“Rathergate” drew much attention before the 2004 election; it may, contrary to its perpetrators’ manifest intentions, have pushed President Bush over the top. Indeed, it was a story that, one would think, deserved to be not just news, but history, one of those scandals that is zealously probed until the truth is wrenched from reluctant guardians.
After all, a major television network had used forged documents in an attempt to sway the outcome of a Presidential election. Wouldn’t the most minimally curious journalists or historians like to know more about that act of infamy than the superficies of headlines? Precisely who at CBS allowed the forgeries in? Were they active conspirators or merely dupes? If dupes, who did the duping, and how did they succeed? Was there anything to the early rumors that political party operatives were involved?
The affair remains mysterious. According to what we know (or think we know), the mainspring of the fraud was an anti-Bush crank with a long record of making wild charges. His account of how he came by the supposedly incriminating documents shifted, the various versions having little in common but their lack of credibility. That the so-called “Killian memos” were fakes wasn’t hard to see. One didn’t need to know anything about 1960s’ typewriters or notice that the font, tabs and line breaks exactly duplicated the default settings of Microsoft Word. It was enough to look at genuine records of Lt. Bush’s service, which CBS had in its possession, all of them very obviously produced by utterly different instruments. And, for the benefit of the utterly unseeing, experts hired by CBS raised strong doubts about the memos’ authenticity.
If I may quote what I said in perplexity a couple of years ago:
[A]ccepting 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 [CBS’s very limited internal inquiry] did not address this mystery. Yet the answer remains important, if only to make the historical record complete.
But none of the elite media cared enough to investigate. National secrets the New York Times can penetrate; CBS News’ remain secure.
Now Dan Rather, of all people, gives us a fleeting opportunity to unearth the hidden facts. I don’t hold out high hopes that his lawsuit against CBS et al. will turn up a great deal. Discovery and cross-examination can be powerful truth detectors, but at least one side has to have a desire to bring the truth to light. That would not, I suspect, be in the self-interest of either plaintiff or defendant. Yet good may come out of this mire. Maybe the case will incite the curiosity of a would-be Woodward or three. If so, Mr. Rather will at long last have performed a useful public service.
Comments