Last Wednesday night at 8 p.m. – when most American televisions were tuned to ABC’s “Lost” – I was fortunate enough to be watching the season premiere of “60 Minutes Wednesday” on CBS. It was an unexpectedly extraordinary hour of television capped by “Desperate Journey,” Dan Rather’s unpromoted first contribution to the “60 Minutes” broadcast since the National Guard documents scandal erupted in mid-September. In his compelling account of illegal aliens who jump onto “The Beast” – the train that travels from a small town in Mexico to Mexico City and then to the United States and freedom – Mr. Rather reminded me of what makes him an indispensable part of American journalism.

Whenever the CBS blue-ribbon commission completes its investigation into the documents story (and there’s no good reason for that to take more than a few weeks, is there?) it will become clear, at last, who is responsible for the most calamitous mistake made by “60 Minutes” since 1995. (That was when creator and former executive producer Don Hewitt allowed CBS to censor an incendiary report on nicotine addiction and prompted the uproar depicted in the 1999 movie “The Insider.”) Sadly, a lot of fine journalists will be on the list of those accountable for the errors that led to the current CBS debacle. And even in the absence of that report, it seems inevitable that everyone from producer Mary Mapes to CBS News president Andrew Heyward will be held responsible for errors made in allowing that story to air, and in defending it in the face of so much legitimate criticism.

I’ve been a part of that chorus of criticism. For the last two years I’ve been reporting “Tick…Tick…Tick…,” a book on “60 Minutes” that by some bizarre miracle arrived in bookstores just as the Rather-CBS story was breaking. I quickly became a fixture on the Fox News Channel as well as CNN and MSNBC, and I took the opportunity to chastise Mr. Rather for his haste in pushing the documents story. I held him responsible for his excessive desire to front all important CBS News stories, which leaves him open to making mistakes of this magnitude. I characterized him as an ego-driven newsman who’d overstepped the rules. While I declared him innocent of liberal bias charges, I accused him of excessive Rather bias, always wanting the headline for himself.

But now we have to consider what will happen if Mr. Rather is formally implicated in this mess. What would the loss of Mr. Rather really mean? It’s hard to imagine him escaping any reprimand for his role in the September 8 documents story. As the face of CBS News and the story’s correspondent, Mr. Rather bore the responsibility of knowing the source; he’d willingly (and falsely) characterized the source as both “solid” and “unimpeachable” in the days before he and CBS News apologized on September 20. “I know that this story is true,” he had insisted to CNN on September 10, before announcing that there would be no apology.

Mr. Rather understands that the punishment for such offenses sometimes exceeds the crime – or so he said when asked by Larry King in June 2003 about the resignation of executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd from the New York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. “Now, you know, when you make big mistakes, there are big prices to be paid, and I don’t want anybody to think that I don’t recognize, because I do recognize that Howell and Boyd and the others involved there, and they’ve acknowledged it,” Mr. Rather told Mr. King that night. “They made some big mistakes and when you make mistakes of that size, there’s usually an outsized price to be paid and they’re paying it.”

I wonder: Will the CBS commission weigh in on the size and scope of the mistake made, or merely report on how it was made? Who will ultimately judge the importance of the mistakes? It’s hard to imagine the task falling to Mr. Heyward, whose lack of objectivity on this topic cannot be questioned. Maybe the decision rightly belongs to Leslie Moonves, the co-chairman of CBS; this has, after all, been a huge public-relations nightmare for his corporation, and he owes the shareholders a solution that will erase the damage done.

Watching “60 Minutes Wednesday” last week helped put things in perspective; it reminded me of what made “60 Minutes” worth two years of my life. It underscored the truth that no one could better redeem CBS News right now than Dan Rather himself – if only he could deliver stories each week as good as “Desperate Journey.” Written and produced by “60 Minutes” veteran Steve Glauber, the story of the train that travels through Tapachula was vintage “60 Minutes,” the kind of ground level reporting that the newsmagazine format was intended to encourage. In focusing on those who wait for the unscheduled train to arrive, Mr. Rather told the story of immigration in vivid, human terms; his conversations captured the difficulty of sneaking out of Mexico this way, as young would-be travelers repeated anecdotes of others failing to survive the treacherous ride. A side trip to Costa Rica slowed the piece up with an off-the-point account of tourists hiring underage hookers in San Jose, but when Mr. Rather returned to Tapachula, the story’s urgent energy was restored.

