Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (70 page)

The Bloggers Who Ate CBS

60 Minutes II
had a monumental broadcast planned for September 8, 2004. In the middle of a tight election, the program was prepared to challenge the veracity of a sitting president’s military service. Former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes was ready to tell the story of how he kept W. from getting drafted. And Dan Rather was ready to present the documents that would finally help answer the broadcast’s tantalizing question: “So what happened with Mr. Bush, the draft and the National Guard?”
³¹

Within
30 seconds
of the documents appearing on television screens, one Internet user was already posting his doubts. An active Air Force officer, Paul Boley—who was serving in Montgomery, Alabama, the same place George W. Bush had been in 1972—was the first to weigh in. On the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com, using the pseudonymous handle TankerKC, Boley wrote:

WE NEED TO SEE THOSE MEMOS AGAIN!

They are not in the style that we used when I came in to the USAF. They looked like the style and format we started using about 12 years ago (1992). Our signature blocks were left justified, now they are rigth [sic] of center . . . like the ones they just showed.

Can we get a copy of those memos?
³²

Less than four hours after Boley’s post came a more “authoritative” statement of doubt from a fellow FreeRepublic.com poster—a group that self-identify as “FReepers”—calling himself “Buckhead.”

Every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.

In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90’s. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn’t used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80’s used monospaced fonts.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.

This should be pursued aggressively.
³³

And it was. In the wee hours, the discussion began to spread across the blogosphere. First it was picked up by two conservative blogs, Power Line and Little Green Footballs. It went quickly from blogs to online magazines, starting with Rupert Murdoch’s conservative opinion publication the
Weekly
Standard
, which cited document experts who pronounced the memos probable forgeries.
³⁴
The story didn’t linger in the blogosphere or opinion media, but leaped right to the commercial outlets.

Twenty-four hours after the story aired, Buckhead proclaimed triumph back on the FreeRepublic.com message board:

Victory in this case justly has a thousand fathers. Tanker KC first pegged them as fakes by the overall look, and I later noted the font issue. Many other defects have been noted by others. I haven’t gotten any work done, but it’s been a ton of fun. The most amazing thing is how this thing has exploded across the internet.

Mwuhahahahaha!!!
³⁵

Another commenter chimed in with:

Isn’t this cool? It’s on the front page of tomorrow’s Washington Post! Great work!
³⁶

As one “FReeper” posted:

With all due respect, this event showcases a phenomenon of “new media” power that could only have occurred through a vehicle with the community force multiplying tools of FR [Free Republic].

. . . No single blog can rally a rapid response over a huge number of vital issues like FR can. This forum is, to use a trite old 90s term, synergy at its most powerful.

Places like FR (in other words FR because it is inimitable) and the blogosphere can work in concert. We’re the town square arguing, vetting and digesting, they’re the disseminating REPORTERS of valuable insights, leads and other interesting stuff we shake loose.
³⁷

MEANWHILE,
LOS ANGELES
Times
reporter Peter Wallsten did some digging, and unearthed Buckhead’s identity.
³⁸
He was Harry MacDougald, an activist Republican lawyer in Atlanta and a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative law group. He played coy with the
Times
, declining to tell the reporter how he was able to create his critique so quickly, and failing to explain the basis for his expertise in the matter.

Another aspect, this one not reported by the
L.A. Times
, was the manner in which MacDougald’s critique was amplified. Shortly after he posted under a pseudonym, his wife, posting under her own name, Liz MacDougald, and making no mention of their connection, recommended his post to Power Line, which propelled the story further. Actually, there were two people who did so. The other, Tom Mortensen, was also deeply involved with the Swift Boat group.

Whether the response to the memos was coordinated beyond that is difficult to say. Boley (TankerKC) told me in an interview that he had seen the
60
Minutes
show by accident, as his wife just happened to turn the set on. He could post his suspicions so quickly, he said, because his computer was on and just steps away. He said that as a career Air Force officer, he noticed instantly that the position of the signature block was based on military protocol that existed only since 1992, and that the memo header deviated from standard.

Regardless of the intentions of the posters and the merits of the arguments about the authenticity of the documents, the story of the backstory took on a life of its own. Soon more people were convinced that Dan Rather and Mary Mapes had done something wrong than that Bush had. Lost in all this was the fact that the documents merely confirmed what reporters had already concluded from their own investigative work. Indeed, the
New York
Times
had asked CBS if it could co-report the memo content and break the story at the same time. And
USA Today
published the documents the morning after CBS aired its story—though it did not face the firestorm or consequences that CBS did.

USA Today
later turned on Burkett and CBS—claiming that, in exchange for providing the documents, Burkett had asked Mapes to put him in touch with the Kerry campaign. Mapes said she merely called the Democrats, with her boss’s permission, to check out a claim Burkett had made about how he had offered them advice on responding to the Swift Boat attacks. It was a tempest in a beer can, but again, it became an Internet sensation.
³⁹

The Independent Panel

Faced with a growing storm, CBS initially stood firm. Two days later, on its Web site, the company declared:

This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his character and his thinking.

