by Russ Baker
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.44
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.45
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.’ ”46 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.”47
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.48 Gazelle said that Bush didn’t seem to want to be recognized, and that when he said hello, W. simply ignored him.49
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.50
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.”
Just about all the evidence suggests that George W. Bush went AWOL from National Guard duty in May 1972 and never returned, thus skipping out on two years of a six-year military obligation. Ever diligent, Bush’s political fixers would later produce those payroll records that supposedly documented a brief, intense flurry of activity in the late fall of 1972 and again in late May through July 1973, i.e., after the period during which W.’s superiors filed a report that he was a no-show. The only evidence that such activity ever took place is a machine-generated form called a 526, unsigned and undated.51 W.’s 526 includes not only “points” for actual duty, but also someth
ing called “gratuitous points,” which a Guardsman is awarded even while on inactive status. Under even the most generous interpretation, this looks an awful lot like some superior officers protecting their posteriors—and W.’s.
Bush’s Guard mates have been almost unfailingly supportive of whatever accounts the Bush team has put out over the years—with a rare exception. In a 2002 telephone interview with USA Today, Dean Roome, Bush’s flying foursome partner and briefly his roommate during jet training in 1970, admitted that the final two years of Bush’s Guard service were troubled. “You wonder if you know who George Bush is,” Roome told the newspaper. “I think he digressed after a while. 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.”52
It might have been irrational. It was certainly illegal. And in cases other than Bush’s, the consequences could be severe. According to Jim Moore, an Austin reporter who researched Bush’s military service extensively, even the slightest infraction brought swift retribution. “I distinctly remember talking to a [Guard] company commander in Lubbock . . . who told me that if anyone was even 10 minutes late for a drill or any kind of duty, they were in trouble,” Moore told me. “If they didn’t show up at all, he either sent someone from the base or called the cops. In one case he told me about, one of his guys was ten minutes late for a second time and he sent MPs to the guy’s house and they dragged him out of bed when he was having sex with his wife . . . I spoke to a lot of people about this and you generally did not screw up and miss Guard drills because if you did most [commanding officers] simply made you eligible for the draft.”53 In other words, one wrong move and you were headed to sunny Vietnam.
Boots in Harvard Yard
At this point in his life, George W. Bush was by no means a likely candidate for Harvard Business School. Even taking into account the value of connections, Harvard’s decision to admit W. inevitably raises eyebrows. How he got into this bastion of excellence has never been made clear, though Harvard’s willingness to accommodate the Bush clan would take on new meaning thirteen years later, when the university committed a sizable chunk of its endowment to prop up an oil company on whose board W. sat—a subject discussed in chapter 16.
Regarding the Harvard admission, once again the Bush family story is that W. did it on his own. The carefully constructed tale, routinely offered to and accepted by most journalists and biographers, is that W. sprang the news over Christmas 1972 when he and his father were purportedly at each other’s throats. As usual, one can find inconsistencies in the accounts. In one version, brother Marvin seeks to inject calm at a tense moment by giving his father the good news of George’s acceptance at Harvard. In another version, it is Jeb who announces the surprising development.54 No matter, George tells his father: I have no intention of going; I just wanted to prove that I could get in without your help.
Yet in his 2000 campaign book, A Charge to Keep, Bush implies that he applied to Harvard Business School not in the fall of 1972, as the above story suggests, but in the spring of 1973 while he was working at PULL. If that account is correct, it would mean he both applied and was accepted after the normal application deadline. Either way, it is unlikely (though not impossible) that the son of the head of the national Republican Party would get into Harvard without his father’s knowledge. This is especially so given W.’s lack of either compelling qualifications or a direct family legacy at Harvard.
In the end, of course, he did attend Harvard. He arrived in Cambridge decked out in his cowboy boots and Air National Guard flight jacket. What he didn’t do was sign up as required with an Air Force Reserve unit in Massachusetts and serve out his original military obligation through the middle of 1974. Instead, he hung out on campus, spit chewing tobacco, and forged important links with figures who would play significant roles in his upward mobility and soon-to-be-growing prosperity.
CHAPTER 9
The Nixonian Bushes
IN EARLY 1969, THE NEWLY ELECTED Richard M. Nixon took one of his first acts as president: he arranged a date for his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Tricia, with George W. Bush. Not only that, he even dispatched a White House jet, at taxpayers’ expense, to pick up young Bush at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in order to bring him back to Washington.
