This is just a supposition, not really up to the standards of FR, and is pieced together from lots of reading of other blogs over the last ten days - can't give an explicit hattip, but a general one to all blogs - and if I get Ouch'ed I will accept and correct.
I believe this was just Step One - the set-up.
It is established that Rather was to fly to Washington and present the memos to the WH, but couldn't get out of New York because of the weather. Instead the doc's were faxed to McClellan, who only had three hours to review them, so said nothing and faxed them out to the world.
It was expected by Rather that Bush or the WH would "deny" the veracity of the memos. Rather would show a clip of the denial.
Rather already had the tape of Marcel Malvey's (?) "authentication" of the signatures in the can.
Can you hear it? In 60 Minutes, eyebrow-raised tones, "Really, Mr. President? Well, that's not what our handwriting expert says." . . . [Cut to tape]
Bush would then be established as a liar. How many times did McAuliffe call Bush a liar the day after the show? A shirker and deserter? They wanted to goad him into a response - pure bully action.
Next came Kitty Kelley - Bush snorted Cocaine at Camp David . . . (breathlessly). They hoped for another denial.
Can you hear it? "Reallllly Mr. President?" Of course we now know she had no tape of the "interview" - and who knows what falsehood they had up their sleeves.
My guess - and it is pure speculation, is they really intended to run with the COCAINE story, escalating the FAKE order to report for a physical into a "fear of detection so skipped the physical" claim. That played the first day or two, then died away.
Imagine the media outrage - the last two days Kerry has used "the "irrational insistence" by Bush that everything is OK in Iraq" line - Kerry's "Bush is in a dream world" riff is out there TODAY! But it would have been He's not just out of touch, he's high on drugs!!
The story would have expanded from "Fortunate Son" to a fortunate, DEBAUCHED son who never really did stop abusing substances. After all, once an addict always an addict, right?
Didn't Babs shriek in June, "He could start drinking again tomorrow!!!?"
They might even have faked some "abortion" correspondence of some kind. That rumor has been floating around for years, too.
But to start the first step they had to have documents. I'm not sure we'll ever know why they used these obvious forgeries - maybe they really DID get snookered. Or maybe they've just convinced themselves that the doc's are real.
As a sidebar, I asked a very bright associate with real 'Nam experience why Kerry would EVER lead with that. My associate thinks that after all these years of lying about his heroism and altering his service record, Kerry has come to believe his own story. That's why he is so enraged over SBVFT - it is a mental illness - really, a delusion - and the deluded brain cannot accept exposure of the truth.
Fortunately, there never were any real documents. We know Pres. Bush earned enough service points to legitimately complete his service and obtain an Honorable Discharge. He did not miss a physical in March, 1972, nor did he disobey an order. None of the "charges" is worth an answer.
The question really shouldn't be, "Why did CBS run the story?" - we know they wanted to entrap the President. The question should be, "Why did they stonewall?" The answer has little to do with fear of admitting an error.
By simply not permitting an answer to these ridiculous charges, that evil Rove caused the perpetrators to become so enraged that they completely lost sight of their original objective, and of the risks they were taking by continuing. They, also, have deluded themselves into believing their own story.
A bully can NEVER accept it when you just walk away, can he? You really can't understand the bully's behavior; you walk away, waiting to be hit in the back; and it just doesn't make sense. Then when the bully really gets mad, when he really loses control, you turn and punch him in the nose - and HE runs away, denying that HE did anything to YOU. But the teacher in the corner saw the whole thing, and he's caught - denial is never so vehement as when it comes from the guilty.
The original story - the 60 Minutes set-up entrapment has been done hundreds of times. It isn't so irrational. The abject denial that the memos are forgeries is totally irrational, dangerous behavior.
Rather is a laughingstock and he knows it - his career will always have an asterisk next to it.
Rather is a bully who just got a bloody nose from somebody who he THINKS is smaller - but the teacher caught him in the set-up.
And he's pointing the finger at ANYBODY other than himself.
Still.. you bring up a good point.. about why Kerry did what he did at the convention. And, the answer is.. this story really started back in Iowa. With the "chance" meeting of Rasmussen and the whole Vietnam vet meme.. took off.. this had been an old standby for Kerry.. but the story of the Hap River Rescue had drama and mythic power. This is how Kerry went form 5% in the polls to being the Dem's unstoppable front runner.
The convention was this same drama written large with all of Kerry's players telling and reinforcing this story and they felt it would have the same power and resonance as it had with the Dem (non-military) base. The problem is that the Swiftboat Vets announced in May that they were upset as hell. But before that they were making contacts and issuing warnings. Probably March or April. Interesting timing eh?
