CBS to issue statement on disputed memos

WASHINGTON — CBS News plans to issue a statement, perhaps as early as today, acknowledging that it was misled on the purported National Guard memos the network used to charge that President Bush received favored treatment 30 years ago.

The statement would represent a huge embarrassment for the network, which insisted for days that the documents reported by Dan Rather on “60 Minutes” are authentic. But the statement could also help defuse a crisis that has torn at the network’s credibility.

It is not clear whether the acknowledgement will include an apology for a story now believed to be based on forged documents, although that is under consideration, sources familiar with the matter said. The sources said they could not be identified because the network is making no official statement.

CBS has stood by the story, even as numerous document experts have called the memos forgeries and a former secretary in Bush’s Guard unit told reporters, including Rather, that the memos were fake, although she said they reflected the feelings of Bush’s former squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard.

The statement was still being hammered out Sunday night after Rather went to Texas to tape an interview with Bill Burkett, the retired Guard official widely believed to have helped provide “60 Minutes” with the memos. Burkett, who has urged Democratic activists to wage “war” against Republican “dirty tricks,” would not comment in an e-mail to The Washington Post on whether he had been CBS’s confidential source.

An examination of the process that led to the broadcast, based on interviews with the participants and more than 20 independent analysts, shows that CBS rushed the story onto the air while ignoring the advice of its own outside experts, and used as corroborating witnesses people who had no firsthand knowledge of the documents. CBS News President Andrew Heyward, who joined the network 23 years ago as Rather’s producer, said his staff was extremely careful with the story. “We have a thorough vetting process,” Heyward said last week. “Everyone was aware this was a high-stakes story.” He approved the piece, Heyward said, because “we felt it was ready.”

Rather also dismissed the notion that CBS was negligent: “I’m confident we worked longer, dug deeper and worked harder than almost anybody in American journalism does.”

In mid-August, producer Mary Mapes told her bosses that she had finally tracked down a source who claimed to have access to memos written in 1972 and 1973 by the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Bush’s squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard. The memos, she was told, revealed how the young pilot from a famous family had received favorable treatment, even after refusing an order to report for a physical. Rather and his producer met the source at an out-of-the-way location.

On Sunday, Sept. 5, Rather and Mapes interviewed Robert Strong, an administrative assistant in the Texas Guard during Bush’s service there. Strong told them the memos were compatible with what he knew of Killian but did not claim to have seen them before. “I cannot recall that Jerry Killian talked about Bush, and am not sure he would have discussed it with me,” Strong recently told The Washington Post.

That same day, back in the ninth-floor offices of “60 Minutes,” across West 57th Street from the CBS Broadcast Center, warnings about the story began to surface.

Emily Will of North Carolina, one of the experts CBS had asked to examine the memos, sent Mapes an e-mail outlining her concerns over discrepancies in Killian’s signature. She also phoned CBS and raised more questions about whether the typography in the memos existed in 1972 and differences with other military documents. “They looked like trouble to me,” Will said.

Linda James, a document examiner who lives near Mapes, was raising similar questions. The two memos she looked at “had problems,” James recalled telling CBS, and she could not rule out that they had been “produced on a computer.”

Document analyst Marcel Matley flew from California to New York, and Rather interviewed him on Labor Day, Sept. 6 — footage that would end up on the cutting-room floor. But Matley limited his examination to Killian’s signature, which he believed was probably valid, but not certain — the lowest endorsement he offers. Because the memos were copies, Matley said in a recent interview, “there’s no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them. … I can’t say either way from my expertise, the narrow, narrow little field of my expertise.”

On Tuesday, Sept. 7, the top brass was turning its attention to the explosive story. Heyward, the news division chief, met with Senior Vice President Betsy West; executive producer Josh Howard, who had taken over in June after shifting from the program’s Sunday edition; Mapes; senior broadcast producer Mary Murphy; and Esther Kartiganer, whose job is to ensure that interviews are not edited in a misleading way.

“All of us asked questions,” Heyward said.