And when, at the end of “Desperate Journey,” Mr. Rather surprised us with a daring leap onto the train itself, it brought to mind the image of Gunga Dan. That moniker attached to Mr. Rather in April 1980, after “Inside Afghanistan,” his infamous report on rebel fighting there, which included footage of Mr. Rather wrapped in native garb and trekking across the Afghan countryside. Like Gunga Dan, the sight of Mr. Rather clinging to the side of “The Beast” conjured up what has made the CBS reporter an electric television personality for four decades. Yes, he seems slightly off-kilter, and we never quite know what he’s going to say or do next. But isn’t that what we want in our front-line journalists and anchors? So many of them today sound indistinguishable from one another – and that includes CBS’s John Roberts and Scott Pelley, who make up the short list at CBS News to replace Mr. Rather. Both men look as though they were born and bred on the Anchor Farm.

The rest of Wednesday night’s “60 Minutes” broadcast showed similar pizzazz. Mike Wallace delivered an interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr., the race car driver, about whom I had no interest until Mr. Wallace showed him to be a narcissistic pig with supernatural delusions. “The Professor,” reported by the consistently inconsistent Vicki Mabrey, was a terrific yarn about a paroled murderer who’d been hired (without the school’s knowledge of his past) as a professor at Penn State. And Lesley Stahl dropped her customary potpourri of phony facial expressions to touchingly update a “60 Minutes” piece about an autistic married couple; the love story Ms. Stahl reported on in 1996 has since ended in divorce.

The episode was a showy display by new executive producer Josh Howard of his skills at replicating the DNA of Don Hewitt’s original “60 Minutes.” Not so last Sunday’s show, where executive producer Jeffrey Fager stalled out with three ho-hum pieces his first week, including a Steve Kroft “expose” that illuminated nothing except Mr. Kroft’s ability to imitate the show’s earlier, better work. Mike Wallace and Bill O’Reilly said nothing of consequence to each other. And Ed Bradley delivered a timely but unmemorable profile of Jordanian-born terrorist mastermind Abu Masab al-Zarqawi as the show-leading piece. Last night’s show included a Mike Wallace interview with Bill Parcells; if it felt stale, it’s perhaps because Mr. Wallace has interviewed the football coach before. Mr. Howard, unlike Mr. Fager, also has had the guts to shake up the “60 Minutes” format a bit by ending his show with his strongest story. That’s a device used at other networks to keep viewers around, but almost never done on “60 Minutes.”

I was dumbfounded and disappointed to hear Morley Safer and Steve Kroft tell the press that the mistakes made by “60 Minutes Wednesday” would never happen on the Sunday night show. That’s the kind of statement that comes back to bite you, and it tells you more about the people who said it than the show they work for. There’s never been any love lost between Messrs. Safer and Rather (they’ve been at each other since their days in Vietnam together), and Mr. Kroft isn’t really talking about anyone except himself.

What neither man understands is the tragic result of all this negative attention for CBS News. In the 24-hour media cycle, Dan Rather and CBS have become touchstones for the public’s growing distrust of journalists, and that can erase 40 years of hard work – for anyone. But removing Mr. Rather won’t do anything to change television news, except for the worse. He and his colleagues have already been chastened to do better journalism; that much was made clear by the exceptional debut of “60 Minutes Wednesday.” Let him explain the mistakes he made, and move on. Why no men or women have ever come along to replace our anchor legends is a sad question for another day. Right now, what matters is that we still need Dan Rather, and “60 Minutes Wednesday,” to survive.