Are the Killian Memos Fakes?

Powerline ^ | September 9, 2004 | Big Trunk at Powerline

[Sue Bob]

The Globe story is itself based on last night's 60 Minutes report: "New questions on Bush Guard duty." The online version of the 60 Minutes story has links to the memos. Killian died in 1984; CBS states that it "consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the material is authentic." Reader Tom Mortensen writes:

Every single one of the memos to file regarding Bush's failure to attend a physical and meet other requirements is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing (especially in the military), and typewriters used mono-spaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction high-end word processing systems from Xerox and Wang, and later of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's.

Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang and other systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used mono-spaced fonts. I doubt the TANG had typesetting or high-end 1st generation word processing systems.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.

[MizSterious]

Ah, but how do you explain away the differences in the signatures?

[cyncooper]

I don't get this kooky idea that the memos are fake. They look authentic to me.

I think people are too defensive and don't realize they don't have to worry about GWB having lied to them.

The memos buttress what the Bush record has always been. There is nothing to be afraid of.

[eno_]

That's Forgery 101 right there.

Criminal Masterminds are rarer than TVs shows suggest. Lots of forgers get bagged for using felt-tip or ballpoint pens to make ducuments that come from the fountain pen era.

[MineralMan]

"I was a personnel clerk in the USAF reserve in 1972 stationed at Ellington AFB (same home base as Bush). We had "better" equipment than the TANG had. They usually got our hand-me-downs. We had 0 (zero) electric typewriters in the person el headquarters for the group.

I know this because I spent a good part of the day typing re-assignment orders.

All our typewriters were manual.
"

Interesting. I was also in the USAF, from 1965-69. Every typewriter I typed on was an IBM Selectric. Some had Cyrillic balls, since I had to type in Russian part of the time.

In the headquarters office for our detachment at Ft. Meade in 1969, there were three IBM Executive typewriters...the very ones that produce proportional spacing like this. They were used for all sorts of documents.

These memos are not official memos, to be disseminated. They're memos for this person's personal file...I suppose to be use to cover his butt under some circumstance.

I'm not saying they aren't faked. I'm saying that they could have been prepared using the equipment at the time.

BTW, the IBM Executive I used to use to typeset that little magazine had a couple of interesting characters. Two of them were a "th" and an "st" as upper case on the number row. They were smaller than the regular font and printed in superscript position. Very useful.

[dartuser]

My mom typed my college papers for me at her work on an IBM typewritter ... that was in 1979 ... so I know they were in existence at least in the late 70s ...

[MineralMan]

"No, the question is - Is it possible that Killian used a typewritter with proportional spacing? And the answer is yes, no matter how you try to justify your head buried in the sand with respect to this issue."

That's true. Some other means is going to have to be taken to disprove these documents. They could have been prepared on a piece of equipment that was pretty common in those days.

[cyncooper]

Have you bothered to read the memos?

Please, don't embarrass yourself with kooky theories.

The memos are not bad for GWB. They are mundane and only buttress his record that's been produced and produced and produced again.

[Doogle]

then they won't fly will they?

Doogle

[aruanan]

I doubt that the forgerers, if they are forgeries, would use typewriters that weren't in existence when the forgeries were supposedly typed.

The "I doubt" ploy, together with "it only stands to reason" and "no one could possibly," have landed a lot of people in a lot of trouble.

[dead]

I know forgery masters are hard to find, but even I (who only forged some rent receipts back in college for nefarious reasons relating to student loans) would know enough not to use typewriters that didn't exist.

[MineralMan]

"I was using an IBM "proportional type" typewriter in an office in the '70's. I published newsletters and training material."

Yup. They were pretty popular back then. Lots of companies used them to punch up their publications and make them look like they were printed.

[AMDG&BVMH]

"a personal file of the commander"

. . . so, they were not in Bush's official file.

i.e. the commander made some notes or draft memos to himself, to perhaps use for future counseling sessions if he saw the need. If they were official documents relating to Bush's performance, they would have been in HIS military file. Not as papers in the commander's own file!

