See the article for more details.
Could a document like this have been produced in the 70’s? Are the font and type style issues strong evidence of forgery?
http://weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=4596&R=9FCD2F192
The white house hasn’t contested the legitimacy of the memos. In fact they released their own copies of two of them last night.
Speaking as someone who was using typewriters in the 1970’s, who remembers both dittos and carbon paper…
There WERE “porportional” typewriters in use at that time. They were a pain in the butt to use, but they existed. I used one on at least one occassion that I can recall. Backspacing was a trick - you had to remember which letters you were backing over, and how many “backs” each took - if I recall “w” and “m” took three, “i” took only one, most took two. The one I used was an IBM. There were also typewriters available from several companies in various fonts, and with special keys - so a key for superscript “th” is possible. I still own a typewriter (Smith-Corona portable manual) that has several keys you could remove yourself and replace with, say, foreign characters and accents (I got it in part because of that feature, which enabled me to type accented characters in French without having to go back over the document with a pen to add the various marks)
It should be noted that these are NOT “full justified” documents - they are still left justified.
There are some “smeared” characteristics, which were common in the days of actual ink ribbons as opposed to film cartridge “ribbon” which came into vogue in the late 70’s/early 80’s.
There are spacing errors, or rather, lack of spacing errors reminding me of the days when correcting minor errors was a pain in the buttski and frequently skipped when it didn’t interfere with legibility.
Curlicue apostrophe’s were available on some typewriters.
NY Times with serifs was available on IBM selectrics, along with other interesting fonts.
From looking at them, I’d say it is possible they were done on 1970’s typewriters, and if so, probably two different machines (even though the fonts were the same), one with a “th” superscript character and one not. But, of course, I am not seeing the original documents where I could look for strike impressions, ink and carbon smears and other indications of authenticity.
If they are fakes, they were made by someone not totally ignorant of typewriters… in which you have to ask why they didn’t avoid some of the “obvious” errors Mr. Forensic has pointed out.
No kidding. When I first heard this nonsense, I went and pulled out some old typewriter documents from one of my dad’s filing cabinets. Every single one had curlicues. I found a few superscripts in smaller fonts too. Looks to me like the WS is just throwing a bunch of bogus claims at the board and hoping their readers won’t do any common-sense fact checking. And they’re probably right about that.
Well, as a onetime calligraphist and current fontophile–also as someone who learned to type in the 70s and used a bunch of different highend typewriters of the day–their arguments are pretty compelling. The superscript [sup]th[/sup] requires some explaining.
OTOH, it wouldn’t surprise me if such sophisticated typewriters–or even early word processors–were available to military brass.
OTOOH, it strikes me as horrifyingly ludicrous that if someone were to try to perpetrate such a high profile hoax, which they KNEW would receive as much scrutiny as the Zapruder film, you’d think the firs thing they would do would be to find a 70s era typewriter.
I remember in my second job out of college in 1981-1982 was touting Radio Shack computers and daisy wheel printers, and even they would not do some of the stuff described in the memo (ie the little “th”), I’m not a font maven like lissener, but in the mod to late 70’s I used a huge variety of typewriters throughout my college career, and occasionally got some pretty heavy duty, high end typewriting help on large, mission critical papers from my mother, who was an executive secretary at Marriot Corporation world HQ, with access to the fanciest typewriters imaginable, and it would still be child’s play to sort out a typewritten document done on those from a laser printed one.
I would find it surprising that CBS would be stupid enough to be fooled by something this obvious. I mean really… this is over the top obvious. Ebay has dozens of circa 1970’s IBM typewriters and ribbons for sale at any given time. A forger would have to be dog lazy and stupid to try faking these memos on a word processor when it would be so easy to forge them correctly.
Yeah, and the quick brown fox would jump over them.
I can verify the proportional font feature existed in one typewriter in the military between May 1970 and May 1972.
That’s when I was stationed at the Alaska Command Information Office at Ft. Richardson and I recall typing on it some. It was a devil to correct typos after the fact because of the proportional feature. This was my first(and last) permanent station of my military time so I’m really positive of this.
I don’t recall the make , nor can I recall one way or another if you could type little letters or numbers above or below the line.
Nightline is running with the story tonight and will have quite a few experts saying they’re pretty suspicious.
A blog, Powerline, seems to have been in front of this and has posted quite a bit of stuff which paints a pretty compelling case. But I am not at all an expert so am relying on the testimony of others.
A legal question.
Under what circumstances would making such a forgery (if it is a forgery) illegal (or legal)?
