CBS Defends Its Report on Bush Military Record
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By JIM RUTENBERG and KATE ZERNIKE
The New York Times
September 11, 2004
nytimes.com
WASHINGTON - The debate over President Bush's National Guard service turned into a furious battle over the minutiae of Vietnam-era typewriter fonts on Friday as CBS News mounted a vigorous defense against critics who doubted the authenticity of four documents that suggested Mr. Bush had shirked his duty.
Dan Rather, the CBS News anchor, moved aggressively - on the air - to protect the credibility of the news division.
Democrats and Republicans watched carefully from the sidelines, deeply aware that the debate could help shape the presidential campaign some 50 days before Nov. 2.
CBS News executives said they were confident their report on what they presented as four newfound memos from the personal files of Mr. Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, dated 1972 and 1973 and first reported on Wednesday, would stand up to scrutiny.
The memos indicated that Mr. Bush, who has long faced questions about his service in the Air National Guard, failed to take a physical examination "as ordered'' and that his commander felt under pressure to "sugarcoat" his performance rating, because First Lieutenant Bush, the son of a prominent congressman, was "talking to someone upstairs."
The report set off debate on Web logs, in newspapers and on television competitors to CBS News about whether such documents could have been produced 30 years ago.
Some forensic specialists said the documents appeared to be fakes created by a modern computer because they had features that could not have been produced on Vietnam-era typewriters. Others disagreed.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Rather said: "CBS News stands by, and I stand by, the thoroughness and accuracy of this report, period. Our story is true."
On television later, he depicted questions about the veracity of the report as a counterattack coming in part from "partisan political operatives." On the "Evening News," Mr. Rather interviewed a handwriting expert who he said had helped CBS News verify the authenticity of the documents. The expert, Marcel B. Matley, said their signatures were consistent with those of Colonel Killian on records that the White House has independently given reporters.
The CBS News report also disputed critics' assertions that raised, or superscript, characters after numbers like "111th" were not consistent with Vietnam-era typewriters.
"Critics claim typewriters didn't have that ability in the 1970's," Mr. Rather said.
"But some models did," he added, showing an old Guard record previously provided by the White House that such superscripts.
Democrats promised to continue questioning Mr. Bush's Guard service. At a news conference Friday, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party chairman, said even if the documents were forged, there was enough evidence from official records and other news accounts to say Mr. Bush had not been honest about his Guard time.
"It has become crystal clear that the president has lied to the American public about his military service," Mr. McAuliffe said.
At the White House, Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman, told reporters that whether the documents were forged or not, "the president met his obligations and was honorably discharged."
It was the typefaces that consumed much of the news media. For every expert who said the documents looked like the work of computers and could not have come from old-fashioned typewriters because of proportional spacing and some type features, there seemed to be another who said they could indeed have been authentic.
Dr. Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist in Georgia who has compiled of database of more than 3,000 old fonts, said people who bought the I.B.M. Selectric Composer model could specially order keys with the superscripts in question. Dr. Bouffard said that font did bear many similarities to the one on the CBS documents, but not enough to dispel questions he had about their authenticity.
A spokesman for I.B.M., John Bukovinsky, said he knew only that the company introduced proportional spacing to some typewriters in 1944, most notably in the Executive line.
Mark A. Robb, team leader of the type development group at Lexmark, which embodies the old I.B.M. typewriting and printing division and now focuses on printers, said specific machines could be custom fitted with the superscript letters in question and that they frequently were.
Some former engineers who worked in the typewriter division said they were not aware of a standard typewriter that could have produced the Killian documents because the superscript letters in question were so rare.
Robert A. Rahenkamp, a former I.B.M. manager who wrote a scholarly history on its typewriters for a company journal in 1981, said, "I'm not aware that we had any superscript technologies back in those days'' on standard proportional space typewriters.
Bill Glennon, a technology consultant in New York who worked for I.B.M. in Midtown Manhattan for 14 years and repaired typewriters throughout that time, said that the Executive had proportional spacing and that its typebar could be fitted with superscript characters. Documents from the period show the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969. But spokesmen for the National Guard and Texas Air National Guard said it was impossible to trace the machines that Colonel Killian's unit, the 111th Fighter Intercept Squadron, or any unit, used so long ago.
Mark Allen, chief of the external media division of the National Guard Bureau public affairs office, said there was no way to reconstruct the equipment or whether Colonel Killian typed the memos or had a clerk type them.
"It's sheer speculation as to what might have transpired,'' Mr. Allen said, "and it's pointless for us to get into that kind of speculation."
The debate once again engulfed the campaign in the events of 30 years ago when, Mr. Bush and Senator John Kerry made separate choices that sent Mr. Bush into a coveted stateside post in the Guard and Mr. Kerry into combat in Vietnam.
Colonel Killian's family and one-time colleagues were drawn into the battle over whether the documents were real and whether he had felt pressure to give Lieutenant Bush special treatment.
Robert W. Strong, 62, was a staff sergeant in the adjutant general's office of the Texas Air National Guard at Camp Mabry at Austin in 1968, when Mr. Bush enlisted. Mr. Strong said in an interview Friday he was quite sure that he and others used Selectrics in the adjutant general's office. He added that he was not sure the typewriters and devices were also in the 147th Combat Support Squadron at the Ellington base in Houston, home of the 111th squadron.
"I'm skeptical that Killian was working on that," Mr. Strong said.
Mr. Strong was a crucial source for CBS News, insisting that the sentiment expressed in the memos were consistent with "the man that I remember Jerry Killian being."
"I don't see anything the documents that are discordant with what were the times, what was the situation and the people that were involved," he added.
Mr. Killian's daughter, Nancy Killian Rodriguez, said, "We have no idea where any of this stuff came out from under."
Ms. Rodriguez, born in 1971, said that she was a toddler when the memos in question were dated and that she did not know what her father thought of Lieutenant Bush at the time. Asked whether she or the family backed Mr. Bush now, she said: "I'm not even going to say. I'm done."
Experts on documents said the veracity of the CBS memos might never be known because they had been copied so many times. CBS News officials said that its papers were copies, too, and that it did not have the originals. The network said it would not identify its original source.
Mr. Rather said, "We worked long and hard and became convinced that, yes, this person had the capacity to get the documents, and, yes, this person was truthful."
Mr. Matley, the documents expert, said in an interview after the program, that he had examined documents and handwriting since 1985 and had testified in 65 trials. Mr. Matley said the documents the network sent him were so deteriorated from copying that it was impossible to identify the typeface.
"It's sheer speculation to say that you couldn't have done that until a computer came along,'' he said.
As a result, he said, he focused on the signatures. CBS sent him the four newfound documents, as well as others that have been verified as signed by Colonel Killian. "There were significant similarities and the differences were insignificant," he said in the configuration of letters and the angle of the writing.
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Jim Rutenberg reported from Washington and Kate Zernike from New York; Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting from Washington for this article, John Schwartz from New York and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston. |
