Rathergate question

I was out of the country for a few weeks when Rathergate initially broke and I had very limited access to English news media. Unfortunately, because of the volume of crap written on the story, it was hard for me to get my hands around it when I got back home.

But, it looks to me that Rather's source was shaky & unreliable as a person and that Rather should have gotten more support, but that the memo itself was never proven to be false - and, I think at least one college professor (a radical librul, I'm sure) analyzed the documents and thinks the memo is legit.

Is my understanding correct?

No, but close.
The content of the memo is believable. However, the actual memos themselves are laughably obvious as forgeries, and even if they had not been so obvious it would have been impossible to prove they were authentic as only bad photocopies existed, and these are easy to fake. This “impossible to verify” alone should have precluded their use as the basis for a story.
It would appear that someone forged documents to “prove” something that was likely really true, and got CBS to buy off on it.

You may hear it said that one of the things that proves the memos false is the presence of superscripts, which could not have been produced by typewriters of the day. This is countered by the assertion that superscripts could indeed have been produced then, and indeed appear in other documents in Bush’s record.
The superscript that appears in the forgeries consists of raised and scaled (different size) type; the superscript that appears in the other documents is the same type on a raised baseline. Further, the interline spacing of the body text in the document is increased a fraction of a line to allow room for the raised superscript, which would be next to impossible on a typewriter. The superscript produced and the line-spacing increase exactly matches that produced by a recent copy of Microsoft Word on a modern laser printer.

Trying to support the memos was (and is) a losing proposition. If you still want to go after Bush’s war record, there are better ways.