Truth or Consequences

Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the Air National Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be the legendary newsman’s finest hour. Instead, it blew up in his face, tarnishing his career forever and casting a dark cloud of doubt and suspicion over his reporting—and that of every other journalist on the case. This month, as Rather returns with a new memoir, Joe Hagan finally gets to the bottom of the greatest untold story in modern Texas politics, with exclusive, never-before-seen details that shed fresh light on who was right, who was wrong, and what really happened.

For the sake of accuracy, IBM designed and manufactured a series of typewriters, the IBM Executive B, C, and D series beginning in 1941, which did in fact provide proportional spaced type for typists in offices. I've owned and used them in the Seventies and Eighties. The forged memos, however, were not produced on an IBM Executive typewriter. The IBM Executive was built with fixed typefaces on the type bars, and the typeface/s used in the memos are what you find used In Microsoft Word, but they were not offered or built into the IBM Executive typewriters.

It is true that the IBM Selectric Composer was introduced in 1966, and it's typefaces could be changed by changing the typeball to produce proportional spaced type. Once more there is the problem with the typeface/s used in the memo being unavailable in the typeballs produced for the IBM Selectric Composer. There is also the impossibility of using the IBM Selectric Composer to produce the automatic kerning of letter pairs seen in the memos.

Contrary to what you can read in Web articles falsely claiming that kerning is the same as or nearly the same as proportional letter spacing, kerning of letter pairs is not something you can find on any typewriter ever built. The only way in which the line spacing of selected letter pairs or true kerning can be done is by typesetting and by computerized digital letter spacing as found in MS Word processing and other computer software. The memos were easily reproducible with MS Word on a personal computer, but impossible to reproduce on an IBM Selectric, IBM Selectric Composer, or and IBM Executive typewriter.

Even if it were possible for an IBM or other type compositor to have produced the typeface/s and letter spacing found in the forged memos, the Air National Guard headquarters and their clerks certainly did not possess or use such machines. Such machines would only have been used in a totally different kind of office whose responsibility would have been to produce graphic designs for Air Force publications. The commanding officer's clerk or secretary certainly would never have had any reason or budgetary appropriation to acquire, use, or maintain such a costly and superfluous piece of graphic arts publishing equipment. I know for a fact that our Air National Guard F-102 Fighter Interceptor Group did not possess or use such a compositor in or outside of the headquarters. I have every reason to assume the Texas Air National Guard acquired their typewriters from the very same supplies of Air Force typewriters as our F-102 Fighter Interceptor Group, Tactical Fighter Wing, and various Air Force wings and squadrons.

I should also be noted how there are numerous other telltale problems with the memos. Although not conclusive by itself, the use of word wrap in the memos should be observed. Most competent typists and secretaries know that you do not break a line where it will separate certain word elements. Instead, the typist breaks the line early to keep the word elements together on the next line. Incompetent typists and computer word processor users fail to notice this requirement windbreak the line in the middle of the pair of word elements. In one of the memos, for example, the date of “14 May, 1972,” was given a line break between the “14” and the “May”, leaving the “14” dangling at the end of one line and the “May” beginning the next line. This is not something a competent secretary would normally do. In a computer word processor, however, the software automatically calculates the end of the line and breaks the line to put “May” on the next line, when a competent user or forger would know better and insert a CTL-Enter command to force the line to break and place the “14” on the next line with the “May” following it. This gives the appearance of a forger who missed something obvious to any competent typist.

Although a Linotype hot lead typesetter was not the only way of composing the type for this type of memo, not even one of these giant hot lead machines would have produced the composing errors found in the memos. The errors we see in these obvious forgeries are consistent with computer word processing which did not exist in 1972.

A person could spend hours listing and refuting point by point the many flatly incredible lies in the article. Lt.Bush and at least one other lieutenant became superfluous to the needs of the fighter-interceptor group when the Congress drastically reduced the military budgets and his unit's mission was changed from active duty air defense to a combination of an operational training unit and active duty air defense. As an operational training unit, the fighter-interceptor group had to have a certain number of qualified instructor pilots considerably greater than were required when it was not an operational training unit. To be qualified as an instructor pilot requires a certain number of flight hours logged in that specific type of aircraft, e.g. F-102. If I remember correctly, the number of flight hours in the aircraft type may have been 2,000 hours.

The youngest pilots recruited by the fighter-interceptor group did not have any opportunity to accumulate the required number of flight hours to qualify as instructor pilots as required by the changed mission of the fighter-interceptor group. Only the oldest pilot members of the unit had enough flight time in the F-102 to qualify as instructor pilots for this type of aircraft.

