Confidentiality Men

Burkett, we all know now, is the man who handed 60 Minutes (the Wednesday edition) the fake documents on which it so heavily relied in its September 8 report suggesting that George W. Bush shirked his duties when he served as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. Watching that segment, one knew an important source lay in hiding, given the way Dan Rather introduced the documents. “60 Minutes” he said, “has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken” from the personal files of Bush’s squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. The documents took the form of memos in which the good colonel, who died in 1984, evidently said that he had been pressured to “sugarcoat” Bush’s Guard performance and that the future president had ignored an order to take a physical examination.

Now, news organizations don’t often “obtain” documents unless someone provides them, and that someone, unnamed, had indeed provided them, along with a description of where they came from, which was conveyed in those three little words: we are told. Doubtless Burkett felt secure in his anonymity as he watched the 60 Minutes segment. But 12 days later he would be fully revealed.

New and then old media subjected the memos (dare I say “hat tip” to CBS News for posting them on its website?) to withering analysis, calling their authenticity into serious question within 24 hours. At first, CBS simply ignored the criticisms. But it could do that for only two days, as doubts about the memos grew. CBS then attacked the documents’ critics (many are “partisan political operatives,” said Rather) while defending the documents in every particular. But CBS couldn’t keep that up, not once it conceded that questions about the memos came from all corners, not just from “active political partisans.” Yet even the credible critics were wrong, CBS insisted. Relying on judgments of new analysts, Rather, anchoring the Evening News on September 13, declared the documents “authentic” and the story “true.”

But the story about the 60 Minutes story was hardly going away. The woman who happened to be Colonel Killian’s secretary when he was said to have written the memos–Marion Carr Knox–surfaced to say that she hadn’t typed those memos and that they weren’t authentic. Knox, however, did think she had actually typed “ones like” them containing “the same information.” Rather drew these points from Knox during an interview for the September 15 installment of 60 Minutes. It was apparent that he still believed in what he called “the major thrust of our [original] report.” But no longer was he willing to defend the memos’ authenticity. “Are those documents authentic,” he asked, or “were they forgeries or re-creations?” On this, he said, “We will keep an open mind.”

Strikingly, Rather said nothing about the source of the memos, which he had previously defended as “solid” and which CBS News in a press release had declared “unimpeachable.” The duty of defending its source fell to the network’s public affairs shop, which issued a release invoking “longstanding journalistic ethics” to explain its unwillingness “to reveal its confidential sources or the method by which 60 Minutes Wednesday received the documents.”

Other media thought those issues worth pursuing. Indeed, in the September 20 issue of Newsweek, available on newsstands on September 13, Howard Fineman and Michael Isikoff said flatly that Burkett, a former commander in the Texas Air Guard who was well-known to Texas and some national media organizations, was “a principal source” for CBS’s story.

On September 18, on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, NPR senior news analyst (once of CBS News) Dan Schorr likewise named Burkett as the source of the documents before adding that CBS was “now stuck” with a confidential source, meaning that they couldn’t disclose Burkett’s name. Host Scott Simon noted that perhaps applicable here was “the old rule” that “if the source turns out to be untrustworthy, you [as a journalist] are released from your agreement[and] can reveal him.”

Over that weekend CBS decided that Burkett was, indeed, an untrustworthy source, and during the Evening News of September 20, Rather explained why in a piece in which he more than identified Burkett by name–he had Burkett on camera, confessing to having “misled” the network on the documents’ origins.

How so? Noting that Burkett “did not come to us, we went to him and asked for the documents,” Rather said that Burkett told CBS that he had gotten the documents from “a fellow Guardsman.” But now he had “changed his story” and was saying that he got the documents from a different source, “one we cannot verify.” In the interview Rather asked: “Why did you mislead us?” Burkett replied: “Well, I didn’t totally mislead you. I did mislead you on the one individual. You know, your staff pressured me to a point to reveal that source.”

Burkett also denied forging or faking anything and said he thought the documents were real though he could not verify them. And he said that “when I sat down with your staff in the first face-to-face session, before I gave up any documents, I wanted to know what you were going to do with them, and I insisted that they be authenticated.”

Rather didn’t contest but seemed to accept what Burkett said about authentication as he confessed “the failure of CBS News to do just that, to properly fully scrutinize the documents and their source.” He said the network should not have aired the documents. “It was a mistake,” and CBS regretted it. He went on to report the CBS announcement that there would be an “independent investigation to examine the process by which the report was prepared.” Richard Thornburgh, the former Bush I attorney general, and Louis D. Boccardi, retired president of the Associated Press, are now on the job.

They have a lot to do, especially on the subject of Burkett and CBS News. Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes, had been pursuing information about Bush’s Guard service for five years and wound up at Burkett’s door (recall what Rather said, “he did not come to us, we went to him”). Did Mapes’s desire for a story rumored for years lead someone to create “evidence” for it and to get the evidence out in the post-Labor Day countdown to Election Day? And why did she chase the story for so long? Merely an old-fashioned hunger for news, or might one suggest political bias? Note well that it was Mapes who facilitated a phone conversation between Burkett (at his request) and Joe Lockhart of the Kerry campaign, which act drew from CBS News a statement asserting that it is “against CBS News standards to be associated with any political agenda.”

More questions: Did CBS in fact check a key part of Burkett’s original story–that he got the documents from a fellow Guardsman, unnamed in Rather’s broadcast but identified by USA Today (who also got the memos from Burkett) as George Conn? Did Conn, who in February disputed Burkett’s accusation that Bush aides conspired in 1997 to “cleanse” the president’s Guard records of embarrassing information, really verify the documents? Conn has told USA Today that he knows “absolutely nothing about the Killian memos.” And just how long was the verified “chain of custody” anyway? Finally, why did CBS so quickly accept Burkett as a reliable source? His partisanship is well known; so, too, his disrelish for Bush, whom he has called a liar with “demonic personality shortcomings.”

Even as Thornburgh and Boccardi assume their role as media critics of the original 60 Minutes story, the news division will continue to report on Bush’s Guard years. A CBS spokeswoman said she didn’t know whether Rather or Mapes was still on that story. Of course, it would be an outrage if they were. Like their once trusted source, they should be out of the story, entirely.

Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.