NEW YORK — Faced with numerous reports that controversial documents about President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service were forgeries, CBS News officials stopped asserting Wednesday that the papers the network had obtained were real, and said they would "redouble" their efforts to resolve the contradictions.
CBS News President Andrew Heyward wouldn't comment when asked if he still believed that the documents, purportedly from the early 1970s, were genuine, as he had insisted a day earlier.
"I have great confidence in our sources and reporting, but obviously there are unanswered questions," he said in an interview.
Heyward said Wednesday night that the network's new efforts were not an investigation but simply "an extension of the reporting we said we'd do."
"There are significant questions swirling around the documents," he said. "We said all along we would continue to report all aspects of the story, and this is an aspect well worth looking into."
Even as CBS acknowledged the questionable origin of the memos, the network asserted that the thrust of its report aired Sept. 8 on "60 Minutes" was true: that Bush had not fulfilled his National Guard commitment 30 years ago and that he had received favorable consideration that allowed him to avoid being sent to Vietnam.
On Wednesday night, the network aired an interview with Marion Carr Knox, who worked for 23 years at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston and served as a secretary and typist for the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, then Bush's squadron commander, and several other officers.
Knox told anchor Dan Rather that she had not typed the memos on which the network had based its first report. She did, however, say that she had typed documents like them, and that Killian had been angry about Bush's refusal to follow an order to take a physical.
She added that the young lieutenant seemed to have a casual attitude about attending drills, and that other officers in the unit were resentful of his absence.
"It seems to me that Bush felt that he was above reproach," Knox told Rather. "I think it's plain and simple. Bush didn't think that he had to go by the rules that others did."
The controversy swirling around CBS stemmed from six memos the network said it had obtained from a source it will not identify but calls "unimpeachable." Four of those memos were used in the "60 Minutes" broadcast last week. The network has acknowledged that the documents are not originals.
