September 14, 2004 | 10:50 a.m. ET
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5445086/
Was Dan duped? (Pat Buchanan)
Dan Rather, successor to Walter Cronkite as anchor of CBS News, may be
about to close out his career on a banana peel.
Last Wednesday, Rather launched a "60 Minutes" pre-emptive strike
against the president. Rather's charges: Bush got into the National
Guard through pull, was an insubordinate officer who refused to take
the medical exam to keep flying and used clout to prevent his being
disciplined.
Rather's attack was based on four newly discovered memos said to be
from the personal files of Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry
B. Killian. The memos, writes The New York Times, indicate "Mr. Bush
.... failed to take a physical examination 'as ordered' and that his
commander felt under pressure to 'sugarcoat' his performance rating,
because First Lieutenant Bush ... was 'talking to someone upstairs.'"
Rather seemed to have substantiated the rumors about Bush's Guard
service, as his piece also featured an interview with former Lt. Gov.
Ben Barnes, who confessed to having interceded to get Bush into the
Texas Air National Guard.
Within hours, however, Rather's case was crumbling. From both
independent analysis of the memos and witness testimony, it appears
that Rather may have been duped into colluding with a scheme to use
forgeries to smear and sink a president of the United States.
First, the new Killian memos appear to have been produced on a word
processor that did not exist in 1972-73. They are written in a Times
New Roman typeface rarely found on old typewriters. The letters "th"
in "111th squadron" are written in a "superscript" few typewriters of
the Vietnam era had. And the spacing of the letters on the memos is
more like that of modern word processors than of early 1970s'
typewriters, where letters were of equal size.
Killian's widow (he died in 1984) and son say he never kept notes and
call the memos a farce. "No officer in his right mind would write a
memo like that," says Killian's son Gary, an ex-Guardsman himself, of
the memo in which Col. Killian says he is being pressured to
"sugarcoat" Bush's record of insubordination. Rufus Martin, personnel
chief in Killian's unit, also calls the memos fakes: "I don't think
Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years."
On "60 Minutes," Rather identified the senior officer who was said to
be leaning on Killian. "Killian says (in his memo) Col. Buck Staudt,
the man in charge of the Texas Air National Guard, is putting pressure
on to 'sugarcoat' an evaluation of Lt. Bush." But according to The
Dallas Morning News, Staudt was discharged from the Guard and gone 18
months before Killian's memo was written.
Rather claims Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, Col. Killian's superior,
confirmed to CBS that the memos were consistent with what he recalls.
But ABC quotes Hodges as saying CBS mislead him into thinking the
memos were handwritten, and he thus responded, "Well if he wrote them
that's what he felt." Hodges now calls the memos a "fraud" that has
been "computer-generated."
If Killian did write the four memos, notes National Review's Byron
York, he would have to have been a complete hypocrite. For as he was
allegedly writing bitter memos to himself about Bush, he was praising
Lt. Bush in the official records in Guard files. Killian's widow says
her late husband was an admirer of young George.
As for Ben Barnes, his daughter Amy says her father is now lying.
Barnes is a Kerry fund-raiser and Nantucket neighbor of the windsurfer
whose story about intervening for Bush has changed over the years.
Despite the cloud over the authenticity of the memos, CBS says it is
conducting no internal investigation of how it got them or whether
they are authentic. Hard to believe. For the reputations of Rather,
CBS and "60 Minutes" are all on the line.
It should not be difficult to authenticate the memos. If they were
written by Killian over an 18-month period, then other memos about
unrelated matters, but with the same Times New Roman font, the same
spacing, the same signature and the same "superscript" should be
there. If, however, none are found, CBS may have placed its
credibility behind a criminal forgery to destroy a president.
Indeed, if these memos turn out to be fakes, CBS and Rather will be
guilty of, at least, having been played for fools. At worst, they
could be convicted in the court of public opinion of collusion in a
plot to bring down a president— a plot into which they were lured by a
blinding bias against George W. Bush.
E-mail at
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"John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in
North Viet Nam prison camps took torture to avoid saying." -- Paul
Galanti POW Jan. 1966 - Feb. 1973
"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
res0mp8t@NOSPAMverizon.net
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