The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed that they were fakes.
But she also said they accurately reflect the thoughts of the commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, and other memorandums she typed for him about Bush. "The information in them is correct," the woman, Marian Carr Knox, now 86, said in an interview at her home here. "But I doubt," she said, pausing, "it's not anything that I wrote because there are terms in there that are not used by Guards, the format wasn't the way we did it. It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together.
"We did discuss Bush's conduct and it was a problem Killian was concerned about," Knox said. "I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done." But, she said, words like "billets," which appear in the memorandums, were not standard Guard terms.
Knox, who was the secretary for the squadron at Ellington Air Force Base from 1957 to 1979, said she recalled Bush's case and the criticism of him because his record was so unusual. Killian had her type memorandums recording the problems, she said, and he kept them in a private file under lock and key. She said she had never voted for Bush because she disliked his record in office.
Killian died in 1984; his widow and son have said that they did not find any memorandums among the private effects they cleared from his office after his death. Killian's son, Gary, who also served at the squadron and who initially thought that the signatures on the documents matched his father's, has come to believe they are fakes, and said he doubted Knox's account, though he recalled her fondly.
"She's a sweet old lady, but she's wrong and it didn't happen," he said. "I always thought well of her, and I know my dad would have also, but she's a sweet old lady."
Knox's comments add to the mystery around the four memorandums that were reported by CBS News last Wednesday, which indicated that Bush had been suspended from flying because he failed to meet standards and report for a physical examination, and that Killian felt pressure to "sugarcoat" his rating because the young Lieutenant Bush, then the son of a congressman, was "talking to someone upstairs."
Executives at CBS said Tuesday that they continued to stand by their statements that they believe the documents are authentic, despite the new questions, and concern from others inside the network, and a report on ABC News that two more experts whom CBS News had consulted to authenticate the documents for its report said they had expressed concerns about the documents' authenticity to the network's producers.
When questions about the documents first arose last week, the anchor Dan Rather said at least four experts had helped convince the network of their authenticity.
But the network has continually declined to provide the name of more than one of those experts. That one, Marcel Matley, said in interviews that he validated only that the signature on the documents was Killian's. But, he said, he did not vouch for the documents themselves and could not rule out that the signature had been cut and pasted onto the records.
Officials at CBS News said on Tuesday that they would at some point in the day provide the name of a document expert who expressed confidence in the records' authenticity before the report was broadcast. But they did not do so, and Betsy West, a senior vice president of CBS News declined to say why.
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