- During last night's 60 Minute segment on President George
W. Bush's Air National Guard service, the CBS News touted a number of documents
which seemingly indicate that the future president failed to meet his service
obligations.
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- That may well be the case but it is becoming increasingly
evident that 60 Minutes, and the Dan Rather, the reporter behind the story,
may have been relying on forged documents to prove their case.
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- Several indicators point to this conclusion including
the fact that the four memoranda, which Rather said were written during
the early 1970s by Bush's commanding officer Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian,
are printed in a proportionally spaced type style similar to the common
computer font Times New Roman. But such computer technology had not even
been invented when the documents were allegedly written.
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- This does not imply, however, that the memos could not
have originated during the 1970s since IBM, the dominant player in the
office equipment at the time had several years earlier invented a typewriter
which allowed typists to use proportional fonts.
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- Such machines, marketed mainly under the model name Selectric
had become quite popular by the early seventies even though they were extremely
expensive according to Jim Forbes, who collects the now-discontinued machines
and operates a web site about them called Selectric.org.
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- For the most part, organizations who could afford the
typewriters only allowed professional typists to use them especially since
they were often cumbersome to use. Non-professionals stuck to the older,
less-complicated typewriters which printed in the traditional monospace
fonts like Courier.
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- As a government installation, it is quite possible that
the Texas Air National Guard had a few Selectric (or its successor models)
in its possession. However, examination of Bush's official records released
by the Pentagon reveals that Killian and his fellow officers did not use
proportional spacing typewriters (1, 2, 3, 4) for their correspondence.
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- For its part, CBS has refused to disclose where it had
obtained the controversial documents. During last night's program, Rather
stated "we are told [they] were taken from Colonel Killian's personal
file." Contacted by The Washington Post, Kelli Edwards, a spokesperson
for 60 Minutes declined to elaborate any further.
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- Other evidence points toward the conclusion that CBS
News may have been duped. Two of the alleged memos, dated May 4, 1972 and
August 18, 1973, use a font technology that was beyond the capabilities
of the day.
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- Both documents use relatively sized fonts to write out
ordinal numbers, a typographical convention used to spell out numerical
orderings or rankings such as "twenty-fourth." In normal English
usage are often written in shorted form using the relevant number followed
by an ordinal suffix. Thus "twenty-fourth" becomes 24th. The
1972 document uses the ordinal 111st and the other refers to 187th.
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- The fact that the person who made the documents used
this notation casts doubt on their authenticity since typing it out numerically
with a superscript ordinal suffix was quite difficult to do on an Selectric
model typewriter which required a very involved process in which the user
would have to feed the paper up half a line, manually remove the device's
"font ball" which was used to place characters onto the paper,
replace it with a ball with a smaller-sized font, advance the page back
down half a line, and then put back the original font ball.
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- While it is conceivable that the memos' creator may have
actually followed the elaborate procedure to get the perfect superscript
ordinal suffix, that does not seem likely according to Gerry Kaplan, another
Selectric collector who operates IBMComposer.org.
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- "The person who produced this copy does not appear
to have taken the time to properly space things out, such as 'May,1972'
has no space after the comma; '(flight)IAW' has no space after the parenthesis.
So, it would be hard to believe that they would take the time to produce
the superscript 'th' manually. So, if no general-use typewriter existed
with such keys, it is unlikely that they took the time to superscript that,"
Kaplan says.
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- Theoretically, it is possible that Killian may have had
access to a font ball which contained superscript-sized ordinal suffixes,
but such an accessory would have been very rare.
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- "If one had a font ball that had a superscript font,
then it could be done, but as far as I know, the only common superscript
font was the number set available on the Symbol balls," says Forbes.
"These would be used for formal papers with footnotes, most likely.
So, the short answer to your question about a letter superscript is 'No.'"
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- The typographical case against the documents' authenticity
is further undermined considering that all of the memos appear to use a
font that was not in wide use on Selectric machines during the early seventies.
A search of Forbes's online archive of common Selectric fonts reveals none
matching typeface used in the purported Killian memos. In fact, the CBS
documents' font looks much more similar to the modern-day Times New Roman.
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- In the face of such evidence (including the fact that
Killian has long since been deceased), and CBS's refusal to reveal its
third-party source, it seems increasingly likely that Dan Rather's "exclusive"
has turned out to be a hoax. Should that be the case, it would not be the
first time that the 72-year-old anchorman has been embarrassed by reporting
unconfirmed stories.
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- In his legendary book on the 1972 presidential campaign
The Boys on the Bus, author Timothy Crouse relayed how many of Rather's
rivals on the White House beat resented him for his gung-ho approach to
the facts.
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- "Rather often adhered to the 'informed sources'
or 'the White House announced today' formulas, but he was famous in the
trade for the times when he bypassed these formulas and 'winged it' on
a story. Rather would go with an item even if he didn't have it completely
nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if
he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as
honest, he would let it rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather
for this. They knew exactly why he got away with it: being handsome as
a cowboy, Rather was a star on CBS News, and that gave him the clout he
needed. They could quote all his lapses from fact, like the three times
he had Ellsworth Bunker resigning, the two occasions on which he announced
that J. Edgar Hoover would step down, or the time he incorrectly predicted
that Nixon was about to veto an education bill."
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- http://ratherbiased.com/news/content/view/202/2/
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