Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (24 page)

Young Bush enjoyed regaling associates with accounts of his drinking exploits. Blount’s nephew, C. Murphy Archibald, remembers W. telling one particular story “what seemed like a hundred times . . . He would laugh uproariously as though there was something funny about this. To me, that was pretty memorable, because here he is, a number of years out of college, talking about this to people he doesn’t know. He just struck me as a guy who really had an idea of himself as very much a child of privilege, that he wasn’t operating by the same rules.”
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W. also enjoyed recounting his adventures at Yale—how he got stopped by police officers there “all the time” for driving drunk but always got off when they learned who he was.

Two unconnected acquaintances of a well-known male Montgomery socialite, now deceased, recounted to me a story told to them by the socialite. In this account, the man had been partying with Bush at the Montgomery Country Club, combining drinking with illicit drugs. The socialite had told them that when the two made a brief stop at W.’s cottage so he could change clothes, Bush complained about the brightness, climbed up on a table, and smashed the chandelier with a baseball bat. Indeed, the family that rented Bush the cottage told me that he left extensive damage, including a smashed chandelier, and that he ignored two bills they sent him. The total came to about nine hundred dollars, a considerable sum in 1972.

A Guarded Assessment

The scenario in which W. fled Texas because he was having flying problems was confirmed to me when I spoke with Janet Linke. She is the widow of Jan Peter Linke, an Air Force pilot who had been flying an F-102 for the Florida Air National Guard and was brought in to take Bush’s place in the 147th Fighter Wing. In a 2004 interview, Mrs. Linke told me of a conversation that she and her husband had with Bush’s commanding officer, not long after they arrived at Ellington. According to Linke, “[Bush] was mucking up bad. [Lieutenant Colonel Jerry] Killian told us he just became afraid to fly.” Linke also recalled that Killian told them Bush “was having trouble landing, and that possibly there was a drinking problem involved in that.”
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Even at the time, Janet Linke realized that Killian meant something out of the ordinary. She knew from personal experience that drinking was commonplace among pilots during that period. Within a year after her husband took Bush’s place, Jan Peter Linke died when his car went off a road and plunged into a lake. Authorities concluded that Linke had been drinking and fell asleep at the wheel. This left Janet Linke a twenty-seven-year-old widow with a three-year-old son. Another member of the unit, Dr. Richard Mayo, said of drinking among the pilots: “I think we all did, yeah. There’s a great correlation between fighter pilots and alcohol. I mean, beer call was mandatory.”
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In summary: W. left his Houston Guard unit under a cloud, then apparently failed to show up for equivalent duty in Alabama. In Montgomery, his drunken exploits as a campaign staffer were known among the staff and others, but in print he was described as a prince. And while all this was going on, his father, named to head the national Republican Party at the end of 1972, finally seemed on an upward track commensurate with his ambitions. Clearly, the problems with his eldest son could not be allowed to thwart those ambitions.

X-Ray Optional

After Blount’s defeat in early November 1972, W. packed up and returned to Texas. But he did not report back to his unit at Ellington as he was required to do.

That December, the Bush annual holiday gathering was held in Washington, D.C., where Poppy was taking over the helm of the embattled Republican Party. The GOP was then in the midst of the Watergate affair, with new revelations unfolding daily. According to a story that has become a staple in the media narrative, W. had an altercation with his father around this time. Supposedly, W. had taken his younger brother Marvin to visit the Allisons— who had a house in the capital from the time Jimmy had worked at the Republican National Committee. After leaving the Allisons’ house, W. drove home drunk and managed to mow down some garbage cans in the process. In a scene beloved of the media, when the father tried to confront his son, W. challenged him to a fight, “mano a mano.”
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The story leaves a vivid impression of a rebellious young man who was beyond his family’s control—a part the legendary James Dean might have played. In reality, W. may have been out of control and under the influence of alcohol, but the proverbial acorn never strayed far from the tree. During the preceding six months, while apparently failing to perform his Guard duty, W. had been in regular contact with his parents. He and his father had been together at the GOP convention in August 1972 in Miami; in October at his grandfather Prescott’s funeral in Connecticut and at the parents’ apartment at the Waldorf Towers in New York City; and finally for this extended visit over the 1972–73 holidays.

Of course the incoming chairman of the Republican Party could ill afford any embarrassment concerning his son’s military service. So the stories of W.’s antagonism toward Poppy were useful in this regard. If the young rebel had indeed acted independently of his father, then the latter was off the hook for what had happened. I could find no evidence that Poppy has ever been pressed to say what he knew about these matters, and he declined interview requests relating to his son during W.’s presidency.

From their holiday gathering in Washington, the Bush clan repaired for New Year’s 1973 to their winter home on Florida’s exclusive Hobe Sound. There they were joined by the Allisons. W. continued to show a lack of maturity. One day, as his mother attempted to drive several miles to the country club where she and Mrs. Allison were to join their husbands, “Georgie,” twenty-six years old, drove in front of them in another car, keeping at a crawl the entire distance, and forcing his mother’s vehicle to stall numerous times. “Bar[bara] was
grim
,” Mrs. Allison recalled.
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Such juvenile behavior could be tolerated, however. What really needed attention was W.’s vanishing act from the Guard. Poppy Bush, an expert in making problems go away, apparently took matters into his own hands.

