New York Times sues Ashcroft over phone records in leak inquiry

By LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press

NEW YORK - The New York Times sued Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday, seeking on First Amendment grounds to block the Department of Justice from obtaining records of telephone calls between two veteran journalists and their confidential sources.

The lawsuit said the justice department was "on the verge" of getting records as part of a "leak" probe aimed at learning the identity of government employees who may have provided information to the newspaper. It asked a judge to intervene.

It said the government intends to get the records, which reflect confidential communications between journalists Philip Shenon and Judith Miller and their sources, from third parties unlikely to be interested in challenging its authority.

The lawsuit said the justice department has advised the Times that it plans to obtain records of all telephone calls by Shenon and Miller for 20 days in the months immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A telephone message left with a government spokeswoman for comment was not immediately returned Tuesday.

Times lawyer George Freeman said most of the sources had no connection to the government's probe.

"We are very troubled at this brazen intrusion into our relationship with our sources, which is unconstitutional and endangers our free press," he said.

Attorney Floyd Abrams, who filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said it was "a very dangerous and unprecedented notion" for the justice department to seek telephone records from third parties rather than the Times.

"In this case, we're talking about the potential compromising of literally dozens of sources because telephone records relate to an enormous array of stories," he said. "It would threaten the ability of all journalists to promise confidentiality to their sources."

Shenon and Miller were described in the lawsuit as award-winning journalists with decades of experience at the newspaper.

Shenon was one of two Times reporters sent into combat with U.S. troops during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Since the fall of 2001, he has reported on homeland security, terrorism and the work of the Sept. 11 commission.

Miller, who won a Pulitzer Price for her January 2001 series on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, has reported extensively for the Times on national security issues, especially terrorism, the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction.

The lawsuit said the scope of the government's demand for telephone records meant that the records would expose the identities of dozens of confidential sources used by the reporters for a vast array of articles about Sept. 11, the government's handling of continued threats from al-Qaida and the war in Iraq.

It said the phone records might reflect hundreds of communications between Shenon and Miller and their sources "at a time when both journalists were investigating and reporting on a vast array of vitally important and controversial matters."

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, a Chicago special prosecutor appointed to investigate government leaks, asked the Times in August 2002 and again in July to produce Shenon and Miller for interviews and to produce records of their calls, the lawsuit said.

He threatened that if the Times did not cooperate, he would obtain telephone records from third parties, the suit said. In a letter dated Friday, Deputy Attorney General James Comey said the justice department had decided it was "now obliged to proceed" to obtain the records, the lawsuit said.

According to the lawsuit, the government told the Times it wanted phone records from Shenon for a probe into a leak by a government employee about a planned raid on the offices of the Global Relief Foundation, an Islamic charity group accused of funding terrorist operations.

The Dec. 14, 2001, raid was not unexpected, and the newspaper had reported on Oct. 1, 2001, that the organization was suspected of providing money and support to terrorist operations, the lawsuit said. It added that neither Shenon nor the Times reported on the raid until after it occurred.

The lawsuit said Miller's phone records were being sought in connection with an investigation into an alleged leak from a government employee to Miller in late September and early October 2001. It said the alleged leak concerned a government decision to freeze the assets of the Global Relief Foundation and a Dallas-based Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation, which has been accused of aiding Hamas.

Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press

AP ALERT----------------

NEW YORK -- (AP) -- CBS appoints former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief executive Lou Boccardi to investigate National Guard documents story.

AP-ES-09-22-04 1150EDT

Senate Confirms Goss as Intelligence Chief

By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times

WASHINGTON - In what senators from both parties called a potential turning point for American intelligence agencies, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to confirm the nomination of Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida as director of central intelligence.

Twenty-eight Democrats joined 49 Republicans in voting in favor of Mr. Goss's confirmation, which was approved 77 to 17. The broad Democratic support represented a victory for President Bush, whose decision in August to nominate a new intelligence chief in an election year was seen by some as a political gamble that might be met with united Democratic opposition.

With Mr. Goss, a Republican, expected to be sworn in as early as Thursday, senators from both parties said they hoped that his directorship would mark the beginning of a new era at American intelligence agencies after a recent history marked by intelligence failures connected to the Sept. 11 attacks and prewar intelligence on Iraq.

"We want to be sure that there are no more 9/11's and no more wars based on dated and dubious intelligence,'' said Senator Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, who was among Democrats favoring confirmation.

Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is often a staunch critic of the White House, said of Mr. Goss's nomination, "This time, the president got it right.''

Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee, praised Mr. Goss as "someone who has the integrity to look the president in the eye and say no.''

At 65, Mr. Goss, a former C.I.A. officer and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, will be the 19th director in the 57-year history of the post. He has described the country's intelligence capabilities as needing enormous improvement, and has said he wants to encourage more risk-taking by American intelligence officers.

Mr. Goss has not otherwise outlined a clear agenda for the new job, whose responsibilities include not only running the C.I.A., but also nominal oversight of the broader network of 15 intelligence agencies. Under the broad restructuring now being debated in Congress, the future of the post is in some doubt, with most reform plans calling for it to be downgraded to that of C.I.A. director alone, subordinate to a new national intelligence director.

On the Senate floor on Wednesday, Mr. Roberts, whose own reform proposal calls for dismantling the C.I.A., described Mr. Goss as "the next, and probably last, director of central intelligence.'' While it is not clear whether Mr. Goss might be nominated to a higher post, Mr. Roberts said that Mr. Goss "was ready to go to work, and he is needed.''

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, had warned Mr. Bush against nominating Mr. Goss, on the ground that he was too partisan for the post.

With the country facing threats from Al Qaeda as well as insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Rockefeller warned that the intelligence chief would become "the most important person for that position ever confirmed by the United States Senate.''

Among those who spoke in favor of Mr. Goss's nomination was Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, who compared Mr. Goss favorably with his predecessor, George J. Tenet, who stepped down in July after a seven-year tenure whose final months were marked by controversy over the recent intelligence failures. Mr. Goss, as an eight-term congressman, Mr. Lott said, "was one of us, and he won't try to fool us.''

Mr. Goss will take the place of John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of central intelligence has been the acting director since July 12. The vote to confirm Mr. Goss came less than seven weeks after his nomination and followed less than four hours of debate on the Senate floor, where only four senators, all Democrats, spoke against Mr. Goss's nomination. Four Democrats and nine Republicans spoke in favor.

Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina, the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees, were absent and did not vote.

Among those voting against the nomination, all Democrats, were Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Jon Corzine and Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut.

Un nuevo jefe de la CIA

por Fabián Escalante (*)

Hace pocos días, el presidente George W. Bush designó a Porter J. Goss, como nuevo jefe de los servicios de inteligencia de Estados Unidos, tras la sustitución de George Tenet en medio de un escándalo provocado por las acusaciones del Congreso norteamericano por no haber aportado la información suficiente, para evitar o neutralizar los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001.

La nueva política de seguridad interna estrenada por la Casa Blanca después de los atentados, prácticamente ha convertido a Estados Unidos en una prisión, donde son espiados por cualquier causa o motivo los ciudadanos, empresas, fundaciones, políticos o simples turistas. Esta estrategia de seguridad era un viejo sueño de los fascistas norteamericanos que aprovechando la oportunidad del 11 de septiembre, instrumentaron el mecanismo que ahora pretenden extender a todos los “oscuros rincones”, donde el imperio determine que existen peligros para sus intereses hegemónicos.

Uno de los argumentos para la inculpación de Tenet fue la deficiente inteligencia humana, es decir la existencia de agentes sobre el terreno, que fueran capaces de evaluar los planes terroristas y en su caso, prevenirlos. Al parecer, esa es una de las razones para que el presidente le preguntara a su hermano Jeb, gobernador de la Florida e íntimo de la mafia terrorista, cuál podría ser su candidato para este importante cargo, desde el que pretende aumentar el control sobre las vidas de sus ciudadanos y de paso, de los del resto del mundo.

La figura propuesta y escogida ha sido Porter J. Goss, un republicano representante por la Florida a la Cámara desde agosto de 1988 y que recientemente firmara un largo informe contra Tenet, como presidente de un comité de inteligencia, donde evaluaba críticamente la actuación de la Agencia para prevenir los ataques terroristas.

Este congresista, nacido el 26 de noviembre de 1938, en Waterbury, Connecticut, es graduado en 1960 de la Universidad de Yale. Habla perfectamente el español y el francés y prestó servicios en la CIA desde 1962 a 1972, donde inició su carrera como oficial operativo y más tarde como jefe de comandos en la J. M. Wave, la gran base operativa que desde Miami, tuvo el peso de la guerra sucia contra Cuba durante la década de los sesenta.

Allí, bajo la cobertura de una empresa de productos químicos, muy cerca de la universidad local, la CIA organizó la base más grande e importante que jamás haya tenido en suelo norteamericano, con un presupuesto de 100 millones de dólares anuales, 400 oficiales de caso, más de 4 000 agentes, 55 empresas de cobertura, marina de guerra y aviación, para incursionar sistemáticamente contra objetivos y poblados cubanos en misiones de terrorismo y subversión.

Goss fue un activo participante de la operación Mangosta, que en 1962 se propuso derrocar al gobierno cubano y que fue preludio de la Crisis de Octubre. En ese año se realizaron contra nuestro país más de 5 870 actos subversivos y terroristas y se fraguaron importantes proyectos de asesinato contra dirigentes políticos.

Posteriormente, fue destacado en México, casualmente en la misma época en que allí comandaba el mecanismo anticubano de la CIA el conocido terrorista David A. Phillips, a cuyo cargo estuvo la manipulación de L. H. Oswald, el “asesino solitario” del presidente John Kennedy.

