Lashing Back Over the Memo Scandal

The value of this book is its long view and its inclusion of something very much lacking in the explosive atmosphere that followed the original report: context. The story behind Mapes's story is laid out in meticulous detail here, and it builds by increments: the dysfunctional, politicized climate surrounding the Texas Guard in the early 1970s; the corroborating witnesses; the memos themselves, and how they mesh -- in ways large and small, in nuance and substance -- with Bush's official Guard records.

Mapes also addresses the typographical issues, which are complex and easily misreported (as they were, she claims, by The Washington Post, among others). According to Mapes, "superscript" typewriters were widely available on military bases in the early 1970s; and no, Microsoft Word cannot reproduce the exact typography of the Killian memos, at least not to a trained eye.

Her case is by no means airtight. But it does suggest that if the Killian memos were fakes, they were more artful, rigorous and extraordinarily well-crafted fakes than Mapes's accusers are willing to admit.

Indeed, of the many nasty and unfair things said about Mapes by the blog mob, at least one of them seems patently false. She may have been duped, but she was demonstrably not reckless in her pursuit of this story. The Guard memos were the product of years of on-and-off effort by a much-decorated journalist who, only months before Memogate, had broken the story of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses. On the other hand, Mapes's narrative is marred by her failure to appreciate her own blind spots, which are enormous. Crucially, Mapes didn't ask too many tough questions about the source of the memos: an embittered, Bush-hating Texas cattle rancher and former Guardsman named Bill Burkett.

In the aftermath of the CBS report, Burkett admitted that he had lied to the CBS team about where he had gotten the goods. The story he then told -- about a mysterious go-between named Lucy Ramirez, who handed off the documents to another mysterious stranger, who then passed them to Burkett at a livestock show in Houston -- would have raised more red flags than May Day in Tiananmen Square had CBS known of it. Remarkably, Mapes doesn't seem skeptical of this bizarre tale even now. "By God, in Texas," she writes, "anything could happen."

Mapes is also far too casual in her dismissal of the revelation that she helped Burkett contact Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart. Mapes says it was all innocent, a casual bit of horsetrading designed to get a source (Burkett) to talk. That may be so, but it looks ghastly and plays right into the suspicions of Mapes's critics.

It's also telling whom Mapes decides to bust spleen over. In addition to her undisciplined machine-gunning of those who blamed her or displeased her, she unspools a dark, Michael Moore-ish theory about White House adviser Karl Rove's supposed role in the whole mess. She not only proves nothing but also comes off as more paranoid and less responsible than the bloggers she seems to loathe.

The only one truly spared in Mapes's account (besides Mapes herself) is her beloved colleague Rather. This is curious. Rather was a key participant in the making of Memogate, but if he stood and fought while the winds howled and the wolves closed in, it's not much in evidence in Mapes's account. It was Rather, after all, who publicly apologized for the story, something Mapes probably should consider a betrayal, since she contends there was nothing to apologize for. One could even argue that Rather saved his own skin -- he stepped down as anchor on the "CBS Evening News" but kept a cushy role at "60 Minutes" -- as Mapes was pushed overboard by CBS.

It's entirely possible that Mapes was wrong -- very wrong -- about Bush's military record. But that's still only theoretical. Mapes doesn't establish the authenticity of the disputed memos here (she can't -- not without Killian, and not without the original documents to test and examine). But then, no one has definitively shown them to be forgeries, either. The "independent" panel that CBS hired to look into the story (composed primarily of lawyers, not journalists, and co-chaired by a former Republican attorney general) cast plenty of doubt on the story and CBS's handling of it. But it never said the report was baseless, never accused Mapes or Rather of political bias or called the memos fraudulent.

Although that's hardly a ringing vindication of Mapes, it's better than a kick in the head, as they say in Texas. It also suggests, as Mapes does, that there's more to the Bush Guard story than we've learned so far.