posted September 21, 2004 05:45 PM              

Kerry Aide Talked to Retired Guard Officer

Tue Sep 21,12:07 PM ET
Associated Press

NEW YORK - A top adviser to John Kerry (news - web sites) says he talked to a central figure in the controversy over President Bush (news - web sites)'s National Guard service at the suggestion of a CBS News producer shortly before disputed documents were released by the network.

But Joe Lockhart denied any connection between the Kerry campaign and the papers supplied to the network by the Bill Burkett, the former Texas Army National Guard official he telephoned at CBS' suggestion.

"He had some advice on how to deal with the Vietnam issue and the Swift boat" allegations, Lockhart said late Monday, referring to GOP-fueled accusations that Kerry exaggerated his Vietnam War record. "He said these guys play tough and we have to put the Vietnam experience into context and have Kerry talk about it more."

Lockhart, the second Kerry ally to confirm contact with Burkett, said he made the call at the suggestion of CBS producer Mary Mapes.

The White House called the exchange evidence of coordination between the Kerry campaign and Burkett.

"The fact that CBS News and a high-level adviser to the Kerry campaign coordinated a personal attack on President Bush is a stunning and deeply troubling development," said White House communications director Dan Bartlett. He urged Kerry to hold accountable anybody involved in helping CBS obtain the documents.

Lockhart denied any involvement. "Bartlett is wrong," he said later Monday.

Kerry adviser Mike McCurry said Lockhart recently told campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill about his conversation with Burkett. Cahill told Kerry, and Kerry saw it just as Lockhart simply responding to the CBS producer's request to call her source, McCurry said.

"He does not believe Joe did anything improper," McCurry said.

Regarding the Republicans focus on a possible Kerry-Burkett connection, McCurry said: "It's to change the subject from talking about Iraq (news - web sites)."

McCurry also said the campaign is "pretty confident" that no one else on the campaign besides Lockhart had contact with Burkett, but the campaign was checking it out.

Earlier, Lockhart said he thanked Burkett for his advice after a three- to four-minute call, and that he does not recall talking to Burkett about Bush's Guard records. "It's baseless to say the Kerry campaign had anything to do with this," he said.

Lockhart said he was sure he had not talked to Burkett about the Guard documents. Burkett did not return a phone call to The Associated Press. He told USA Today in a story for Tuesday's editions that his interest in contacting the campaign had nothing to do with the documents.

"My interest was to get the attention of the national (campaign) to defend against the attacks," Burkett told the newspaper.

CBS News apologized Monday for a "mistake in judgment" in its story questioning Bush's Guard service, claiming it was misled by the source of documents that several experts have dismissed as fakes. The network said an independent panel would look at its reporting about the memos.

CBS News spokeswoman Kelli Edwards said Mapes had declined to comment.

"This is an example of the kind of thing that the independent panel that will be named in a few days will look into. When that review is complete, we will comment," Edwards said.

Burkett admitted this weekend to CBS that he lied about obtaining the documents from another former National Guard member, the network said. CBS hasn't been able to conclusively tell how he got them, or even whether they're fakes.

Kerry ally Max Cleland, a former Georgia senator, also said he had a brief conversation last month with Burkett, who told him he had information about Bush to counter charges against Kerry's Vietnam War service. Cleland said he gave Burkett's name and phone number to the campaign's research department.

Kerry spokesman David Ginsberg said nobody in the campaign's research department followed up on Burkett's offer of information.

Lockhart said Mapes asked him the weekend before the story broke to call Burkett. "She basically said there's a guy who is being helpful on the story who wants to talk to you," Lockhart said, adding that it was common knowledge that CBS was working on a story raising questions about Bush's Guard service. Mapes told him there were some records "that might move the story forward," Lockhart said. "She didn't tell me what they said."

posted September 21, 2004 05:47 PM              

Published on Thursday, September 9, 2004 by the Boston Globe
Bid Cited to Boost Bush in Guard
'73 Memo Tells of Request to 'Sugar-Coat' Report

by Walter V. Robinson and Francie Latour

In August 1973, President Bush's superior officer in the Texas Air National Guard wrote a memorandum complaining that the commanding general wanted him to ''sugar coat" an annual officer evaluation for First Lieutenant Bush, even though Bush had not been at the base for the year in question, according to new documents obtained and broadcast last night by CBS News.
The commander, the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, wrote that he turned aside the suggestion from Brigadier General Walter B. Staudt, Bush's political mentor in the Guard. But he and another officer agreed to ''backdate" a report -- evidently the evaluation -- in which they did not rate him at all. There is such a report in Bush's file, dated May 2, 1973.

