Bump
Back in my typesetting days I could mistakenly set a whole paragraph of type that was supposed to be Times Roman in a completely different font, such as Helvetica, and no one ... not even the proofreader ... would know the difference.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush/articles/2004/09/11/authenticity_backed_on_bush_documents/
"Philip D. Bouffard, a forensic document examiner in Ohio who has analyzed typewritten samples for 30 years, had expressed suspicions about the documents in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, one in a wave of similar media reports. But Bouffard told the Globe yesterday that after further study, he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.
Analysts who have examined the documents focus on several facets of their typography, among them the use of a curved apostrophe, a raised, or superscript, ''th," and the proportional spacing between the characters -- spacing which varies with the width of the letters. In older typewriters, each letter was alloted the same space.
Those who doubt the documents say those typographical elements would not have been commonly available at the time of Bush's service. But such characters were common features on electric typewriters of that era, the Globe determined through interviews with specialists and examination of documents from the period. In fact, one such raised ''th," used to describe a Guard unit, the 187th, appears in a document in Bush's official record that the White House made public earlier this year."
"Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.
In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 -- three years before the dates of the CBS memos -- the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.
As for the raised ''th" that appears in the Bush memos -- to refer, for example, to units such as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron -- Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s, and that the military could have ordered such custom balls from IBM."
Was that Selectric Composer an expensive typewriter in its time? If so, I doubt very much that the State of Texas (or any state) would have purchased it for the Army National Guard. The states and the fed tend to buy cheap office equipment to this day.
I would expect it to more likely have been a manual typewriter if it were used in the National Guard in 1972--maybe an Underwood or a Royal.
To give you an idea of how behind the times National Guard units are on office equipment, I saw clerks in some units using typewriters instead of computers and printers in the early 1990s.
Excellent work.
Doug could run out and talk to the guy!
Dan Blather said there are other Bush records from the pentagon that have superscript.
how is it that we are sure what typewriter it was??
To me the smoking gun is wordwrap. Others have noted that the wordwrap of a manual typewriter works differently than a word processor.
In particular, MSWORD wraps the current word when the end of a word passes the right margin, so that no line of text exceeds the right margin. By contrast, a person typing manually finishes the word (or syllable with hyphen) he is typing when the right-margin bell rings, and then does a carriage return. The net effect of the manual typewritten style is that, if one draws a vertical line at the bell-margin, that line should go through (intersect) the last word of every line of text.
Clearly, from the 1 AUG 1972 memo (and possibly others), NO SUCH VERTICAL LINE CAN BE CONSTRUCTED THAT INTERSECTS THE LAST WORD OF EVERY WRAPPED LINE OF TEXT!
This fact says that the margin control of the documents was not done according to manual typewriting protocol. By contrast, the margin control ends up exactly what MSWORD produces.
I've pointed this out on other threads. And on another thread, bolobaby noted that "this is not definitive proof by any stretch of the imagination," because a typist has the option to manually violate the wrapping convention of the bell, and squeeze in extra words. But I replied, what are the odds that a manual typist, over the span of 4 memos, would exactly choose to squeeze in the EXACT SAME words, so as to "accidentally" coincide with what MSWORD would produce. I would say, with metaphysical certitude that the odds are nil. Bolobaby agreed.
Remember the a Perry Mason, where he showed that a document was actually typed on the murder's typewriter by palming the ball and switching them in court? Of course you do, it was "The Case of the Elusive Element". Tragg gets all flustered when Perry shows him how the forged document could have been typed on another machine without having access to the actual machine.
http://www.oz.net/~daveb/Season6.htm#177
Let's call Rathergate, "The Case of the Elusive Element".
Don't even worry about it: The Selectric Composer cost as much as two cars, and was used to produce camera-ready copy. The procedures to compose a page required you to type it twice.
Typing "memos to self" on one of these things would be less plausible that asserting Col. Killian flew to work in a gyrocopter he made himself.
This story is nailed. The memos are a fraud.
That seals it. Microsoft Word circa 2004.
Is it known that Selectrics were used at those offices at the time.
IMHO, they had the best keyboard of any device known to man (well, at least this man!)
I've got one old IBM computer keyboard that comes close to the selectric in terms of feel, with a hard and distinct "key click."
Does anyone know where I might be able to find more keyboards like this? I've never seen them anywhere else, and it seems all the newer keyboards have a sort of "mushy" key feel, even the IBMs.
The keyboard I've got was old when I bought it (used), and that was at least 12 or 13 years ago!
Mark
Phil Dragoo has provide a link which shows us how this forgery was done on a computer with MS Word 2002.
Go to the link and see what Howlin told us, unfold in about one minute.
http://img41.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img41&image=60minbusted.swf
Would a Composer's default vertical single space default line up PERFECTLY with a document made by MS WORD? The Killian documents line up vertically perfectly with the MS Word default single space for Times New Roman.
If the Composer's default verticle line spacing was not identical to MS Word, then it could not be the typewriter even if the fonts lined up perfectly (which they don't).
The memo is a fraud.
I clerked in the Georgia National Guard from 1971 - 1977.
I never saw anything but a manual typewriter.