Authenticity of Bush's Guard papers questioned

By Michael Dobbs
The Washington Post

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Experts consulted by news organizations pointed to typographical and formatting questions about four documents as they considered the possibility that they were forged. The widow of the National Guard officer whose signature is on the bottom of the documents also disputed their authenticity.

The documents, which were aired Wednesday night on "60 Minutes II," bear dates from 1972 and 1973 and include an order for Bush to report for his annual physical and a discussion of how he could get out of "coming to drill."

Democrats, meanwhile, stepped up criticism of Bush's service with the National Guard between 1968 and 1974. The Democratic National Committee sought to fuel the controversy yesterday by holding a news conference at which Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa pointed to the documents as a fresh indictment of Bush's credibility.

CBS News released a statement yesterday standing by its reporting, saying that each of the documents "was thoroughly vetted by independent experts and we are convinced of their authenticity."

CBS spokeswoman Kelli Edwards declined to respond to questions raised by experts who examined copies of the papers at the request of The Washington Post, or to provide the names of the experts CBS consulted.

However, a senior CBS official who asked to remain anonymous named one source as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone, and that Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."

The official said the network regarded Hodges' comments as "the trump card" on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges did not respond to messages left on his answering machine.

In a telephone interview from her Texas home, Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell, described the records as "a farce," saying he did not "keep files." She said her husband considered Bush "an excellent pilot."

A CBS reporter contacted her before Wednesday night's broadcast, she said, but did not ask her to authenticate the records.

If authentic, the documents would contradict several longstanding claims by the White House about an episode in Bush's National Guard service in 1972, when he abruptly gave up flying and moved from Texas to Alabama to take part in a political campaign. The CBS documents purport to show that Killian, who was Bush's squadron commander, was unhappy with Bush for his performance toward meeting his National Guard commitments and resisted pressure from superiors to "sugarcoat" the record.
 
An examination of the documents by several independent experts contacted by the Post shows that they are formatted differently from other Texas Air National Guard documents whose authenticity is not questioned.

William Flynn, a forensic document specialist, said the CBS documents raise suspicions because of their use of proportional spacing techniques. Documents generated by the kind of typewriters that were widely used in 1972 space letters evenly across the page, so that an "i" uses as much space as an "m." In the CBS documents, each letter uses a different amount of space.

While IBM had introduced an electric typewriter that used proportional spacing by the early 1970s, it was not widely used in government. In addition, Flynn said, the CBS documents appear to use proportional spacing both across and down the page, a relatively recent innovation. Other anomalies include the use of the superscripted letters "th" in phrases such as "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron," Bush's unit.

"It would be nearly impossible for all this technology to have existed at that time," Flynn said.

Other experts largely concurred. Phil Bouffard, a forensic document examiner from Cleveland, said the font used in the CBS documents appeared to be Times Roman, widely used by word-processing programs but not common on typewriters.

CBS officials insisted that the network had done due diligence in checking the authenticity of the documents with independent experts. The senior CBS official said the network had talked to four typewriting and handwriting experts and confirmed the authenticity of Killian's signature.

The doubts about the documents left the White House and the Bush campaign in a state of suspended animation. White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said officials there had not attempted to authenticate the documents but simply released copies "provided to us by CBS in the interests of openness."

Washington Post reporters Mike Allen and Howard Kurtz and researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.