Commanders all the time keep notes of their subordinates' performance for future reference. They do not put things in the soldier's official file unless it is necessary and justified by the overall record of the soldier.

IOW, he consciously CHOOSE NOT to make these things a matter of Bush's personnel file. For a reason!

Notwithstanding the fact that they may be fakes, they don't hold any meaning at all . . .

[Sacajaweau]

I agree. They're real. It's interpreting a dead man's ideas. These are the same folks that interpret the Constitution to say "killing babies" falls in the choice category and ignores the murder category.

[norton]

Don't know about the type but I just noticed that at least the last memo begins with:
"Subject: CYA"

That's a pretty telling start for a one-year after the fact discussion of who should write an officer's review when the officer has not been under their immediate command or observation.
The other documents seem like pretty standard back-and-forth about assignment and stated intention to leave the service a year before that time...

But the chorus will not care about that a bit.

Most remarkable, and pointed out by the lefty on FOX this AM, is that the media brought this out in mass - no 527s or any such source - the media wing of the dem party.

[UseYourHead]

Sorry - I'm not caffeinated yet!

[nikos1121]

How many signatures do we have as yet on that petition that request Kerry sign a form 180 to have his milatary records released?

nick

[MineralMan]

" find that the phrase "proportional spacing" is used only with the wheel typewriters that came out AFTER the Selectric I and II. Later Selectric models had "selective spacing" - it looks more and more as if this could be blown open."

Not a Selectric. The IBM Executive typewriter was a different animal. It did produce proportional spacing. It was well established by the time these memos were supposed to have been produced.

[faithincowboys]

The thing that stood out to me, and I admit I wasn't alive back then, was the use of "CYA". Was CYA used back then?

[AMDG&BVMH]

"Subject: CYA"

yes, sounds like a mere documentation trail for the commander; not intended to be formal action relating to the soldier . . .

[igoramus987]

from link...

The IBM Executive typewriter I found at a garage sale was magnificent, and (having been long since replaced by the Selectric), dirt cheap. Only somebody with a PhD in secretarial skills could operate it. It was a proportional spacing machine: an 'm' was five spaces wide, an 'i' was two. There were two separate space bars (two and three spaces respectively). To correct a mistake, you had to know the width of all the characters involved so that you could backspace the appropriate amount (backspace was the only single-space key on the machine). There was an arcane procedure for producing justified type which involved typing a page a first time (while using a special guide to measure where the lines ended), noting the extra spaces that needed to be added, marking the copy to show where two-width spaces would be replaced with three-width spaces (or, in the worst case, two two-width spaces), and typing the page a second time. Even loading the ribbon (it was one of the first carbon ribbon machines on the market) was a major challenge: its rimless reels would spill their contents at the slightest mishandling, and the thin (less than 1/2" wide) tape had to be threaded through bewildering series of slots, grooves, carriers, and guides. It was a machine only a fanatic could love, and I did. I made regular trips to Santa Barbara's IBM parts center, and spent hours with tweezers, probes, hooks, needle-nosed pliers and other fine tools, getting it working right.

The IBM Executive IBM Model D 1967 could do proportional spacing

c.f. link 1 and link 2

Later models of Selectrics replaced inked fabric ribbons with "carbon film" ribbons that had a dry black or colored powder on a "once-thru" clear plastic tape. These could be used only once but they were in a cartridge that was simple to replace. They also introduced auto-correction, where a sticky tape in front of the print ribbon could remove the black-powdered image of a typed character, and introduced selectable "pitch" so that the typewriter could be switched among pica ("10 pitch"), elite ("12 pitch"), and sometimes agate ("15 pitch"), even in one document. Even so, all Selectrics were monospaced -- each and every character was the same width. Although IBM had produced a successful typebar-based machine, the IBM Executive, with proportional spacing, no proportionally-spaced Selectric office typewriter was ever introduced. There was, however, a much more expensive proportionally-spaced machine called the Selectric Composer which was considered a typesetting machine rather than a typewriter.