Unsolved Mysteries

Last week, the tortured saga of the bogus documents came to a close. Or at least the major issues were settled of how CBS News came to rely on—and then adamantly defend—dubious records of President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. As the investigative panel chosen by CBS, former Associated Press CEO Louis Boccardi and former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh, reported in exhaustive detail, 60 Minutes Wednesday aired a segment on Sept. 8 that was tainted in almost every regard. But the report doesn't resolve all the questions that spring from the story of how producer Mary Mapes, with a barely engaged Dan Rather as her correspondent, rushed the story onto air. Yes, we know that Mapes obtained photocopies of National Guard documents from a longstanding Bush critic, former Texas Army National Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. And we know about what happened: According to the report, Mapes came to believe fervently in the authenticity of the documents that purported to show Bush getting into the Guard through favoritism and then avoiding punishment for breaking rules. The panel says the producer ignored evidence that the documents might be false and she skirted the truth when dealing her supervisors at CBS as the story was haphazardly vetted and then thrown on the air. And then, when the blogosphere erupted with withering critiques of the documents, CBS News spent 12 long days denying the obvious. Rather's exit from the Evening News was hastened by the scandal. Three CBS executives were asked to resign last week. Mapes was fired. CBS announced new rules for its newsgathering operation. But the story is hardly over, and plenty of questions remain.

Despite the investigative panel's exhaustive fact-gathering, Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi did not even attempt to answer the biggest question of all in this matter. But the report does contain come intriguing information. On Aug. 25, two weeks before the fateful CBS broadcast, Bill Burkett wrote a commentary for Linda Starr and Bev Conover's anti-Bush Web site Online Journal that included a passage with this warning: “George W. Bush, you may be the president. But I know you lied” based on “the files that we have now reassembled.” Some observers, in addition to wondering what “reassembled” files would look like, also speculate about who the “we” in that sentence refers to.

At CBS, Dan Rather may be the only remaining soul who still clings to the thin thread of hope that the documents actually came from the files of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian of Bush's squadron. One CBS executive says, “Don't dismiss the possibility that Burkett wrote them himself.” Certainly, Burkett's Army National Guard background made him familiar with military documentation, and it might explain the appearance in the documents of Army terms such as “billet” that Air National Guard personnel found jarring. But Burkett also repeatedly implored Mary Mapes to have CBS authenticate the papers he gave her. And, indeed, Mapes herself wasn't always so convinced that the documents were genuine. She told the panel that she worried early on that they might have been planted as “a political dirty trick”—and she related a meeting when she raised the possibility with Burkett. He seemed “genuinely shocked” at the suggestion, Mapes said.

When Mapes contacted Joe Lockhart in the Kerry campaign on Burkett's behalf, Lockhart's alarm bells went off. “Lockhart said that he told her he was reluctant to get involved, as he wanted to know how sure she was that it was not a setup,” the report says. “Lockhart said that something 'did not feel right.'”

As with the best political black ops, it's not obvious which side might have generated the documents. If they were manufactured with enough mistakes embedded to guarantee that they would be revealed as bogus, then suspicion turns to supporters of President Bush: he was essentially inoculated against further inquiries into this National Guard service after the CBS debacle. But if the documents were fashioned in the hope that they'd sail unchallenged into the permanent public record—and who could have predicted the unprecedented blogoscopy they were subjected to—then they benefited the Kerry campaign. One thing is certain: there's a National Magazine Award or a Pulitzer for the journalist who solves this mystery.

The pity is that, if Mapes hadn't become so obsessed with proving the latest little wrinkle in Bush's military record—in other words, trying to put a little polish on old news—the producer would have recognized that she had a hell of a story to cover: who ginned up the phony papers and why.

Four CBS employees lost their jobs over the National Guard story, including Betsy West, who as senior VP for prime time was an important fixture in the CBS hierarchy. In the panel's report, CBS News President Andrew Heyward's involvement in the tale is every bit as prominent as Betsy West's, and yet, when it came time for network President and Viacom Co-COO Leslie Moonves to lay blame, the buck apparently stopped with West. Heyward remained unscathed. Why? For one thing, the burden to challenge Mapes' story fell heaviest on the executives below Heyward.

