Andrew Sullivan discusses the question of whether or not these documents (allegedly typed in the early 1970s by one of Bush's officers in the National Guard) are forgeries.
Like Andrew Sullivan, I am not an expert on fonts, but I was 19 years old in 1973, and I can state that I never saw any typewriter capable of producing the kind of text which appears on this document.
I had an IBM selectric typewriter, which at the time was considered state of the art, and you could buy typeballs which featured different fonts. But I never saw a font like the above. The layout is all wrong.
In particular, the superscripted "th" which appears in "187th" would have been impossible with any typewriter of the time.
MORE: In an interesting and honest post, Kevin Drum speculates that the documents can't be forgeries because the White House faxed out copies of them. But as it turns out (and as Drum concedes) the White House merely sent out copies of the CBS documents:
UPDATE: I now have copies of the memos the White House released, and they are just versions that CBS faxed to the White House the day before the 60 Minutes segment aired. There's no indication that the White House had its own copies of these memos and had been sitting on them.
all the words line up perfectly using Times New Roman size 12. Each line ends in the same word. I would tend to believe that the chances of a person anticipating the appropriate time to go to the next line in the exact manner that Microsoft Word does it automatically due to preset margins is highly unlikely.
OK, I'll try it right now.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON: UNBELIEVABLE! Using Microsoft Word 2000, in whatever the standard format is (I changed nothing, as I use Times New Roman size 12 as my default) I just typed out the entire document without making any line breaks.
EVERY LINE IS IDENTICAL!
And here it is, a scan of my "forgery" of the forgery.
It's starting to look as if this was meant to be obvious.
UPDATE: Bigger image uploaded.
MORE: Sorry about the typo; mine says "CTA" instead of "CYA." (Close enough for government work?)
AND MORE: In a fit of my own "CYA" I've rescanned it with that minor correction, and uploaded it in pdf file format. (Download file.)
UPDATE: I can't speak for every single one of the documents, for I haven't examined them that closely. But I will say that there is no way that the one above can possibly be authentic. Printing the document in Microsoft Word with the New York size 12 font is an exact match. Since everyone is offering theories as to why (Tom Maguire offers especially interesting speculation), I'd like to offer one of my own: I think the big bad Old Media may be having one at the expense of the blogosphere.
They're showing a little muscle here, and I'd be willing to bet this won't be reported.
FINAL UPDATE (9/14/04): I am uploading one last version of my forgery of the forgery, in pdf format. At this late date it's beside the point (for countless bloggers have made identical copies), but when I read about the curved apostrophes I realized mine were wrong (I long ago customized Word to get rid of them), so I changed the feature back to the curved apostrophe default, and redid the forgery. (Just so that I can say that I did make an exact copy of the forgery, without even slight deviations.)
POST-FINAL UPDATE (09/17/04): Just when you think something is over.... Unbelievably, I now see that an outfit called the Creative Response Concepts or something is claiming credit for being the first to expose the forgery:
Creative Response Concepts (CRC), the VA-based agency promoting the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, used right-wing blogs and news sites to turn a CBS report casting doubt on President George W. Bush's National Guard service into a potential black eye for both the network and the Democrats.
They "used" Charles Johnson, Power Line, and all the others? That's pretty arrogant, and I agree with Glenn Reynolds that it's rank opportunism.
I wasn't keeping track of the order in which any of these bloggers exposed the forgery, although it appears that Charles Johnson was the first, and should get the credit. (I saw Andrew Sullivan's link to Power Line first, so that was what I linked. I made my first forgery quite late in the day.)
But if there's one thing I can definitely assert, it's that when I made my various forgeries, I was NOT used by Creative Response Concepts!
posted by Eric on 09.09.04 at 01:36 PM
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Comments
My first reaction to seeing the image of the other document (the one with the centered header), and noticing the proportional font and the unlikely centered header was... "who the &^*# do they think they're fooling?"
I'd almost credit the idea of someone handing this to CBS to get them to make fools of themselves.
Sigivald · September 9, 2004 06:03 PM
Yup, it's so obvious that I'm almost embarrassed for them.
I am not 100% sure, but I believe that Little Green Footballs "broke" this story first.
bryan · September 10, 2004 01:55 AM
During the 1970s and 1980s, I had a Smith-Corona electric typewriter with a very interesting sans serif font. My Dad, a history professor, used an old manual typewriter which had a font more like the one shown in that document. Neither typewriter would have been capable of producing that "th".
This incriminating typewriter story reminds me of the secret papers that Whittaker Chambers had hidden inside of a pumpkin, the font of which was traced to Alger Hiss's typewriter.
The same media that are pushing this phony business about Bush were siding with Hiss against Chambers back then.
IBM Executives back then had proportional spacing and a superscript "th" character. As to the line breaks, MS Word reproduces the alglorithm typists learned.
The documents may be bogus, but the argument above doesn't prove it.
There may be other arguments against the memos, but this ain't one of them.
michael · September 15, 2004 10:23 AM
The question of "who's getting taken for a ride" is not assisted by the pcmag link you provide, for its example does not show identical texts. If you download the images and line them up, you'll see that the lines created by the IBM machine are wider. (Something even using the smallest possible font cannot alter.)
Every test of IBM machines has failed to recreate anything like the above Killian document. A $10,000 reward has been offered for anyone who can do so. But, so far, no one can.
The bare assertions that IBM machines "could have" done this are getting a bit tired.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
My first reaction to seeing the image of the other document (the one with the centered header), and noticing the proportional font and the unlikely centered header was... "who the &^*# do they think they're fooling?"
I'd almost credit the idea of someone handing this to CBS to get them to make fools of themselves.