From Florida, W. did not head directly back to Texas. Instead, he stopped off in Alabama—a state where he no longer resided—and did two things. First, he visited a dentist at Dannelly Air Force Base for a routine X-ray, thereby generating paperwork that could be presented to the press three decades later as evidence of his Alabama military service. The White House would portray the visit as an exam. But in a 2004 interview, the dentist who had seen Bush, Dr. John Andrew Harris, told me that his clinic did not even do actual dental work. Bush, he said, was merely there to have his teeth charted for identification purposes in case of death. This is especially odd, since by the time of Bush’s visit, the nonresident of Alabama was no longer flying at all, seemingly negating the entire purpose of the exam.
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On that same quick stop in Montgomery, W. called a young, former Blount campaign staffer, invited her to dinner, showed up wearing his military uniform, and announced that he was in town for “guard training.” Decades later, during W.’s 2004 reelection campaign against John Kerry, who had served with distinction in Vietnam, Bush’s staff was pressed to explain the gap in his military service. The White House released the record of the dental exam and referred phone calls to the young Blount staffer. The American media, for the most part, accepted these two items as proof that Bush had fulfilled his service obligation.

Very Private Public Service

Having “fixed” his military service problem in Alabama, W. went back to Texas, where he attempted to secure his missing service credits. But his superiors did not want him back. This was a serious hitch. It would be nine months before W. could be packed off to Harvard Business School, and there were untold ways in which the prodigal son could get himself into trouble in Houston. So another solution was found: unlikely as it may sound, George W. enrolled as a “counselor” in an inner-city youth program.

Professional United Leadership League, or PULL, was an attractive place to park W. for a spell. He was an avid sports fan, and PULL was all about sports. Its front men were two retired Houston Oilers football players, John L. White and Ernie Ladd. They recruited a pantheon of local sports greats who mentored neighborhood kids. PULL was not only acceptable to the Bushes; it was virtually a creation of Poppy’s. Several years earlier, Poppy had hit upon the idea to help generate African American support in his senatorial race. He donated much of the start-up money for PULL in 1970, then served as the organization’s honorary chairman.
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U.S. News & World Report
would state in 1999 that Bush senior had arranged for W. to serve at PULL because he “hoped to expose the footloose son to ‘real life.’ ”
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In a video shown at the 2000 Republican Convention, Bush’s stint at PULL was touted as emblematic of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” “Well, a wonderful man named John White asked me to come and work with him in a project in the Third Ward of Houston,” Bush says in the video. “If we don’t help others, if we don’t step up and lead, who will?”

But the evidence points in a rather different direction. Ten days before W.’s reelection in 2004, Knight Ridder published a little-noticed story by reporter Meg Laughlin that was based on conversations with former PULL employees who had reluctantly agreed to talk. “We didn’t know what kind of trouble he’d been in, only that he’d done something that required him to put in the time,” said Althia Turner, White’s administrative assistant. “George had to sign in and out. I remember his signature was a hurried cursive, but he wasn’t an employee. He was not a volunteer either,” she said. “John said he had to keep track of George’s hours because George had to put in a lot of hours because he was in trouble.”
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Others echoed those observations. Former Houston Oilers player Willie Frazier, who was a PULL summer volunteer in 1973, said, “John said he was doing a favor for George’s father because an arrangement had to be made for the son to be there.” The impression was that Poppy had arranged for W. to work at PULL as some kind of “restitution.” Fred Maura, a close friend of White’s, put it this way, referring to W. as “43,” for the forty-third president, and his father as “41,” for the forty-first president: “John didn’t say what kind of trouble 43 was in—just that he had done something and he [John] made a deal to take him in as a favor to 41 to get some funding.”

Maura’s claim tracks with the recollections of Jack Gazelle, who worked at a city of Houston office that distributed federal revenue-sharing grants. Gazelle told me he remembers returning from an extended summer leave to be told that “George Bush Jr.” was in the office doing research into obtaining grants from the Nixon administration for PULL.
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Gazelle said that Bush didn’t seem to want to be recognized, and that when he said hello, W. simply ignored him.
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Although George W. describes this period as one of full-time work counseling children, some of his putative colleagues don’t remember it that way. Jimmy Wynn, the former Houston Astros baseball star, told me in a 2004 interview that the gregarious Bush was popular with the kids. But rather than working intensively counseling individual kids, Wynn said, W. addressed large assemblies of PULL participants from time to time.
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In any case, Bush has insisted that he worked at PULL full time from early 1973 until he left for Harvard in the fall. Yet that’s also the period when he claims to have put in long hours at Ellington Field. His payroll records show him being credited with a surge in Guard duty during the summer— when those inner-city kids were out of school and needed PULL the most. For example, Bush is recorded as being on base for seventeen out of the twenty-two weekdays in July. This suggests an urgent need to add hours to his service in order to qualify for an honorable discharge. Yet Bush couldn’t possibly have been in two places at the same time—and eyewitness accounts suggest that he may not have been on base at all.

The White House has released Bush’s recollections of his 1973 Texas Guard duty that cite “paper shuffling” and “odds and ends” in the flight operations office. It was the kind of job that would have enabled the lively jokester ample time to socialize. As Bush told the
Texas Monthly
in 1994, “What I was good at was getting to know people.”

Yet none of his Guard friends have been willing or able to confirm without ambiguity that Bush returned to the Texas unit after Alabama. This raises questions regarding the legitimacy of the payroll records released by the White House, which show Bush being paid for so many days of service from late 1972 until the middle of 1973. In one sense, it was Alabama all over again: the gregarious, in-your-face George W. Bush somehow managed to be invisible on two military bases over a period of seventeen months.

Indeed, W.’s superior officers at Ellington would sign papers saying that he had “not been observed” between May 1, 1972, and April 30, 1973. And no paperwork about alternative service in Alabama was ever produced or forwarded to the Texas Air National Guard as required by regulations. The lack of any documented service would raise questions back at Denver’s Air Reserve Personnel Center, the same folks who had told Bush he could not hide out in a do-nothing postal unit. The center wrote the Texas Air National Guard asking for an explanation of Bush’s disappearance and received this cryptic response: “Report for this period not available for administrative reasons.”