[First published in AM New York.]
“SAY IT ISN’T SO, Joe!” we all want to yell. But at Dan Rather (left).
That cry from a baseball fan to “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, when the hero was exposed in the gigantic 1919 World Series fraud, seems about right just now for Rather, the tall-in-the-saddle truth-teller from Texas, and from CBS News as well of course.
Given even the tiniest smidgen of doubt about those now-disputed Texas Air National Guard documents, you would have thought that ‘60 Minutes’, which set the gold-standard for investigative journalism on TV over the decades, would have pulled out all the stops to double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the “memos-to file” purportedly written by then-Lieutenant George W Bush’s commanding officer three decades ago.
It may be true, as the official CBS line proclaims, that the story they stand by so stubbornly is based upon more than just those pieces of paper, but to have allowed any scope for suspicion about the papers clearly blows a gaping hole in the story itself – and CBS’s overall credibility, sad to say.
I’ve looked recently at a lot of typewritten documents from 1972 – in relation to some sinister military conduct (in Northern Ireland) that’s under examination for a documentary film – and boy, do they differ starkly from modern word-processed documents.
We’ve all gotten remarkably acclimated now to seeing sophisticated typography flow from our keyboards. Surely, you would have thought, “60 Minutes” producers would instantly notice the all-too-familiar, modern-looking spacing, proportionately graduated between letters and lines in their supposedly 32 year-old source-documents.
Not to mention the awfully suspicious superscript ‘th‘ above the line in “111th Squadron“. Such typographic devices, commonplace nowadays, were of course rare in 1972 – almost non-existent in fact, except with the rarely-seen, expensive IBM Selectric typewriter. I’m prepared to believe that there could be an explanation for why these documents look as anachronistic as they do, but CBS isn’t giving it.
I WORKED AT CBS in the late 1990s, and many a time I sat with Rather’s long-standing colleague, Mike Wallace (much longer standing, in fact) as we went over stories in preparation for broadcast. Rightly, I had to bear the brunt of his many detailed questions – persnickety, sometimes downright withering ones.
As I write, no-one has explained if some simple questions were ever asked in the ‘Sixty’ office. Most obviously: “Why do these papers look so different from other 1972-73 papers released out of 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron?” Or: “Have we tried a match with other notes unquestionably written by the commander, Lt Colonel Killian?” Or: “Have we found the secretary who typed them“. [Someone else did, after CBS’s initial broadcast – and now aged 86 she was quick to cut doubt on them.]
It can grate on journalists to be called on to reveal the skeletal scaffolding that underpins the body of their finished work, but it often makes sense to do so. If all of those pertinent questions had been raised and answers of some kind found – why not weave that part of the investigation into the broadcast story? It would have headed off many of the course counter-attacks that came son swiftly afterward. Or so you would have though, someone sighs.
But the team evidently didn’t do that. Perhaps – a horrible notion – those questions were not even asked. Say it isn’t so, Dan.
