Was the Dan Rather Story Untrue?

[Jack_Dawson]

I keep hearing about how everyone got fired and how "discredited" Dan is but wasn't the story about Bush's National Guard "service" basically true?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/aptv_story.asp?category=1401&slug=TV%20eCBS%20Guard

[Kikosexy2]

1. I firmly believe...

the majority of it is true. Come on, the Repubes went way out of their way to discredit it and quick. No doubts here.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. Yes, the story was correct, the one memo....

is questionable. I don't think they have been able to prove it's faked yet, but it's the general consensus. One reporter got fired, the other 3 were forced to resign, (and I heard they are still working for CBS, just another department)

[Warren Stupidity]

13. at the time rather f*d up

the Boston Globe (parent company NYT) was running a great in depth examination of the real evidence, which was pretty damning to *. Of course just by coincidence rather gets set up with the bogus memo while the series is starting to get legs and the MSM gets to forget about the plain facts of the matter and focus on rathergate. It was a classic disinformation campaign. You have to admire them, they do their homework.

[WoodrowFan]

3. yes

If I remember correctly the information was correct, but some of the letters were not the originals.

[Vinca]

4. I always had the impression it was true.

Too bad someone thought it was a good idea to reconstruct the documentation. The commission investigating the fiasco should have traced the documents back to their origin. Everyone assumes they came from a Democrat, but I've always thought they might have Republican origins for the purpose of causing the scandal that ensued. The general public, who might not be as aware as many of us, would have sympathy for Dubya and feel bad that the nasty Democrats would have the chutzpah to devise such a nasty story.

[txaslftist]

7. I always thought so, too.

Down here in Texas GWB claimed to have found a 'bug' in his campaign office, and laid it at the doorstep of his opponent. Most commentators at the time thought he'd planted it himself, but the timing of it came right before an election, the clarification after.

[jobycom]

11. That's such a cliche Rove manuever. He's done it often

Rove as a teenager was somehow involved in Watergate as a young staffer. Later, in Texas, he was caught bugging his own office and blaming it on the Democrats. That was when he was handling Bill Clemmons campaign against Mark White.

Mark White's manager was William McKinney, who later began working for Rove. McKinney is famous because it was his office that supplied the videotapes of Bush's debate training to Gore's camp. A staffer of McKinney's was convicted of lying to investigators about mailing the tapes. McKinney was promoted. Interestingly, McKinney stuck up for the staffer, even backing her story about what was in a package she was videotaped mailing. So if she lied, so did McKinney, and Rove had him promoted. He works for Bush in some capacity now.

Notice that the bug in the office in the 80s mirrored the real crimes of Richard Nixon, and the debate tapes scandal in 2000 mirrored the real crime of Reagan stealing Carter's debate notes in 80. Rove loves historical parallels. He modeled Bush's presidency after McKinley's. He models Bush speeches after Hitler's, and that's no accident.

None of the above is speculation, or denied even by the Republicans, or at least the ones who know what they are talking about. All of it is supported and documented. Both events were investigated by the FBI.

No question he was setting Burkett and Rather up, since they were both willing to drop the goods on Bush. Then there's the Hatfield claim about "Fortunate Son." Hatfield claimed Rove had given him some of the info about Bush and his cocaine conviction, then denied it when the book was released, probably so that they could get the info out there and then discredit the author, thus discrediting the info itself.

One more thing: When Gore's people turned over the debate tapes, Bush's people tried for a short time to make it work, and accused Gore of paying someone to steal the tapes. It was so obviously a stupid charge that even the media didn't go with it. They started asking the Bush camp if they had tried to set Gore up. One reporter at an impromptu outdoor press conference trapped Karen Hughes. He asked her if it was a setup, if anyone in the Bush camp knew about it beforehand, etc, and she denied everything. Then the reporter asked her if she would take a lie detector test over it. She froze. Her eyes widened in fear, her jaw dropped, and she turned pale. You could see what she was thinking: that refusing would reveal the lie, and taking the test would reveal the lie. She looked stunned and trapped for about ten seconds, then you could see her look at the camera, release she was being recorded, and blurt out "of course we would."

