Campaign panic in perfect Times Roman (Former Army Clerk/Typist Discusses CBS Memos)

MIAMI, FL. – If I hear one more Vietnam war story out of either presidential campaign I might just sit out this election. But the documents "60 Minutes" recently revealed as proof of President Bush's dereliction of military duty made me want to send my old Army sergeant out to Dan Rather's office. He had a way to deal with misguided trainees - he'd whack us with his "Ugly Stick." After high school I enlisted in the US Army, the only clear alternative for a teen without college plans in the late 1970s. I had two options: a rifleman posting or an administrative position. As a Grateful Dead democrat, I chose typewriter keys as my weapon. After basic training, I was sent to clerk school at Fort Jackson, S.C. There, in concert with thousands of push-ups and hundreds of grueling force-marched miles, I learned how to type in 1980.

And nearly a decade after the dubious "60 Minutes" documents were allegedly created, military-issue typewriters were still unable to produce such memoranda.

The clerk's Bible at Jackson typist training was Army Regulation 340-15, "Preparation and Management of Military Correspondence." Our Moses: Staff Sgt. Phillips, a tall, balding Vietnam veteran whose starched fatigues belied his smoke-stained teeth and eye-burning breath. He was quick with quips in his thick Southern drawl and just as fast to anger. Speed was our only goal as we tapped out "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" on our Olivetti manuals. Too slow? Do it again. Errors were acceptable, but only a few. And no backspacing or correction fluid was allowed; that was considered cheating and we always got caught.

If a trainee stepped out of line, he got the Ugly Stick. Sarge brandished the remnants of a golf club with its head broken off in what was surely a fit of rage at the nearby Ft. Jackson Country Club. He spun it, Chaplin-esque, as he wandered the classroom rows of sweating trainees.

Normally, Phillips would bring the club shaft down on an errant GI's desk with a crack that stopped all typing. Sometimes, he might clip you with the sharp end.

More important, we had to quote AR340-15, chapter and verse. Don't remember the salutation for a Congressman? You get the Ugly Stick. Can't recall the margins on an official memorandum? Ugly Stick. Get a signature block wrong? Duck, and fast.

After training, I was shipped off to the 25th Infantry Division in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. At the division public affairs office, I suffered one recurring error: In the final signature block, after carefully typing through paragraphs and pages, I couldn't seem to add the "TH" after the "25" without fouling up the entire document. When my new sergeant caught the first such error, he made me fetch AR340-15 and recite the relevant guideline aloud. By the time my enlistment was up, that page in the manual was dog-eared and brown with fingerprints.

I have one clear memory of my Army enlistment in the early 1980s. We clerks cursed every day that our well-supplied, active duty infantry division headquarters had no word processors and not enough electric typewriters. Those electric typewriters we had did not shrink and raise the TH to a superscript like one "60 Minutes" memo allegedly typed to file in 1973 by Bush's National Guard squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian.

Our apostrophes weren't curlicues like in the CBS memo where Killian supposedly wrote about pressure on him from "upstairs" to "sugarcoat" Bush's performance report. Military documents of that era had erratic character spacing; every hunt-and-peck letter was a dash different shade of black ink.

But not in these "blockbuster" documents impugning the president - they were perfectly uniform Times Roman word processing.

Mr. Rather's documents are too perfect, too much like Microsoft Word. In fact, the closer you look the more this looks like a con. The authenticity was incredibly easy to check, but the perpetrators of the possible forgery and the legendary newsman were too eager to tarnish the president.

They missed the obvious. But they also missed a vital rule in campaign politics that I learned as a marginal communications staffer in the 1992 Bush/Quayle reelection campaign. The imperative: don't panic.

In the last days of that doomed 1992 Bush reelection effort, we knew we were losing. James Baker and other close Bush friends and family moved in to keep a close eye on all our work. In particular, they were looking for mistakes that would embarrass the family. At the time, dubious documents about the Arkansas governor's alleged "zipper problem" were floating temptingly around campaign headquarters. Wrong-headed whispers among junior staff about "saving the campaign" could be heard if you listened closely.

Finally, we were called into a meeting and given a simple instruction: Anyone caught trafficking in this information would be summarily fired. The Bush family did not want to "win this way." Because we were almost sure to lose anyway, they made a further promise that violators would never work in Washington again. Any doubts were laid to rest when we were told who sent this message: the president's son, George W. Bush.

