by Richard Polt

In September 2004, typewriter experts, including me, got some unusual media attention. The question was whether the documents used by "60 Minutes" to support the allegation that President Bush did not properly perform his National Guard duties, documents supposedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian in 1972 and 1973, could really have been produced at that time. (The documents can be seen here, here, here, and here.)

The documents were obviously not produced by a commonly used typewriter of the period, and obviously could easily have been produced by a word processor today. Here are the features that make me (and so many others) say this:

• Differential spacing (an "i" is narrower than a "w," for instance). This was a feature found on a few expensive typewriters (such as the IBM Executive), but most were monotype machines (each character is equally wide). Most computer fonts, such as the Times New Roman that is the default font for Microsoft Word and that looks much like the font in these documents, are differentially spaced.
• Kerning. The characters in the documents appear to be closely fit together, or "kerned," in a way that is typical of word processing but difficult to achieve on an ordinary typewriter.
• The small superscript "th" in "187th" and some occurrences of "111th." It is easy to make a superscript on any typewriter--just turn the platen. But it is not so easy to make a superscript that is in smaller type than the rest of the type. Either you need a special "little th" character (possible, but unusual), or you need to switch to a different type element (such as a Selectric type ball) that uses a smaller type, then switch back to the first type element. But Microsoft Word automatically superscripts the "th."
• Curly apostrophes. Most typewriters used straight apostrophes (as in he's). But curly apostrophes (as in he’s) are standard in word processing.
• Centering. Three lines of perfectly centered text (found at the top of two of the documents) are easy to produce on a computer. They can also be produced on any typewriter, of course, but you have to count the characters -- or on a typewriter using differential spacing, you would actually have to measure each line of text. It would require some time-consuming arithmetic.

Given all these points, CBS finally admitted that it could not authenticate these documents. However, there were some doubts left in some people's minds (including mine), because some high-end early-seventies typewriters featured differential spacing, interchangeable fonts, and other sophisticated capacities; these included the Varityper and the IBM Selectric Composer.

Now, however, I have no doubts left: the documents are definitely fakes. In order to prove this, one has to get into the nitty-gritty of sophisticated early-seventies typewriters. The man to do this is Fred Woodworth, an Arizona printer who despises computers and still produces several periodicals on a Varityper. I will let Woodworth speak for himself (with his permission). His letter to me on this topic, handsomely written on an IBM Selectric Composer, is available here as a three-page PDF file (400K). We are presenting this information solely as a matter of technical interest, not as a political statement (for the record, I'm a Democrat, and Woodworth is an anarchist). I take no position on who produced these fakes and on whether the allegations against George W. Bush are true.