Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (67 page)

Certainly, the Bush forces were keeping a wary eye on the issue, but by 2004 any potential storm seemed to have passed. The further W. got from TV reporter Jim Moore’s persistent questions in 1994 about his Guard service, and the more the damage control effort seemed to be working, the more casual he got about his “military problem.” In fact he became downright cocky. While governor, though he stayed away from Camp Mabry, he bragged about flying an F-102 jet while visiting a veterans’ cemetery. As president, speaking at a Veterans Day event at Arlington National Cemetery in 2003, Bush declared:

Every veteran has lived by a strict code of discipline. Every veteran understands the meaning of personal accountability and loyalty, and shared sacrifice. From the moment you repeated the oath to the day of your honorable discharge, your time belonged to America; your country came before all else.
⁴⁶

To many listeners, it sounded as though he was talking about himself.

But by 2004, as the president continued to order National Guard troops to Afghanistan and Iraq—men and women who, like himself, had assumed that Guard duty would not involve fighting abroad even in wartime—deep public doubts had set in. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction was becoming a huge problem. Tough questions threatened to dominate the campaign, and W.’s prospects were iffy at best. Moreover, the Democratic field included not one but two highly decorated war veterans, John Kerry and Wesley Clark. It would be a disaster if a majority of Americans were to conclude that Bush was a trigger-happy commander in chief who had plunged the United States into a cataclysmic and unnecessary war— after he himself had shirked his own service.

CHAPTER 22

Deflection for Reelection

F
OR A TIME, THE ISSUE OF BUSH’S Guard service bubbled along mostly on the Internet and talk radio. But in January 2004, the filmmaker Michael Moore—a supporter of General Wesley Clark’s candidacy— called Bush a “deserter” at a rally of more than thousand people outside Concord, New Hampshire.

On February 1, matters escalated further when the chairman of the democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, appeared on a Sunday chat show and accused Bush of being AWOL. His counterpart at the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, quickly called the comments “slanderous” in an interview with the
New York Times
.
¹

“President Bush served honorably in the National Guard,” Mr. Gillespie said in a telephone interview. “He was never AWOL. To make an accusation like that on national television with no basis in fact is despicable.”

Soon, the matter had exploded into a full-scale crisis—so grave that Bush, who hardly ever gave media interviews, went on NBC’s
Meet the Press
to insist again that he had served in Alabama.
²

TIM RUSSERT: The
Boston Globe
and the Associated Press have gone through some of the records and said there’s no evidence that you reported to duty in Alabama during the summer and fall of 1972.

BUSH: Yeah, they’re—they’re just wrong. There may be no evidence, but I did report; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been honorably discharged. In other words, you don’t just say “I did something” without there being verification. Military doesn’t work that way. I got an honorable discharge, and I did show up in Alabama.

W.’s service record was a justifiable line of inquiry. He had included it in his campaign biography, and he invoked the military imagery whenever it was opportune. More, he was sending the current generation of Guardsmen off to Iraq, where the risk of injury or death was great. For the Bush forces, exposure was a fundamental threat. Any new revelations regarding the candidate’s own record could be devastating, especially in crucial swing states such as Florida, chock ablock with military personnel past and present. Bush was counting on those votes in what looked to be another tight election.

And the stakes were higher still: Abandoning military service is a felony with no statute of limitations. Punishment is at the discretion of the soldier’s commander, and can range from a mild “rehabilitation” to more severe penalties, especially in wartime.
³

A Masterpiece of Spin

Anybody who had watched the Bush team in action knew how it would respond: a fierce defense, followed by a rapid reversion to attack mode. It moved quickly to suppress the Guard story, and then to destroy the messengers. Then it seized the offensive and raised doubts about Kerry’s service as a soldier in Vietnam. It was a staggering display of chutzpah, and like a refresher course in Psy-Ops 101.

The first part—diverting inquiry into Bush’s missing two years of National Guard duty—was particularly challenging. But the Bush team was primed for challenges.