“We asked core questions — about reliability, authenticity, motivation, could the source have had access to the documents,” West said. The executives were satisfied by Mapes’s answers, and she began writing the script.

But in separate phone calls to Mapes that day, two of the network’s outside experts tried to stop the journalistic train, or at least slow it down.

Linda James said she “cautioned” CBS “if they ran it, that the problems I saw, that other document examiners would see. It just wasn’t ready. The package wasn’t ready. It didn’t meet authenticating (standards). To go at that stage, I just couldn’t imagine.”

Emily Will said she called the network that Tuesday and repeated her objections as strongly as possible. “If you air the program on Wednesday,” she recalled saying, “on Thursday you’re going to have hundreds of document examiners raising the same questions.”

Howard was struck by the fact that Bartlett, in his interview, kept referring to the Killian memos to support his argument that the president had fulfilled his military obligations.

“This gave us such a sense of security at that moment that we had the story,” Howard said. “We gave the documents to the White House to say, ‘Wave us off this if we’re wrong.’ ” But Bartlett said CBS never asked him to verify the memos and that he had neither the time nor the resources to do so.

The wheels were in motion. In mid-afternoon, the CBS executives went into a pair of eighth-floor editing rooms where the segment was being put together in pieces, over Rather’s soundtrack. They made some script changes as the crew struggled to slice three minutes out of the 15-minute segment.

After the piece was broadcast, one colleague asked an elated Rather whether he was sure the documents were real. “I have never been more confident of a story in my life,” he said.

The first sign of trouble came the next afternoon, when a staffer told Howard that a Web site was questioning whether the Killian memos could have been produced on an early 1970s typewriter. In fact, the Internet was buzzing with such critiques.

Howard said he believed some of the outsiders’ questions about superscript and proportionate spacing were “kind of silly.”

On Friday, Sept. 10, as major news organizations began questioning the validity of the memos, Rather interviewed document expert Matley by satellite from San Francisco and used his comments on the “CBS Evening News.” In the piece, Rather strongly defended the network’s story, even while noting that “some people, including many who are partisan political operatives,” were questioning whether the documents were authentic.

Rather, who had first tangled with a Republican White House during Watergate, said in an interview that the focus should not be on CBS and that journalists “should be asking President Bush and his staff questions about what is true and not true about the president’s military service.”

A new problem surfaced when reporters found that the man cited in a 1973 memo as pushing to “sugarcoat” Bush’s record, Col. Walter B. “Buck” Staudt, had been honorably discharged a year and a half earlier.

As conservative critics called for Rather’s scalp, the spotlight turned to who provided the documents to CBS and whether that person was part of a hoax, or even a political setup.

As the storm of criticism grew louder, Rather, Heyward and the program’s staff still believed that the documents were genuine. They had no way of knowing that an 86-year-old woman in southwest Houston was discussing the controversy with a neighbor.

“I know Dan Rather is right,” Marian Carr Knox, a former secretary in Bush’s Guard unit, recalled saying. The neighbor said she should do something about it. So she called a Houston newspaper, Knox told CBS, but did not get a call back. Dallas Morning News reporter Pete Slover soon tracked down Knox and showed her copies of the Killian memos.

“These are not real,” declared Knox, who said she handled Killian’s memos. “They’re not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him.”

CBS got hold of Knox and had her on a plane to New York on Wednesday. Rather started the hour-long interview at 4 p.m., and while Knox said the underlying story was true — that Killian had made such comments about Lt. Bush — she insisted the memos were fake.

As they continue their investigation into whether they were hoaxed, CBS officials have begun shifting their public focus from the memos themselves to their underlying allegations about the president. Rather said that if the memos were indeed faked, “I’d like to break that story.” But whatever the verdict on the memos, he said, critics “can’t deny the story.”

As the days begin to blur for Josh Howard, he embraces the same logic: “So much of this debate has focused on the documents, and no one has really challenged the story. It’s been frustrating to us to see all this reduced to a debate over little ‘th’s.”