Más tarde, en 1965, “coincidió” con Phillips en la estación de la CIA en Dominicana, al mismo tiempo que las fuerzas norteamericanas desembarcaban en ese país y desalojaban al gobierno legítimamente establecido por los militares constitucionalistas encabezados por el coronel Francisco Caamaño Deñó.

Luego, probablemente como un premio al esfuerzo realizado, fue destacado en Europa occidental, donde contrajo una rara enfermedad en la sangre que lo hizo abandonar el servicio activo y dedicarse a los negocios y a la política.

Goss, quien lleva ya 16 años en el Congreso y planeaba el retiro, propuso “casualmente” a mediados de este año, una legislación que aumentara la autoridad del director de la CIA, sobre un presupuesto de más de 40 000 millones de dólares, a la vez que le confiriera a este funcionario todo el control de las actividades clandestinas.

Porter J. Goss con 65 años cumplidos, una fortuna personal y una extensa hoja de servicio a las órdenes de la reacción y el neofascismo norteamericano, no ha sido designado en tan alto cargo por una decisión casual o superficial, merced de algún favor político. Todo lo contrario. Se trata de un nuevo paso de la administración Bush para concluir la limpieza de “intelectuales” dentro de la Agencia, más apegados a los informes, análisis y técnicas de escuchas, que a los avatares de los campos de batalla, para establecer la preponderancia de los “operativos”, es decir, los reclutadores de terroristas a la imagen y semejanza de Bin Laden.

El imperio que pretende Estados Unidos, no solo se alcanza por medio de las agresiones y las guerras, los bloqueos y las campañas mediáticas, hacen falta también los caballos de Troya y los matones dispuestos a “eliminar” a todos aquellos que osen disentir de Washington: ¡O están con nosotros o contra nosotros!, esa es su consigna. Ello en buen español significa que el nuevo jefe de la CIA, un veterano operativo de “los momentos duros”, se apresta a convertir a la Agencia en un aparato secreto que apriete su gatillo de fuego en cualquier oscuro rincón, donde los emperadores decidan.

(*)General de División del Ministerio del Interior de Cuba, ex jefe de los servicios de inteligencia

Modified Limited Hangout

Modified Limited Hangout
by The Wall Street Journal

The big news in yesterday's mea culpa by CBS News isn't that the network was "misled" about "documents whose authenticity is in doubt," as it was finally forced to concede. The story is the admission that the source Dan Rather trusted with CBS's reputation was none other than Bill Burkett, a noted antagonist of President Bush.

Journalists -- including us -- use all manner of sources, of course, and many of them are partisans of one kind or another. But as much as possible we owe readers an indication of where those sources are coming from. And if those sources turn out to be wrong, as they sometimes are, then our obligation is to own up to the error as soon as possible.

The problem in this case is that before yesterday CBS never gave its viewers even a hint that its entire controversial story hinged on the word of someone who has made it one of his main goals in life to defeat Mr. Bush. Even after the documents on Mr. Bush's National Guard service were called into question, CBS refused to let viewers in on the secret of its source's motives.

This is the real scandal here, and it makes us wonder if Mr. Burkett is the end of this story. It isn't as if Mr. Burkett's motives were hard to discover. On August 25, addressing Mr. Bush in the second person, Mr. Burkett wrote in a Web posting, "I know from your files that we have now reassembled, the fact that you did not fulfill your oath, taken when you were commissioned to 'obey the orders of the officers appointed over you.'"

More intriguing, in an August 21 posting, Mr. Burkett said he had spoken with Max Cleland, the former Georgia Senator and fierce John Kerry advocate, about how to respond to Republican campaign tactics. "I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. He said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with. But none of them have called me back."

This, believe it or not, is the source Mr. Rather described as "unimpeachable." The kindest interpretation is that the famous anchor and CBS were gullible. But perhaps they will forgive their audience for also now suspecting some partisan bias -- especially in light of an interview with Mr. Rather that the trade publication Broadcasting & Cable published August 30.

Asked if the media were paying too much attention to the Swift Boat Veterans' criticisms of John Kerry, Mr. Rather replied: "In the end, what difference does it make what one candidate or the other did or didn't do during the Vietnam War? In some ways, that war is as distant as the Napoleonic campaigns." Yet nine days later Mr. Rather was reporting on Mr. Bush's National Guard service as if it were the story of a lifetime.

CBS said yesterday that Mr. Burkett admits giving "a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source." Mr. Burkett and CBS have not revealed that source, but we know he had contact with a Kerry surrogate, Mr. Cleland, who expressed a desire to "counterattack."

We also know that Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe was quick to offer his own theory -- that Karl Rove had fabricated the documents. And we know that the day after Mr. Rather's report aired, the Democrats unveiled "Operation Fortunate Son," a campaign video about Mr. Bush's National Guard service that incorporated footage from "60 Minutes."

All of this raises the question of whether CBS was a vessel for, if not a willing participant in, a partisan dirty trick two months before a closely contested Presidential election. Last week Mr. Rather told the Washington Post that "if the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story." It was too late for that; Web writers and other news organizations had beaten him to it. But if CBS wants to restore the credibility it enjoyed back in the era of Edward R. Murrow, it will now get to the bottom of the story behind Mr. Rather's discredited story.

CBS Apologizes for Its Story on Bush Memos

Documents were not verified and a key source lied, the network acknowledges on air

By Josh Getlin, Elizabeth Jensen and Matea Gold
Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK — In an extraordinary admission, CBS News apologized Monday for using unverified documents about President Bush's military service in a "60 Minutes" broadcast and said a key source on the story had lied to the network.

The embarrassing news — which dominated television broadcasts and political websites throughout the day — culminated in a "CBS Evening News" segment in which anchor Dan Rather confronted Bill Burkett, a former National Guard commander and longtime Bush critic who provided the material. Under Rather's questioning, Burkett admitted he had misled a CBS producer about where he had obtained the photocopied documents, though he denied forging them.

As the segment ended, Rather added his own apology for CBS' flawed reporting, which has quickly become an issue in the 2004 presidential election:

"I want to say personally and directly, I'm sorry…. This was an error made in good faith as we tried to carry the CBS News tradition of asking tough questions and investigative reporting. But it was a mistake."

The network promised to appoint an independent panel of experts to investigate how the story was reported.

The memos were purportedly written by Bush's immediate supervisor, the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, and were presented to show that Bush allegedly received preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, and that Killian felt pressure from above to "sugarcoat" Bush's performance in the early 1970s.

Monday's admission was a galling mea culpa for CBS officials, who believed they had scored a journalistic coup when the Sept. 8 story aired. But as controversy erupted over the broadcast and the veracity of the memos, a story that initially seemed poised to cast a cloud over Bush instead created a giant black eye for a network that has long prided itself on excellence.

It was learned Monday that the CBS news producer working on the report helped put a senior advisor to John F. Kerry in touch with Burkett, saying he would be helpful to the campaign.

CBS officials hoped their apology and a subsequent probe would begin to quell the controversy. However, Republican critics found the apologies insufficient, and media observers questioned whether the news division's wounds would heal quickly.

Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, challenged the network to reveal who created the documents, who provided them to producer Mary Mapes and whether Kerry's "supporters, party committee or campaign played any role."

Burkett said in a recent Internet posting that he had approached the Kerry campaign, offering information on Bush's Guard service, but had been rebuffed.

Joe Lockhart, a Kerry senior advisor, maintained that he and the campaign had nothing to do with the "60 Minutes" story.

But on Saturday, Sept. 4, Lockhart said he got a call from Mapes, a CBS producer who told him she was working on a piece about Bush's National Guard service that would air the following Wednesday.

She said she had documents but would not tell Lockhart what was in them, Lockhart added.

He said he thought she was calling to get the campaign's response to the story, but instead Mapes gave him Burkett's name and cellphone number.

"She said there was someone helpful on the story who had been trying to reach the campaign and really wanted to talk to me," Lockhart recalled. Mapes did not tell him that Burkett had been in the National Guard.

Lockhart said he put the number aside and forgot about it until the following Sunday night or Monday morning, when he called Burkett. He said they had "a short and inconsequential conversation" that lasted about three or four minutes.

"He basically wanted to talk to me because he said the Kerry campaign and the Democrats had not been tough enough in responding to the Swift boat attacks," Lockhart said, referring to the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which had been challenging Kerry's military record and antiwar activities.

Burkett suggested that Kerry give a speech about his Vietnam service. "I listened, told him I appreciated his advice, and said goodbye," Lockhart recalled.

Lockhart said he didn't realize until recently that Burkett might be the source of the Guard memos. Asked about Mapes' action, CBS spokeswoman Kelli Edwards said the matter was "an example of the kind of thing that the independent panel … will look into. When that review is complete, we will comment."

CBS said Mapes was not available for comment. She was still assigned to the documents story as of Monday afternoon.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan accepted CBS' belated apology but added: "There are still serious questions that we believe need to be answered, and we think they should be fully investigated."

The network initially defended its story and dismissed critics as partisan opponents. But during Monday's on-air interview, Burkett conceded that he had misled CBS in saying that he got the documents from a National Guard official.

The network said it was still trying to identify the actual source. A CBS insider said Burkett told the network that he received the documents from an anonymous source at a hotel.

Asked why he misled the network about the source, Burkett, 54, told Rather: "Your staff pressured me to a point to reveal that source…. And I simply threw out a name that was basically, I guess, to take a little pressure off for a moment."

In its Sept. 8 broadcast, CBS said the documents came from the personal files of Bush's commander, Killian. But the papers came under immediate attack, with Internet-based critics saying the memos included typefaces and fonts that could not have been produced by electric typewriters at the time.

