Blogger Who Faulted CBS Documents Is Conservative Activist
By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — It was the first public allegation that CBS News used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush's National Guard service — a highly technical explanation posted within hours of airtime citing proportional spacing and font styles.
But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Times has found.
The identity of "Buckhead," a blogger known previously only by his screen name on the site freerepublic.com and lifted to folk hero status in the conservative blogosphere since last week's posting, is likely to fuel speculation among Democrats that the efforts to discredit the CBS memos were engineered by Republicans eager to undermine reports that Bush received preferential treatment in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.
Republican officials have denied any involvement among those debunking the CBS story.
Reached by telephone today, MacDougald, 46, confirmed that he is Buckhead, but declined to answer questions about his political background or how he knew so much about the CBS documents so fast.
"You can ask the questions but I'm not going to answer them," he told The Times. "I'm just going to stick to doing no interviews."
Until The Times identified him by piecing together information from his postings over the past two years, MacDougald had taken pains to remain in the shadows — saying the credit for challenging CBS should remain with the blogosphere as a whole and not one individual.
"Freepers collectively possess more analytical horsepower than the entire news division at CBS," he wrote in an e-mail, using the slang term for users of the freerepublic site.
MacDougald is a lawyer in the Atlanta office of the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice and is affiliated with two prominent conservative legal groups, the Federalist Society and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, where he serves on the legal advisory board and has been involved in several high-profile cases.
Founded in 1976, the Southeastern Legal Foundation advocates "limited government, individual economic freedom, and the free enterprise system," according to its website.
The foundation has fought affirmative action and domestic partner benefits for government employees, and successfully challenged a Clinton administration plan to use proportional sampling, rather than a hard count, to estimate the population in the 2000 census.
MacDougald helped draft the foundation's petition in 1998 that led to the five-year suspension of Clinton's Arkansas law license for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.
And MacDougald assisted in the group's legal challenge to the campaign finance law sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.). The challenge, ultimately presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, was funded largely by the Southeastern Legal Foundation in conjunction with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the law's chief critic, and handled by former Clinton investigator Kenneth W. Starr.
The Supreme Court upheld the law, which banned unlimited contributions from corporations to federal candidates and political parties.
The foundation was joined in its challenge by a cadre of groups that spanned the ideological spectrum, including the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union.
MacDougald is also a Republican appointee to the Fulton County Board of Registration and Election.
Last week, MacDougald once again plunged into a politically charged controversy — but this time his participation was anonymous.
Operating as "Buckhead," which is also the name of an upscale Atlanta neighborhood, MacDougald wrote that the memos that CBS' "60 Minutes" presented on Sept. 8 as being written in the early 1970s by the late Lt. Col Jerry B. Killian were "in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman."
"The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers," MacDougald wrote on the freerepublic website. "They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.
"I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively."
The Sept. 8 late-night posting — written less than four hours after the CBS report was aired — resulted in a flurry of sympathetic testimonials from fellow bloggers, spreading within hours to other sites. The next day, major newspapers such as The Times and the Washington Post began consulting forensic experts and reporting stories that raised similar questions.
CBS has insisted that the four memos, dated from 1972 and 1973, had been authenticated by the network's experts and by "close associates" of Killian, who confirm "that the documents reflect his opinions and actions at the time."
The memos showed Killian resisting pressure by a higher-up to "sugarcoat" Bush's performance evaluation and ordering Bush to take a physical examination so he could keep flying.
CBS has cited an expert, Bill Glennon, an information technology consultant, who said IBM electric typewriters that were in use in 1972 could provide proportional spacing and the superscript — the small "th" — evident in the disputed memos.
The network also has sought to counter the arguments by referring to a typewriting script distributor, who says the typing style in the memos has been available since 1931. Moreover, CBS points out, some of the lettering in question was evident in Bush's military records previously released by the White House.
Still, when Killian's former secretary came forward this week to say she did not believe the memos were authentic either, anchor Dan Rather and other network executives stopped asserting that the memos were real. They said they would "redouble" efforts to resolve unanswered questions.
While bloggers and some conservative activists hailed Buckhead as a hero in their longtime efforts to paint the mainstream media as politically biased, some Democrats and even some conservative bloggers have marveled at Buckhead's detailed knowledge of the memos and wondered whether that suggested a White House conspiracy.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe even speculated openly to reporters that the whole thing could have been orchestrated by White House political advisor Karl Rove. The Bush campaign called the allegation "nonsense."
MacDougald is an outspoken conservative and a Republican active in local politics.
"I attended a meeting on Tuesday to organize lawyers for Bush-Cheney in my state to monitor and, if necessary, litigate election issues," he told fellow "freepers" in a Buckhead posting last month.
As a lawyer, MacDougald has represented government waste whistle-blowers and has challenged affirmative action laws that give racial and ethnic minorities preferences in higher education.
He is not a big financial contributor to political causes, having donated $250 to the Georgia Republican Party in 2002, when Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed was chairman. Reed is now a senior strategist for the Bush campaign.
Associates of MacDougald scoff at the notion that he was doing anything but acting alone when he offered his observations about the CBS memos.
"Harry is a very strong conservative and a very passionate conservative so if he sees something that looks fishy, he's going to say something about it," said Lynn Hogue, a Georgia State University law professor and former executive director of the Southeastern Legal Foundation.
"When he's not absorbed with work, I think he spends the rest of his life in the wee hours of the morning on freerepublic," Hogue added. "And that's the outlet through which he shares his concerns and insights, and so rather than being a matter of conspiracy, it's just him doing what he does."
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