2004 Election: Inside The War Rooms

The President didn't know what to make of the National Guard documents his communications director Bartlett showed him that morning in early September in the Oval Office. They looked like fresh evidence that Bush had received preferential treatment and ignored a direct order to attend a flight physical. Bush had never seen the documents before and had never heard of them. He couldn't remember having a conversation with anyone about the flight physical (which he had admitted skipping), as the documents contended. What Bush did notice was that his address on the documents was not the one he used while he was in the service. But there was the whiff of truth in the documents. They could be real. Bush and his staff weren't sure, but they had to come up with a reaction quickly. 60 Minutes had just sent the documents over that morning, and the camera crews were arriving in three hours.

At another time, Bush and Bartlett might have challenged the authenticity of the documents. But stiff-arming the press had failed during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and after the tempest over WMD claims in the State of the Union address, so the last thing Bush wanted was a credibility fight. "We couldn't challenge their veracity because then people would challenge ours," says Bartlett. A softer defense was hatched: Bartlett would hint that the alleged new evidence was being pushed by the President's political enemies but would stick to the talking points: Bush had been honorably discharged.

The strategy worked better than the Bush campaign could ever have imagined. After the 60 Minutes piece aired, bloggers took up the campaign's cause. Suddenly the story was about superscripts and typewriters and Dan Rather's history of trouble with Republicans. Had the Bush campaign made the same charges, they would probably have fallen flat. But though the bloggers were in some cases even more rabidly pro-Bush than his own staff members, they nevertheless seemed like gumshoes going after the truth. Bartlett eventually stopped spinning and just let the bloggers take over. Questions about the President's service dwindled, and CBS was forced to endure the kind of treatment White House aides received every week. "This is the gift that keeps on giving," said Bartlett at the time. "It's fun being on the other side of it for a change and watching them do all the things we get criticized for: denial, spin and stonewalling." Eventually, Rather had to acknowledge on-air that the documents might be forgeries and apologize for vouching for them. CBS appointed a two-person panel--Richard Thornburgh, Attorney General under the first President Bush, and Louis Boccardi, former president of the Associated Press--to investigate what had gone wrong and report back after the election.

KERRY

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