She was caught, and knew it, and if there was any true media in America that would have been the biggest story of the campaign. But the tape was never played again, as far as I know. If you didn't see it live, you never saw it. I wonder if that reporter is still alive these days...

[WI_DEM]

5. as usual the media protects W

the story was true but some of the documents may not have been originals. Too bad.

[txaslftist]

6. The story was basically true.

Bush used family connections to jump 500 other applicants to get a NG spot and avoid the draft. Once the war was over he no longer paid attention to the NG, as he didn't need to be in it anymore.

[Ivan Sputnik]

8. True, but it doesn't matter

The RW has used the questionable memo to "frame" the larger story as bogus. Sad, innit?

[RobertSeattle]

9. No

It's so pathetic that so many Right Wingers hold up Dan Rather to a much higher standard of honesty than the President of the United States.

[Canuckistanian]

10. Of course it's true

Rove & co. manged to pull such a masterful switcheroo that most people believe that the whole story had been discredited.

[kskiska]

12. Killian's secretary was interviewed on the same program

and said that the content of the letters was true. She was there at the time.

[starroute]

14. The memos were probably copies of real originals

There was a lot of discussion about them here. The memos gave every appearance of having been produced on a 1960's proportional-spacing typewriter (probably an IBM Executive.) The font could not be matched by any current computer font. And there were certain irregularities in the letters that would only arise when using an old-fashioned typewriter with keys.

There were, admittedly, definite problems with the memos. What CBS had was copies, not originals, and they hadn't managed to find out where they'd really come from. But the right's real coup was that they managed to jump in *instantly* and convince everyone that they memos were simple forgeries, to the point where almost everyone in the country now believes that this is true.

I did a lot of searching at the time and was never able to link Karl Rove to any of the people involved in the fake forgery story. Harry W. MacDougald, who make the original claim that the memos could be reproduced exactly in MSWord, turned out to have connections to Richard Mellon Scaife, Ken Starr, and the whole anti-Clinton jihad. So did Scott Johnson, who picked up the story next.

From that point, the story was moved along by Brent Bozell and his long-time associate Greg Mueller. Bozell is the fellow who's constantly crusading against the "liberal media" and filing complaints with the FCC. Greg Mueller also had ties to the anti-Clinton jihad, and his PR firm, Creative Response Concepts, represented the Swiftboaties. Bozell and company were already out to get CBS and specifically Dan Rather twenty years ago.

Because of these multiple connections, I'm fairly sure that Scaife (or his associates) and Bozell were the ones behind it, and that the primary intent was to destroy Dan Rather and cripple CBS. Rove may or may not have known what was going on, but if he did, I'm sure he kept his distance from the messy details.

[agarrett1]

15. Only the new information was false

As the Swift Boat Vets were having a big impact on the Kerry campaign, the media became interested in the stories of President Bush skipping out of his guard duty. The White House responded to the effect of releasing some of his military records, and there were some airmen coming forward saying the remembered serving with Bush.

Nothing stellar, certainly, but then it was an old story. We already knew he had used family connections to get a guard slot, and that he got deferrments to work on a political campaign. So the introduction of even the slightest positives made this story look better for the President.

In this, CBS came out with their story - the excuse for it was new information, records from his time in the Guard, that showed not just weak performance, but dereliction of duty. They also purported to show that political influence was exercised on Bush's behalf to cover this up. These documents proved to be forgeries.

So it depends on what you consider the "central story." If you think the central story is that Bush used family influence to get into the guard, and didn't do a lot while he was there, then the story was largely true. If you think the central story was the new information, the proof of dereliction of duty, that it was largely faked.

Drew Garrett