The story further unraveled a week later, when Rather interviewed Marion Carr Knox, 86, who had been Killian's typist. She said the documents were not authentic, but — in a twist — noted that they reflected Killian's view of Bush's service.

According to the documents, Bush did not report for a required physical exam and failed to meet performance standards. The network furnished the White House with copies of the memos before the Sept. 8 broadcast.

Josh Howard, "60 Minutes Wednesday Edition" executive producer, told The Times last week that the network moved forward with its report when the White House did not question the documents' authenticity.

In an interview Monday with The Times, the 72-year-old Rather took personal responsibility for the mistake, as "leader of the team," but said it's difficult to pinpoint blame or even discuss whether someone should lose his job.

"Given the number of people involved in this, directly involved in the news-gathering, vetting and approving, well, I just don't know. There were a lot of people, including myself," he said.

Rather, who has worked closely with Mapes for years, said he stood firmly behind the 48-year-old producer, calling her "a terrific reporter. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody hopes that their mistake will not be the only way that people define them and their work."

In a sign of turbulence, BoycottCBS.com, a conservative website, launched a campaign asking that CBS Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer be removed as a questioner in the Oct. 13 presidential debate.

The network responded that Schieffer "is one of the most experienced and respected journalists covering Washington D.C. … and we are proud he was chosen by the [debate] committee," according to CBS spokeswoman Sandra Genelius.

Observers said it was too early to tell if the "60 Minutes" broadcast would inflict more lasting damage to the network.

"The key will be if this incident leads to a fall-off in viewers, who are turned off by CBS' mistakes," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

"If that happens, this becomes a corporate problem, and people who operate at that level will not have much patience for this."

Advertisers could pose another problem, especially if they begin to abandon the network as a direct result of the "60 Minutes" broadcast, some experts suggested. Network spokesman Dana McClintock said Monday that no advertiser had pulled ads out of CBS' news programs.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward, who said the network would announce members of the investigative panel this week, promised that its findings and recommendations would be made public. "If they can bring a truly credible investigation to the question and address what went wrong and why, I don't think this will be an enormous problem," said Richard Wald, former president of NBC News and executive vice president of ABC News. "But if they can't do this, it will be a credibility problem that dogs them forever."

Questions Surround Man Who Provided Documents

CBS's 'Unimpeachable Source' Is Ex-Guard Officer With History of Problems and of Attacking Bush

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post

The man CBS News touted as the "unimpeachable source" of explosive documents about President Bush's National Guard service turns out to be a former Guard officer with a history of self-described mental problems who has denounced Bush as a liar with "demonic personality shortcomings."

Over the past three years, retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett has given dozens of newspaper and television interviews accusing the president and his aides of destroying documents and stealing elections. In e-mail messages to an Internet chat group for Texas Democrats, he has also said that the "Bush team" sent "goons" to intimidate him at his ranch in Baird, Tex.

"They can go to hell," the retired officer, 55, wrote in a March 29 posting. "I'll continue to defend the freedom of this nation -- not the liars who have wrested its helm."

Burkett's allegations against Bush and leaders of the Texas National Guard were featured prominently in a controversial book, "Bush's War for Reelection," by a former reporter, James Moore, that was published in February. The book led to Burkett's briefly becoming a TV talk-show celebrity, with his allegations of corruption and favoritism in the National Guard.

Stories about Burkett appeared in dozens of newspapers, including the New York Times, along with outraged denials from former Bush aides. Burkett said he overheard a conversation in 1997 between Joe M. Allbaugh, who was then Bush's chief of staff, and the commander of the Texas National Guard on how to "sanitize" National Guard files to prevent any political embarrassment to Bush, who was running for reelection as governor of Texas.

A Feb. 13 story in the Boston Globe noted that a former Guardsman cited by Burkett as a key corroborating witness denied that he led Burkett to a room where Bush's records were being vetted. "I have no recall of that whatsoever," said George O. Conn, a former chief warrant officer with the Guard and a friend of Burkett's. "None, zip, nada." Burkett later said that Conn, a civilian employee of the U.S military in Germany, recanted his story because of political pressure from the White House.

Conn could not be reached to comment.

As a former planning officer in the Texas National Guard, Burkett had the opportunity -- at least in theory -- to witness the events that he described. But he also had a clear motive to attack his former superiors. In 1998, he became embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Guard over medical benefits after he contracted a mysterious disease while on assignment in Panama.

In interviews, Burkett accused the Guard of failing to provide him with proper medical treatment, as a result of which he became partly paralyzed and had a nervous breakdown. He told author Moore that, in desperation, he saved himself from death by taking a dose of cattle penicillin that turned out to be three times the correct dosage for his body weight.

Moore was one of Burkett's staunchest defenders until the "60 Minutes" program, but said yesterday that he no longer knew whether to believe him. "I've got so caught up in the white noise of political skullduggery that I no longer trust anything anyone tells me," Moore said.

For Burkett, attacking Bush, posting Internet messages and giving media interviews have become such all-consuming passions that he has had little time to tend to his ranch. As reporters began gathering outside his modest one-story house on the Texas scrub last week, neighbors complained that Burkett's cattle were roaming across their land.

Interviewed over the weekend by CBS, Burkett acknowledged that he had "misled" the network by simply "throwing out a name" when asked to reveal the source of the documents. He insisted that he had not forged the documents and that he had urged CBS producers to investigate their authenticity before using them in a broadcast.

For 10 days, CBS declined to name Burkett as the person who provided the disputed Guard documents, saying only that they came from an "unimpeachable source." CBS spokeswoman Kelli Edwards said yesterday that the network was investigating a Sept. 9 statement that asserted the network had spoken with "individuals who saw the documents at the time they were written."

In the rush to air the documents Burkett provided, CBS producers inadvertently left clues about their confidential source. People asked by CBS to authenticate the documents said the papers bore a header showing they had been faxed from a Kinko's in Abilene, Tex., 21 miles from Burkett's home. Documents examiner Emily Will said the footer indicated the document had been sent at 6:41 p.m. on Sept. 2.

The next day, at 7:32 p.m., Burkett posted a message hinting that CBS News was on the verge of airing a major scoop on the Bush National Guard controversy. "No proof, just gut instinct," he wrote.

Staff writer James V. Grimaldi contributed to this report.

Blue Truth, Red Truth

The CBS flap is one more sign of the ferocious struggle between political partisans to see the world their way

By NANCY GIBBS

Which world did you watch last week?

Do you live in the world where President Bush, whose bold wartime leadership has made America safer, survived an ambush from that liberal lion Dan Rather, who tried to swing the race with a bunch of phony documents trashing Bush's National Guard service, only to have the charges blow up in his face?

Or do you live in the world where Rather, the Tiffany network's honored heir to Walter Cronkite, spoke truth to power, made a true if perhaps flawed case that Bush shirked his duty more than 30 years ago, and is by implication unfit to serve as Commander in Chief today?

Red Truth holds that Rather has at last taken his place alongside other disgraced liberal icons, who have recklessly disregarded the standards of journalism to try to bring this President down. Blue Truth sees Rathergate as a sideshow; the problem with the mainstream media is not that they are biased but that they are lazy and have given Bush a free pass from the start. Red Truth looks at Bush and sees a savior; Blue Truth sees a zealot who must be stopped. In both worlds there are no accidents, only conspiracies, and facts have value only to the extent that they support the Truth.



This is where we live now, and where the final battles of this campaign will be fought. Anyone can carry a weapon. The traditional heralds compete with the authors and bloggers and filmmakers and cable barkers and radio rabble-rousers who appeal to those who tailor the news to fit their political niche. Campaign-finance reform has changed the channels through which the money moves, restricting fund raising by the candidates but filling the war chests of allied guerrillas. Above all, the stakes of the outcome seem to change the rules. If you believe that your children's safety depends on the right guy winning, what tactics can possibly be out of bounds, and what scruples—political or intellectual or legal or journalistic—are more important than ultimate victory?

Delighted Bush backers could only savor the satisfaction that of all the media titans it was Dan Rather who had been humbled: he who had famously tangled with Bush's father during the 1988 campaign, had ingratiatingly interviewed Saddam Hussein during the walk-up to the war and had been the featured speaker at a 2001 Texas Democratic fund raiser (even if he did apologize later), and whom his colleague Andy Rooney describes as "transparently liberal." Within hours of the 60 Minutes broadcast Sept. 8, skeptical bloggers were spitting challenges to the authenticity of the CBS documents on Internet sites like freerepublic.com and powerlineblog.com. No typewriter in 1972, the Netizens argued, could have produced those papers, which alleged that Bush violated orders to take a physical and that his superiors were pressed to "sugarcoat" his evaluation.

Though many mainstream papers ran CBS 's charges essentially unchallenged on their front pages the next morning, their reporters were also catching the blowback from the bloggers. By day's end Fox News, the A.P. and abc News had called the CBS story into question. Before long White House spokesman Scott McClellan would suggest that the documents might have been leaked by Democrats, and California Republican Congressman Christopher Cox was calling for an investigation. For his part, Rather not only defended his reporting but also questioned the motives of those who challenged him, telling USA Today that a "thick partisan fogging machine seeks to cloud the core truth of our story." He denied any political leanings and cast the controversy as a Red Truth jihad. "People who are so passionately partisan, politically or ideologically committed, basically say, 'Because he won't report it our way, we're going to ... check him out of existence if we can. If not, make him feel great pain.'" But under the combined weight of various challenges to the memos, the network eventually said it would investigate their authenticity.