Moonves says the biggest surprise to emerge from the investigation was “the fact that a single person can take the ball so far down the field without having to answer a lot of questions.” West and 60 Minutes Wednesday executive producer Josh Howard, Howard's No. 2 Mary Murphy and CBS lawyers all might have posed some of the right questions, but they failed to detect shaky answers or didn't push hard enough to test the strength of Mapes' reporting. “There were a lot of points in this process where red flags should have gone up,” Moonves says.

In effect, Heyward's subordinates failed to follow their boss's instructions every step of the way. Before the story aired, Heyward specifically urged West and Howard in an e-mail to “work closely with” Rather and Mapes, cautioning the executives not let those two “stampede us in any way.” In the days after the Sept. 8 broadcast, as the torrent of criticism increased and CBS embarked on its disastrous defense of the story, Heyward ordered a systematic review of how the documents had been authenticated, raising the possibility that CBS should back away from the story.

The fact that West effectively ignored the first order and rejected the second as she plunged ahead with a strategy of hostile defensiveness no doubt sealed her fate. But wasn't Heyward responsible for leading the team and demanding results? As far as Moonves is concerned—and Moonves' opinion is about all that matters on the subject—Heyward “said and did all the right things from his perch. I think the process let him down,” Moonves says. “I don't think that warranted his going.” Moonves, sympathetic to the plight of the any corporate executive, adds, “We all have lieutenants that we trust to be doing things, and you don't know always know whether they're being done.”

Also working in Heyward's favor: his reputation as a loyal soldier, someone who is reliably eager to please his boss. That sort of devotion is known to appeal strongly to Moonves, who—like many leaders—does not exactly surround himself with a lot of footloose executives likely to wander off the corporate reservation.

But it's not clear what the future at CBS holds. 60 Minutes Wednesday survived the National Guard story, but with its anemic ratings, the show is not assured of surviving 2005. And morale at CBS News has hit Black Rock-bottom. Tom Freston, Moonves' co-COO at Viacom, is competing with him to succeed Sumner Redstone atop the company, and Freston just made a move to burnish his credentials by hiring Brad Grey to revitalize Paramount. Moonves could very well answer by targeting CBS News for a shakeup. It's not clear how Andrew Heyward would fit into those plans.

President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard had been pretty thoroughly raked over during his first presidential campaign. In fact, Mapes herself had been working the case as far back as 1999 and even enlisted Rather to conduct a couple of interviews, although, in the end, she couldn't come up with a usable story. But plenty had been written and broadcast about Bush's military history by the time Mapes dived into the story last summer. And, indeed, in the tit-for-tat world of journalism, when John Kerry's Vietnam service became an issue last year, assignment editors almost reflexively warmed to balancing the equation by turning to Bush's record again.

But what they found was precious little information that qualified as news. Mapes was clearly riveted by what she saw in the documents turned over to her by Burkett, but others at CBS were underwhelmed. According to the investigative panel's report, Howard told them that, when Mapes showed him the first set of documents from Burkett, he “wondered why Mapes was excited about them as he did not think that they contained significant new information.”

Mapes made her case, bolstering it with additional documents from Burkett, but even then she encountered resistance at CBS during the vetting process. At a meeting involving Mapes, Howard, Murphy and other network news executives on the morning of Sept. 8, the day the segment about Bush's stint in the Texas Air National Guard aired, “Mapes was asked to explain why the documents were newsworthy, as some participants did not think that they advanced the story of President Bush's TexANG service.”

In the end, Mapes convinced CBS that the story was newsworthy because it appeared to prove that President Bush had benefited from string-pulling to get into the Air National Guard, a relatively safe haven during the Vietnam War, and had broken military rules apparently without consequence. We'll never know what the American public might have made of this news. But its track record in having already elected Bill Clinton, who actively avoided the military draft, and Bush, whose military record is not exactly heroic, suggests that the reaction might have been a nationwide shrug.

