The morning before Dan Rather went on the air with his flammable story, senior staff at CBS's 60 Minutes gathered to consider whether it was true. Network producers, lawyers and Betsy West, a CBS News senior vice president, among others, met in a screening room to decide whether to broadcast the story about President Bush's record in the National Guard. Five days before, they had received copies of new and intriguing memos suggesting that Lieut. Bush had ignored a direct order to get a physical and that his superiors were pressured to "sugar coat" his evaluation. No one talked much about whether the documents could have come from a 1970s-era typewriter, and there was no strident dissent. But, says Josh Howard, the show's executive producer, "We pressed the producer on 'How do you know they're authentic?'" And the producer, a respected veteran named Mary Mapes who had helped break the stunning Abu Ghraib torture story just months before, had answers. She had credible sources and document experts, he says.
Much of this evidence would melt away in the days to come. The family and the office typist of Lieut. Colonel Jerry Killian, the alleged author of the memos, as well as additional document experts, would say they did not look real. There would be calls for Rather's resignation. The Wall Street Journal would declare that the "liberal media establishment" had finally lost its hold on the national agenda. But behind the hysteria, this is a story about human errors whipped into a new-media news cycle. It is also a familiar tale of journalists wanting ever so badly to fit all the disparate fragments of a story into a fine, taut narrative.
Rather and other CBS News employees acknowledged for the first time last week that there may be problems with the authenticity of the memos. "It's up to us to get to the bottom of legitimate questions that have been raised," CBS News President Andrew Heyward told TIME. Then, in a surprising twist, Howard pulled the Administration back into the fiasco on Friday. "If the White House had just raised an eyebrow--they didn't have to say they were forgeries--but if there was any hint that there was a question, that would have sent us back," says Howard. The morning the show aired, CBS staff members had shown copies of the memos to Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. In response, according to a transcript of the interview, Bartlett tried to spin parts of the memos in Bush's favor and attributed the whole debate to partisan sniping. He did not, however, challenge the authenticity of the memos.
But the White House did not check the memos for invisible ink either. And why should it have? After all, the documents were allegedly written some 30 years ago by Bush's squadron commander in Texas, who has been dead for 20 years. There was no reason the Administration would have known if the documents were real.