Maybe those documents ARE real...!

As some of you may know, I have from the first presumed that the CBS documents were fakes. I still would have strongly advised CBS not to use any documentation of unknown provenance, even if I felt that the documents were genuine.

Even so, I've been looking more carefully into the narrower question of whether the typeface of the document matches the Time New Roman font available via Microsoft Word. I'm a graphic designer by trade, and I know a few things about various fonts.

Obviously, I cannot say that the docs are authentic. And I wish the scans made available via CBS were of much higher quality. Even so, I do feel comfortable in saying that -- however these documents were produced -- they were NOT made with the Times New Roman font commonly available in Microsoft Word.

Try this experiment. First go here.

Then, use Acrobat's zoom function to make the characters quite large when you call up the May 4, 1972 CBS document. Then type in the same characters in Word. Again, zoom into the characters. Place the two windows side-by-side.

In all instances, the lower-case "h" has a COMPLETELY different shape -- the vertical stroke is much taller in Word. The lower-case "u" is very different, as is the numeral "3." Note the differences in the upper serifs of the lower-case "x."

To my eyes, the line thickness has much greater variety in a Microsoft Word document -- in fact, there is almost NO variety in the typeface of the CBS documents. Anyone who has dealt with heavily-photocopied old documents knows that the copying process tends to make thin parts of characters disappear. When the document is darkened to make the thin strokes visible, the thick strokes tend to become quite "overweight." Here, the line quality is surprisingly even. This tells me that original typeface did not have much, or any, variety of line thickness.

Note, for example, how comparitively thin the slanted line is in the numeral "4" in a Word Times New Roman document. Now look at the "4" in the CBS document. Every part of the "4" is the same thickness.

The letters really do bob up and down as opposed to laying flat horizontally, a factor which argues for typewritten origin. Look, for example, at the "a"s in "administrative" in paragraph 2 of the May 4, 1972 letter. There are ways to replicate this effect by computer, of course...but as I've noted, anyone using Photoshop to make the thing look authentically typewritten would have used a non-proportional font.

Does this mean the documents are authentic? Not necessarily. I have here simply addressed the question of whether they were produced using Microsoft Word. I feel that any objective person who has conducted the same examination I have outlined here will agree that the origin of these documents must be found somewhere else.