You may recall that Rather aired six of what he claimed were official air force memos that seemed to nail George W. Bush for a string of delinquencies  while a member of the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war. They gave a pretty down and dirty picture of the insubordination that George allegedly got away with during his days as an off-and-on jet pilot from 1968-1973. The White House labeled the memos “fakes”, dwelling for the most part on the typeface, proportional spacing and other characteristics that “proved” they had been typed on a modern word processor, rather than a typewriter of 1972 vintage when the memos were dated.

By dwelling on the allegedly anachronistic characteristics of the typing and totally ignoring the charges listed, the White House succeeded in luring the media into spinning the documents as fakes en toto.

William Safire, former speech writer for Richard Nixon, bought it hook line and sinker.  In his syndicated column of September 22/04 he wrote:

 “Some person or persons concocted a scheme to create a series of false Texas Air Guard documents and append a photocopied signature to one of them.”

Marian Knox, who was secretary to Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, George’s immediate superior, gives a different spin to the story. She said that the memos in question might be fakes but the information they contained was accurate. She said she had typed many memos like these for Colonel Killian, Bush’s immediate superior and that he kept them in a locked drawer of his desk. (At Ellington Air Force Base in Houston ).  She said the fakes looked like they might have been copied from the “real ones.”

The question arises then, how did those memos get out of that drawer and into the hands of the man who turned them over to Rather?

 Which brings us to consider that man, retired Texas Air Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett.  Burkett had retired from the Guard in 1979 after a welter of accusations

directed at the Guard which he charged was corrupt, inefficient and guilty of cheating him of his deserved retirement and medical benefits. To support his evidence of corruption he charged that George W. Bush, son of then Texas congressman George Herbert Walker Bush had been edged into the Guard ahead of 500 Good Ol’ Texas boys and that once in had been promoted to Lieutenant without the qualifying training required of the other cadets. He charged additionally that George W. had consistently missed drills, dodged a physical exam and was essentially AWOL for almost a year doing political campaigning for a Senatorial candidate in Alabama . 

Burkett told Rather a couple of  cock and bull stories about the origin of the memos – later admitting he had lied about the first story but still sticking by his second version that they had been given to him under strange circumstances by a woman named Ramirez who told him they were from the personal files of Col. Killian. There is no need to go into the details of these two stories, since neither measures up to the logic we suggest concerning those memos that Colonel Killian’s kept locked in his desk drawer.

The fact is Burkett would have been easily able to obtain those memos all by himself.  Burkett and Killian were career Guard officers of equal rank and had undoubtedly schmoozed about their boy Bush and his flaunting of the rules.  Burkett must surely have known about the memos Killian had written and must have been anxious to add some official word to what he already knew about George. Knowing of Burkett’s relationship with her late boss, Ms Knox would have had no reason to keep them from Burkett if he asked for them. Killian might even have given the memos to Burkett before he died.

If these “fakes” are indeed copies of the original “real ones” mentioned by Ms. Knox, Bill Burkett himself must have done the copying.  All he had to do was scan the documents on a computer and make exact copies of them. The operator can then do anything he wants to with the copies,

including changing the type face on the copies from what he scanned to one he preferred. Having explained all the reasons why it would be so easy to switch the type faces one is driven to ask, why?

Why fix something that ain’t broke?

The reason they evolved in Burkett’s hands from being genuine to being “fakes” is that Burkett just couldn’t leave well enough alone. He decided to add some offenses that Killian had not included in his memos. He couldn’t insert the added changes in a different typeface than the typeface of the original he had scanned so he changed the overall face to one almost identical as the original – almost but not quite, as some computer geeks discovered.

 It is doubtful that Burkett ever thought the memos would be subjected to the intense scrutiny they received at Dan Rather’s hands. He at first turned over only two of the six memos, not to Rather, but to Dan’s producer, Mary Mapes.

She bought the whole package and it cost her her job.  The White House has succeeded in convincing the media that because the typeface is bogus, that the same thing held for the charges.

The Bush people never did address any of the charges singly.  They have been content, until this day, to condemn the whole package as purely and simply phony when only the typing didn’t hold water.  

Why the press didn’t address the facts in this case as assiduously as they did Watergate is beyond me.  Whether one accepts the conclusions I have drawn from  evidence I have cited, the evidence is there and some conclusion cries out to be drawn from it.  

Was Rather right or wrong or what?

Article by:

Peter Harkins