Toward the end of its report, the investigative panel tries to put itself in Mapes' position and comes down on her side. The section is called “Assuming the Killian Documents Were Authentic, They Added New Data to the Bush TexANG Record.” But “new data” doesn't exactly explain the desperate, head-over-heels dash to get the story on the air. Much as President Bush's supporters would like to think that the motivating factor for the scramble was a certain date in early November, the likely explanation was the pressure emanating from the nature of TV news. Mapes & Co. wanted to beat the competition. In the sprint for the finish line, they failed to notice that their scoop—even if legitimate—didn't really add up to much.

Don't look for Mapes to surface at any major TV news organization. A more likely place to find her in the news: as the subject of a story about a lawsuit filed against CBS for wrongful dismissal. She could look for a precedent in April Oliver, a producer who was also felled by a story harking back to the Vietnam era: the “Operation Tailwind” report in 1998 for CNN on the military's supposed use of nerve gas. CNN disavowed the piece, and heads rolled, much as happened at CBS, but Oliver sued and eventually walked away with a six-figure settlement.

The prospects of getting re-hired in the new business for Murphy, Howard and West are considerably better. Although they took the blame for letting the National Guard story get onto the air, plenty of their fellow producers in the television business murmured, There but for the grace of God go I. When a field producer fails to disclose information in response to direct questions, keeps conflicting facts out of discussions and generally befogs the vetting process as a story is only hours from airing, it would take a mind-reader to discover fatal errors in a story. Howard, Murphy and West are veteran news producers, with many ties throughout the business.

Linda Mason, newly appointed senior VP of standards and special projects in response to the scandal, says she feels for her co-workers who were asked to resign. Speaking personally, not for the network, she says, “I think that's a tragedy. They were all really great people and have done great work for CBS for years. But I was not part of that decision.”

Some of these folks might have more fans than others—Howard is especially well liked—but none is likely to be still out of work after, perhaps, spending a nice long summer at the beach.

A 60 Minutes insider tells B&C that the fallout from the National Guard episode “is affecting our ability to get people to talk to us. We've given anybody who wants it the perfect excuse to shut us out.” Les Moonves made a good start with his quick personnel moves last week and his introduction of rules ranging from requiring producers to inform senior management about the names and backgrounds of their sources in sensitive stories to mandating coordination between the news department and the communications department to ensure that the network's public statements are “fair and accurate.” But clearly more remains to be done in the rehabilitation of CBS News' reputation.

Mason, the new CBS troubleshooter, says viewers' respect is something the network will have to “earn, story by story.”

Given CBS News' storied history, the scandal hit the network perhaps harder than it would have one of its competitors. It was especially devastating that Dan Rather, the personification of CBS News in a way that other anchors are not twinned with their employers, was central to the debacle: Compounding the problem is the fact that, as Boccardi tells B&C, the scandal hit “in an environment where there's a lot of emotion and a lot of mistrust” of the media.

One good way to buttress CBS News as a journalistic enterprise would be for Viacom to open its wallet. CBS has been a threadbare operation for years, with a thin bench of reporters and producers. The panel's report amply showed a culture of poor management. Reinvigorating the news operation might mean spending money on the sort of new hires and new resources that will bring in unforgettable—and impeccably reported—TV journalism.

The investigative panel said that it found no political agenda behind the National Guard story. But—fair or not—a sizable part of the public assumes that Rather, who famously clashed with Richard Nixon and President Bush's father when he was in the White House, invested so much in the National Guard story because of an animus for Republicans. When Rather steps down from the anchor position this spring, that may go a long way toward addressing assumptions that CBS's reporting is biased.

Beyond the impact of the bogus-documents story on CBS, there's the question of how it affects the rest of the news business, which has seen poll after poll indicate plummeting public confidence in its reliability. In 1988, for instance, a Pew Research study found that 58% of Americans thought there was “no bias” in election coverage. In 2004—before the CBS bogus-documents scandal—the number had dropped to 38%.

Mason, who has been with CBS since 1966, has seen other news operations roiled by scandals, and felt the effects. “I think we are all in this together,” she says. “When one of us falters, all of us suffer.”

The good news, she adds, is that news operations survive, from NBC and Dateline to CNN to The New York Times: “Nobody has really escaped some sort of taint. And they've all come back from it by reinforcing their standards and working hard to get back their credibility.”