Text 2328, 221 rader
Skriven 2004-09-16 04:03:12 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:10/345)
Ärende: TANG & Bush
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This article can be found on the web at

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040927&s=baker

Why Bush Left Texas

by RUSS BAKER

[posted online on September 14, 2004]

Growing evidence suggests that George W. Bush abruptly left his Texas Air
National Guard unit in 1972 for substantive reasons pertaining to his inability
to continue piloting a fighter jet.

A months-long investigation, which includes examination of hundreds of
government-released documents, interviews with former Guard members and
officials, military experts and Bush associates, points toward the conclusion
that Bush's personal behavior was causing alarm among his superior officers and
would ultimately lead to his fleeing the state to avoid a physical exam he
might have had difficulty passing. His failure to complete a physical exam
became the official reason for his subsequent suspension from flying status.

This central issue, whether Bush did or did not complete his duty--and if not,
why--has in recent days been obscured by a raging sideshow: a debate over the
accuracy of documents aired on CBS's 60 Minutes. Last week CBS News reported on
newly unearthed memos purportedly prepared by Bush's now-deceased commanding
officer. In those documents, the officer, Lieut. Col. Jerry Killian, appeared
to be establishing for the record events occurring at the time Bush abruptly
left his Texas Air National Guard unit in May 1972. Among these: that Bush had
failed to meet unspecified Guard standards and refused a direct order to take a
physical exam, and that pressure was being applied on Killian and his superiors
to whitewash whatever troubling circumstances Bush was in.

Questions have been raised about the authenticity of those memos, but the
criticism of them appears at this time speculative and inconclusive, while
their substance is consistent with a growing body of documentation and
analysis.

If it is demonstrated that profound behavioral problems marred Bush's wartime
performance and even cut short his service, it could seriously challenge Bush's
essential appeal as a military steward and guardian of societal values. It
could also explain the incomplete, contradictory and shifting explanations
provided by the Bush camp for the President's striking invisibility from the
military during the final two years of his six-year military obligation. And it
would explain the savagery and rapidity of the attack on the CBS documents.

In 1972 Bush's unit activities underwent a change that could point to a
degradation of his ability to fly a fighter jet. Last week, in response to a
lawsuit, the White House released to the Associated Press Bush's flight logs,
which show that he abruptly shifted his emphasis in February and March 1972
from his assigned F-102A fighter jet to a two-seat T-33 training jet, from
which he had graduated several years earlier, and was put back onto a flight
simulator. The logs also show that on two occasions he required multiple
attempts to land a one-seat fighter and a fighter simulator. This after Bush
had already logged more than 200 hours in the one-seat F-102A.

Military experts say that his new, apparently downgraded and accompanied
training mode, which included Bush's sometimes moving into the co-pilot's seat,
can, in theory, be explained a variety of ways. He could, for example, have
been training for a new position that might involve carrying student pilots.
But the reality is that Bush himself has never mentioned this chapter in his
life, nor has he provided a credible explanation. In addition, Bush's highly
detailed Officer Effectiveness Reports make no mention of this rather dramatic
change.

A White House spokesman explained to AP that the heavy training in this more
elementary capacity came at a time when Bush was trying to generate more hours
in anticipation of a six-month leave to work on a political campaign. But, in
fact, this scenario is implausible. For one thing, Guard regulations did not
permit him to log additional hours in that manner as a substitute for missing
six months of duty later on. As significantly, there is no sign that Bush even
considered going to work on that campaign until shortly before he departed--nor
that campaign officials had any inkling at all that Bush might join them in
several months' time.

Bush told his commanding officers that he was going to Alabama for an
opportunity with a political campaign. (His Texas Air National Guard
supervisors--presumably relying on what Bush told them--would write in a report
the following year, "A civilian occupation made it necessary for him to move to
Montgomery, Alabama.") But the timing of Bush's decision to leave and his
departure--about the same time that he failed to take a mandatory annual
physical exam--indicate that the two may have been related.

Campaign staff members say they knew nothing of Bush's interest in
participating until days before he arrived in Montgomery. Indeed, not one of
numerous Bush friends from those days even recalls Bush talking about going to
Alabama at any point before he took off.

Bush's behavior in Alabama suggests that he viewed Alabama not as an important
career opportunity but as a kind of necessary evil.

Although his role in the campaign has been represented as substantial (in some
newspaper accounts, he has been described as the assistant campaign manager),
numerous campaign staffers say Bush's role was negligible, low level and that
he routinely arrived at the campaign offices in the afternoon hours, bragging
of drinking feats from the night before.

According to friends of his, he kept his Houston apartment during this period
and, based on their recollections, may have been coming back into town
repeatedly during the time he was supposedly working full-time on the Alabama
campaign. Absences from the campaign have been explained as due to his
responsibilities to travel to the further reaches of Alabama, but several
staffers told me that organizing those counties was not Bush's de facto
responsibility.

Even more significantly, in a July interview, Linda Allison, the widow of Jimmy
Allison, the Alabama campaign manager and a close friend of Bush's father,
revealed to me for the first time that Bush had come to Alabama not because the
job had appeal or because his presence was required but because he needed to
get out of Texas. "Well, you have to know Georgie," Allison said. "He really
was a totally irresponsible person. Big George [George H.W. Bush] called Jimmy,
and said, he's killing us in Houston, take him down there and let him work on
that campaign.... The tenor of that was, Georgie is in and out of trouble seven
days a week down here, and would you take him up there with you."

