of the exposure of Hersh's "bombshell"
was aired in the New York Times on September 27th. In this story,
Bill Carter disclosed that there were doubts expressed about the
documents by NBC to Hersh many months ago. Warren Littlefield, an
NBC executive, said that Hersh had tried to peddle a documentary
to them based on the documents. After NBC sent their experts to
look at them in the summer of 1996, he told Hersh that in their
opinion the documents were questionable. He said that NBC's
lawyers were more specific with Hersh's lawyers. This was backed
up by David Samuels' article in The New Yorker of 11/3/97. So
Hersh's denials on this point, mentioned by Carter, ring hollow.
What makes the hollowness more palpable is one of the typing
inconsistencies in the documents. On the Jennings segment, former
FBI expert Jerry Richards showed one of the most blatant errors
in the concoction. The typist had made a misspelling and had gone
back to erase it. But the erasure was done with a lift-off ribbon
which was not available in 1960 and was not sold until the
seventies. This erasure is so clear it even shows up in photos in
the Samuels article. Hersh has been a reporter since the early
sixties. For at least two decades (before computers came in), he
made his living with a typewriter. Yet, in all the hours he spent
looking at these papers, this anachronism never jumped out at
him?
That Hersh could be such an easy mark, that he was so eager to
buy into the Summers-Haspiel-Slatzer concoction tells us a lot
about what to expect from his book