This would not be the only time that Nixon would bestow special favors upon the Bush family. Six months earlier, as the GOP presidential candidate, he had seriously considered Poppy as a potential running mate, even though the latter was just a freshman congressman. Two years after W.’s date with Tricia, following Poppy’s second unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate, Nixon named him his ambassador to the United Nations. And two years later, with President Nixon’s nod, Poppy served a stint as chairman of the Republican Party. It was a quick rise from relative obscurity to the highest level of national politics—and all with Nixon’s help.
Taped conversations reveal that Nixon considered Poppy Bush a lightweight.1 Nevertheless, he repeatedly pushed Poppy ahead, often over people who were much more qualified. This put the elder Bush on the upper rungs of the ladder to the presidency. In all probability, had Nixon not so favored Poppy, he never would have reached the top. And had Poppy Bush not been president, his son George W. Bush almost certainly would not have either. In no small way, Richard Nixon helped to create the Bush presidential dynasty.
What disposed Nixon so positively toward the Bushes? A little-known fact, certainly missing from the many splendid biographies of the thirty-seventh president, is the likely role of Poppy Bush’s father, Prescott, in launching Nixon’s own political career.
Beyond that, the depth and complexity of the ongoing relationship between Nixon and the Bushes, a relationship that spanned nearly three decades, has somehow eluded most historians. An index search of the name Bush in the major Nixon biographies—including even those published after George H. W. Bush rose to the presidency—finds at most a handful of mentions, and in some cases, none at all.
The long overlooked Nixon-Bush story is a tale filled with plots and counterplots, power lust and ego trips, trust and betrayal, strategic alliances and rude revenge. It has a kind of mythic circularity: the elite Bush clan created the “populist” Nixon so that a President Nixon could later play a major role in creating a Bush political dynasty. And finally, the trusted Bushes, having gotten where they wanted, could play a role in Nixon’s fall.
GENERALLY, RICHARD NIXON was known to be a wary and suspicious man. It is commonly assumed that he was paranoid, but Nixon had good reasons to feel apprehensive. One was probably the worry that someone would unearth the extent to which this self-styled outsider from Whittier, California, had sold his soul to the same Eastern Establishment that he publicly (and even privately) reviled. At the same time, he knew that those elites felt the same about him. They tolerated him as long as he was useful, which he was—until he got to the top. Then the trouble started.
Obeisance
When Poppy Bush arrived in Washington after the 1966 elections, he was immediately positioned to help large moneyed interests, and by so doing improve his own political fortunes. His father, still influential, had twisted arms to get him a coveted seat on the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes all tax legislation. The committee was the gatekeeper against attempts to eliminate the oil depletion allowance, and Bush’s assignment there was no small feat. No freshman of either party had gotten on since 1904.2 But former senator Prescott Bush had personally called the commit-tee chairman. Then he got GOP minority leader Gerald Ford—a Warren Commission member and later vice president and president—to make the request himself.3
It was a lot of voltage, but the rewards were worth the effort. Poppy now would be a go-to rep for the oil industry, which could provide Nixon with the Texas financial juice he would need to win the Republican nomination in 1968. Bush was also now a crucial link to an alliance that was forming between Eastern bankers, Texas oilmen, and intelligence operatives.
Indeed, Texans and Bush friends dominated the Nixon presidential campaign. For fund-raising, Poppy recruited Bill Liedtke, his old friend and former Zapata Petroleum partner, who became Nixon’s highest-producing regional campaign finance chairman. Poppy’s ally, Texas senator John Tower, endorsed Nixon shortly before the 1968 GOP convention and was put in charge of Nixon’s “key issues committee.” Once Nixon’s nomination was secured, Poppy and Prescott worked their networks furiously, and within days some of the most influential members of the Republican Party sent letters to Nixon urging him to choose Poppy as his running mate. The names must have given Nixon pause—the CEOs of Chase Manhattan Bank, Tiffany &Co., J. P. Stevens and Co., and on and on. Not surprisingly, executives of Pennzoil and Brown Brothers Harriman were among the petitioners.4
Thomas Dewey, éminence grise of the GOP, also pushed for Poppy. Nixon put Bush’s name on a short list. But as he glimpsed the prize in the distance, he began to assert his independence. To the surprise of almost everyone, he selected as his running mate Spiro Agnew, Maryland’s blunt and combative governor, who had backed Nixon opponent Nelson Rockefeller, the “limousine liberal,” in the primaries. Agnew seemed to offer two things. One, he could be the attack dog who enabled Nixon to assume the role of statesman that he craved. And two, there was little chance that he would outshine the insecure man under whom he would be serving. (Poppy Bush would adopt a variation on this same strategy in 1988 when he selected as his running mate Senator Dan Quayle, who was handsome but inexperienced, and would be ridiculed for his gaffes and general awkwardness.)