It was an important campaign lesson: Don't act in haste and anger. Always check and recheck all information, especially when your candidate is dreadfully stalled. Only smart politics and hard work can recover a campaign in disarray.

Somehow, John Kerry's allies forgot this rule. So did Dan Rather. He, especially, gets the Ugly Stick.

From 1978 until 1995, I worked as a court reporter in division- and corps-level SJA offices. Now, a court reporter earns his bread through typing ... the in-court stuff is important because it gets it to that point, but, in the end, it's the original and four or five copies of the transcript of the record of trial that the Staff Judge Advocate, the Convening Authority (the Commanding General of the Corps or Division), and the military appellate courts are waiting to pounce on. Nothing can proceed in the processing of the appellate process until the record of trial is prepared, reviewed by both counsel, and authenticated by the military judge. Speed and accuracy are required: take too long and it doesn't matter how clean the copy is; do it too fast, with too much errata, and they're sending it back to you for a retype.

When I became a court reporter in 1978, we were using Royal 550 manual typewriters, one typewritten original and a five-carbon paper snap set for the copies. Xeroxing was too expensive for the Army at that time, so we did it in an original and five carbon copies. Make a mistake, you carefully roll the paper set out far enough to get to the carbons with an eraser, making sure not to smear the work around the error. In those days before saving the record of trial to memory, making errata corrections from the trial and defense counsel on the saved copy, and giving the military judge a clean record, if the counsel came back with errata, it meant pen-and-inking the changes on the face of the record and presenting your disgrace to the whole military legal field .. and posterity, because these things get stored for a LONG time.

My assignment from Fort Hood to Korea in 1979 meant that I remained using the Royal 550, except we had to make the typing ribbon last as long as we could, which meant rewinding it, reversing it, and hoping that there was enough ink remaining in the spaces between the letters to continue to make clear copies.

I thought I was in hog-heaven when I was assigned to Mannheim and we had LANIER word processors...big hulking pseudo-computers that were only good for typing. But you could save your work product and it made errata corrections easy. 21st Support Command probably had about 10 .. all in court reporter shops in Mannheim and K'Town. None of the Division or Corps staffs had anything remotely resembling such treasures.

When I returned to Fort Hood in 1985, it was back to the Royal 550s for awhile, then Selectrics (with the golf-ball heads) and Swintecs (partial memory typewriters which could back you out of trouble with correct-tape almost as fast as you could get into it). When computers finally came to the court reporters, in about 1987, I decided to keep using the Swintec because I could make corrections on the face of the original record faster than most could figure out the keyboard corrections in the pre-mouse days. It still meant that I couldn't "save" the copy for post-errata cleanliness, but, by this time, I was both accurate and fast. Meanwhile, those unfortunate to use the computers went through a myriad of word processing program incarnations .. WordPerfect (in varying numbers), ENABLE, proto-Word, and too many other titles that flashed through the "official" requirements for word processing.

Finally, in about 1989, I was required to give up my typewriter and go to Microsoft Word.

Throughout my stint as a military court reporter (and now as a DoD civilian one), we were required by regulation to use the "standard" font, either Courier or New Courier, for processing courts-martial and other legal documents. Times New Roman was not allowed per AR 27-10 or the Manual for Courts-Martial.

As typing goes, military court reporters are pretty much the elite, the Rear Echelon Rangers. Yet, in my career as a military court reporter, until the time I was given a computer .. even including the old univac-type LANIER word processing system .. we never had the ability to superscript "th", unless we wanted to give the roller a half-turn down and try to keep the two letters even while typing with one finger and holding the roller. It wasn't worth the effort .. 1st Cavalry Division, 2nd Infantry Division, 21st Support Command, 2nd Armored Division, they all remained number-and-letters on the same level.

So, no, I do NOT believe that some obscure ANG unit was given equipment that the military's "professional" typists never saw and could only dream of. Anyone who thinks so, obviously hasn't spent enough time in the rear with us REMFs or in uniform at all.

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"...golly... e-mail from Mr. Rather... hmm... good job... but... problems... hmm... no more memos needed... hmm... blogosphere... hmm... lay-off... hmm... gee... wonder what a 'lay-off' is... hmm..."

"...golly... e-mail from Mr. Rather... hmm... good job... but...
problems... hmm... no more memos needed... hmm... blogosphere...
hmm... lay-off... hmm... gee... wonder what a 'lay-off' is... hmm..."