No sooner had McAuliffe fired his “AWOL” salvo than the White House communications apparatus swung into action. It tried to overwhelm the media by dumping large quantities of military records, usually on short notice. Many of these records turned out to be duplicates of previous releases from 2000; sometimes there were multiple copies within a single set. In some cases, journalists were allowed to look at documents but not make copies. The Bush team understood media time pressures and overburdened reporters, and leveraged those liabilities to its advantage.

The White House also depended on friendly journalists to ask safe questions and run out the clock. There was punishment and virtual exile from Republican campaign sources for those who demanded answers.

Meanwhile, stonewalling was the order of the day. Suddenly, military offices of all types, used to routinely responding to reporters’ requests, were indicating that their hands were tied. In general, all inquiries to military offices were redirected, without explanation, to the Pentagon, starting in mid-February. “If it has to do with George W. Bush, the Texas Air National Guard or the Vietnam War, I can’t talk with you,” Charles Gross, chief historian for the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C., told reporters from the Spokane, Washington,
Spokesman-Review
.
⁴

None of this erased the fundamental dilemma. There were abundant indications that in May 1972, when he abruptly left Houston for Alabama, the future president and commander in chief had simply walked away from his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War. No amount of equivocation could get around that. Neither could an honorable discharge received in 1973 explain why the sole evidence that he had actually shown up anywhere after May 1972 was a machine-generated form listing dates and points earned. The fact was, his own officers had not seen him in Texas, and no credible documentation or witnesses emerged in Alabama.

A related issue was his failure to continue piloting a military jet for the full six-year period of his contract. Though he was supposed to serve as a pilot through 1974, Bush’s last time in a cockpit was in April 1972. The Bush White House explained that W. had stopped flying because to continue he would have needed to take an annual flight physical. It was almost laughable, but surprisingly effective in obscuring the central point: Bush had simply left his Houston unit without taking the required physical. He just hadn’t bothered; and so it was his own action—or rather inaction—that had led to the end of his flying career. On that basis alone, he was essentially AWOL. Bush had made an effort to join a postal unit in the Alabama Guard. When he was rejected as “ineligible,” he got permission to join a flying unit in which he would not be required to fly—where, as best as can be determined, he never even bothered to show up.

In short, Bush abruptly stopped flying, walked away from his unit, failed to take a physical, and, all credible evidence indicates, never again put in a day of service. This, as we have seen, became a problem three decades later. In 2003, Bush was ordering thousands of National Guardsmen into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan—including large numbers from Texas. Few of these part-timers had ever expected to see combat abroad, just as W. himself hadn’t. Many of them felt poorly prepared.
⁵
In interviews, they said that they had had only a few weeks of specialized training and that they had begged for more, in vain. In addition, they complained about inadequate equipment and vehicle armor. One Guard soldier described how his unit lacked even a basic handbook on tactical procedures, much less any briefing on the complicated social fabric of Iraq. In other words, they were sitting ducks.

During this period, the published lists of military casualties in Iraq frequently included Guardsmen. And here was evidence that their commander in chief, the one who had ordered them to duty, had apparently skipped out when it had been his turn to serve, even though it was a cushy assignment that involved practically no physical danger.

REGARDING BUSH’S FAILURE to take his flight physical in 1972, his political handlers presented an array of inadequate and conflicting explanations. During the 2000 presidential campaign, a spokesman stated that Bush did not take the exam prior to his birthday in July 1972 as required because he was in Alabama at the time while his personal physician was back in Texas. That answer was misleading at best. Only authorized flight surgeons could perform the physical, and such surgeons were certainly available in Alabama. And if Bush believed that
any
doctor could perform the physical— i.e., not just his personal one—why didn’t he simply go to a doctor in Alabama?

By 2004, the Bush team was putting forward a new excuse. White House communications director Dan Bartlett said Bush had failed to take the physical because he knew he would be on nonflying status in Alabama. That was not credible either, since it was not up to Bush to make that decision. Besides, according to regulations, the physical exam was compulsory for all inducted pilots in the Air National Guard, whether or not they were actively flying at the time.

