September 12, 2004

Golden Shower


Back from vacation (scroll down). Had a great time. Now, back to full sentences.

Last week, 60 Minutes updated the Bush/National Guard story, producing 4 new documents to support the inference that Bush failed to report for duty when he was required to do so, and thereby undermining his entitlement to an honorable discharge. Within hours a buzz arose over whether the documents were authentic. The essential problem is that the documents have the very strong appearance of being prepared in Microsoft Word or some other word processing software, a technology that obviously didn't exist in 1972. Some of the common complaints have been the match of the type face, proportional spacing, kerning, use of superscript characters, use of "curly" apostrophes, line spacing, line centering, etc. As of Sunday morning while I'm typing, I think it's fair to say while the documents may indeed be authentic, there's far and away enough reason to doubt them, and if 60 Minutes expects us to credit their story they need to come forward with a better explanation of their sourcing.

But anyway, if you want to read bad summaries of this pissing contest try any big newspaper. If you want to actually take the Golden Shower, however, start with Powerline's first post on the documents' doubtful authenticity. For some more technical approaches to the similarities between the documents and a Word reproduction of them, try here and scroll for stuff on signatures, superscripts, and IBM Selectrics, here for a discussion of the possible use of the IBM Selectric Composer, and here for other detail on fonts, typewriters, etc.

The best technical response to these arguments I could find is here and here.

Complicating the matter, a document expert quoted by the Boston Globe in a story supporting the documents' authenticity now says they misquoted him. And it turns out, one of the individuals referenced in the documents as pressuring their author to grant Bush favors had in fact retired many months before the document was purportedly created.

Two things stand out to me in all of this. For those who think there's no smoke here, I'd love to see a modern reproduction of these memos on a 1972 vintage office typewriter that matches as closely as the Word reproductions do. Many who have attacked the authenticity of the documents have indeed reproduced them with astonishing ease on a modern computer running MS Word. How about some enterprising blogger doing the same thing to establish that yes, in fact an old IBM Selectric or whatever could do the same thing today? Second, all of these comparisons, overlays and the like being demonstrated today have been performed using nth generation copies of the original documents. CBS doesn't have the originals and we don't even know if their copies were made from the originals. Given that duplication by either fax or photocopier distorts the document and that each subsequent copy made from a prior copy increases that distortion, I wonder how sure anyone can be about these comparisons without better information on how far removed the copied documents are from the originals.

Posted by Peter at September 12, 2004 09:54 AM
Comments

Easy:

Alterman's blog has this letter from a reader:

Name: Connie Kreienheder
Hometown: St. Peters, MO
Dear Eric,
I'm a regular reader and am grateful for the common sense (with sources) that I find in your column. With that said, I'm forwarding the following info because I know there are currently attempts to persuade the public that the 60 Minutes documents on Bush's "service" might be fake, so I've done a little research of my own and thought I'd pass along my findings. I don't know about these so-called typography experts, but they need to go back to school. They're out to lunch when they say the fonts in the documents weren't available in the early 70's.

The first IBM Selectric typewriter came out over 40 years ago, in 1961 and used the interchangeable font "golfball" typing element, better known as a typeball. Additionally, the IBM Selectric "Composer" was a hybrid that came out in 1966 and had proportional spaced fonts. The IBM Selectric I and II had the following fonts available to these models:

10-pitch type: Advocate, Bookface Academic 72, Delegate, Orator, Courier 72, Pica 72, Prestige Pica 72

12-pitch type: Adjutant, Artisan 12, Courier 12 Italic, Scribe, Prestige Elite, Courier 12, Elite 72, Letter Gothic

Special Type: Light Italic, Script, Printing ANSI-OCR, Symbol 10, 108 OCR, Manifold 72, Symbol 12

Even if superscript had not been available under one of the special type font "golfball" elements, all a clever typist had to do was change the ball to a smaller pitch font, roll the carriage roller backward one half-line, hold it there and type the two letters, "th", to achieve the superscript "look," and there were many fussy officers who desired these things in their correspondence. I know this because I was a clerk-typist and secretary for the Federal Government Civil Service and U.S. Army command in St. Louis, MO in the early 1970's, and had to use these tools.

So to those that say the fonts weren't available in the early seventies.......BALDERDASH!
_____
What would Ockham have to say about all this, with his Razor and all?

G

Posted by: Glenn at September 13, 2004 11:12 PM

Occam would say that if pigs had wings they could fly, and if early 1970's typewriters could generate a duplicate with the ease and felicity of MS Word, someone would have done it by now.

Although to be fair, the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, and all that.

Posted by: Peter at September 14, 2004 10:12 PM