Fantastic reference, Drag. Very interesting. I'm no expert, but to my untrained eye it looks like even the signatures may have been forged.
Add in that Staudt (if that reference is to the same person in question) had retired the year before the memo mentioning his name was allegedly written, and that Bush may have been gone from the address to which one of the memos was supposedly sent long before 1972, and things don't look too good for CBS.
The CO's secretary at my little outfit (Naval Regional Medical Clinic, Port Hueneme, CA, 1978-80) had an IBM Selectric IIRC, but everyone else had a Remington or other IBM wanna-be, none of which would have had superscript capability. Even if one concedes that the documents in question could have been created on state-of-the-art equipment available at the time, I doubt seriously that an ANG unit, even a Texas ANG unit, would have had even one such state-of-the art typewriter. The cost of the only contemporary machine capable of producing a document with those characteristics has been quoted at $3,600 to $4,000 in 1970 dollars - what would that be, nearly 20 grand in today's dollars? Not too likely.
Cheers,
Daiwa