Some reporters tried to dig deeper, but most ended up getting spun. Dan Bartlett worked backward. Bush’s honorable discharge, he said, couldn’t have come about unless Bush had attained the required number of annual service points—and you couldn’t get the required number of service points without showing up. This argument neatly sidestepped the possibility that high-ranking Guard officials had manufactured an honorable discharge for a favored son of a favorite son. At the time, Richard Nixon was in the White House, Poppy was head of the Republican Party, and the D.C. offices of the National Guard were notoriously politicized. Indeed, the director would later resign in disgrace over favoritism-related charges.

Besides, as everyone knew, if you could get into the Guard through politics, you could get out the same way. The unsubstantiated points sheet of unknown provenance could easily have been manufactured during this period. And even the honorable discharge itself was questionable on its face. W. got it eight months
before
his service obligation ended. It didn’t take a cynical opposition researcher to raise an eyebrow.

The main problem for Bush was simply the lack of hard evidence that he had ever set foot on the Montgomery base during his six months in Alabama. Several supposed eyewitnesses did surface to support Bush, but their claims were less than convincing. For example, one member of the Montgomery-based unit in which Bush was supposed to serve did his best to back up the president in an interview with the
Birmingham News
:

Joe LeFevers, a member of the 187th in 1972, said he remembers seeing Bush in unit offices and being told that Bush was in Montgomery to work on Blount’s campaign.

“I was going in the orderly room over there one day, and they said, ‘This is Lt. Bush,’ ” LeFevers said Tuesday. “They pointed him out to me . . . The reason I remember it is because I associate him with Red Blount.”
⁶

The account is sketchy at best. Yet apparently, reporters never tried to confirm LeFevers’s account, nor to ascertain his credibility or possible motivations, which is standard journalistic practice. Instead, Bush’s defenders quickly spread the LeFevers story around the Internet and talk circuit.

Another “witness” would make an appearance by the end of this crucial week, in the
Washington Post
:

A Republican close to Bush supplied phone numbers yesterday for an owner of an insulated-coating business in the Atlanta area, John B. “Bill” Calhoun, 69, who was an officer with the Alabama Air National Guard. Calhoun said in an interview that Bush used to sit in his office and read magazines and flight manuals as he performed weekend duty at Dannelly Field in Montgomery during 1972. Calhoun estimated that he saw Bush sign in at the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group eight to 10 times for about eight hours each from May to October 1972. He said the two occasionally grabbed a sandwich in the snack bar.
⁷

Calhoun, the unit’s flight safety officer, told the Associated Press: “I saw him each drill period. He was very aggressive about doing his duty there . . . He showed up on time and he left at the end of the day.” Inconveniently, however, even Bush himself would not claim to have done duty in Alabama during the summer months. Someone had perhaps forgotten to coordinate the stories. Still, the White House did not disavow Calhoun’s claims. Calhoun even came with a sidekick—a doctor friend who claimed that the officer had brought Bush to him for a physical.

But again, there was no documentation that any physical exam had actually been performed. And again, not even Bush was claiming that. It turned out that the doctor himself wasn’t even making the claim. It was the doctor’s son who spoke to a reporter for the
Montgomery Advertiser
—because, he said, at age sixty-four, his father could not handle the volume of inquiries.

Meanwhile, NBC News introduced another witness, of sorts:

CORRESPONDENT DAVID GREGORY: Joe Holcombe, who worked with Mr. Bush on that Alabama Senate campaign, does recall asking why Mr. Bush was absent from a meeting.

JOE HOLCOMBE: I just innocently asked where George was, since he wasn’t there, and then I was told that he was at a National Guard [drill] that weekend.

Holcombe wasn’t claiming that he knew Bush was doing Guard training, or even that Bush had told him so, only that a third party had said that he was. This did not stop the White House from pointing Holcombe out as an “eyewitness” of sorts, and reporters began citing him.

On February 12, 2004, things started to get really knotty for Bush. MSNBC’s
Hardball
featured Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, the former Texas National Guard consultant who recounted his claim to have personally observed efforts to clean up Bush’s records.