Timezone problem

[Flight 800]

I have one RHEL4 server that won't allow me to adjust timezones correctly.
I want the timezone set to EDT, this is what I've done so far:

date -s 'Fri Dec 9 15:39 EDT 2005'

then:

timeconfig US/Eastern

then:

mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtimeOLD
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern /etc/localtime

However, the time when using 'date' command still shows timezone as UTC, not
EST.  Nothing I do seems to change this.  Any ideas?

thanks, Brad