It was surprising, but not exactly astonishing, to learn, via PowerLine, that liberal journalistic icon Marvin Kalb doesn’t think that there is any, much less abundant, evidence that the infamous “Killian memos” were forged. He didn’t need to read blogs to learn the truth; the Washington Post reported it over a year ago.
When John Hinderaker of PowerLine sent Mr. Kalb a summary of the evidence, the response was a classic brush-off: It wasn’t important whether “The documents in Rather's story were faulthy [sic], fake, fogeries [sic], – choose your word [and choose your spelling, too, I guess].” All that’s important is that, thirty-some years ago, George W. Bush didn’t serve in Vietnam. Trying to change the course of a Presidential election by basing a major news story on phony “facts” is evidently a venial offense by comparison.
What, I wonder, would Mr. Kalb have thought if the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had circulated forgeries about John Kerry’s war record, then dismissed criticism on the grounds that Kerry later made false accusations of atrocities against his fellow soldiers? I suspect that he – and the rest of the journalistic Left – would be in full hue and cry after the forgers to this day. The scandal would be as unending as the Valerie Plame affair, with considerably more justification.
By contrast, Kalb and his peers, though occasionally willing, when pressed, to admit to the existence of the Rathergate fraud, are incurious about who perpetrated it. It’s well known that a crank named Bill Burkett was the proximate source of the fakes and that his shifting stories of how he obtained them are unbelievable. The unanswered, because unasked, questions are, Where did he really obtain them, and why did CBS treat them so credulously?
The general assumption on the Right side of the blogosphere is that Burkett manufactured the memos himself. If so, their misuse of military acronyms and nomenclature indicates that he was amazingly careless. As Col. William Campenni, who has first-hand knowledge of the Texas Air National Guard in Lt. Bush’s day, observes,
Whereas the typographical errors were the starting point in exposing these forgeries, for those of us actually there it was the content and format of the memos themselves that were the proof of their falsity – we just didn’t do it that way or use those forms, and the dates and people involved were fictitious or impossible. We were able to cross match them with our own records and calendars to prove that dates and events were incompatible, or that the people referenced (Strong, Carr, Hackworth, Lechliter, Burkett) were not in a position to give accurate comment.
Bill Burkett served in the same outfit and shouldn’t have committed blunders that are so obvious to his erstwhile colleagues. If he was himself the forger, one would expect greater care about matters that were within the realm of his personal experience. A more plausible hypothesis is that the documents were given to him and, in his zeal to “get” the Evil George W. Bush, he ignored all signs of inauthenticity. Believing what one wants to believe, without critical examination, is typical crank behavior.
On the other hand, accepting at face value documents without a verifiable provenance that come from the hand of a known partisan zealot is not typical journalistic behavior. Biased the MSM may be, but it isn’t a ship of fools. While I’ll grant that Mary Mapes is, on the evidence of the posted chapter of her forthcoming book, a fool and a half, 60 Minutes II had a staff that was certainly capable of detecting a fake on the “Killian” level of amateurishness. Moreover, the staff started the vetting process the right way, by sending the memos to independent experts for review.
As is well known now, the examiners’ first reactions were mostly negative. Yet the network shunted them aside and went ahead with the story, cherry picking testimony from the one whose conclusions were favorable to a limited extent on a narrow issue. (He couldn’t prove that the purported signatures on the memos were forged, though he also stated that signatures cannot be authenticated from a photocopy, which is all that he was given to work with.)
No matter how much those in charge of 60 Minutes II loathed George W. Bush or how eager they were to scoop the competition, it is impossible to believe that they proceeded without greater assurance that they were relying on genuine documents. The “Killian memos” were not secondary support for a report based primarily on other evidence; they were the Big News, the breakthrough that lent credibility to an interview with a former Texas House Speaker, who contradicted past public statements about whether he had used political influence on young George Bush’s behalf, and lesser anti-Bush tidbits. Almost everyone, including ardent Bush defenders, took it for granted at the outset that the memos had checked out; any debate would center on what they proved or didn’t prove about Lt. Bush’s conduct.
That they were instead frauds – and inept frauds at that – was flabbergasting. CBS’s credulity remains flabbergasting and unexplained to this day. The Thornburgh report did not address this mystery. Yet the answer remains important, if only to make the historical record complete. Long ago I expounded my own theory: that someone whom the network’s decision makers implicitly trusted and do not want to embarrass vouched for the memos. The details of my original scenario need to be revised in light of what we have learned since then, but the overall idea remains sound, I think, or at least more sensible than the alternative notion of mass idiocy at CBS. If I’m right, it would be extremely interesting to know who had the stature both to entice veteran journalists into a fiasco and be worth protecting afterward.
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