John Kerry supporters were so frustrated at the turn of events, they could only suggest this must somehow be the work of Bush's Dr. Evil, Karl Rove. How could their guy, a decorated war hero, have dropped in the polls after being slimed for a month by unsubstantiated charges about his Vietnam record, while Bush, who has never fully answered questions about whether he performed his duties during five years in the Air National Guard, looked as if he would escape any damage just because CBS had screwed up its fact checking? On the very day of the CBS broadcast, a group called Texans for Truth unveiled its AWOL ad claiming that Bush never even showed up for the Alabama unit he transferred to in 1972; the Democratic National Committee released the video Operation: Fortunate Son, which details the ways in which Bush allegedly received preferential treatment. Now it looked as if Bush had been vaccinated, even if other records supported the substance of CBS 's charge. The conspiracy theories were further fueled when the Los Angeles Times revealed that "Buckhead," the blogger who led the charge, was no phantom font expert but the guy who filed suit to have Bill Clinton disbarred in Arkansas during the Monica madness. "If this is a campaign about who did more 30 years ago, we lose," a senior Bush campaign adviser told Time. "But it's not about that."

The network's mess served members of the Bush campaign beautifully, and not just by taking the focus off the turmoil in Iraq. It fed their story line that they are once again fighting as outsiders. When you control the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, it's a neat trick to act like an underdog. But to the extent that the Republicans could turn the Liberal Media into the Establishment enemy, liken themselves to Thomas Paine and Martin Luther, nail their charges to the door, distribute their pamphlets, rally their faithful, it was in the interest of giving their base a tyrant to battle. CBS tied its argument up nicely as well when, acknowledging questions about the authenticity of the documents, it said they were true in spirit. Even the pollsters, with their models and metrics, were at a loss to explain where the race had landed: Gallup had Bush 13 points ahead; the Pew Center and Harris Interactive had a 1-point race. At this moment, meteorologists have an edge when it comes to reliability.

In a sense, the candidates and their parties have only themselves to blame for the challenges they face and the power they have lost as they try to navigate this new landscape. Certainly, technology made it possible to nationalize the sense of community, help people find political soul mates and search for their personal truths online; but the political class also helped peel people apart. Both parties redrew districts to be more politically homogeneous, marginalized their centrists, elevated their flamethrowers, viewed with suspicion anyone who sounded temperate or reached across the aisle. At the same time, the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which ended mandatory balanced coverage of politics, gave birth to talk radio, and the television universe splintered between the old networks and the new culture of cable gladiators in which opinion was more entertaining than information and cheaper to produce as well. In the face of the passionate partisan fights over President Clinton's impeachment and the 2000 Florida recount, it was no wonder people sought refuge in a section of the infosphere where certainty was possible.

Meanwhile, the 2002 McCain-Feingold law dramatically changed the way money flowed into the system and whom it flowed to. With candidates restricted to maximum donations of $2,000 from individuals and with parties no longer allowed to accept unlimited tubs of soft money, the supposedly independent 527 committees like the left-wing MoveOn Voter Fund and the Kerry-bashing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth entered the message-management game playing by their own set of rules. Together, these 527 groups have raised more than $240 million. Their ads have been edgier, uglier and arguably more effective than anything the candidates or parties have unleashed in years. Some, like the attacks on the candidates' military records, show real people testifying to the candidates' flaws in a kind of mockumentary style that further blurs the truth.

When MoveOn debuted its latest ad last week, the two sides instantly fought over its message. In the TV spot, a soldier holds his rifle above his head as he sinks up to his chest in the desert quicksands; a narrator remarks, "George Bush got us into this quagmire. It will take a new President to get us out." Bob Dole, who chairs Bush's veterans coalition, charged that "depicting an American soldier in effect surrendering in the battle against the terrorists is beyond the pale." MoveOn officials insisted that the soldier was not surrendering and that the ad was designed to highlight a deteriorating situation that the Administration has denied.

Thus do the most important issues unfold, not just across the gray pages of the serious papers but in a foaming free-for-all in which every charge, however fair or false, gets BlackBerried and instant messaged in a Darwinian democracy of ideas. At a rally in Huntington, W.Va., last week, 3-year-old Sophia Parlock dissolved into tears after having her Bush-Cheney sign torn up by Kerry-Edwards supporters. The picture was mailed out by the Republican National Committee after conservative Matt Drudge spotted a wire photo. The Democrats meanwhile sent around the story of a Gold Star mother, whose son was killed in Iraq, being arrested at a Laura Bush speech in Hamilton, N.J., when she tried to interrupt the First Lady. As for that little girl with the sign, the Democratic Underground posted a story claiming that her father is a Bush campaign operative who used his child to create a partisan photo op, having done the same with a different kid four years ago against Al Gore. No incident is too small to produce its own parallel truths. And the party e-mail lists make sure that these truths make their way into every Red or Blue mailbox.

In the past few weeks, as Bush moved into the lead for the first time in months, his home-field advantage became clear. Conservatives say that, of necessity, they learned long ago how to transmit their message below the radar of the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood. They became the masters of direct mail, which helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, and their next wave of messagemakers was much quicker to understand the power of talk radio, cable and blogs. Until the week of the Republican Convention, it had been three years since Bush had talked to the Washington Post or the New York Times. In his 31/2 years in office, he has given 15 press conferences, the fewest of any President in 50 years. But he has talked to Rush Limbaugh, and he's scheduled to appear on the O'Reilly Factor this week.

While leery of the old media, this White House is expert at narrowcasting to the new. From the Amish to snowmobile users to stockcar-racing fans, the Bush coalitions are sliced like Bible leaves and addressed according to their specific priorities. Aiming to strengthen his socially conservative base, Bush in May sat down with a handful of journalists from religious media to discuss his opposition to abortion and gay marriage. The transcript of that long interview, even the fact that it was happening at all, was not released to the mainstream White House press corps. In May the campaign released a Web ad featuring Laura Bush talking about education, which ran on 60 sites, including cookinglight.com.

The campaign also keeps a close eye on the blogs, using them, just as it uses Limbaugh, to mainline information to the G.O.P. faithful. "Blogs are what talk radio was a few years ago," says Bush campaign communications director Nicole Devenish. Her staff members regularly write, along with the message for the talk-radio circuit, the one that will go out to blogs and websites that link to the Bush campaign site. Bush staff members rely on technorati.com and truthlaidbear.com, which track political blogs and websites to see what items in local papers, on websites and in blogs are getting the most hits. "If a story moves up through the rankings and linking, we can know," says one of the Bush staff members assigned to alert the rest of the team about which stories are moving through the blogosphere. "We*spacecan get indicators about stories before they break elsewhere. It's like an early-warning system."

That attention has proved fruitful, since blogs are where some of the most powerful if picayune attacks on Kerry have taken hold. When Kerry put Swiss cheese rather than the traditional Cheez Whiz on his Philly Cheese Steak last year in Philadelphia and last month in Green Bay, Wis., called the famous Packer stadium "Lambert Field" instead of Lambeau Field, the bloggers lampooned him for being out of touch. Does this matter? The Washington Post wrote off Kerry's chances in the key swing state of Wisconsin because his slip was "akin to calling the Yankees the Yankers or the Chicago Bulls the Bells."

While Republicans have relied on the Internet to spread a message, Democrats have focused more on the Net's power to raise money. One of the great anomalies of American politics was that Republicans could always count on many small donors, while Democrats depended on a few big sponsors. Back in the days of Barry Goldwater, his movement had more than 650,000 individual donors, compared with 22,000 for John F. Kennedy in 1960. Campaign-finance reform, however, meant that Democrats would need to broaden their donor base fast. The party claims to have quadrupled its small-donor base since the last election. MoveOn's 527 committee has been able to spend more than $17 million this cycle—not bad for a group that didn't exist seven years ago.

But some Kerry advisers think he has missed an opportunity to rally voters to his cause using the Net. "I don't think this campaign really understands the new technology," says one. "Yes, they raised money with it, but they don't see it as an organizational tool." The reason, he says, is that the team still steers by the stars of the New York Times and the TV networks. Senior adviser Mike McCurry reads the Daily Kos and a few other blogs, but most Kerry aides don't and instead rely on one staff member to provide an overnight summary. The Internet is not their medium. "It's not where they live. It's not how they talk to each other," says the adviser. "The Kerry camp hasn't moved. It's where campaigns were 20 years ago. They are going to do it the way they did it in '88 for Michael Dukakis. They are going to do it on TV, but broadcast television is damned near irrelevant for the rest of the cycle. Things move too fast now."



That failure is strange because the Democrats have seen the changes coming from a long way off. It was Clinton, after all, who played the sax on Arsenio and talked about his underwear on mtv. The Democrats invented the war room, having learned from the evisceration of Dukakis that every attack must be answered. In some ways, Kerry's team has adapted to the new world. When rumors of an affair with an intern swirled last February, Kerry followed the cardinal rule: Don't elevate rumors into a story in the mainstream press. He went on Don Imus' radio show to deny them, and they faded away.

But the events of August suggested that Kerry's team was not yet quick or smart enough. Unlike in February, when Kerry was less well known, by August the Bush team had constructed a cartoon narrative of Kerry as a phony, unprincipled opportunist. When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launched its ads claiming that Kerry had embellished his war record, the accusations fell on fertile soil. Quite apart from Red America, in the purple enclaves of Missouri and Ohio, there were plenty of voters who would hear the charges on cable or online and believe there was something to them. Only 29% of voters in last week's New York Times/CBS poll think Kerry is telling the entire truth about his Vietnam service, and 49% think he's mostly truthful but hiding something.

