September 16, 2004

Memogate: About The Typewriter

CBS didn't ask Marian Knox about the typewriter she had at the Texas Air National Guard office back in '72-'73, but the Dallas Morning News did. It wasn't an IBM Selectric Composer, the fancy but expensive type-setting machine that some experts think could have produced the apparently forged memos that CBS presented as authentic.

Knox said signs of forgery abound in the four memos.

She said the typeface on the documents did not match either of the two typewriters that she used during her time with the Guard. She identified those machines as a mechanical Olympia typewriter and the IBM Selectric that replaced it in the early 1970s.

She spoke fondly of the Olympia, which she said had a key with the "th" superscript character that has been the focus of much debate in the CBS memos.

Beyond that issue, experts have said that the Selectric and mechanical typewriters such as the Olympia could not produce the proportional spacing found in the disputed documents.

Knox said she was sure the documents were not direct transcriptions because the language and terminology did not match what Killian would have used.

For instance, she said, the use of the words "billets" and a reference to the "administrative officer" of Bush's squadron reflect Army terminology rather than that of the Air National Guard. Some news reports attribute the CBS reports to a former Army National Guard officer who has a long-standing dispute with the Guard and who has previously maintained that the president's record was sanitized.

So, we are left with this: the memos CBS presented as authentic could not have been typed by anyone at the Texas Air National Guard on the dates indicated on the memos. The TANG didn't have a typewriter that could produce them. Killian's secretary says she didn't type them. A Killian memo of known authenticity contradicts the content of the CBS memos, and Knox presents no evidence to support her claim that the forged memos are "accurate" but the authentic memo isn't.

As for the forged memos, the overwhelming weight of the analysis by document examiners is that they were produced on modern word-processing equipment. The documents were faxed from a Kinko's in Abilene, Texas, which has modern word processing equipment. Bill Burkett, a long-time Bush opponent who has made wild and unsubstantiated claims about Bush's National Guard records having been sanitized, lives near that Abilene Kinkos, and has an account there. A month ago, he wrote an article for the left-wing Democrats.com admitting that he had "found no documentation from LTC Killian's hand or staff that indicate that this unit was involved in any complicit way to either cover for the failures of 1LT Bush..."

So, did he take 15 minutes to create such documents, either at home or on a Kinko's PC, and then fax them from the Kinkos? And did CBS ignore Burkett's history and his obvious credibility problems - not to mention the advice of document authentication experts that the memos were forgeries - in order to smear George W. Bush? And are they now presenting Ms. Knox to defend the fraudulent memos as being an "accurate" reflection of the thinking of a man who, CBS knows, is dead and therefore can't be asked if his secretary is telling the truth.

That's not journalism. That's a partisan smear job. Dan Rather might have been a good journalist, once. Not anymore. Now he's a joke.

UPDATE: Bill Adams has a good analysis of what the Knox interview really says about Dan Rather and the story based on forged memos. What, exactly, does Dan have without the memos? Not much. Not much at all.