Last update: September 14, 2004 at 11:39 PM
Ex-Guard secretary: Bush memos are fake, but accurate
Maureen Balleza and Kate Zernike, New York Times
September 15, 2004 GUARD0915
HOUSTON -- The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed they were fakes.
But she also said they accurately reflected the thoughts of the commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, and other memos she typed for him about Bush. "The information in them is correct," Marian Carr Knox, now 86, said in an interview at her home in Texas. "But I doubt," she said, pausing, "it's not anything that I wrote because there are terms in there that are not used by Guards, the format wasn't the way we did it. It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together.
"We did discuss Bush's conduct, and it was a problem Killian was concerned about," Knox said. "I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done." But, she said, words like "billets," which appear in the memorandums, were not standard Guard terms.
Knox, who was the secretary for the squadron at Ellington Air Force Base from 1957 to 1979, said she recalled Bush's case and the criticism of him because his record was so unusual. Killian had her type memorandums recording the problems, she said, and he kept them in a private, locked file. Asked about her politics, she said she had never voted for Bush.
Killian died in 1984; his widow and son have said that they did not find any memos among the private effects they cleared from his office after his death. Killian's son, Gary, who also served at the squadron and who initially thought that the signatures on the documents matched his father's, has come to believe they are fakes, and said he doubted Knox's account.
Knox's comments add to the mystery around the four memos reported by CBS News last Wednesday, which indicated that Bush had been suspended from flying because he failed to meet standards and report for a physical exam.
startribune.com |