But back in the Blue World the Kerry team inhabited, the "larger truth" was that it was outrageous for a President and a Vice President who supported the Vietnam War but didn't fight in it to stand by while their surrogates questioned Kerry's service. Even if the charges were coming from an independent group of veterans, the Kerry camp thought it could rely on the mainstream media to police the situation and inform voters that they were false. Kerry adviser Bob Shrum, says a Democratic strategist, "kept telling Kerry over and over, 'We don't need to respond. It's only a $170,000 ad buy. Nobody will hear it.'"

But Shrum was assuming that the old order was still in place, not realizing that old media and their insurgent competitors are locked in an asymmetrical conflict, with one set of outlets following the traditional conventions of neutrality and balanced coverage and the other not. So when the talk shows began covering the charges, they adhered to those conventions and gave equal time to those leveling the attacks and the Kerry representatives disputing them. "Every credible news organization knocked down their allegations," moans a Democratic strategist—as if that mattered. "They didn't understand what was going on," Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi says of the Kerry team. "It was almost like, 'That's not true, so we don't need to respond.' That's the trap they fell into. They just got the big wake-up call that it doesn't work that way anymore."

The blue armies do have some advantages. Among the most potent weapons for Blue Truth, conservatives admit, have been documentaries. As a political force, notes Richard Viguerie, the godfather of direct mail, "that didn't exist four years ago. I had two meetings on that very issue this week. I feel conservatives do a lot of things well, but movies are not on that list." Among recent Blue Truth films are Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, which replays the controversy over the Florida recount, and Uncovered: The Whole Truth of the Iraq War. Both are produced by Robert Greenwald, whose Outfoxed film, a critical look at Fox News, sold 100,000 dvds this summer. Meanwhile, MoveOn enlists actors like Martin Sheen and Matt Damon to sell its message. One marketing survey found that 40% of 18- to 24-year-olds said celebrity endorsements would influence their vote.

Still, Kerry has had to tread carefully around "allies" like filmmaker Michael Moore. Since supporting so controversial a figure could have cost him among independents, Kerry took to telling reporters who asked about Moore's incendiary anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, that he didn't need to see it because he had been living the past four years. While any help is welcome, Kerry aides avoid talking to friends at the 527s for fear of looking as if they are coordinating their efforts, which is illegal, and so have no control over flammable ads or the whack-a-Bush online games that they fear could backfire and alienate the middle. In January, MoveOn supporters submitted an ad to its site comparing Bush to Hitler, which the Kerry campaign quickly condemned. Now MoveOn cofounder Wes Boyd says he bends over backward to see beyond the base. "It's a very centrist country," Boyd says.

The Kerry campaign says it has awakened. "We now have a pretty aggressive team that's out there watching what they do and pushing back," says Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton White House press secretary who joined the Kerry campaign a few weeks ago. The team still has time. In 2000, 14% of voters said they decided which presidential candidate to vote for only in the final two weeks of the campaign; 5%, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.

But it is also true that four years ago, many said it didn't matter who won. Voters live in a different world now, a much scarier one in which uncertainty is uncomfortable. While there are still those who call themselves independent, prefer their news straight and have not decided whom to vote for, they may not be the target audience in this race. If Rove is right, the race will turn on which campaign has done a better job of finding its true believers, inspiring them with a stirring message and getting every last one to the polls on Election Day.

—Reported by Perry Bacon Jr., Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson, Michael Duffy, Viveca Novak and Karen Tumulty/Washington and David Bjerklie/ New York

The Paper Chase

How Did Dan Rather Get in This Fix?

By AMANDA RIPLEY

The morning before Dan Rather went on the air with his flammable story, senior staff at CBS's 60 Minutes gathered to consider whether it was true. Network producers, lawyers and Betsy West, a CBS News senior vice president, among others, met in a screening room to decide whether to broadcast the story about President Bush's record in the National Guard. Five days before, they had received copies of new and intriguing memos suggesting that Lieut. Bush had ignored a direct order to get a physical and that his superiors were pressured to "sugar coat" his evaluation. No one talked much about whether the documents could have come from a 1970s-era typewriter, and there was no strident dissent. But, says Josh Howard, the show's executive producer, "We pressed the producer on 'How do you know they're authentic?'" And the producer, a respected veteran named Mary Mapes who had helped break the stunning Abu Ghraib torture story just months before, had answers. She had credible sources and document experts, he says.

Much of this evidence would melt away in the days to come. The family and the office typist of Lieut. Colonel Jerry Killian, the alleged author of the memos, as well as additional document experts, would say they did not look real. There would be calls for Rather's resignation. The Wall Street Journal would declare that the "liberal media establishment" had finally lost its hold on the national agenda. But behind the hysteria, this is a story about human errors whipped into a new-media news cycle. It is also a familiar tale of journalists wanting ever so badly to fit all the disparate fragments of a story into a fine, taut narrative.


ROBERT MILLER / POLARIS
CBS News President Heyward, left, with Rather in 2001

Rather and other CBS News employees acknowledged for the first time last week that there may be problems with the authenticity of the memos. "It's up to us to get to the bottom of legitimate questions that have been raised," CBS News President Andrew Heyward told TIME. Then, in a surprising twist, Howard pulled the Administration back into the fiasco on Friday. "If the White House had just raised an eyebrow—they didn't have to say they were forgeries—but if there was any hint that there was a question, that would have sent us back," says Howard. The morning the show aired, CBS staff members had shown copies of the memos to Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. In response, according to a transcript of the interview, Bartlett tried to spin parts of the memos in Bush's favor and attributed the whole debate to partisan sniping. He did not, however, challenge the authenticity of the memos.

But the White House did not check the memos for invisible ink either. And why should it have? After all, the documents were allegedly written some 30 years ago by Bush's squadron commander in Texas, who has been dead for 20 years. There was no reason the Administration would have known if the documents were real.

Bartlett says that, having heard rumors about a big exclusive in the works, he had his staff call CBS at 5:45 p.m. the day before the Sept. 8 broadcast. "They said, 'Oh, yes, we were going to call,'" Bartlett says. By 7 p.m., CBS staff members had read Bartlett the memos over the phone. He told them he wouldn't comment on the air until he had physically seen them. The next day, he was given three hours to look them over. He showed them to the President, who said he had no recollection of those specific documents. "There was no way to check the authenticity," Bartlett says.

After the story began to unravel, CBS—and Rather in particular—spent a week aggressively defending it. Then Rather broadcast an interview with Marian Carr Knox, Killian's typist, who had by that point told several news outlets that she didn't think the memos were real. But Rather emphasized that Knox felt the memos nonetheless reflected Killian's opinion at the time. "Those who have criticized aspects of our story have never criticized the heart of it ... that George Bush received preferential treatment to get into the National Guard and, once accepted, failed to satisfy the requirements of his service," Rather said. That may be true and important, but it is the kind of thing better left unsaid by the subject of a media inquisition.

Of course, Rather has a 40-year history of rushing into the inferno. And the fact that conservatives have been calling him biased since before man walked on the moon seems to have done little to deter him. When he covered President Richard Nixon, he was known as "the reporter the White House hates." In 1988 he relentlessly grilled George H.W. Bush, then Vice President, about the Iran-contra affair, and the elder Bush has not spoken to him since. Rather got in trouble again in 2001 for speaking at a Democratic fund-raiser in Texas, for which he later apologized. But those who know him well say he isn't driven by politics as much as his addiction to breaking news. "He takes to stories like he's still a kid and trying to prove himself," says a CBS News producer. "He loves it." Rather's contract expires in 2006, at which point he will be 75. Heyward denies any talk of asking Rather to leave early.

But that doesn't mean the rest of the staff at CBS News is happy. "We're getting whacked. And it's not fun," says the CBS News producer, who blames CBS executives, not Rather. "CBS seems to be caught flat-footed. They were slow to respond." Heyward says it's too soon to say if anything should have been done differently. But he concedes that in the current maelstrom of media, "very quickly, in this case almost instantly, you can find yourself in a debate that is raging on so many levels that it is difficult to keep track of and sort out legitimate concerns."

Ironically, one of the reasons CBS (and the White House) may not have vetted the memos with extra care is that they weren't all that shocking. "This wasn't the document that said, 'Here's the proof that George Bush was using cocaine,'" says Howard. "These were documents that incrementally added shading to the story. The idea that someone would forge a document that was so mild—that didn't send up a warning flag." (Then again, CBS was excited enough about the memos to hype them on its original show.) Mapes, who spent five years pursuing this story, declined to comment.

CBS now has a 12-person team furiously working to sort out the story. Other reporters are now fixated on Bill Burkett, who has become a prime target of speculation as a possible source of the memos. A retired National Guard officer, Burkett has spent years telling the media shifting stories about efforts to purge or embellish Bush's military records. In February, Burkett told TIME, "I don't have the smoking gun, but there was an effort to make (Bush) look better than he was." He has posted angry and sometimes reckless statements on liberal blogs. CBS's Howard denies that Burkett was interviewed for the Sept. 8 show but won't comment further.

Since the story broke, Burkett has not spoken to reporters. His lawyer says Burkett never falsified any memos. Besieged by calls last week from irate viewers, the CBS affiliate in Abilene, Texas, 21 miles from Burkett's home, broadcast a special message disavowing the network's original story. As for Bush's military records, they still contain glaring holes. But that has been largely forgotten in the recent excitement. Says a senior Administration official of the focus on CBS's predicament: "This is the gift that keeps on giving."

—Reported by Anna Macias Aguayo/Abilene, John F. Dickerson/Washington, Sean Gregory and Nathan Thornburgh/New York, Hilary Hylton/Austin and Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas

When newspapers fudge the numbers

After a handful of newspapers confess that they inflated circulation figures, the industry finds itself facing a new credibility problem

By KRIS HUNDLEY
St. Petersbourg Times

For Scott Harding, head of the nation's largest advertising buying group, the revelations this summer that four large U.S. newspapers had inflated their circulation was a stunner.

