by Russ Baker
Bush flattered, seduced, and wheedled. The country needed to stick together at this difficult time, he said. And, heck, if a president couldn’t count on old chums to back him, whom could he trust? To the dozen or so in attendance, the message was clear: you’ll be hearing from reporters and dirt-diggers, and we need you to close ranks. “We had the president of the United States give us essentially a national security briefing [on Iraq],” recalled Dean Roome. “I was very thrilled that somebody of his stature would take time out of his day.”22
The meeting did not come to light until after the election, in an interview between Roome and Corey Pein of the Columbia Journalism Review. Roome told Pein that between briefings on Iraq and Afghanistan, “there was a lot of joking around, slapping on the back. Weird to call him Mr. President but we did.” He added, “It made you feel pretty important, getting briefed by the president on world affairs.” When Pein visited with Roome, a photograph of Roome’s meeting with Bush hung on the wall.
While W. was at the livestock show, so too was his nemesis Bill Burkett. The retired officer and rancher was expecting a package. In early March, according to Burkett, he had received a call from a man who instructed him to call a Houston Holiday Inn that night and speak with a guest named Lucy Ramirez. When he got Ramirez on the line, she told him that she was an intermediary whose responsibility was to deliver to him a packet of documents.
During that phone call Ramirez had asked if Burkett would be in Houston anytime soon. He replied that he would be there in two weeks to attend the Houston livestock show, where he displayed and sold his prize Simmenthal cattle and promoted the bull semen that was a source of income for ranchers.
In Houston, Burkett was approached by a man who could have been Hispanic, who handed him a legal-sized envelope—presumably the man associated with “Lucy Ramirez.” (A woman in the next booth confirmed to two reporters that a man approached Burkett and gave him an envelope.) That package would turn out to be meta phorical dynamite, and in a few months it would blow up in the faces of quite a few people—including Burkett, Mary Mapes, and the TV correspondent and news anchor Dan Rather.
A Swift Boot
The Bush forces began to regain the campaign offensive in May. That month, a day after John Kerry unveiled a twenty-seven-million-dollar advertising campaign highlighting his Vietnam service, a new group calling itself the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth held its first press conference.
One of Karl Rove’s basic tenets is that you attack an opponent at their point of strength. Kerry, oblivious to this, had led with his proverbial chin, and rested his campaign first and foremost upon his status as a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War. That is where the Swift Boat cadre went to work and eventually demolished the most threatening point of comparison between Kerry and Bush.
To be sure, Kerry had invited the venom from some of his fellow Swift Boat officers. He had authorized the historian Douglas Brinkley to write a book about his military service, in which he criticized several fellow officers. One of them was Roy Hoffmann, the former commander who up until then had been friendly to Kerry. It is quite possible that this slight played a role in Kerry’s defeat. It did not matter that even John O’Neill, a lead figure in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, apparently did not think much of George W. Bush either. “He always referred to him in private as ‘an empty suit,’ ” recalled Bill White, who was a law client of O’Neill’s.
The anger these men felt toward Kerry was catnip for the Republican attack operation, and before long, hardened pros were helping spread their anti-Kerry message. George W. Bush’s biggest backers footed the lion’s share of the bill—even though the anti-Kerry groups supposedly were independent. There were million-dollar-plus infusions from a cast of characters straight out of Dickens. From builders of houses whose roofs routinely caved in to leading emitters of cancer-causing substances, these moneymen were kept way in the background while public relations experts quietly directed grizzled veterans before the cameras.
The Swift Boat vets themselves had plenty of Bush connections. One legal adviser, Benjamin Ginsberg, had been serving as national counsel for W.’s presidential campaign. The vets’ advertising production team was the same one that had helped mock Michael Dukakis for Poppy in 1988. And the biggest donor to the Swift Boaters was Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, a longtime friend and associate of Karl Rove.23 Rove and the White House insisted that they had nothing to do with it. No one could prove otherwise.
To its credit, the mainstream media approached the claims with skepticism. (A study by the organization Media Matters found that only one of the fifteen major newspaper editorial boards gave credence to the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans.24) However, on cable TV and in the blogosphere, the accusations raged twenty-four hours a day for weeks. This was especially true after the release in August of the book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, published by Regnery, which media critic and former conservative journalist David Brock describes as “a right-wing Washington house that filled the best-seller lists in the 1990s with a slew of largely fictional anti-Clinton tracts packaged as nonfiction.”25 The various arms of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation—especially Fox News and the New York Post—helped push the book into bestseller territory.
This was a serious problem for Kerry. At the 2004 Democratic Convention, noted Frank Rich, he “placed most, if not all, of his chips on presenting himself as a military hero.”26 It was not exactly brilliant strategy. In effect he was making himself the issue, rather than the incumbent Bush. Making matters worse, when the Swift Boaters attacked, Kerry did virtually nothing, thus confirming the popular impression that he was actually a wimp who wouldn’t hit back. Instead, he gave news photographers a photo op of himself windsurfing off Nantucket, thus suggesting that he was an elitist wimp to boot. He decided he didn’t want to dignify the smear with a response, thus conceding the spin war to the attackers.
Eventually, other Swift boat veterans surfaced to defend Kerry, but the damage had been done. Kerry’s service had become the issue, rather than W.’s failure to serve. It was a psy-ops coup, and just a warm-up to what was ahead.
