Chapter One
I woke up smiling on September 9, 2004.
My story on George W. Bush’s Guard service had run on 60 Minutes the
night before and I felt it had been a solid piece. We had worked
under tremendous pressure because of the short time frame and the
explosive content, but we’d made our deadline and, most important,
we’d made news.
I was confident in my work and marveled once again at the teamwork
and devotion of so many people at 60 Minutes. They really knew how
to pull together to get a story on the air. I was also deeply proud
of CBS News for having the guts to air a provocative story on a
controversial part of the president’s past.
By the end of the day, all of that would change. By the end of the
month, I would be barred from doing my job and under investigation.
By the end of the year, my long career at CBS News would essentially
be over, after a long, excruciating, and very public beating.
But on this day, all that was unimaginable. I was just anxious to
get into the office and get the reaction to the story. I raced to
the hotel room door and pulled The New York Times and USA Today off
the floor, curled up on the sofa, and read the front-page coverage
of our story. Online, I checked The Washington Post and saw that
there, too, it was front-page material.
It deserved to be, for a number of reasons.
Dan Rather and I had aired the first-ever interview with former
Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes on his role in helping Bush get
into the Texas Air National Guard. Getting Barnes to say yes had
taken five years and I thought his interview was a home run.
Finally, there were on-the-record, honest, straight-ahead answers
from a man who intimately knew the ins and outs of the way Texas
politics and privilege worked in the state National Guard units
during the Vietnam War. Ben Barnes’s version of events was crucial
to understanding a significant chapter in President Bush’s life from
thirty years ago, an important key to unlocking the questions many
Americans had about the man in the White House.
What had George W. Bush done during the volatile Vietnam years? Who
was he back then, really? Was he a young man who volunteered to
pilot fighter jets off the country’s coastline, a brave young flier
ready and willing to risk his life in the skies over Vietnam?
Or was George W. Bush-like so many well-connected young men in the
Vietnam era-simply doing whatever he could to avoid fighting or
flying anywhere near the jungles of Southeast Asia? Did he complete
his service to the National Guard or walk away without looking back
simply because his family’s status meant that he could?
Did he do his duty? Did he tell the truth?
Our story on September 8, 2004 also presented never-before-seen
documents purportedly written in 1972 by Bush’s then-commander, Lt.
Col. Jerry B. Killian. Killian had died in 1984 and his important
testimony on Bush’s service had not been part of all the years of
debate that had raged over whether or not the president had
fulfilled his Guard duties.
These documents appeared to show that Killian had not approved of
Bush’s departure from the Guard in 1972 to work on a Senate campaign
for Republican Roy Blunt in Alabama. They showed that Killian had
ordered Bush to take a physical that was never completed and that
Killian had been pressured by his higher-ups to write better reports
on Bush than were merited by the future president’s performance. The
Killian memos, as they came to be called, turned on its head the
version of George W. Bush’s Guard career that the White House had
presented. These new memos made Bush look like a slacker, not an ace
pilot.
I had spent weeks trying to get these pieces of paper and every
waking hour since I had received them vetting each document for
factual errors or red flags.
I worked to compare the new memos with the official documents I had
received since 1999. They meshed in ways large and small.
Furthermore, the content the essential truth of the story contained
in the memos, had been corroborated by Killian’s commander general
Bobby Hodges in a phone conversation two days before the story
aired. On September 6, he had said the memos reflected Killian’s
feelings at the time and this was what he remembered about how
Killian had handled Bush’s departure from the Guard.
We had a senior document analyst named Marcel Matley fly to New York
to look at all the documents we had, the official documents that had
been previously released by the White House as well as the “new”
ones. After examining them for hours, blowing up signatures and
comparing curves, strokes, and dots, he gave his best opinion on
their authenticity. Since the documents were copies, not originals,
he could not offer the 100 percent assurance that came by testing
the ink or the paper.
But he said he saw nothing in the typeface or format to indicate the
memos had been doctored or not produced at the time they were
alleged to have been. The analyst also vouched for the Killian
signatures after comparing them with more than a dozen other Killian
signatures we had on the photocopied official documents. A second
analyst, Jim Pierce, agreed after examining two of the Killian
documents and comparing them to the official records and signatures.