The bogus circulation numbers resulted in higher advertising rates, which meant that Harding's clients - including such major companies as Sears, AT&T and BMW - had been routinely overcharged for their ads.

Since mid June, Tribune Co.'s Newsday and Hoy, Hollinger International's Chicago Sun-Times and Belo Corp.'s Dallas Morning News have admitted boosting the paid circulation figures on which ad rates are based. Instead of delivering newspapers - and advertisements - to paying customers, at least two of the publications reportedly tossed thousands of copies into trash bins and even onto dead people's doorsteps.

"I don't think it's the tip of the iceberg, but it's a little larger than an ice cube," Harding said. "It would not shock me if there were another disclosure."

Newspapers make as much as 85 percent of their revenues by selling an audience - their subscribers - to advertisers. The bigger the audience, measured in paid circulation, the more a newspaper can charge.

That makes fudging circulation numbers the newspaper equivalent of cheating on the bottom line. Coming on the heels of several high-profile cases of reporters' fabricating stories, it can only add to newspapers' credibility crisis.

The three publishers' confessions also come at a time when newspaper circulation nationwide is on a gradual downward trend as the public bypasses daily papers for the Internet, radio and TV.

Three years ago, the industry tried to compensate for the decline by allowing deeply discounted and bulk sales to count toward paid circulation. Some of the fraudulent numbers disclosed this summer came from these new categories of paid circulation.

In response to the admissions of wrongdoing, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry group that is supposed to verify publishers' numbers annually, censured the guilty papers and has scrambled to tighten its audits.

Newspaper executives double-checked their own circulation practices, and ad representatives everywhere tried to reassure clients, particularly savvy national accounts, that their newspaper's circulation numbers are real.

"This has kind of rattled my confidence," said Conrad Szymanski, president of Beall's Department Stores, a major advertiser in Florida papers. "When circulation numbers have an audit stamp, that gave me a lot of confidence. If I'm getting something less, I'm paying too much."

Tribune Co., the Chicago-based media giant, rocked the newspaper industry in mid June when it disclosed that its two papers on Long Island had inflated their circulation numbers. Three months later, on Sept. 10, Tribune acknowledged that the bad situation was even worse than previously acknowledged.

According to the publisher, Newsday's daily circulation in 2003 was between 480,000 and 490,000 copies, about 100,000 less than reported. Sunday circulation was between 570,000 and 580,000, not 672,000.

At Hoy, Newsday's Spanish language tabloid, daily circulation was in fact about half of what had been reported, in the range of 45,000 and 55,000, rather than 93,000.

Tribune Publishing president Jack Fuller attributed the discrepancies to "poor documentation, records mismanagement and programs that deliberately violated (Audit Bureau) regulations and Tribune policies."

The Audit Bureau expects to complete its investigation into both papers by mid October. Tribune said it is continuing its review of circulation practices at its 12 other papers, including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

After its initial announcement, Newsday fired its vice president of circulation. The publishers of both Newsday and Hoy subsequently announced their early retirements, and five circulation managers and directors were fired. Two executives from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune paper in Fort Lauderdale, were brought in to handle Newsday's circulation and managerial duties.

By late July, Newsday announced that ad rates would be reduced for 16 months, with rebates if circulation falls below a guaranteed minimum. A total of $95-million has been set aside for use in negotiating settlements with advertisers who had been overcharged since 2001.

The district attorney on Long Island is investigating possible criminal charges against Newsday and Hoy.

Meanwhile, outsiders wondered how the newspapers could orchestrate such a massive fraud, involving the routine disposal of tens of thousands of newspapers that advertisers had been told were going to readers. According to Newsday's published reports on its own scandal, and the lawsuit filed by several advertisers in February, pressure was intense on circulation staffers and independent distributors to meet unrealistic circulation goals.

A Newsday systems analyst said she was repeatedly ordered by her boss to enter inflated numbers into the company's computer program and remove figures that showed circulation dropping. At the same time, carriers and distributors of single copies were given hundreds of papers they could not sell with instructions to toss them into Dumpsters or on doorsteps of former subscribers. One former distributor said, "We even delivered to addresses where the house had been burned down."

A former Hoy employee told reporters the Spanish-language paper was dropped off at stores, regardless of the potential audience. "They would require stores, if they were carrying Newsday, they had to have copies of Hoy whether they wanted it or not," the unidentified source said. "Even if . . . there wasn't a Spanish-speaking person within 40 miles."

The revelations on Long Island followed by just two days the disclosure that the Chicago Sun-Times, the nation's 13th-largest paper, had overstated its single-copy sales, those sold individually in stores and in boxes, by 23 percent for several years. The paper's owner, Hollinger International, had installed a new publisher in November in the midst of an acrimonious battle with its controlling shareholder, Conrad Black. Circulation discrepancies came to light after the paper raised its newsstand price to 50 cents from 35 cents on April 1, but revenues failed to increase.

The Sun-Times' current and former circulation chiefs left the paper in late June. The paper said it was too early to determine how much advertisers are owed, pending an internal audit.

In early August, another major metropolitan newspaper made another startling announcement. Belo Corp. said circulation at its flagship paper, the Dallas Morning News, had been overstated by about 1.5 percent daily and 5 percent Sundays. The paper's executive vice president of operations resigned, and the company set aside $23-million to settle with advertisers. At least five shareholder lawsuits have been filed on behalf of Belo shareholders because of the circulation restatement.

Circulation changes
There were several common threads among the three circulation scandals. All involved public corporations, all involved large-market newspapers with a high number of single-copy sales (as compared to home subscribers), and all relied heavily on independent distributors.

And with the exception of Hoy, which boasted that it had tripled circulation in four years, the other papers reported very modest increases. In some cases, these papers even showed slight circulation decreases, despite adding phantom sales.

By lying, these publications were mitigating the circulation declines faced by nearly every newspaper in the nation.

"Newspaper readers are dying off," said John Morton, an industry expert in Silver Spring, Md. "Circulation has been in decline for more than a dozen years. And it probably will continue to decline unless some of these attempts to attract young readers prove more successful than likely."

Morton said declining circulations have not kept newspapers from being highly profitable. The industry last year reported average operating margins of over 20 percent as publishers cut costs and raised ad rates despite lower circulation figures.

Faced with gloomy numbers, the U.S. newspaper industry and its audit bureau agreed in 2001 to change the way they count paid circulation.

Previously, only papers sold at 50 percent or more of the cover price counted as paid circulation that could be counted in the setting of ad rates. Under new rules, the bar was lowered to 25 percent.

The change meant that newspapers could increase circulation by selling highly discounted subscriptions. There was one treacherous side effect to these cut-rate deals: New readers attracted by bargain prices tend to drop the paper when the discount ends, so newspapers have to spend more on marketing to retain the same number of subscribers.

Another circulation change allowed publishers to include as paid circulation papers sold at bulk discount to entities such as airlines, hotels and sports teams that distribute them to patrons. These so-called third-party sales, which are hard to track and of questionable value to advertisers, grew rapidly.

(Newspapers donated by subscribers or underwritten by third parties for students through the Newspapers in Education program are considered paid circulation and were prior to 2001.)

John Payne, senior vice president of the Audit Bureau, said third-party sales are still a small percentage of most newspapers' circulation. Such sales are also itemized in audits so that advertisers can see them.

"Whether third-party sales are good, bad or whatever, that's for advertisers and publishers to decide," said Payne, whose board includes representatives from both publishing and advertising. "It's all clearly spelled out on the statements."

The Audit Bureau, which earned $22-million last year in audit fees from publishers of newspapers and magazines, has been criticized by one former employee for failing to uncover the circulation scams. In an article in Editor & Publisher, Jay Schiller, an ex-Audit Bureau auditor, said auditors ignored red flags, such as the phenomenal growth at Hoy.

"If Hoy was an Olympic or professional athlete, it would have been taking drug tests every week," Schiller wrote. "No one gets that big that fast."

The Audit Bureau's Payne rejected Schiller's criticism, adding that he left the company more than a decade ago. "The (Audit Bureau) does not tolerate fraud," he said. "And we'll do whatever it takes to ensure it doesn't happen again. Or we'll catch it."

"The core medium'
Though readers might not see a problem with the trend toward discounted or free newspapers, advertisers do.

"Not all circulation is created equal," said Harding, chief executive of Newspaper Services of America.

Beall's, for example, wants to know whether a newspaper's home delivery circulation is increasing in high-growth areas near its stores. Single-copy sales in tourist areas or giveaways in hotels are considered largely irrelevant because those readers are unlikely to become customers.

Newspaper executives have long wished that advertisers would drop the emphasis on circulation and focus instead on the number of people who pick up the paper. In a home, for example, only one person counts toward paid circulation even though others in the household may read the paper.

In recent years, the Audit Burea u has begun reviewing a paper's methodology for determining readership and including that data in its annual circulation audit. Jay Smith, president of Cox Newspapers, based in Atlanta, said studies have shown that readership is generally 2 to 21/2 times the paid circulation. Though the 17 dailies in the Cox chain have shown circulation declines of 1 to 2 percent per year for the past several years, Smith said the readership number has remained fairly constant.

"As an industry, I really worry that if we limit ourselves to a discussion of paid circulation, we're going to be selling ourselves short," Smith said.

Advertisers say they're willing to pay for readership, but not at the same rate they pay for circulation. At the same time, media buyers like Harding, who is on the board of the Audit Bureau, say they haven't detected a shift in ad spending as a result of the circulation shenanigans at a few big players.