The Chase Is On
After the February scrum, the pack of journalists looking at Bush’s service record had quickly diminished. Among the small band who continued was Mary Mapes, the Dallas-based CBS producer who had scored a big success earlier in the year by breaking the story about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. (Despite the CBS scoop, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and the New Yorker now receive, and deserve, the lion’s share of the credit for exposing the scandal, because CBS initially bowed to the Pentagon’s request not to broadcast the prison abuse photos. The network only went ahead when it learned that Hersh’s article was about to run—and only the New Yorker ran the pictures.) But now Mapes was back on the Guard story.
As for Bill Burkett, he had hidden away his little care package. But by summer, rumors began circulating about the existence of documents that could explain or corroborate W.’s missing service record. According to Bur-kett, “Lucy Ramirez” had instructed him to handle the documents in a precise manner, and made him promise that he would do so. He was to copy the documents, and then burn the originals, along with the envelope they had come in.27 Ramirez made Burkett promise to keep her identity—and her role in providing the documents—a secret.
Burkett claims to have done exactly as he was told. Though Burkett had personal axes to grind with Bush, given his military history and his own fierce sense of honor, many reporters considered his story credible. Burkett said he believed that Ramirez’s insistence that he burn the materials was for security reasons—to remove any traces of DNA, which might expose whoever originally obtained them.
As the temperature rose around the story, various reporters from the New York Times, Vanity Fair, USA Today, and other news organizations sought a piece of the action. But 60 Minutes II had the inside track. What happened next morphed into an epic scandal that would s
oon overwhelm questions about Bush, and influence media coverage for the rest of the election. There would be many casualties: CBS anchorman Rather, producer Mapes, and three other CBS staffers were fired or dismissed. Bill Burkett would become a pariah, and his life would collapse around him. As such, he became yet another in a long line of people who had stood up to the Bushes and suffered the consequences.
A Texas-based freelance researcher, Mike Smith, on retainer for CBS, had been communicating with Burkett, and as the document rumors grew, he began pressing the former Guard official for concrete evidence. In late August, Burkett agreed to meet with Mapes and Smith. Burkett, accompanied by his wife, brought a huge stack of documents, many of them pertaining to his own history with the Guard, to their rendezvous at a pizza parlor in rural West Texas. The CBS team suffered through Burkett’s agonizingly extensive preliminaries and finally pressed him to get to the matter at hand.
Burkett reached into a blue folder and pulled out a sheet of paper, dated August 1, 1972. It appeared to be an order from Bush’s superior, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, suspending Bush both for “failure to meet annual physical examination as ordered” and for “failure to perform to USAF/Tex ANG standards.” It said that Bush “has made no attempt to meet his training certification or flight physical” and that he “expresses desire to transfer out of state including assignment to non-flying billets.” It also referred to his pilot status as “critical.”
Burkett showed Mapes and Smith a second, related document (and three days later would provide another four). Mapes read the two documents with growing excitement, and then focused on the reportorial issue: how to get copies. Burkett, however, was ambivalent. He told Mapes he was worried about the consequences of getting into a renewed dustup with the president of the United States. His wife, Nicki, was even more reticent. After a show of what Mapes took to be great anguish—perhaps it was—Burkett released the documents.
If there was a single moment at which things went off track for Mary Mapes and CBS, this was it. Mapes was elated at the appearance of manna from heaven, as most reporters would be. The documents comported with what she knew of Bush’s military service based on years of reporting. Now she had what seemed to be concrete evidence. Her main concern at the moment was to get out of the pizza joint before Burkett changed his mind. Every second seemed like an hour. The group drove to a Kinko’s copy center in Abilene, the nearest large town, and her heart beating, Mapes faxed the documents to New York.
Mapes instructed an associate there to begin the crucial process of vetting—to the extent that it is possible to verify such photocopies. The documents were presented to a handful of experts, from a CBS military consultant to independent document examiners around the country. After scrutinizing the materials in New York, and comparing the purported Killian signatures with verified ones found on other official documents, handwriting expert Marcel Matley told Mapes that he felt that, on balance, the memo signatures seemed to be authentic. Colonel David Hackworth, a CBS consultant and the most decorated living soldier in the United States, gave his overview of what the documents suggested to him about Bush: “He was AWOL.”28
The sentiment was not universal. It was exceedingly difficult to establish with any degree of certainty whether the documents were real. For one thing, Burkett had presented the reporters with copies, not originals. That eliminated telltale signs of authenticity such as age of paper, an ink signature, and evidence of the model of typewriter used. Furthermore, as a copy is further copied, other clues become degraded. With each generation, details such as spacing and even the appearance of letters begin to change subtly.
What Burkett gave to Mapes was at best a copy of an original, and perhaps a copy of a copy. What CBS New York received by fax from Abilene and sent to several document examiners was a generation worse. Then there were issues surrounding the skills required to judge these copies. One needed some kind of expertise in specialized military procedure and jargon from a par ticular time frame, as well as a detailed knowledge of the history of typography. Could such documents have been produced in 1972? One could not prove them real beyond question, but could they be proven fake? In a somewhat parallel case, the distinguished investigative reporter Seymour Hersh had used what he believed to be letters from Marilyn Monroe to sign a $2.5 million contract with ABC for a new Kennedy documentary.29 Then someone noticed that the letters contained a five-digit zip code, though those had not yet been invented.30
Mapes desperately wanted more time. But CBS executives, under competitive pressures, decided that the story had to air within a few days. Other news organizations were pressing Burkett for the documents, and there were scheduling issues as well. The CBS brass didn’t want to be scooped.
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 “FReep
er” 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.