A Forgery Scenario by Ockham

I think I see why the Ra^thergate forger was so careless: He intended the “Killian” memoranda to be an October Surprise. If they were made public only days before the election, their prima facie flaws wouldn’t matter. There wouldn’t be enough time for Bush partisans to expose them convincingly. He was probably relying, too, on the pre-blogosphere velocity of the news cycle. In 2004 forgeries floated on Thursday were discredited by Saturday. That would not have been the case in 2000.

Unluckily for the plot, somebody looked at Senator Kerry’s descent in the polls and panicked. Let’s construct a hypothetical, but pretty plausible, scenario:

1. The forger (“F”), someone reasonably, but not intimately, familiar with the Texas Air National Guard, c. 1972, desirous of finding decisive proof of the “Bush AWOL” legend, composes the four incriminating “memoranda”, using his laptop and Microsoft Word. He saves in PDF format, prints the files on his inkjet printer, then makes photocopies of photocopies until the product looks “old”.

2. F approaches a crony (“C”) who is a trusted friend or relative of a higher-up (“H”) at CBS News. He tells C that he knew George W. Bush’s immediate superior in the Air National Guard, the now-deceased Col. Jerry Killian, and recently stumbled across copies of some memos about Lieutenant Bush that he had gotten from the colonel in some casual manner. (For example, “After the funeral, I helped Mrs. Killian throw out Jerry’s old papers, but I kept a few, because I thought that they would be of historical interest. I’ve lost the originals but fortunately made copies.”)

3. F asks C whether H might be interested in the papers. He emphasizes that he is very reluctant to get involved in any public fashion. He must have C’s assurance that his name will not be used and that, in fact, the materials won’t be publicized at all “unless they’ll make a difference”. C agrees to those terms.

4. C takes the documents to H, who hands them over to his underlings for vetting. Since he trusts C and knows that C trusts F, he has no doubts about authenticity. He promises C that F’s wishes about disclosure will be respected.

5. Vetting proceeds, with no sense of urgency, as this is a story that may never run. “The election is John Kerry’s to lose”, so why pile on? Naïve research assistants raise the obvious questions about fonts, proportional spacing, superscripts, apostrophes and so on. H assures them that the source of the story is “rock solid”. Perhaps he explains to the youngsters that typed documents did indeed look like that, based on his hazy recollections of IBM Selectric output.

6. Then come the Swift Boat Veterans and the Republican National Convention and polls showing George Bush with a double digit lead. H grows alarmed. Without consulting C or F, he tells the news team to polish the Bush National Guard story and go with it. If anyone is bold enough to warn that the documents underlying the “new questions” may be inauthentic, he brushes them aside. He knows that C can’t be a party to forgery.

7. And so 60 Minutes announces its scoop, and we all know what came next.

This reconstruction is, as I said, speculative, but I believe that it accounts for all of the known facts in an economical fashion and does not attribute psychologically improbable behavior to any of the actors. One particular advantage is that it minimizes the number of knaves and fools. Only F is the former. Only C is genuinely the latter, and it could be that he, like H, was undone by excessive trust rather (must start avoiding that word) than stupidity.

If my theory is more or less correct, discovering the culprit will be hard. H won’t want to implicate C, and both C and F have every motive to lie low. No one else knows enough to tattle. Because criminal charges are virtually unthinkable, there won’t be an investigation by anyone with subpoena powers. I suppose that, after the election, the President could sue for libel, in which case the facts would probably come out, but I can’t imagine that, win or lose, he would want to take such an unprecedented step.

Hence, I gloomily conclude, F will remain a villain without a name. He is nonetheless a villain, who, at a time of national crisis, tried to influence an election through fraud. All Americans should consign him in their thoughts to the same inferno as Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth.

Addendum: In the Comments, “Mellipse” writes magisterially, “It’s obvious [Bush] skipped out on his service.” Obvious? Lt. Bush’s official records (summarized by Byron York months ago) show that he met his minimum Guard obligation in every year from induction through honorable discharge. The Boston Globe has argued, as I have noted elsewhere [vide Addendum], that the Guard didn’t follow proper procedures for crediting service, but, if true, that can’t be blamed on Bush.

That Lt. Bush didn’t fulfill his obligation is “obvious” to those whose mindset is permanently locked in the “BUSH LIED!!!” position – which makes them patsies for anti-Bush frauds.

Further Reading: On the off chance that there is any rational being who still harbors doubts that CBS relied on forgeries, Joseph M. Newcomer, a leading authority on computer typography [résumé] (and, he hastens to note, “not a fan of George Bush”), demonstrates that –

The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.

Comments

[Mellipse]

Why would Bush sue for libel under any circumstances? It's obvious he skipped out on his service.