"For our clients, newspapers are the core medium," he said. "They get a measure by the ring of the cash register every day as to how productive their ad is. But clearly they insist on accurate numbers and getting what they pay for."

That's the conundrum faced by 60 car dealers on Long Island who sued Newsday in July after the fraud disclosures. The newspaper responded by refusing to carry the dealers' ads.

With both sides losing money - dealers' sales were down, while Newsday reportedly was missing out on $1-million per month in ad revenue - a resolution was reached earlier this month.

The ads are back in Newsday, with the dealers paying a lower rate than before the lawsuit.

Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Kris Hundley can be reached at 727 892-2996 or hundley@sptimes.com

At a glance

Tribune Co.

Newsday:
inflated weekday and Sunday circulation by nearly 100,000 in 2003; earlier years
being reaudited

Hoy: daily circulation of the New York edition in 2003 about half of what had been reported

Remedy: up to $95-million set aside to compensate advertisers

Stock price since announcement: down 12 percent

Hollinger International

Chicago Sun-Times: single-copy circulation overstated by
72,000 daily copies for several years

Remedy: No compensation program yet announced

Stock price since announcement: down 3.2 percent

Belo Corp.

Dallas
Morning News: inflated daily circulation by 1.5 percent, Sunday by 5 percent

Remedy: set aside $23-million for advertisers

Stock price since announcement: down 3.7 percent

A Spyhole Into North Korea

By Andrei Lankov

No state is complete without a security agency, often derogatorily described as the "political police" in less democratic countries (or simply countries we happen to dislike). Of course, the notion of what constitutes a challenge to law and order differs according to the political system in question. An act that may be regarded as high treason in one state might be viewed as a perfectly normal part of the political process in another.



The core of the North Korean internal security system is the Ministry of the Protection of State Security (MPSS or kukka anjon powibu in Korean). Not much is known about this institution, and not only because of its secretive nature. When the Cold War was at its height, American publishers churned out a tidal wave of publications about the KGB, and the Soviet official press produced an equally impressive amount of material about the CIA and FBI. These publications were heavily biased, but they still provided useful if distorted information. Nothing like it is happening in Korea. For some reason the South Korean authorities zealously guard all the information about the MPSS they undoubtedly have.

Nonetheless, something is known. The security police operated within the Ministry of the Interior from the inception of the North Korean state. In February 1973, the political police functions were entrusted to a new Ministry of State Political Security. It was headed by Kim Pyong-ha, a distant relative of Kim Il-sung. However, the connection with the Great Family does not necessarily help. After all, under a dictatorship it is very dangerous to be a chief of political police, as fates of Stalin's numerous henchmen testify. In 1982 Kim Pyong-ha was purged and disappeared. Then the MPSS was subjected to a thorough purge, and thousands of officers who were deemed to be closely related to Kim Pyong-ha were sent to labour camps with their families _ the collective responsibility is a cornerstone of the North Korean system. The guards recollect that new inmates were arriving in trainloads. Well, they learned what had been the fate of their victims before them¡¦

In 1993, the Ministry of State Public Security acquired its present name. The MPSS, together with the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Public Security, reports directly to the head of the state and not to the Cabinet. It is not known who is currently the head of this powerful agency, but it has often been suggested that these duties are technically assumed by Kim Jong-il himself. Perhaps, this is really the case: the Great Leader is a known fan of spy adventures, with a penchant for all things clandestine.

Like the KGB, after which it was once loosely patterned, the MPSS deals with a number of tasks. It is responsible for overseas intelligence (along with the so-called "Third Department" and "Room 35"), and it also deals with government communications and the protection of important installations. However, its major task is to fight espionage and dissent within the country.

In tracking and uprooting "unreliable elements," the MPSS relies on an extensive network of informers. It has been stated repeatedly by the defecting MPSS officials that the general rule of thumb is to have one informer for every 50 members of the population. The special representatives of the MPSS are dispatched to all important factories and institutions to monitor the political reliability of the staff.

Even the most innocent remarks can be easily represented as political subversion. For example, in the 1970s, a vet uttered something like "in this world only pigs can live happily," while treating a pig. This was interpreted as a counter-revolutionary statement; the culprit was arrested, tortured and shot, while his family was sent to a prison camp. We know this story from a camp guard who later managed to defect.

The network of prison camps for the real, potential or imagined enemies of the regime is also managed by the MPSS. On the base of aerial and satellite photos, it is now believed that North Korean camps keep between some 150,000 and 200,000 inmates.

I wonder what will happen to the MPSS officers in the future. I do not think these people will ever be punished - save for a handful of the most notorious or unlucky ones. Too many people, for far too long, have partaken in crimes in what is arguably the world's most repressive regime. Perhaps, forgetfulness (if not forgiveness) is the most practical solution. But that is another story.

A serio?

NEW YORK (AP) - CBS will say it can't prove documents it relied on for 60 Minutes story about President Bush's National Guard service were authentic, executive says.

Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time

By SARA RIMER
The New York Times

MONTGOMERY - Nineteen seventy-two was the year George W. Bush dropped off the radar screen.

He abandoned his once-prized status as a National Guard pilot by failing to appear for a required physical. He sought temporary reassignment from the Texas Air National Guard to an Alabama unit but for six months did not show up for training. He signed on as an official in the losing campaign of a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, and even there he left few impressions other than as an amiable bachelor with a good tennis game and a famous father.

"To say he brought in a bunch of initiatives and bright ideas," said a fellow campaign worker, Devere McLennan, "no he didn't."

This year of inconsequence has grown increasingly consequential for President Bush because of persistent, unanswered questions about his National Guard service - why he failed to take his pilot's physical and whether he fulfilled his commitment to the Guard. If anything, those issues became still murkier this past week, with the controversy over the authenticity of four documents disclosed by CBS News and its program "60 Minutes" purporting to shed light on that Guard record.

Still, a wider examination of his life in 1972, based on dozens of interviews and other documents released by the White House over the years, yields a portrait of a young man like many other young men of privilege in that turbulent time - entitled, unanchored and safe from combat, bouncing from a National Guard slot made possible by his family's prominence to a political job arranged through his father.

In a speech on Tuesday at a National Guard convention, Mr. Bush said he was "proud to be one of them," and in his autobiography he writes that his service taught him respect for the chain of command. But a review of records shows that not only did he miss months of duty in 1972, but that he also may have been improperly awarded credit for service, making possible an early honorable discharge so he could turn his attention to a new interest: Harvard Business School.

Mr. Bush, nearly 26, went to Alabama in mid-May 1972 to work on the campaign of Winton M. Blount, a construction magnate known as Red who was a friend of Mr. Bush's father. The Democratic opponent was Senator John J. Sparkman, chairman of the Senate banking committee, a legendary power in what was still a solidly Democratic South.

Mr. Bush, while missing months of the Guard duty that allowed him to avoid Vietnam, was the political director of the Blount campaign, which accused Mr. Sparkman - a hawk on the war - and the national Democrats of supporting "amnesty for all draft dodgers" and of showing "more concern for coddling deserters than for patriotic American young men who have lost their lives in Vietnam." In the last week of the race, the Blount campaign ran a radio advertisement using an edited recording of Mr. Sparkman that made him appear to support forced busing of schoolchildren, which he opposed.

Although campaign records list Mr. Bush as third in command, people who worked in the race said he was not involved in those tactics or with the overall agenda. Mr. Bush's connection was Jimmy Allison, a political operative from Midland, Tex., who was running the campaign and was a close friend of George H. W. Bush, having managed the elder Mr. Bush's 1966 Congressional victory in Houston.

Mr. Allison's widow, Linda, who volunteered in the Blount campaign, said she became curious about the young Mr. Bush's job after noticing his coming into the office late and leaving early.

"I asked Jimmy, 'What does Georgie do?' '' Mrs. Allison, 73, said in an interview, repeating the account she had given to Salon, the online publication. "He just said George had called him and told him that Georgie was having some difficulties in Houston. Big George thought it would be beneficial to the family and George Jr. for him to come to Alabama to work on the campaign with Jimmy."

Wandering Pleasure-Seeker

In Houston, nearly five years out of Yale, Mr. Bush had been adrift, without a career or even a long-running job. He had been rejected by the University of Texas law school and had briefly considered, then abandoned, a run for the Texas Legislature. Acquaintances recall him tooling around town in his Triumph sports car, partying with a crowd of well-to-do singles.

His jobs had mostly come through family ties, and in 1971 he was hired as a management trainee at Stratford of Texas, an agricultural and horticultural conglomerate owned by a Bush family friend, Robert H. Gow. Mr. Bush's immediate supervisor, Peter Knudtzon, then Stratford's executive vice president, recalls him as a smart, dutiful worker who, while lacking direction, was keenly interested in the process of politics - "how people get elected, where the power is."

Every so often, he would take off work to fly with the National Guard. His entree to the Guard had come through Ben Barnes, then the lieutenant governor of Texas, who has said that he helped get Mr. Bush, among other well-connected young men, a slot at the request of a Bush family friend. When Mr. Bush applied, in 1968, one of the forms he filled out asked if he would volunteer for overseas duty; he checked "I 'do not' volunteer for overseas."

And he got off to a splashy start. After basic training and a year at flight school in Georgia, he was assigned to Ellington Air Force Base outside Houston, where he flew F-102 fighter jets. In March 1970, with his father, himself a World War II Navy pilot, in Congress, the Texas Air National Guard issued a news release announcing that the young Mr. Bush "doesn't get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed," but from "the roaring afterburner of the F-102." As he wrote in his autobiography, "It was exciting the first time I flew, and it was exciting the last time." In a November 1970 evaluation, his squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, called him a "top-notch" pilot and a "natural leader."