The Kerry Campaign figured these guys could be held at a distance because every time he has been attacked like this, he has turned this attack against the attacker and actually gotten a boost out of the attack.
The Kerry campaign expected and moved forward with the plan that the President would glom onto the Swifties and push their case. And the Kerry camp prepared "Operation Fortunate Son" as an answering salvo.
However, there was a problem in the core of "OFS." It was old news. Yawn... so it needed a new charge to drive it forward. This charge was that Bush Deliberately disobeyed a direct order. And this was to be reinforced with a plausible why.. because he didn't want to be caught with coke in his bloodstream. (This whole line of attack is an anachronism because drug testing like this really didn't get peoples attention for another decade in the 80's)
Still, it didn't need to be true.. just plausible and salacious. Something to drive the story home. So they looked through what they had from the President's files and they saw hints of what they needed. So they went looking for documents that would say what they needed. What happened next is just lies confronting lies, I don't have a clue at this point. Perhaps the story of Burkett picking up the forgeries in March is true, perhaps something else is true.
But several things went wrong with the plan as it unfolded.
First, the swifties chose to form a 527 and write a book with really well foundationed assertions. This allowed the Swifties to not approach the Administration for help. And, because they did their homework well and because the case is compelling on the face of it. They quickly found enough support to go forward.
Second, The blogosphere and talk radio embraced the swifties with their hearts and spread the stories they had to tell across the country. So that by the time any normal organization would have been just clawing for attention.. Kerry was faced with the Swifties messages already accepted as fact long before "OFS" was ready to roll. It was scheduled to strip the President of his credibility just after Labor day. So, so despite the whole press stating as a point of fact that the Swifties were full of who ha.. folks just shrugged and didn't buy it. They already decided Kerry was just exactly who the swifties said he was.
There is and was a vast communications system still digging and exploring and finding the Swiftboat story more confirmed day by day and the damage is being done to the MSM for ignoring this story. Folks are using its coverage as a barometer of "trustworthyness" of the the news source.
Third, apparently Burkett and Barns were skittish about their place in this drama. I am not sure of this at all. We will have to see.
Fourth, the memos looked real enough for non-technical folks. Its called a scatoma, you can't see certain things because you are conditioned not to notice them. We just accept words on a page without thinking, does this look like it was written on a typewriter? This all screams of a forger who is in his/her 20's. Someone who never wrote a term paper for high school or college on a typewriter. Someone who never even considered that this might be an issue. They just worried about making it look old.
Fifth, Bush had taken a very different tactic vs the Dems on 527's, they were suing to have them put onto the sidelines, therefore they couldn't use them and the Dems had worked out how to coordinate and dispatch 527 funds like artillery. This is transparent and laughable. I remember hearing Kerry's people whine because they were "off of the air" in August. (Not advertising) But this was planned, and coordinated to conserve funds for the after Labor Day campaign. Instead, the 527's and Dem Party was tasked to carry the water. the 527's didn't have anything in the pipe to counter the Swifties in August because they didn't expect for them to be able to cut through, but when they started to, Kerry responded and this set up an echo chamber vaulting "Unfit for Command" to #1 bestseller status. Not the plan.
Sixth, CBS has been carrying the Dems water all year really since Wilson and making millions on the way. Coordinating attacks on the president with multimedia roll outs Books and exclusives and all to great effect Wilson started the "president" lied.. lie right after our triumph in Iraq and this more than anything has lead to the Chaos in Iraq. It gave the rebellious allies a reason to hold back support rather than rolling up their sleeves and making the best of it.
Each one of these attacks doesn't happen in a day. It takes months to write books and film stories and get these things in place to roll. CBS was working on their piece of "OFS" and they needed these documents to make this whole story "NEWS". Wilson's "the president lied" about the Uranium story came from the forged letters from Niger that were planted, we find by the French to discredit Bush and the Coalition, so that the Iraq action could be stopped at the UN.
Seventh, they expected the Whitehouse to make a big denial. It was suppose to be GWB not Dan Rather doing the deny deny deny thing. Just like what you said.
Eighth, the Pajamahadeen strike. (Much has been said about this.) And break up the news cycle and OFS's wheels literally explode off of the train, but I am convinced ABC had a wiff of what was happening and they were already investigating this. ABC's nightline on the 9th didn't come out of no where. Instead, I think they called the theme of this scandal in an almost erie non-sequitur. The whole show was focused on Opposition Research and what happens if you get it wrong. Essentially blaming the Kerry Campaign for the memo's long before anyone else. This was strangely prescient of the Prowler's piece on how these documents originally came from Kerry's Oppo Research unit. And ABC had a ex-Kerry research staffer. ABC is just biding their time on rolling out the next bits of this, or perhaps they are sitting on this as part of some other Faustian pact. Will we know? The future will tell.