frequency, or perhaps to something in Rather's journalistic background. Or it might have been a scientific query, relating to the number of times a specific function or action is repeated within a given time.
But if the thugs were making a scientific inquiry, then their method was sloppy. The question, without a context, is meaningless, akin to asking somebody, "How much does it weigh?" without telling them what "it" is. Mr. Rather had every right to have answered the thugs with, "Frequency of what?" if he had been given the opportunity.
Rather did not have the opportunity, because the attackers were not expecting an answer. Rather was not expected to provide one. The encoded taunt was the verbal version of a sucker punch.
While I was puzzling over the case, I came across a story by a former professor of English at the University of Houston, the late Donald Barthelme. The story is called "The Indian Uprising." It is a very beautiful and complex abstraction, in which wild, Hollywood-type Indians lay siege to the city. The outlook for the city, if the uprising succeeds, mirrors the fate of two lovers who are suffering from an uprising of bad feelings.
"What is the situation?" I asked.
"The situation is liquid," he said. "We hold the south quarter and they
hold the north quarter. The rest is silence.""And Kenneth?"
"That girl is not in love with Kenneth," Block said frankly. "She is in
love with his coat. When she is not wearing it she is huddling under it.
Once I caught it going down the stairs by itself. I looked inside. Sylvia."Once I caught Kenneth's coat going down the stairs by itself but the coat
was a trap and inside a Comanche who made a thrust with his short, ugly
knife at my leg which buckled and tossed me over the balustrade through a
window and into another situation.The appearance of the name "Kenneth" made me pause over the passage. As a character, Kenneth was thinly drawn; just an important, distant personage, a little pretentious. One seldom sees the name "Kenneth" or hears it. But "Kenneth" appears in another story by Barthelme, called "Can We Talk." He is referred to as a "friend."
One can safely conclude that Barthelme had a running character in his fictions named Kenneth. This is arguably the only case of a running Kenneth in the history of literature. And Barthelme drew heavily from his life to make his fictions. But I was not reading Barthelme to look for clues; I was reading him because he, to my mind, is great and better with each read. So I gave the "Kenneth" coincidence no more thought until, in the same collection, Sixty Stories, I came across this exchange, in "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel":
A. I use the girl on the train a lot. I'm on a train, a European train with
compartments. A young girl enters and sits opposite me.... The book is in
her lap. Her legs are fairly wide apart, very tanned, the color of--Q. That's a very common fantasy.
A. All my fantasies are extremely ordinary.
Q. Does it give you pleasure?
A. A poor ... A rather unsatisfactory ...
Q. What is the frequency?
Imagine my shock at finding, quite out of the blue, the words "Kenneth" and "What is the frequency?" combined within the same text, by a writer from Houston, Dan Rather's hometown.
It was an odd coincidence. What are the chances of finding "Kenneth" and "What is the frequency?" in any way connected to each other, outside of the mouths of Mr. Rather's attackers? And yet here they were, inside Donald Barthelme's book.
The photo of Barthelme on the back of the dust jacket: a stocky fellow with a leprechaun's face and beard, wearing a checked shirt and a leather vest, with a patch of Rorschach-style wallpaper behind his head. Was this mischievous but gentle soul the type to rough up a news anchor or hire goons to do the job? He looked capable of a prank but not one so violent.
The coincidence seemed to be just that: a strange, puzzling, but unintentional juxtaposition, one of life's sublime jokes.
Intrigued by the Rather riddle, I researched Dan Rather's career as a newspaper reporter and editor in Houston but could find nothing except the tale of a tireless, ambitious young man--what used to be called a B.M.O.C.--with something of a roving eye for what his biographer referred to as "coeds."
Mr. Rather excelled first as the editor of a college newspaper. Eventually he broke into radio and then television journalism. Might there have been a grudge or a simmering jealousy from as far back as then? Somebody Rather stepped over on his way up the ladder of success, or the boyfriend or husband of one of those "coeds"?
Mr. Barthelme, just six months younger than Mr. Rather, also grew up in Houston. Barthelme attended the University of Houston; Rather attended Sam Houston State College. After their stints in the military in the fifties, both went into journalism. Rather worked at a Houston radio station, while Barthelme went to work as a reporter for the Houston Post.