By 1972, though, something had changed; the excitement seemed to have waned. Mr. Bush's flying buddy from Ellington, Dean Roome, said Mr. Bush may have been frustrated because the unit's growing role as a training school left young pilots fewer opportunities to log hours in the air. Others who knew him believe he simply lost interest. He was once again at loose ends, without a regular job, having left Stratford after a year or so, unhappy in the company's buttoned-down atmosphere.

Whatever precisely was drawing Mr. Bush away from flying, it was then, in the spring of 1972, that the Alabama job came along. He had worked for Jimmy Allison before - on a 1968 Senate campaign in Florida - but this would be his first full-time job in the family business, politics.

Still, there was the matter of his commitment to the Guard. Moving to Alabama meant taking a temporary leave from his Texas unit; Guard officials say it was not unusual for civilian officers to take jobs away from their home states. Mr. Bush did not wait to line up a spot with an Alabama unit before arriving in Montgomery in mid-May.

Mr. Bush first tried to join the 9921 Air Reserve Squadron in Montgomery, which was classified as a "standby reserve unit." Unlike his unit in Texas, the Alabama unit had no planes and its members were neither paid nor required to attend monthly drills.

In July, though, senior Guard officials rejected Mr. Bush's transfer, saying he had to continue with a "ready reserve unit," which requires monthly attendance. In that same period - the precise timing is not clear - he did something that brought his dwindling flying ambitions to a close: he failed to take the annual physical exam required of all pilots.

In his 1999 book, "A Charge to Keep," Mr. Bush did not mention the missed physical or the suspension. "I was almost finished with my commitment in the Air National Guard," he wrote, "and was no longer flying because the F-102 jet I had trained in was being replaced by a different fighter." In fact, when he missed his physical he had almost two years left in the Guard.

Later, an aide to Mr. Bush explained that he had missed his physical because he was waiting to get examined by his personal physician. But pilots were required to be examined by military doctors.

More recently the White House has said that he did not take the physical because Alabama units were not flying the F-102. But his second application to transfer to Alabama - after the rejected transfer in July - was filed in September 1972, at least two months after he had missed his physical.

Whatever the reason, on Sept. 5, Mr. Bush was notified that he was suspended from flying "for failure to accomplish annual medical examination."

By that time, still without an Alabama unit, he had not attended a required monthly drill for almost five months, according to records released by the White House. Under the law at the time, he could have been sent to Vietnam. But in the relatively relaxed world of the Guard, and with hardly anyone being called up for active duty anymore, officials took no action. He was free to stay in Montgomery and work on the Blount campaign.

Richard Nelson, who had been Mr. Blount's political director, remembers briefing Mr. Bush when he arrived in town. "He was a bright young man," Mr. Nelson recalled. "I knew who his father was."

The months in Montgomery were part of what Mr. Bush has described as his "nomadic" years, when he "kind of floated and saw a lot of life." No one remembers him worrying about his Guard status - or, for that matter, much of anything else. He worked the phones in the Montgomery office and drove around the state meeting with county chairmen. He played tennis at Winton Blount's mansion and partied with the other young campaign workers at watering holes like the Top of the Star, at the Montgomery Holiday Inn.

Kay Blount Pace, 52, the candidate's daughter, said Mr. Bush did not act like the son of the man who was then the United States ambassador to the United Nations. "This was just Joe Blow - cute, fun George Bush, who fit in with the campaign," Ms. Pace said.

Murphy Archibald, a nephew of Winton Blount's, remembers Mr. Bush rolling into the office at noon and joking about how much he had had to drink the night before.

"I found him to be far younger than his age," recalled Mr. Archibald, a Democrat in Charlotte, N.C., who had gone to Vietnam in 1968.

One way or another, Vietnam ran through the lives of the young campaign workers in Montgomery. Devere McLennan said he figured he got lucky when, after enlisting in the Marines, he washed out of Quantico with a bad back. Another campaign worker, Emily Marks, had a college boyfriend who had been killed by a land mine in Vietnam a couple of years before. In 1972, Ms. Marks, the daughter of an old Montgomery family, was dating George Bush, and she remembers that he was in the Guard but could offer no detailed recollections. "A lot of people were doing Guard duty," she said in an interview.

That September, grounded from flying but still obligated to his Guard service, he wrote to his Texas squadron commander, Colonel Killian, asking for permission to perform his monthly drills with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery for September, October and November, according to documents released by the White House.

"We told him that was O.K. with us," said Bobby W. Hodges, then a commander in the Texas Guard. He was told he would have to do drills there, Mr. Hodges added. "He may or may not have done it. I don't know."

Payroll records released by the White House show that in addition to being paid for attending a drill in Alabama the last weekend in October, Mr. Bush was also paid for a weekend drill after the Blount election, on Nov. 11 and 12, and for meetings on Nov. 13 and 14.

But there are no records from the 187th indicating that Mr. Bush, in fact, appeared on those days in October and November, and more than a dozen members of the unit from that era say they never saw him. The White House said last week that there were no records from the Alabama unit because Mr. Bush was still officially part of the Texas Guard. But Mr. Hodges, the former Texas commander, said the 187th "should have a record of his drills."

Mr. Bush's former campaign colleagues remember being aware that he had some relationship with the Guard. Mr. McLennan recalled going with Mr. Bush to the dry cleaner to pick up his Guard uniforms. Joe Holcombe, who managed the Montgomery office, remembers Mr. Bush missing a meeting at the candidate's house.

"Jimmy said, 'He's with the Guard,' '' Mr. Holcombe said.

A Fight Between Hawks

That fall, political observers were predicting a big victory for the incumbent, but the Blount campaign fought hard.

Although both candidates were hawks in a fiercely pro-military state, Mr. Blount tried to align his opponent with George McGovern, the Democratic Party's antiwar presidential candidate. Then, a few days before the election, the Blount campaign broadcast a radio commercial in which Mr. Sparkman, a staunch segregationist, was heard saying "busing is all right."

According to an account in The Birmingham News, the Blount campaign had produced the commercial by deleting part of Mr. Sparkman's lengthy answer to a question about busing during a radio interview, and switching a question and answer on the subject. The Blount campaign maintained at the time that the interview had simply been compressed for time's sake, but the Sparkman campaign said the tape was doctored to inject racial innuendo. Blount campaign workers say these tough tactics had the mark of Mr. Allison.

Mr. Bush's own retelling of the Blount campaign leaves out any negative aspects. He described Mr. Allison, who died in 1978, as "a wonderful friend" and "a mentor in a way." He wrote that "I witnessed firsthand the effects of populist campaigning." Gov. George Wallace, who was shot that spring, taped a radio commercial for Mr. Sparkman casting Mr. Blount as an elitist multimillionaire who lived in a mansion with 26 bathrooms.

Winton Blount lost in a landslide. "A good man went down to defeat," Mr. Bush wrote.

A Return to Houston

After the election, Mr. Bush returned to Houston, moving out of his small rented bungalow in Montgomery. He left the place a mess, with a broken light fixture and piles of debris, according to Mary Smith, whose husband was the bungalow's caretaker. Ms. Smith said her husband, who has since died, sent Mr. Bush a bill for professional cleaning but never heard back.

By January 1973, Mr. Bush had a new job, with an inner-city youth program organized by John L. White, a former professional football player who knew his father. And he continued his erratic relationship with the National Guard, where he had 18 months left of his six-year commitment.

A review of records raises questions about whether he was properly credited for his service. Documents released by the White House show that he was paid for drills in January, April and several days in early May 1973. These drills were in Alabama, the White House said, and his old friend Emily Marks, now Emily Marks Curtis, said she remembered Mr. Bush returning to Montgomery for Guard duty.

But Mr. Bush had been authorized to drill in Alabama only from September through November 1972.

By the summer of 1973, Mr. Bush had decided to go to Harvard Business School. According to documents released by the White House, he wanted an early discharge from the Guard but did not have enough service points for 1972 and 1973, since he had missed months of training. Guardsmen were required to earn 48 points each fiscal year, or four points for each weekend drill every month.

Although missed drills can be made up, regulations at the time said it had to be done within 30 days and in the same fiscal year. As the time for his early discharge neared, Mr. Bush was lacking enough points; according to records for July 1973, he attended drills on 18 days that month.

When questions arose about Mr. Bush's Guard service, the White House asked a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, Albert C. Lloyd Jr., to review his record. In a memorandum released by the White House in February, Mr. Lloyd wrote that from May 1973 through May 1974, Mr. Bush accumulated 35 training points and 15 points for being a Guard member "for a total of 56 points.'' It is not clear how Mr. Lloyd came up with 56, instead of 50. Another military document released by the White House indicates that Mr. Bush had earned only 38 points from May 1973 until his discharge that October.

A retired Army colonel, Gerald A. Lechliter, who has prepared an extensive analysis of Mr. Bush's National Guard record, described Mr. Lloyd's memorandum as "seemingly an attempt to whitewash Bush's record." Mr. Lloyd declined comment last week.

Mr. Lechliter, who describes himself as a political independent, also said that Mr. Bush was not entitled to 20 credits he received from Nov. 13, 1972, until July 19, 1973, because the service was being made up improperly.

Mr. Lechliter also said that Mr. Bush should not have been paid for these sessions. "That would appear to be a fraud," he said in an interview last week.

However the points added up, on Oct. 1, 1973, Mr. Bush was awarded an honorable discharge. By that time he was already at Harvard.

Sara Rimer reported from Montgomery for this article, Ralph Blumenthal from Texas, and Raymond Bonner from Texas and Washington.