by Kitty Kelley
In 1968 registering for the draft was mandatory for all males eighteen years old. Being subject to the draft was a duty that healthy young men with no deferment had to bear. At that time such service usually meant a tour in Vietnam. This accounted for the high number of antiwar demonstrations on college campuses.
“I guess guys like George didn’t have to worry because they knew they were never going to have to fight,” said Mark Soler.
George’s fraternity brother and later his business partner Roland Betts said that George faced a different kind of pressure. “He felt in order not to derail his father’s political career he had to be in military service of some kind.”
Members of the Yale class of 1968 were surprised when George said he didn’t remember any antiwar disturbances on campus. “I know that’s what he claimed, and God knows the guy did a lot of drinking in college, but he just couldn’t have been that drunk,” said Christopher Byron. “Vietnam was the terror of our lives . . . There was an antiwar march or antiwar meeting or protest at least once a week at Yale . . . and every time Reverend Coffin opened his mouth there were camera crews crawling all over that campus.”
Others in the class of 1968, including Mark Soler, share similar recollections. “All we ever talked about at Yale then was school, sex, and the war in Vietnam,” he said, “and not always in that order.”
After graduating from Yale in June 1968, George reported to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, and then took his six weeks of basic airman training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Upon completing it in September 1968, he was commissioned a second lieutenant. He returned to Ellington, where the Texas Air National Guard staged a special ceremony so that Congressman Bush could be photographed pinning second-lieutenant bars on his son. “That’s how they do things,” said Brigadier General John Scribner, director of the Texas Military Forces Museum in Austin, “play it up big, especially since he was a congressman’s son. That was important to the Guard.”
George received his commission without ever attending Officers’ Training School. “I’ve never heard of that,” said Tom Hail, a historian for the Texas National Guard. “Generally they did that for doctors only, mostly because they needed flight surgeons.” Normally such a commission required eight full semesters (four years) of college ROTC courses or eighteen months of military service or the completion of Air Force Officer Candidate School.
With his commission in hand, George went on inactive duty in September 1968 to work in the political campaign of his father’s friend Representative Edward Gurney, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida. Jimmy Allison, the media strategist who had helped the senior Bush get elected to Congress and had worked for him against Ralph Yarborough, was going to run a similar campaign for Gurney against LeRoy Collins, the former governor of Florida.
“The race was getting so much attention we decided we needed a press plane and someone to take care of reporters,” recalled James L. Martin, then Gurney’s top aide. “That’s when Jimmy said young George Bush was available.”
“Telephone calls were exchanged,” said Pete Barr, another campaign media strategist, “and young George came to Orlando . . . to sheepdog the press . . . He always said he was the pillow-toter.”
The “pillow” was essential equipment for the candidate. Gurney, who fought in World War II, had suffered a bullet wound to the spine and needed to sit on a soft feather cushion, which George dutifully carried for him. The wound made campaigning arduous, so Gurney periodically retired to his home in Winter Haven to rest. George whiled away the time with Pete Barr.
“We would play a lot of tennis and drink a lot of beer,” said Barr, “and talk a lot of politics.”
Gurney’s opponent, LeRoy Collins, had been the first elected politician in the South to declare publicly that segregation was “unfair and morally wrong.” Ed Gurney hammered him the same way George Bush had hammered Ralph Yarborough. Gurney branded Collins “Liberal LeRoy,” distributed photographs of him meeting with Martin Luther King, and bashed him as a radical, an agitator, and a race mixer.
Gurney won by 300,000 votes. Political analysts recognized that he had sailed into office on the jet stream of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” a thinly disguised appeal to white bigotry.
Second Lieutenant Bush witnessed the noxious efficacy of stirring racial hatred, which, unfortunately, became a hallmark of his family’s future campaigns. His father’s presidential campaign in 1988 used a vicious race commercial to win, as did George’s 2000 primary campaign in South Carolina. The end result for both Bushes was victory at the expense of decency.
Many years after the Gurney campaign, a curious circle of history drew George W. Bush near the legendary Florida governor he had worked so hard to defeat. On December 10, 2000, George, then governor of Texas, watched the Florida recount begin that would determine his presidency. The hand count commenced in the LeRoy Collins Public Library in Tallahassee, where Governor Collins’s retort to a rabid segregationist was inscribed on the wall: “I don’t have to get re-elected, but I do have to live with myself.”
Ed Gurney’s victory in 1968 had made him Florida’s first Republican senator since the Civil War and given George Herbert Walker Bush renewed hope that he could win the Senate seat in Texas in 1970.
After the Gurney campaign, Second Lieutenant Bush returned to full-time active duty in the National Guard. He was assigned to flight school at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia, where he learned to fly the T-38 Talon.
“I gave then-Lieutenant Bush two of his check rides, including his final instrument and navigation flight check,” said Jim Wilkes. “He was an excellent pilot and so graded.”
