The debate over US President George W. Bush's National Guard service turned into a furious battle over the minutiae of Vietnam-era typewriter fonts on Friday, as CBS News mounted a vigorous defense against critics who doubted the authenticity of four documents that suggested Bush had shirked his duty.
CBS News anchor Dan Rather moved aggressively on air to protect the credibility of the news division.
Democrats and Republicans watched carefully from the sidelines, deeply aware that the debate could help shape the presidential campaign some 50 days before Nov. 2.
CBS News executives said they were confident that their report on Wednesday night, on what they presented as four newly discovered memos from the personal files of Bush's squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, would stand up to scrutiny.
The memos indicated that Bush, who has long faced questions about his service in the Air National Guard, failed to take a physical examination "as ordered" and that his commander had felt under pressure to "sugarcoat" his performance rating, because 1st Lieutenant Bush, the son of a prominent congressman, was "talking to someone upstairs."
The report set off debate on Web logs, in newspapers and on television competitors to CBS News about whether such documents could have been produced 30 years ago.
Some forensics specialists said the documents appeared to be fakes, created by a modern computer, because they had features that could not have been produced on Vietnam-era typewriters.
Others disagreed.
In an interview on Friday, Rather said: "CBS News stands by, and I stand by, the thoroughness and accuracy of this report, period. Our story is true."
On television later, he depicted questions about the veracity of the report as a counterattack coming in part from "partisan political operatives."
In his Evening News report, Rather interviewed a handwriting expert who he said had helped CBS News verify the authenticity of the documents. The expert, Marcel Matley, said the signatures on the documents were consistent with those of Killian's own records that the White House has independently given reporters.
The CBS News report also disputed critics' assertions that superscript characters after numbers were not consistent with Vietnam-era typewriters.
"Critics claim typewriters didn't have that ability in the 1970s," Rather said. "But some models did," he added, showing an old Guard record previously provided by the White House that contains such superscripts.
Democrats promised to continue questioning Bush's Guard service. At a news conference on Friday, Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe said that even if the documents were forged, there was enough other evidence from official records and other news accounts to say Bush had not been honest.
"It has become crystal clear that the president has lied to the American public about his military service," McAuliffe said.
Obligations met
At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that whether the documents were forged or not, "the president met his obligations and was honorably discharged."
But it was typeface that consumed much of the news media. For every expert who said the documents looked like the work of computers and could not have come from old-fashion typewriters because of their proportional spacing and some of their type features, there seemed to be one who said they indeed could have been authentic.
Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist in Georgia who has compiled a database of more than 3,000 old fonts, said people who bought the IBM Selectric Composer model could specially order keys with the superscripts in question.
Bouffard said that font did bear many similarities to that of the CBS documents, but not enough to dispel questions he had about their authenticity.
A spokesman for IBM, John Bukovinsky, said he knew only that the company introduced proportional spacing to some of its typewriters in 1944, most notably in the Executive line of typewriters.
Mark Robb, team leader of the type development group at Lexmark, which embodies the old IBM typewriting and printing division and now focuses on printers, said specific machines could be custom fitted with the superscript letters in question and that they frequently were.
Rare letters
Some former engineers who worked in the typewriter division said they were not aware of a standard typewriter that could have produced the Killian documents because the kind of superscript letters in question were so rare.
Robert Rahenkamp, a former IBM manager who wrote a scholarly history on IBM typewriters for a company journal in 1981, said, "I'm not aware that we had any superscript technologies back in those days."
Bill Glennon, a technology consultant in New York, worked for IBM in Midtown Manhattan for 14 years and repaired typewriters throughout that time. He said the Executive had proportional spacing and that its typebar could be fitted with superscript characters.
Documents from the period show that the Air Force had tested the IBM Selectric Composer as early as April 1969. But spokesmen for the National Guard and the Texas Air National Guard said it was impossible to trace the kind of machines that would have been used by the unit, the 111th Fighter Intercept Squadron, or any unit, so long ago.
Mark Allen, the chief of the external media division of the National Guard Bureau public affairs office said that there was no way to reconstruct what equipment might have been used or whether Killian actually typed up the memos or had a clerk type them up for him.
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