Bush Guard Documents: Forgeries?

Thu, Sep 9, 2004 at 8:32:04 am PDT

Here’s today’s Boston Globe story on President Bush’s Air National Guard service, focusing on memos purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian: Bid cited to boost Bush in Guard.

I write “purportedly” because, as Power Line points out this morning, the documents (which can be found in PDF form at CBS News) are highly questionable.

A post at FreeRepublic sums up the situation:

Howlin, 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.

The memo dated Aug. 18, 1973 is a particularly egregious example, with curly apostrophes and a superscript “th” (unknown on the typewriters of 1973):