Dan Rather, the anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1981 to 2005, grew up in Houston during the Great Depression, when the booming oil capital of today was merely a big town, and his father’s job, digging ditches in the oil fields, was a coveted one. As he writes in his new essay collection, What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism, “This was what the United States of America was like not that long ago: a country where families struggled to live on dirt streets, with dirt floors, and little or no income to pay the grocery or medical bills.”