Bill Burkett was the

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainm ...

source in the

Killian documents The Killian documents controversy (also referred to as Memogate or Rathergate) involved six documents containing false allegations about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973. D ...

affair of 2004. He is retired as a Lieutenant Colonel from the Texas Army National Guard. He claimed that in 1997, while outside the governor's office in Austin, he overheard a conversation about "wanting to bury George W. Bush's Vietnam service record". This has been disputed. Burkett had received publicity in 2000, after making and then retracting a claim that he had been transferred to

Panama Panama ( , ; es, link=no, Panamá ), officially the Republic of Panama ( es, República de Panamá), is a transcontinental country spanning the southern part of North America and the northern part of South America. It is bordered by Co ...

for refusing "to falsify personnel records of Governor Bush", and in February 2004, when he claimed to have knowledge of "scrubbing" of Bush's TexANG records. According to the review panel, investigations by major news outlets at the time, including CBS, "revealed inconsistencies... which led to questions regarding his credibility and whether his claims could be proven". Burkett's claims about the origins of the documents have since changed several times. He admitted to lying to CBS about the origin of the memos when he said he got them from fellow guardsman George Conn, then claiming that he received the Killian documents from a woman calling herself "Lucy Ramirez" who has never been identified. The documents, purported to have been typed in the early 1970s, were likely produced many years later with a computer using

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...

on default settings. Burkett said he burned the originals after faxing copies of the documents to CBS. When asked about Burkett's role in the controversy, David Van Os, Burkett's lawyer, responded with the hypothesis that someone may have reconstructed documents that they believed existed in 1972 or 1973.

References

Living people Killian documents controversy Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-mil-bio-stub

See also

References