I felt that I was in the clear, that I had done my job, and that the
story met the high standards demanded by 60 Minutes.
I called my husband and son to say good morning, just as I had done
every morning in all the years past when I was out of town. As
always, my husband told me my work had looked great and my
seven-year-old boy told me to come home as fast as I could and to
bring him a surprise. It was a regular ritual.
I was staying at my favorite hotel home away from home, The Pierre,
a grand old New York pile that is stuffy and high-priced. Without my
CBS discount, I never would have seen the inside of the place.
The Pierre is also quiet, close to the office, and sweetly
old-fashioned. Old-fashioned enough that Kitty Carlisle apparently
still goes there often for “highballs,” according to the hotel
bartender, along with a male friend and their respective nurses. I
once ran into her in the ladies’ room, looking like she had just
stepped off the set of To Tell the Truth, mink capelet and all.
The elevator operators and doormen were older, too, and they were
kind, always looking out for me. They knew me because of my regular
visits and comfortingly clucked over how hard I was working when I
stayed there.
On this trip, they had seen me leaving very early and coming in very
late for the past few days. I had been staggering out to catch a cab
to work by 9 a.m. and arriving back exhausted about 3 a.m. after the
bar had closed and the hotel was buttoning up for the night. By the
time I arrived, there was often no one in the lobby except a
bellman, me, and perhaps a gaudily dressed female guest or two.
I often wondered what those women thought I did for a living.
Disheveled and limping, straggling along with a heavy briefcase full
of files, I entered the hotel lobby each night looking like a
failing hooker for that small subset of customers who preferred
exhausted, unkempt professional women.
On this morning, though, my energy was back. I was exhilarated by
another success.
When I got to work, my mood was reinforced. I made rounds to thank
the editors who had worked so hard to get the story put together in
time for air. Their jobs are not for the faint of heart or for
people who panic when time is short or the workload is overwhelming.
I ran into other producers and correspondents and collected hugs and
kisses and congratulations. There were jokes about what we would do
as a follow-up. Dan and I had broken the Abu Ghraib story in late
April. Now this. My team, the people at 60 Minutes, and Dan all felt
like we were on a roll.
The new executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday, Josh Howard,
gave me a hug and congratulations, following up on a flattering
e-mail he had sent me around midnight the night before: “I was just
sitting here thinking about how amazing you are. I’m buckled in,
ready to see where you’ll take us next. Let’s go!”
There was no hint of what was to come, no whiff of doubt about the
work we had all done on the story.
I saw CBS vice president Betsy West standing in the CBS building’s
eighth-floor lobby, waiting for the slow, unreliable elevators, and
we laughed at how awful the previous night had been, how hurried and
harried we all had been trying to get the story on. There had been
shouting and impatience and flashes of anger. She laughed and said,
“That’s as close to the sausage making as I ever want to get.” I’d
told her that we’d all gotten sausage all over us and that was as
close as I ever wanted to come to missing my deadline. We both felt
good about the story and agreed that it had looked polished on the
air, in contrast to the carnage left behind in the editing rooms and
the offices where we had done our scripting.
This behind-the-scenes carnage was not particularly unusual in
television. For fifteen years at CBS I had pushed back against
deadlines to perfect a script, to change a shot, to make a story
better. I had never missed a deadline, never put on a story that I
did not feel comfortable with.
There was nothing more important to me, or to any of us at 60
Minutes, than getting the story right, no matter how limited the
time or how tough the topic. I had a well-earned reputation for
being able to “crash,” to get a story on quickly and competently.
For whatever reason-probably because I grew up in a large, loud,
distracting family-I was able to focus when others couldn’t. I
could keep writing when the room was full of people yelling at the
top of their lungs. I was able to think clearly when the clock
seemed to be ticking too fast.