Adding to the difficulties, the fighter-interceptor group was ordered to prepare for the retirement of their F-102 fighter-interceptors and replace them with the F-101 McDonnell-Douglas Voodoo fighter-interceptor. This order exacerbated the problems faced by the unit commanders as they tried to comply with their changed mission orders. Now they not only had to acquire a roster of pilots qualified as instructor pilots for the F-102 fighter-interceptor, they now also had to acquire pilots qualified as instructor pilots for the F-101 fighter-interceptor as well.

The fighter-interceptor group must fulfill its mission orders while remaining in the fiscal budget appropriated for its operations. When Congress drastically reduced the budgets for the military, this fighter-interceptor group's budget for number of authorized flight hours was also reduced. This reduction in flight hours created a severe conflict in the ability of the unit to provide the minimum number of hours of flight time required to meet Operational Readiness (OR) standards and regulations. Each pilot is required by regulations to log a certain minimum number of flight hours in any type of aircraft and a certain minimum number of flight hours in a specific aircraft type to maintain pilot proficiency standards. The unit's command was given only a limited number of flight hours for the entire unit and its mission, and these limited flight hours then had to be divided among all the pilots to meet their minimum requirements. The number of flight hours available to the unit as a whole was nowhere near enough to give the unit's current roster of pilots the tens of thousands of hours of flight time needed to qualify as pilot instructors for both the F-102 and the F-101. The only way possible for the unit to meet its mission obligations was to recruit replacement pilots who already had or nearly had the thousands of hours of flight time in the F-102 and/or F-101 fighter-interceptors required to qualify as instructor pilots for the changed mission orders.

The only source for these replacement instructor pilots were the older pilots in the Air Force active duty squadrons who had already been flying the F-102 and/or F-101 fighter-interceptors for enough years to log near to or more than 2,000 flight hours. Since the Deomocrat majority in Congress forced the inactivation of a large proportion of the active duty Air Force squadrons, there were many long experienced F-102 and F-101 pilots who the Air Force had to separate from active military service due to a lack of a budget, aircraft seats, and aircraft. The Air Force headquarters encouraged the 147th Fighter-Interceptor Group and the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron to recruit these experienced pilots separated early from active duty to become their new instructor pilots.

Although the recruitment of the replacement instructor pilots being separated from the active duty Air force resolved the instructor pilot problem for the Air National Guard units, it also created another conflict and problem. The Air Force regulations until a few years later did not permit the units to offer its younger pilots early separation from their commissions. There were only enough flight hours in the unit budgets to allow the replacement instructor pilots, the trainees, and the active duty air defense sorties to perform their missions. There simply was no budget of any meaningful size remaining to allow the pilots not rated as instructor pilots to log even their minimum flight hours required to remain on flight status. Consequently, the unit commanders were compelled to ask these younger pilots to attempt to find other Air Force Ready Reserve units in the Air National Guard or Air Force Reserves where they could fulfill their remaining service commitments either on flight status as a pilot or on non-flight status behind a desk on the ground. This attempt to resolve the problem also ran into a number of stonewalls with regulations that failed to anticipate the problems arising from such a massive RIF (Reduction In Force). The other units in the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserves had much the same problem of having more people on their rosters than their reduced sized budgets would allow them to retain on their personnel rosters.

Consequently, the 147th FIG and 110FIS like many other Air Force, Air Force Reserve, and Air National Guard units of the time encouraged the personnel they could no longer employ to seek another unit where they could fulfill their service commitments until such time as their commitment expired or the Air Force regulations were changed to permit early separation for the good of the service.

Lt. Bush was too young to ever have acquired the number of flight hours required to remain i his unit as an instructor pilot. He was also too young to have completed his combat flight training in time to qualify for an assignment to air combat in the Vietnam Conflict. The Democrats in Congress forced an end to the U.S. defense of South Vietnam before Lt Bush could possibly have qualified for a combat assignment. If John Kerry had been the same age as Lt. Bush, he too would have been too young to have received an assignment to the U.S. Navy Swiftboats, which were transferred to the RVN navy in 1970. Kerry volunteered to bug out, whereas Lt. Bush was forced out of his assignment as a combat pilot by the Democrats in Congress who denied his combat unit the budget for his assigned mission.

All the rest of the twisted misrepresentations of what happened all stems from his unit being unable to make any further use of the services of F-102 pilots of Bush's age and flight hours. Lt, Bush was never AWOL and was quite properly granted an honorable discharge well deserved. Special treatment was not required to enlist in the Air National Guard, which accepted enlistments and granted commissions even when comparable assignments were not being offered by active duty Air Force recruiters. The article is just one large lie and defamatory smear.

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