Allison said that the younger Bush's drinking problem was apparent. She also
said that her husband, a circumspect man who did not gossip and held his cards
closely, indicated to her that some use of drugs was involved. "I had the
impression that he knew that Georgie was using pot, certainly, and perhaps
cocaine," she said.

Now-prominent, established Texas figures in the military, arts, business and
political worlds, some of them Republicans and Bush supporters, talk about
Bush's alleged use of marijuana and cocaine based on what they say they have
heard from trusted friends. One middle-aged woman whose general veracity could
be confirmed told me that she met Bush in 1968 at Hemisfair 68, a fair in San
Antonio, at which he tried to pick her up and offered her a white powder he was
inhaling. She was then a teenager; Bush would have just graduated from Yale and
have been starting the National Guard then. "He was getting really aggressive
with me," she said. "I told him I'd call a policeman, and he laughed, and asked
who would believe me." (Although cocaine was not a widespread phenomenon until
the 1970s, US authorities were struggling more than a decade earlier to stanch
the flow from Latin America; in 1967 border seizures amounted to twenty-six
pounds.)

Bush himself has publicly admitted to being somewhat wild in his younger years,
without offering any details. He has not explicitly denied charges of drug use;
generally he has hedged. He has said that he could have passed the same
security screening his father underwent upon his inauguration in 1989, which
certifies no illegal drug use during the fifteen preceding years. In other
words, George W. Bush seemed to be saying that if he had used drugs, that was
before 1974 or during the period in which he left his Guard unit.

The family that rented Bush a house in Montgomery, Alabama, during that period
told me that Bush did extensive, inexplicable damage to their property,
including smashing a chandelier, and that they unsuccessfully billed him twice
for the damage--which amounted to approximately $900, a considerable sum in
1972. Two unconnected close friends and acquaintances of a well-known
Montgomery socialite, now deceased, told me that the socialite in question told
them that he and Bush had been partying that evening at the Montgomery Country
Club, combining drinking with use of illicit drugs, and that Bush, complaining
about the brightness, had climbed on a table and smashed the chandelier when
the duo stopped at his home briefly so Bush could change clothes before they
headed out again.

It is notable that in 1972, the military was in the process of introducing
widespread drug testing as part of the annual physical exams that pilots would
undergo.

For years, military buffs and retired officers have speculated about the real
reasons that Bush left his unit two years before his flying obligation was up.
Bush and his staff have muddied the issue by not providing a clear,
comprehensive and consistent explanation of his departure from the unit. And,
peculiarly, the President has not made himself available to describe in detail
what did take place at that time. Instead, the White House has adopted a policy
of offering obscure explanations by officials who clearly do not know the
specifics of what went on, and the periodic release of large numbers of
confusing or inconclusive documents--particularly at the start of weekends and
holiday periods, when attention is elsewhere.

In addition, the Bush camp has offered over the past few years a shifting
panoply of explanations that subsequently failed to pass muster. One was that
Bush had stopped flying his F-102A jet because it was being phased out (the
plane continued to be used for at least another year). Another explanation was
that he failed to take his physical exam in 1972 because his family doctor was
unavailable. (Guard regulations require that physicals be conducted by doctors
on the base, and would have been easily arranged either on a base in Texas or,
after he left the state, in Alabama.)

One of the difficulties in getting to the truth about what really took place
during this period is the frequently expressed fear of retribution from the
Bush organization. Many sources refuse to speak on the record, or even to have
their knowledge communicated publicly in any way. One source who did publicly
evince doubts about Bush's activities in 1972 was Dean Roome, who flew
formations often with Bush and was his roommate for a time. "You wonder if you
know who George Bush is," Roome told USA Today in a little-appreciated
interview back in 2002. "I think he digressed after awhile," he said. "In the
first half, he was gung-ho. Where George failed was to fulfill his obligation
as a pilot. It was an irrational time in his life." Yet in subsequent years,
Roome has revised his comments to a firm insistence that nothing out of the
ordinary took place at that time, and after one interview he e-mailed me
material raising questions about John Kerry's military career. Roome, who
operates a curio shop in a Texas hamlet, told me that Bush aides, including
communications adviser Karen Hughes, and even the President himself stay in
touch with him.

Several Bush associates from that period say that the Bush camp has argued
strenuously about the importance of sources backing the President up on his
military service, citing patriotism, personal loyalty and even the claim that
he lacks friends in Washington and must count on those from early in his life.

In 1971 Bush took his annual physical exam in May. It's reasonable to conclude
that he would also take his 1972 physical in the same month. Yet according to
official Guard documents, Bush "cleared the base" on May 15 without doing so.
Fellow Guard members uniformly agree that Bush should and could have easily
taken the exam with unit doctors at Ellington Air Force Base before leaving
town. (It is interesting to note that if the Killian memos released by CBS do
hold up, one of them, dated May 4, 1972, orders Bush to report for his physical
by May 14--one day before he took off.)

Bush has indicated that he departed from Ellington Air Force Base and his Guard
unit because he had been offered an important employment opportunity with a
political campaign in Alabama. The overwhelming evidence suggests, however,
that the Alabama campaign was a convenient excuse for Bush to rapidly exit
stage left from a Guard unit that found him and his behavior a growing problem.
If that's not the case, now would be an excellent time for a President famed
for his superlative memory to sit down and explain what really happened in that
period.
 
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