What if it was done as a prank? What if the documents were (or were not) sold as legit? What if they were given away, with a claim they were real? Does simply faking the Dead Guy’s signature constitute a crime?
Typewriters used to have all sorts of screwy characters available on the number keys.
As I mentioned over in GD, there’s even a typed TNG document that listed Bush as a pilot trainee in the “111**[sup]th[/sup]** Fighter Interceptor Squadron” in 1968. No one’s called that document a forgery yet.
Here’s the laundry list of errors from the powerline link
But that is a different font. Probably not significant, just a thought.
If you looked at the linked letters, in the ones with the superscript “th”, you don’t see a superscript “st” after “111”, the “st” is normal lowercase. This, and the mistake “111th” with superscript, would be consistent with a typewriter having a superscript “th” key but no other superscripts available.
MS Word, on the other hand, will helpfully make an “st” superscript for you after 111th. So someone making a forgery would have to go back and “unsuperscript” the 111st. But that would mean they didn’t unsuperscript the “th”?
As mentioned in this thread, proprotional fonts and Times New Roman fonts were all available in the 1970’s. Superscripts were less common, but entirely possible. These “facts” prove neither that the letters are forged nor that they are authentic.
Some of the points raised I can’t add or subtract anything to, so I’ll just stick with the ones where I can make a sensible statement
Unless you can conclusively prove that no one anywhere at any time used this term - which may have been a result of less than perfect conformence to style rules - this neither proves nor disproves authenticity.
One word: “typos”. Typewriters do not have spelling or grammar check, typos were rampant, and if they weren’t on a document for wide distribution or they didn’t interfere with comprehension they were left alone. If authentic, they were typed by a human being and human are notoriously prone to errors.
I work in an industry with many standard acronyms. Despite everyone being familar with them, it is common practice to spell them out in the first occurance in a document, then to proceed with the acronyms. So that doesn’t strike me as wildly out of line - I mean, eventually you’re going to get a new guy who’s not famillar with terms and he’ll need those little explanations.
Also, we are talking about a national guard unit, yes? Where a substantial portion of people live in the civilian world most of their time? I could see a someone in a command position developing a habit of writing out acronyms, including something like “NLT”, for either new recruits or for people who don’t have 24/7 immersion in the Air Force to improve comprehension in written communications.
Most of what this guys offers as “proof” can be labeled “mistakes made by a mediocre typist”. Others - such as the font issue - are not as clear-cut as he makes them out to be.
Going strictly by appearances, there are some unusual features to them but it’s not impossible that they were typed in the 1970’s. Simply looking at copies of these won’t work - in order to prove/disprove authenticity you would need a forensic expert to physically examine the actual documents. As I mentioned in my first post, such things as strike impressions would be extremely hard to fake. There are also tests that can be run on paper and ink composition that could date the materials involved.
But, as usual, the conspiracy theorists are off and running at the mouth…
I think the only resolution is to have an independent lab test the paper and ink of the original. I think under a microscope it would be easy to tell if the impressions of the letters came from a typewriter ball or were inkjet or laser.
You wouldn’t even need a microscope - a good magnifying glass would do the job.
How absurd can politics get? The wife of Bush’s former CO claims he never typed! (Unfortunately, he is no longer living.) Is that like “I never inhaled”??? What the heck is this? Like, he couldn’t have dictated a letter to a grunt? C’mon! How could this CO have survived without filling out the paperwork in triplicate? She must think we were all born yesterday…
When it comes to typewriters, I was born yesterday. I don’t think I’ve ever used one in my life for anything other than a completely redundant typing class and don’t intend to start now. (The one time I had to fill out a preprinted form using a typewriter I got Dad to do it for me.) So this whole discussion about what is possible and what isn’t involving a typewriter is way over my head.
That being said, how hard could it be to test the paper, the ink, if the characters were put on the paper in a way consistent with a typewriter, and the like? And even then, how hard could it be to kick out a forgery using a typewriter at Kinko’s or something and maybe try to age the paper a bit?
QUOTE=Jinx]The wife of Bush’s former CO claims he never typed
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These two comments seem to correlate. Somebody who “didn’t type” could still sit down at a manual typewriter and hack out a letter very slowly. Making ‘errors’ such as incorrect formatting of abbreviations and jargon. I’ve seen plenty of WW2 typescripts and letters where similar inconsistencies and mistakes appear.
The closest I’ve heard to ‘damning evidence’ is the issue of the signature. But we only need to see a verified copy of the guy’s signature to know whether it’s faked, or if he was using the wrong style.