Agreed. Any of the millions of Americans who worked in military/government offices in that time period would be able to recognize whether a document could or could not have been produced on the equipment in use at that time. And military/government equipment was WAY behind what was in use in the private sector, so just because somebody from IBM says some very new Selectrics at that time "might" have had superscript capability, doesn't have anything to do with the matter.
It's worse than that.
Times New Roman is a fully proportional font. This means that each letter has its own customized width, just as we see all the time today.
Not even the best of the old typewriters could produce something like that. IBM's Executive has four pre-formed widths. The fonts were customized to fit one of those four. So for example the 'i' would be wider than on a true proportional font because the 'r' would share the same width.
I notice that a lot of people have been talking about Selectrics, but a Selectric would provide much higher print quality than I see in any of the memos or forms of the period. They used old-fashioned electric typewriters with typebars, not balls.
Other than running memos through a typesetter, there's just no way you could create that kind of type in those days.
What amazes me is the stupidity of the people who forged these documents. I've never forged a document before in my life, and I would have known to duplicate the typeface and so on.
I at least like to think that at the highest level of political campaigning somebody out there had a brain.
Guess not.
That alone is enough for me to be absolutely appalled at the idea of Kerry for President. Someone who selects a campaign staff this stupid deserves what they get.
D
Even if equiptment that could do that existed at the time (which I do not concede), it was top-of-the-line, very expensive, and took training to operate. I could see the Pentagon having something like that for composing offical documents: letters to Congress and cabinet officals, certificates for medals being awarded, promotion notifications for senior officers.
It is not within resonable probability that a TANG Lt Col would have such a machine in his office, nor that he would go to the trouble required to achieve perfect centering in the heading for a memo destined for just his personal files