''I'll backdate but won't rate," Killian apparently wrote in what is labeled a ''memo to file." Initials that appear to be Killian's are on the memo, but not his name or unit letterhead.

The August 1973 document, dated as Bush was preparing to leave Texas to attend the Harvard Business School, represents the first apparent evidence of an attempt to embellish Bush's service record as his time in the Guard neared its end.

The four pages of documents also contain an August 1972 order from Killian, suspending Bush from flying status for ''failure to perform" up to US Air Force and Texas Air National Guard standards and failing to take his annual flight physical. The suspension came three months after Killian had ordered Bush to take his physical, on May 14, 1972.

The documents also contain what appears to be Killian's memo of a meeting he had with Bush in May 1972, at which they discussed the option of Bush skipping his military drills for the following six months while he worked on a US Senate campaign in Alabama. During that meeting, Killian wrote that he reminded Bush ''of our investment in him and his commitment."

CBS, on its Evening News and in an in-depth report on ''60 Minutes," said it obtained the documents from Killian's ''personal files." Anchorman Dan Rather reported that the White House did not dispute the authenticity of the documents and said the network had used document authorities to verify their authenticity.

The disclosures by CBS follow a report in yesterday's Globe that Bush signed documents in 1968 and in 1973 promising to fulfill specific training requirements or face a punitive order to active duty. The records examined by the Globe, and verified by several former military officers, show that Bush did not meet his commitments. Nor was he penalized.

The White House, in response to the Globe report, ascribed political motives to two of the analysts quoted by the Globe. A third retired officer quoted in the Globe report who agreed with them has been a White House consultant on Bush's military records. Last night, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, asserted in an e-mail to the Globe that Bush had no obligation to do Reserve duty in Massachusetts. And the White House reiterated its position that, notwithstanding the records, Bush fulfilled his military commitment. Bush received an honorable discharge.

Former military officers said last night that the four documents obtained by CBS, two of which should have been in Bush's publicly released file, contain evidence that political influence may have come into play as he sidestepped his training requirements in his final two years of service, from May 1972 until May 1974.

''These documents represent strong evidence that Lieutenant Bush didn't perform after April 1972, regardless of whether he received a paycheck," said retired Brigadier General David L. McGinnis, who was a top aide to the assistant secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs.

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now a national security specialist at a liberal think tank, said after reviewing the CBS documents last night that if Killian and Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr. had written a truthful evaluation report on Bush, ''he would have been called to involuntary active duty."

Added Korb: ''For the commanding officer to suggest that his [Bush's] evaluation be sugar-coated is a clear indication of the political influence Bush had." Korb said the alleged suggestion by Staudt was also a ''violation of military ethics." An effort by the Globe last night to reach Staudt was unsuccessful. Harris, like Killian, has died.

On ''60 Minutes," CBS also aired an interview with Ben Barnes, the former Democratic speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, expressing regret that he helped Bush land a Guard slot in 1968 at the request of a Bush family friend. Barnes's intercession was first reported in a legal deposition he gave in 1999. Bush has denied there was political influence.

In his first public interview on the subject, Barnes, now a fund-raiser for Senator John F. Kerry, said he helped Bush and many other politically connected young men avoid military service in the Vietnam War to further his own political career, and that he now regrets his actions.

''I don't think that I had any right to have the power that I had, to choose who was going to go to Vietnam and who was not going to go to Vietnam," Barnes said. ''In some instances, when I looked at those names, I was maybe determining life or death, and that's not a power that I want to have." He added: ''I'm very, very sorry."

Yesterday, the White House dismissed Barnes's interview. ''The bottom line is that there's no truth to this," Dan Bartlett, Bush's communication director, told CBS.

The White House spent much of yesterday on the defensive on the issue. After the Globe report, Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, labeled Bush's National Guard service ''a very big issue," since it calls into question his credibility.

''These new documents show that the president did not serve honorably," McAuliffe said. ''How about you [Bush] for once owning up to your own record and tell the American people exactly what you were doing when you were supposed to be serving?"

Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, dismissed McAuliffe's comments as ''false," ''reckless," and ''silly."

The White House made no such characterizations of the four pages of documents written by Killian, whom Bush described as a friend in his 1999 autobiography, ''A Charge to Keep." Dated during the controversial final 17 months of Bush's assignment to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, the four pages begin with Killian's written order dated May 4, 1972, for Bush to report 10 days later for an annual flight physical required of all pilots.