On CBS
Evening News with Dan Rather
, the old warhorse echoed that, and added, “If any definitive evidence to the contrary is found, we will report it.” But for the time being, he said, “There is none.”

As the criticism mounted, though, CBS News president Andrew Heyward was demanding answers. One of the questions, to Burkett, was about the source of the documents. In the days after Mapes faxed them from Abilene, she had barraged Burkett with demands that he reveal his source. Finally, grudgingly, he had identified George Conn, a friend from the National Guard, who divided his time between Germany and Texas. Mapes had tried repeatedly to reach Conn for confirmation, without success.

But now that the story had exploded, Burkett admitted to Heyward that he had only told Mapes the Conn story to get her off his back, because he had promised not to reveal the involvement of Lucy Ramirez. Now the Ramirez version—supposedly the truthful one—came out.

But was this the real story? As I later learned, there was a Hispanic couple who had worked for the Guard, could have had access to the files of the late Lieutenant Colonel Killian, and were a possible match for the pseudonymous Ramirezes. Their surname was even similar. When I visited their home in Houston, the woman seemed to know exactly why I was there. She cryptically explained that her husband had prohibited her from speaking about the matter. I noticed what seemed to be their recent good fortune: they had apparently just moved into a brand-new house in a brand-new housing development, and had a brand-new car out front. Beyond that, there was little by way of clues, let alone answers.

Meanwhile, CBS’s parent company was shifting into damage-control mode. On September 22, two weeks after the program aired, CBS announced plans to convene an “independent review panel” headed by pedigreed outsiders. The two big names on the panel created for this purpose turned out to be former U.S. attorney general Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief Lou Boccardi. Thornburgh was a particularly odd choice, considering that he had been attorney general during Poppy Bush’s administration. Thornburgh, who had briefly made headlines back then for ordering the statues of scantily clad females on display in the Justice Department modestly draped on official occasions, was back on the morals beat. During the CBS inquiry, he expressed keen interest in Mapes’s use of salty language. “Did you use the word ‘horseshit’? Was that really appropriate in a newsroom?”

After retiring from the AP, Boccardi had been retained by the
New York
Times
to investigate the fabrications of its reporter Jayson Blair. But he remained almost entirely silent during the closed panel hearings. He only asked two questions, including, “When did you realize the documents had been faked?” When Mike Smith replied that it had not been established that the documents were counterfeit, the panel lawyers laughed at him.

Although Smith had been assured that CBS had his best interests at heart, and that the company would look out for him, it soon became apparent that he was raw meat. To Smith, it felt like a McCarthy hearing. The panelists were concerned that Smith had worked for the late columnist Molly Ivins. They even asked if he had ghostwritten columns for Ivins, which was unlikely, since Ivins had one of the nation’s most distinctive— and idiosyncratic—writing styles. There also was a question about a hundred-dollar donation to a fund-raiser for a liver transplant involving a liberal partisan.

Potential bias could have been relevant, but it unquestionably is a secondary consideration behind truth. Nevertheless, the upshot became clear: CBS was going to cover its own behind by portraying its reporters as anti-Bush liberals who didn’t deserve the company’s support. The network did nothing to defend the principles of journalistic inquiry. Still less did CBS get past the procedural missteps of its employees to resolve the underlying factual issues of the Guard story—as Mary Mapes herself had wanted to do. No formal inquiry by military and document experts was ever convened, and to this day the question of whether the documents are forgeries hasn’t been resolved.

CBS-Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone, whose company was facing crucial regulatory decisions by Bush’s Federal Communications Commission, admitted his “severe distress” at the Rather report.
⁴⁰
He noted his belief “that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.”
⁴¹

In the end, what mattered most was this: the documents were either real or they were forgeries that closely mirrored the reality of Bush’s National Guard experience at that point in time. If the latter, then this could mean that they had been concocted with built-in anomalies to set up CBS and Bush’s critics. Might that explain why the bloggers were ready to respond so quickly?

On the other hand, if the forgeries were designed by anti-Bush conspirators to
hurt
the president, it wasn’t clear how. The memos didn’t add a great deal to what reporters had already established, beyond a kind of black-and-white confirmation—though it was enough of an addition to trigger the CBS report. If anti-Bush forgers were going to go to all that trouble, wouldn’t they have added some juicy new meat to the rather skeletal facts that were already known?

Lost in all the commotion about the authenticity of the documents and the ethics of the journalists at CBS was this undeniable fact: The overwhelming evidence, even absent these documents, is that the president of the United States had gone absent without leave from his military unit in 1972 and had never been held accountable for that crime.