The Rathergate Cover-up started on September 10, 2004 — and hasn’t stopped yet
On September 10, 2004, it appears from the Thornburgh/Boccardi Panel’s report, CBS began in earnest to perpetrate a cover up of the Rathergate scandal.
1) Andrew Heyward suspected the Rathergate memos were phony after watching GMA (p. 161), and asked for an internal investigation and answers by noon in an email to West at 7:49 AM:
[I]s it possible that it’s a clever dirty trick by Rather-haters – a SETUP aimed at CBS? According to Stephanopoulos this morning, “some Democrats” are suggesting that, and it occurred to me as well…
2) Josh Howard was burning up the keyboard even earlier — at 4:53 AM, again to West, also addressing the “hoax” issue (p. 162), and was very concerned that something was wrong:
If indeed one or more of the documents is not authentic, it would mean that CBS News was the victim of an elaborate hoax. We have no evidence that that was the case. But we are continuing to aggressively investigate, and should we find that anyone – the Kerry campaign, the Bush campaign, or anyone else – – was responsible for circulating fraudulent documents and orchestrating a hoax, no one would be more anxious to break that story than CBS News.
3) Yvonne Miller, assistant to Mary Mapes, strongly suspected the memos were phony on September 10 as well (p. 169):
During the day on September 10, the only examiner among the original four contacted by 60 Minutes Wednesday personnel was Matley, who agreed to be interviewed again that day for the CBS Evening News. The Panel was told that Pierce was unavailable. No efforts were made to talk further with Will or James. Significantly, Mapes instructed Miller to find additional examiners.
4) Miller and Howard both heard directly from an expert that the documents were phony (p. 174-175):
Tytell told the Panel that he told Miller on Friday, September 10, that the documents aired on the Segment were prepared in Times New Roman, a typeface available on modern computers but one that did not exist on typewriters in the 1970s. Tytell said that Miller responded that the documents were “real” because the documents were obtained from a “trusted source” and other document examiners had indicated that the documents were “good.” Tytell asked her to identify the other examiners, but she declined.
Later on September 10, Tytell spoke at length on the telephone with Howard.99 Tytell explained his concerns in detail and offered to come to CBS News to explain why he believed the Killian documents were forgeries. Howard told the Panel that he spoke to Tytell for about 30 minutes and found Tytell to be convincing. He found the discussion to be an “unsettling event” that shook his belief in the authenticity of the documents. Howard later reported his conversation with Tytell to Mapes, West and Heyward. West suggested he tell Mapes about the call. According to Howard, Mapes’ response was that one could always find experts willing to take different sides in an authentication debate.
5) Howard’s concerns increased during the day, and produced possibly the most damning lines in the deeply flawed Panel report on Rathergate (p. 163):
Later on September 10, Howard would again express concerns to West, Mapes and Heyward about the Segment after speaking with Peter Tytell, an individual with extensive typewriter experience. At that time, Howard’s concerns again were not acted upon and thereafter Howard did not have a major role in the Aftermath, with West apparently taking the management lead and Mapes taking the production lead on follow-up stories that defended the Segment.
6) Major General Hodges, CBS’s “trump card” for authentication of the phony memos told Dan Rather and Mary Mapes they were fake on September 10 (p. 178):
Major General Hodges told the Panel that at around 9:30 p.m. Central time on Friday, September 10, Rather called him with Mapes on the line. Rather told Major General Hodges that he was proud of his service to our nation and wanted to know if he had any comments about the Killian documents. Major General Hodges told Rather that he had been misquoted by a senior CBS News official and asked: “Is that you, Dan?” Rather denied being the official, but stated that the network knew who the official was. Major General Hodges then told Rather that he did not think the documents were authentic. He told the Panel that Rather responded with words to the effect that “We have to go by our experts,” and did not ask him why he did not believe the documents were authentic. Rather then exited the conversation….
The words “we have to go by our experts” were, in effect, a lie on Dan Rather’s part, since Rather knew, in putting together his disgraceful Evening News broadcast for September 10 (p. 170), that CBS had zero experts who were in a position to authenticate the documents:
The Panel has examined the process by which this portion of this CBS Evening News report was prepared. In early drafts, the script stated that Matley “still believes the documents are authentic . . . both the typeface and handwriting.” (emphasis added). Significantly, the emphasized language was dropped in the final script and the word “real” was substituted for “authentic.” The Panel is not surprised that these words were dropped, since Matley had advised Mapes’ team orally on September 6, and then in a fax on September 10 (see Exhibit 6) that he could not authenticate the documents. The Panel finds the use of the word “real” in Rather’s lead in on the September 10 report to have been misleading….
Conclusion
By the end of September 10, Heyward, West, Howard, Rather, Mapes and Miller had all been informed, directly or indirectly, that document experts, content experts, or both, believed the Rathergate memos to be phony.
Our questions include: (1) why does the Thornburgh/Boccardi Panel still deny that the memos are clearly frauds; (2) what communications went to Les Moonves and Sumner Redstone, and what directives, if any, came from the most senior executives at CBS and Viacom?