The Aug. 1, 1972, document removing Bush from flight status for ''failure to perform to USAF/TexANG [US Air Force and Texas Air National Guard] standards" and failing to take the flight physical suggests that Bush did not comply with Killian's May order. The August document also calls for the convening of a ''flight review board" that would have assessed Bush's status. There is no record that such a board was appointed. In that memo, Killian also recommended that the unit he commanded, the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, replace Bush as a pilot with someone from a waiting list of pilots who had served in Vietnam.

The Aug. 18, 1973, memo might draw the most attention from the White House. Another ''Memo to File," it starts, ''SUBJECT: CYA" -- a venerable military acronym for ''cover your ass."

General Staudt, it begins, ''has obviously pressured [Colonel Bobby W.] Hodges more about Bush. I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job." He wrote that Lieutenant Colonel Harris ''gave me a message today . . . regarding Bush's [annual officer efficiency report] and Staudt is pushing to sugar coat it."

But, Killian wrote, ''Bush wasn't here during the rating period," and he didn't have any ''feedback" from the unit with whom Bush said he trained in Alabama. ''I will not rate," Killian wrote.

In the CBS news magazine report, Robert Strong, a friend of Killian who ran the Texas Air National Guard administrative offices during the Vietnam era and who reviewed the documents for ''60 Minutes," said he believed that Killian took his responsibilities as a pilot very seriously, but that in Bush's case, Killian found himself ''between a rock and a hard place."

In trying to satisfy commands from a superior to give a favorable evaluation to a soldier who had underperformed but had powerful political connections, Strong said Killian faced an impossible situation.

Globe staff reporters Rick Klein and Michael Rezendes contributed to this report.

© 2004 Boston Globe Company

posted September 21, 2004 06:11 PM            

Been here, done this.

posted September 22, 2004 06:10 PM              

"They've done a lot of great work over there … particularly with the Abu Ghraib story," Kroft told the Daily News. "They didn't rush that story on the air. This one, for whatever reason, they did."

At the same time, the White House wants to know more about the debacle, in particular, exactly what sort of exchange took place between Joe Lockhart (search) — the senior Kerry campaign adviser who talked to Burkett over the phone — a CBS producer and Burkett himself. Lockhart stated he only listened to Burkett for a few minutes and that the documents were never discussed.

"Now, we're supposed to believe that it was just a routine phone call; they were just talking about swift boat ads and those things," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said on Wednesday.

"It's hard to think that that passes a smell test. When you have such high-level communications and then, more importantly, when we saw the '60 Minutes' piece air, there was a full frontal assault on President Bush from the Democrat National Committee, from the Kerry campaign — from all their surrogates," Bartlett said.

Burkett told USA Today that he agreed to turn the disputed documents over to CBS if the network would arrange a conversation with the Kerry campaign.

Spokeswoman Kelli Edwards said CBS wasn't aware that this was part of any deal, but it's one of the things that will be examined by an independent commission CBS will soon appoint to look into the incident.

posted September 22, 2004 06:12 PM              

Democratic insiders are fearful of what the scandal could do to their party.

"You start tying these connections together … I said I'm so scared because I know what's going on with my party," said Democratic strategist Pat Caddell. "The fact is, [Burkett] did not approach CBS, CBS approached him looking for the documents, which means someone tipped CBS off … which could be a violation of the law."

Veteran CBS news anchor and managing editor, Dan Rather (search), acknowledged Monday that the network approached Burkett about the documents, knowing he had been trying for several years to discredit Bush's military service record.

"The public is already voting with their feet on this and it's only gonna get worse," Caddell said. "Those documents did not come by immaculate conception, they came from somewhere."

The Lockhart contact "is going to cast more doubt on not just the practices, but the motives behind the story," added Frank Sesno, former CNN Washington bureau chief and professor at George Mason University.

Burkett, who said in an interview with CBS that aired Monday that he lied about the source of the documents, now says he got the memos from a woman named Lucy Ramirez. He told USA Today that Ramirez called him from Houston in March, offering him the documents.

posted September 24, 2004 11:30 AM              

Cronkite Calls CBS Report 'Embarrassing'
1 hour, 27 minutes ago

BOSTON - Former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite called the network's report questioning President Bush (news - web sites)'s Vietnam-era National Guard service "embarrassing" but urged patience until an investigation is complete.

"We must wait while CBS management conduct the investigation they have promised. We can then decide what our reaction should be," said Cronkite, 87, who was in Boston on Thursday night to receive an award.