The previous year, I had “crashed” an entire hour overnight for 60
Minutes Wednesday. Dan had done interviews with Ron Young and David
Williams the two Apache helicopter pilots who had crashed and been
captured in Iraq. Rescued by U.S. Marines, the two men had been
pursued by countless reporters and producers for an interview. My
wonderful friend and associate producer, Dana Roberson, helped me
talk the two pilots into trusting us to tell their story.
Steve Glauber, a veteran 60 Minutes producer, had worked round the
clock, flying to the other side of the world and then back from
Kuwait in forty-eight hours, carrying precious videotape. He had
done touching and important interviews with the rest of the pilots’
unit, men and women who had mourned the two lost airmen after the
crash. The unit members had vowed to find their comrades and had
flown out on mission after mission wearing headbands with the two
pilots’ names on them.
We did the interviews with the pilots at two o’clock on Tuesday
afternoon. They were great. But now I only had a few hours to script
and organize the editing of the broadcast, in order to make it to
air the following night. And all of it had to be overseen and
approved by Jeff Fager, then the broadcast’s executive producer, and
his right hand, senior producer Patti Hassler.
With their help and guidance, I was able to get the script done. The
editors were phenomenal and put together a beautiful,
heart-wrenching, and illuminating hour.
But there had been more than a few furrowed brows. Editor David
Rubin had been doing his trademark shrieking down the hall from my
office as he cut in pieces of digitized tape. Everyone was dead
tired and on a brutal deadline. By airtime, we were all staggering
around like the undead. But we had done it. And the next day, we’d
had the same kind of tired but happy conversations we were having on
September 9.
It was another day of exhausted exultation. I got congratulatory
e-mails, phone calls, and pats on the back. Other reporters called
repeatedly as they worked to catch up to my story. I was thrilled.
All that changed about 11:00 a.m., when I first started hearing
rumbles from some producers at CBS News that a handful of far right
Web sites were saying that the documents had been forged.
I was incredulous. That couldn’t be possible. Even on the morning
the story aired, when we showed the president’s people the memos,
the White House hadn’t attempted to deny the truth of the documents.
In fact, the president’s spokesman, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that
the documents supported their version of events: that
then-lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.
Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never
heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line.
They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites
loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being
compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times
reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.
All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on
typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed
to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts
hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these
analysts or commentators-or whatever they were-were coming up
with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one
another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.
I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes
had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the
air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We
hadn’t put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a
longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name
“Buckhead,” set the tone for what was to come.
There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work
done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record,
no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond
a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface.
That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.
People from around the country, especially those with a harsh
political bent, began chiming in on the sites with accounts of their
own experience with typewriters in the 1970s. Someone claimed to
remember that electric typewriters at the time did not do
“superscripts,” a small “th” or “st” or some such abbreviation that
was lifted higher on the line than the other letters. This was
important, because in the Killian memos, the 111th was sometimes
typed as the 111th, something that drove the bloggers wild. Another
person claimed there was no peripheral spacing on old typewriters,
even though there had been on some of the old official documents.
I remember staring, disheartened and angry, at one posting. “60
Minutes is going down,” the writer crowed exultantly.
My heart started to pound. There is nothing more frightening for a
reporter than the possibility of being wrong, seriously wrong. That
is the reason that we checked and rechecked, argued about wording,
took care to be certain that the video that accompanied the words
didn’t create a new and unintended nuance. Being right, being sure,
was everything. And right now, on the Internet, it appeared
everything was falling apart.
I had a real physical reaction as I read the angry online accounts.
It was something between a panic attack, a heart attack, and a
nervous breakdown. My palms were sweaty; I gulped and tried to
breathe. My heart was pounding like I had become a cartoon character
whose heart outline pushes out the front of her shirt with each
beat. The little girl in me wanted to crouch and hide behind the
door and cry my eyes out.
The longtime reporter in me was pissed off … and I hung on to
her strength and certainty for dear life. I had never been
fundamentally wrong, never been fooled, never been under this kind
of attack. I resolved to fight back.
(Continues…)
St. Martin’s Press
Copyright © 2005
Mary Mapes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-312-35195-X
Excerpted from Truth and Duty
by Mary Mapes
Copyright © 2005 by Mary Mapes.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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