Posted on 09/09/2004 11:14:40 AM PDT by RatherBiased.com
During last night's 60 Minute program on President George W. Bush's Air National Guard service, the CBS News touted a number of documents which seemingly indicate that the future president failed to meet his service obligations.
That may well be the case but it is becoming increasingly evident that 60 Minutes, and the Dan Rather, the reporter behind the story, may have been relying on forged documents to prove their case.
Several indicators point to this conclusion including the fact that the four memoranda, which Rather said were written during the early 1970s by Bush's commanding officer Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian, are printed in a proportionally spaced type style similar to the common computer font Times New Roman. But such computer technology had not even been invented when the documents were allegedly written.
This does not imply, however, that the memos could not have originated during the 1970s since IBM, the dominant player in the office equipment at the time had several years earlier invented a typewriter which allowed typists to use proportional fonts.
Such machines, marketed mainly under the model name Selectric had become quite popular by the early seventies even though they were extremely expensive according to Jim Forbes, who collects the now-discontinued machines and operates a web site about them called Selectric.org.
For the most part, organizations who could afford the typewriters only allowed professional typists to use them especially since they were often cumbersome to use. Non-professionals stuck to the older, less-complicated typewriters which printed in the traditional monospace fonts like Courier.
As a government installation, it is quite possible that the Texas Air National Guard had a few Selectric (or its successor models) in its possession. However, examination of Bush's official records released by the Pentagon reveals that Killian and his fellow officers did not use proportional spacing typewriters (1, 2, 3, 4) for their correspondence.
For its part, CBS has refused to disclose where it had obtained the controversial documents. During last night's program, Rather stated "we are told [they] were taken from Colonel Killian's personal file." Contacted by The Washington Post, Kelli Edwards, a spokesperson for 60 Minutes declined to elaborate any further.
Other evidence points toward the conclusion that CBS News may have been duped. Two of the alleged memos, dated May 4, 1972 and August 18, 1973, use a font technology that was beyond the capabilities of the day.
Both documents use relatively sized fonts to write out ordinal numbers, a typographical convention used to spell out numerical orderings or rankings such as "twenty-fourth." In normal English usage are often written in shorted form using the relevant number followed by an ordinal suffix. Thus "twenty-fourth" becomes 24th. The 1972 document uses the ordinal 111st and the other refers to 187th.
The fact that the person who made the documents used this notation casts doubt on their authenticity since typing it out numerically with a superscript ordinal suffix was quite difficult to do on an Selectric model typewriter which required a very involved process in which the user would have to feed the paper up half a line, manually remove the device's "font ball" which was used to place characters onto the paper, replace it with a ball with a smaller-sized font, advance the page back down half a line, and then put back the original font ball.
While it is conceivable that the memos' creator may have actually followed the elaborate procedure to get the perfect superscript ordinal suffix, that does not seem likely according to Gerry Kaplan, another Selectric collector who operates IBMComposer.org.
"The person who produced this copy does not appear to have taken the time to properly space things out, such as 'May,1972' has no space after the comma; '(flight)IAW' has no space after the parenthesis. So, it would be hard to believe that they would take the time to produce the superscript 'th' manually. So, if no general-use typewriter existed with such keys, it is unlikely that they took the time to superscript that," Kaplan says.
Theoretically, it is possible that Killian may have had access to a font ball which contained superscript-sized ordinal suffixes, but such an accessory would have been very rare.
"If one had a font ball that had a superscript font, then it could be done, but as far as I know, the only common superscript font was the number set available on the Symbol balls," says Forbes. "These would be used for formal papers with footnotes, most likely. So, the short answer to your question about a letter superscript is 'No.'"
The typographical case against the documents' authenticity is further undermined considering that all of the memos appear to use a font that was not in wide use on Selectric machines during the early seventies. A search of Forbes's online archive of common Selectric fonts reveals none matching typeface used in the purported Killian memos. In fact, the CBS documents' font looks much more similar to the modern-day Times New Roman.
In the face of such evidence (including the fact that Killian has long since been deceased), and CBS's refusal to reveal its third-party source, it seems increasingly likely that Dan Rather's "exclusive" has turned out to be a hoax. Should that be the case, it would not be the first time that the 72-year-old anchorman has been embarrassed by reporting unconfirmed stories.
In his legendary book on the 1972 presidential campaign The Boys on the Bus, author Timothy Crouse relayed how many of Rather's rivals on the White House beat resented him for his gung-ho approach to the facts.
"Rather often adhered to the 'informed sources' or 'the White House announced today' formulas, but he was famous in the trade for the times when he bypassed these formulas and 'winged it' on a story. Rather would go with an item even if he didn't have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather for this. They knew exactly why he got away with it: being handsome as a cowboy, Rather was a star on CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed. They could quote all his lapses from fact, like the three times he had Ellsworth Bunker resigning, the two occasions on which he announced that J. Edgar Hoover would step down, or the time he incorrectly predicted that Nixon was about to veto an education bill."
I've been known to break tomboy's hearts and demoralise them into behaving like ladies..
As to self-typing vs. secretary-typing:
If the memo were typed by someone else, wasn't it common practice to put the typist's initials somewhere below the signature? Maybe 2-3 lines down left-justified?
FYI--I started in the biz world as a CPA in 1979 and never typed anything on my own for biz until 1982 or 1983.
Great line.
:^)
That's been true every place I've worked.
The secretary would type and post script initials on the bottom left of the document, as well as the initials of those receiving copies i.e. CC would indicate that the document was carbon copied!
These are fakes!
*sigh*
The flipside of my horrible dating history.
Tomboys deciding that being a lady is better..
Anything that pertained to MY military is in MY personal file, not my commanding officer's
Merry: Post #17:
" Considering the MSM will never print a retraction, it is best to just let it all blow over. I was at a large gathering of people yesterday, everyone was talking about the SBVs, no one was talking about Bush and the National Guard. People are not stupid and besides this is old news. "
Merry: 2004-06-12
Believe it or not, that was not SOP at TANG. At least during the years Bush was there.
There should be purchase orders that can be tied to the unit, if they had one.
Absolutely. Good catch there.
This is verifiable. Every time a unit officially purchases something, there is a paper trail.
bump
Oh. So, let me guess - you married her ?? .....
Nope.
She's sitting somewhere dressing nicely and ladylike, broken and soul-less.
And blaming me.
Of course.
Good point.
I learned touch-typing as a Sophomore in high school in the mid-1970s, and later, as one of my contributions to our school newsmagazine I typed the articles we would later paste up by hand. To obtain a justified paragraph one would have to first write the article on yellow, less expensive paper, manually count the number of characters in any given line, determine how wide in characters a column would be, then divide the available space across the line, counting as one would type.
Tedious?
Our newspaper typewriter? An IBM Selectric.
I do not recall curved apostrophes and I certainly do not recall a superscript "th" character key.
Reviewing a copy of the document purported to be a memo of a now-deceased officer, the only way that "th" could have been created was with a special key -- or with contemporary word processing software.
I've typed on other Selectrics, and have a small collection of manual and electric typewriters of various makes and models.
I do not know of a one that offered any of the features under the glare of FReeper scrutiny -- and hopefully soon under the glare of everyone's scrutiny.
Who created the forged documents? Who passed them to the media? Why did CBS report this in the manner it did without checking first the documents' authenticity?
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
There seem to be baseline shifts in the original document (could be an optical illusion, though, due to the poor quality of the copy). This could be because they were typed on a typewriter, or it could be because they were done in a program that allows for baseline shifting, or it could be a Photoshop filter. I can think of no explanation for the smart apostrophes, though, except for the computer angle.
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