New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire's September 13 column alleged that controversial memos revealed by CBS's 60 Minutes on September 8 “have all the earmarks of forgery.” But the column -- titled "Those Discredited Memos" -- is rife with misleading claims and outright distortions.

Implying that CBS's analysis of the documents lacks credibility since the network lacks the original documents, Safire referred in the second sentence of his column to "[t]he copies of copies of copies that formed the basis for the latest charges." But, in fact, a September 11 Los Angeles Times article -- to which Safire himself referred later in the column -- reported that a “CBS official who spoke on condition of anonymity” said the documents “were copies of the originals.” (In any case, if lack of original documents undermines CBS's analysis, then typographical judgments about them by CBS's critics are even less credible, since these critics apparently have access only to scanned PDF copies of the documents posted on the CBS website.)

In the next sentence, Safire stated that the font allegedly used in the disputed documents “is the default typeface of Microsoft Word, highly unlikely to have been used by that Texas colonel, who died in 1984.” But in fact, as Media Matters for America has explained, both the font Times New Roman and its close relative, Times Roman, were created as early as 1931 and were available on 1970s-era typewriters. As this font history noted, IBM specifically hired Stanley Morison, typographical adviser to the Monotype Corporation and the designer of Times New Roman, to adapt the font for its Selectric typewriter. The article also reported that "[i]n the early 1990s Microsoft ... hired Monotype Typography to design a series of core fonts for Windows 3.1," one of which was Times New Roman. So it's no accident that Microsoft Word's default font looks like a popular font that had been around for 50 years, including on typewriters. The New York Times reported on September 11 that "[d]ocuments from the period show the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969."

Safire noted that a September 12 Dallas Morning News article “looked into the charge in one of the possible forgeries dated Aug. 18, 1973, that a commander of a Texas Air Guard squadron was trying to 'sugar coat' Bush's service record. It found that the commander had retired from the Guard 18 months before that.” But though his column is filled with reports from other papers, Safire apparently failed to note a September 12 USA Today article that also examined the claim about the commander, retired Colonel Walter B. “Buck” Staudt:

Some former Guard officials agree that Staudt may still have been wielding influence behind the scenes after he retired. Bob Strong, a former Texas Air National Guard officer who was assigned to state headquarters in 1972, said Sunday [September 12] that Staudt was powerful and well-connected in Texas politics and had been influential in getting Bush into the Guard.

“Because of his political connections, he still had the potential to become involved in political decisions with Bush,” Strong said.

Critics of CBS have frequently pointed to superscript type on the disputed documents as evidence of forgery, claiming that 1970s-era typewriters couldn't produce such type. Safire suggested that CBS was being dishonest when it noted that other documents from Bush's military file known to be authentic also contained superscript type because those documents used a different typeface:

CBS, on the defense, claimed that “some models” of typewriters of the 70's could do that trick, and some Texas Air National Guard documents released by the White House included it.

“That superscript, however,” countered The A.P. [Associated Press], “is in a different typeface than the one used for the CBS memos.”

But the typeface of the confirmed documents is irrelevant. CBS never claimed that its newly discovered documents were created with the exact same typewriter as the confirmed documents it cited “on the defense.” Rather, CBS was answering critics who, as MMFA has documented, have falsely claimed that superscript technology for typewriters did not exist in the 1970s.