George received his silver wings in December 1969 and returned to Ellington, where he trained to fly the missile-armed supersonic F-102 Delta Dart jet fighter called the Voodoo. Retired Colonel Maurice H. Udell, who instructed him, was impressed by his attitude. “He had his boots shined, his uniform pressed, his hair cut, and he said, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir,’” he recalled. “I would rank him in the top 5 percent of pilots I knew. And in the thinking department, he was in the top 1 percent. He was very capable and tough as a boot.”
On March 24, 1970, the Guard issued a press release to the Houston papers praising their “first hometown student” as an exemplary citizen soldier: “George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation who doesn’t get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed. Oh, he gets high, all right, but not from narcotics . . . As far as kicks are concerned, Lt. Bush gets his from the roaring afterburner of the F-102.”
Three months later the Guard issued another press release when George graduated from training school. The press office included a photo of George with his father and a photo of Congressman Bush shaking hands with the commanding officer, Buck Staudt. Another press release followed in July 1970, when George completed a successful deployment to Tyndall Air Force Base Florida and fired a missile from his F-102. On Election Day in November 1970 before the polls closed, the Guard issued yet another press release to announce the promotions of George W. Bush and Lloyd Bentsen III to first lieutenant even as the elder Bentsen was defeating the elder Bush.
Throughout that year George had worked on his father’s campaign for Senate. Shortly after his dad’s bitter defeat, George and his Yale classmate Don Ensenat applied to University of Texas Law School. Neither was accepted, although Ensenat eventually became a lawyer. Page Keeton, then dean of the Law School, wrote to one of the people who had recommended George. Without a sterling academic record to emphasize, the writer had stressed George’s immense likability, which left the dean unimpressed: “I am sure young Mr. Bush has all the many amiable qualities you describe, and so will find a place at one of many fine institutions around the country. But not at the University of Texas.”
His mother recalled her son’s first big rejection as slightly unnerving. “I think that got under his skin a bit,” Barbara said, “because I don’t think he was used to no
t doing what he wanted to do.”
Without graduate school or a full-time job, George idled his days around the pool of the Chateaux Dijon, the expensive apartment complex he had moved to in Houston.
Finally his father, who had gotten him every job he had ever had, stepped in again. This time big George called Robert H. Gow, who had been an officer of Zapata Offshore when George was running the company. Gow, who was a member of Yale’s class of 1955 and of Skull and Bones and a roommate of George’s cousin Ray Walker, had left Zapata to start Stratford of Texas, an agricultural conglomerate. As a favor to George senior, Gow hired young George as a management trainee.
“We weren’t looking for someone,” Gow told The Washington Post in 1999, “but I thought this would be a talented guy we should hire, and he was available.”
George joked about his new job to friends. “I’m now wearing a suit and tie and selling chicken shit,” he said.
When he wasn’t traveling for the company, he was sitting in the boss’s office.
“George liked to talk,” said Gow. “He was searching for what to do. He was constantly wanting to talk about what to do with his life.”
He lasted nine months before he quit in boredom. “I didn’t mind the chicken shit,” George said, “just the suit and tie.”
For a while in 1971 he flirted with the idea of running for the state legislature, but he changed his mind.
“He may have decided he wasn’t ready,” said Don Ensenat. “The role model he saw in his father was that you go out and make a name for yourself outside the political arena first.” The Texas Legislature, which meets only 140 days every two years, is not considered full-time employment, so candidates are expected to be established members of the community when they run.
George remained unemployed for several months and lived off his trust fund—the $10,000 left in the educational trust set up by his paternal grandparents. He put in haphazard hours with the Guard, but not enough to meet his requirements. By April 1972, he was lagging behind. That same month the Air Force began executing random drug tests, which meant that any pilot or mechanic could be requested on the spot to submit to urinalysis, blood tests, or examination of the nasal passages. On April 17, 1972, George W. Bush made his last recorded flight before disappearing from the official records until October 1972.
By then the psychedelic sixties had spun into the seventies, affecting even the military. Few families, including the Bushes and their relatives—the Walkers and the Ellises—went untouched by the influence of drugs, whether marijuana, amphetamines, or cocaine.
Jeb Bush, an Andover student in those days, described himself as a “cynical little turd at a cynical little school” who smoked pot and inhaled.
Josiah Wear Ellis, known to his friends as Joey, snorted cocaine regularly at Colorado College. “I was living on the top floor of the house where Joey Ellis and the child of a noted member of the Federal judiciary would come to buy their coke,” said Bill Penrose, who also attended Colorado College. “He was a cocky, smug guy, utterly indifferent to people less well off than him. Joey was totally into the Bush thing. ‘We’re-in-charge-and-we-should-be. We’re entitled.’”
Joey Ellis’s brother John does not deny the family’s struggle with drug abuse. “We all got hit,” John told Beverly Jackson of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Our family suffered terribly.” John Ellis, the son of Nancy Bush Ellis and a first cousin of the Bushes, admitted going into Hazelton in 1988 for drug rehabilitation. He later tried to launch a magazine called Fix as a support tool for people trying to conquer their addictions.
