CNSNew.com is reporting that typography experts are fairly confident that documents exposed on CBS’s 60 Minutes II were fake. The documents, allegedly authored in 1972, used proportional fonts and superscript lettering, not widely available in 1972.
I am very familiar with the typewriter the Navy used in the 1980s: IBM Selectric III. It had changable font golfballs, one of which was proportional (CGTimes). But it looked awful. The proportional spacing was in consistent. Most people stuck with the Courier font. I believe that one of the fonts we had on the USS Woodrow Wilson had some special superscript characters. I don’t remember if th was one of them
The IBM Selectric III was not available in 1972. And a National Guard unit wouldn’t have had them until the active duty military was ready to disgard them. (Reserves and Guards tend to live with hand-me-downs from the actives.) The Selectric II was released in 1971, but I don’t know when the DoD began purchasing them. (Here’s some history on the Selectric.)
I would not be surprised at all if Dan Rather personally forged the documents. Ever since George 41 humiliated him on the evening news in 1988 he’s been out to get the Bushes.