"The reaction at the moment, of course, is embarrassment for everyone who is connected to CBS, and that embarrassment, I hope, will be squashed in time as we know what happened," he said.

Cronkite's successor, Dan Rather apologized Monday for relying on questionable documents to support the Sept. 8 "60 Minutes" story.

The CBS report cited documents purported to be from one of Bush's commanders in the Texas Air National Guard. The documents say the commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, ordered Bush to take a medical exam, which he did not, and felt pressured to sugarcoat an evaluation of then 1st Lt. Bush.

The network appointed Dick Thornburgh, attorney general in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and former Pennsylvania governor, and Louis D. Boccardi, who retired last year as president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press, to conduct an investigation into the report.

posted September 29, 2004 02:05 PM              

E-conomy / Paul Andrews
Finding both sides on the Web

The day before Dan Rather and CBS apologized for the "60 Minutes" memo fiasco, I was listening to a network radio investment-advice show where a caller referred to something he had read on the Internet.

Don't believe anything you see on the Internet, the financial expert retorted. You can't tell what's really true. That sentiment, long propagated by the information gatekeepers of established news media, is getting a bit worn around the edges. If the CBS debacle proved anything, it's that no "respected" or "trusted" medium in our society is in a position to call the Internet kettle black.

In fact, a case can be made that the Internet in general — and Web loggers in particular — represent the new Truth Police in an era of increasingly elusive verity.

Bloggers were the first to jump on red flags pointing to possible fakery in the CBS memos. Their alerts led document experts to look into the matter and other news outlets to investigate.

The Internet's archiving, indexing and search capabilities have been used in numerous cases to detect sloppy reporting or plagiarism. Mailing lists, instant messaging and newsgroups constitute a growing wealth of information and research.

Perhaps most significant, the Internet has shown itself to be a strong self-correcting mechanism. Yes, there's a lot of hooey out there. But it gets "outed" pretty quickly, and any diligent Internet user can generally find out the real truth simply by burrowing further into the Web itself.

All of this represents a huge shift in the way information works in American culture.

When the Web first began making waves a decade ago, I thought as a journalist that the media establishment's efforts to ensure truth would be all the more affirmed. I never suspected that instead the media might become "infected" with "Internet-itis" — cut-and-paste journalism where any substantiation will do as long as it fits the agenda.

It's possible to argue that news media have always played fast and loose with factuality. I don't believe that. Instead, competitive pressures to get a scoop before it hits the Internet have pushed reporters to take shortcuts and, in some instances, deliberately fabricate.

By the same token, past errors and distortions never faced the potential for exposure that they do today. One medium seldom challenged what the other published or broadcast. Questions or doubts from credible sources had little outlet for wider dissemination.

The Internet has changed the whole dynamic. E-mail lists, Web-site postings, instant messaging, blogs and other mechanisms can create a virtual firestorm in a matter of hours.

In the same way the Net has "deconstructed" other professions, including stock brokering, car sales and travel agencies, it is breaking down the media's ivory tower. Today there is just as much, if not more, need for the authenticating role media have always played. But that authentication has to adapt to and draw on the power of the Internet as well as rely on its own resources.

"Any business with a strong information component is being transformed," said Al Erisman, co-director of the Institute for Business, Technology and Ethics in Bellevue. A former Boeing information manager, Erisman regularly wrestles with the social implications of technology in a column he writes for the institute's magazine, Ethix.

The same microcomputer capabilities that permitted the realistic look and feel of the bogus memos, Erisman noted, also provided the means to detect and expose the fabrication.

"People think of technology as neutral — not playing on either side," he said. "Actually it's ambivalent. It plays on both sides."

It's a lesson CBS and Dan Rather might keep in mind as they presumably try to determine how they were bamboozled. The tool that brought them down ultimately could prove useful in leading them to vindication.

posted September 29, 2004 02:52 PM            

The only thing I would add is that one would have to be prepared to swallow a load of BS to believe CBS/60 Minutes Lite/Dan Rather inadvertently wandered into fantasy land with Rather's report.

The triangulation between the rabid Democrat Bush hater, Bill Burkett, Dan Rather, a Democrat fund raiser and one or more top officials in the Kerry campaign headquarters is impossible to overlook.

All the more impossible to overlook when the DNC came out 2 days later with a new ad making exactly the same points Rather attempted to make.

Takes a bit longer than that to research material, cut an ad, schedule it with television stations and get it on the air. So it was planned in advance to coincide with Rather's phony report.