Beginning in the 1970s, the Bushes, like other families, coped with the drug scourge and the cross-addiction of alcohol. As recently as 2003, one of W.’s younger brothers, Marvin, was getting illegal prescriptions from a Virginia dentist named Denis Peper for narcotic substances. Peper told a close friend that he wrote “off the books” prescriptions for Marvin. The dentist’s license was suspended on October 17, 2003, by the Commonwealth of Virginia.
“The Ellis family and the Bush family have had serious problems with booze,” said Marylouise Oates, a writer and Democratic activist. “I remember when John Ellis called to say he couldn’t come to my wedding because he was going into Hazelden. He was taking Antabuse and still drinking then . . . I’ll bet George W. went to Hazelden, too, but I can’t prove it.”
While there is no indication that George W. Bush was institutionalized for substance abuse, legitimate speculation arose after he failed to show up in 1972 for his annual physical with the National Guard and was suspended from flying. This raised the question of whether he had been reported for drug abuse and, if so, whether he had been disciplined or treated.
Such information would be contained in the report of the Flight Inquiry Board, which routinely conducts an official review of the reasons for suspension and then determines appropriate action. The report of the Flight Inquiry Board is missing from the military records of George W. Bush that were released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2000 and from the records released by the White House in 2004. After two records’ releases, the report of the Flight Inquiry Board is still missing.
“Bush’s ‘failure to accomplish annual medical examination,’ as the record states, could not have been either casual or accidental,” said retired First Lieutenant Robert Rogers. “There is circumstantial evidence pointing to substance abuse by Bush during this period . . . Is it unreasonable to raise the possibility that he was suspended from flying as a direct or indirect consequence of substance abuse? It might be if there was no way for Bush to prove his innocence. But George W. Bush can readily defend himself, if he so chooses, simply by voluntarily releasing his complete military records, which he has refused to do.”
Bill L. Burkett, a retired state plans officer with the Texas National Guard, claimed that in 1997 the Texas National Guard Archives had been “scrubbed” by order of then-Governor Bush’s staff to protect the governor. Burkett said he was present when certain members of Bush’s staff contacted the Guard. One he specifically identified was Dan Bartlett, then the governor’s liaison to the Texas National Guard. Burkett said that after Bartlett’s call to Major General Daniel James III, the documents were shredded. James was the adjutant general for the state of Texas at the time and denied Burkett’s allegation. On June 3, 2002, James was appointed national director of the Air National Guard by President George W. Bush.
In the spring of 1972, George W. embarked on what he would later describe as his “nomadic years.” Seeing him adrift, his father stepped in again to get him another job with Jimmy Allison, who was running Republican Winton “Red” Blount’s campaign for Senate in Alabama against Democratic Senator John Sparkman.
In his UN diary George senior mentioned Blount, a multimillionaire builder who had resigned as Nixon’s Postmaster General to run for office. “I like him,” George wrote. “He is strong—a real man.”
After George senior called Jimmy Allison, young George was hired in May 1972 for nine hundred dollars a month to work in what was considered an impossible campaign against an unbeatable incumbent. After Blount announced his candidacy, one Alabama columnist noted, “It’s as good a time as any to go over Niagara in a barrel.”
Republicans were still a rare species in the South. “At that time in Alabama, people would spit on you if you were a Republican,” recalled Nee Bear, one of several women George dated during the Blount campaign. Even President Nixon, a fellow Republican, would not step forward to support his Postmaster General. “Sparkman was a leading senator,” Red Blount recalled, “and the President needed his support.”
George’s job was to monitor the polls, but he kept the bad news to himself. On Election Day, his roommate, Devere McLennan, was preparing for a victory-night party. “That’s when George explained to me we weren’t going to win,” he said.
It was a monumental loss. “Red got 36 percent of the vote, compared to 72 percent for Richard Nixon,” George recalled. “The t
icket splitting was phenomenal.”
Those who worked with George at that time remember him as an affable social drinker who acted much younger than his twenty-six years. They recall that he liked to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey, and to eat fistfuls of peanuts, and Executive burgers, at the Cloverdale Grill in Birmingham. They also say George liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the bathroom for a line of cocaine. The newspapers in Birmingham for that year carried many stories about the scourge of cocaine from Vietnam and China, much of it imported by the French.
George, according to the recollections of others, tended to show up late every day for work, “around noon,” come into the office, prop his cowboy boots on a desk, and start bragging about how much he had drunk the night before.
Red Blount’s nephew C. Murphy Archibald, an attorney in Charlotte, North Carolina, remembered George telling stories about how the New Haven police always let him go, after he told them his name, when they stopped him “all the time” for driving drunk as a student at Yale in the 1960s. Bush told this story—“what seemed like a hundred times”—to others working in the campaign, said Archibald.
“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.”
During the Blount campaign, George spent a great deal of time with “Blount’s Belles,” a group of young Republican women and Montgomery debutantes who worked for the campaign. Red Blount’s son, Tom, at the time an architect in Montgomery, recalled his encounter with Bush: “He was an attractive person, kind of a ‘frat boy,’” Tom said. “I didn’t like him.”