by Russ Baker
Meanwhile, the original justification for Bush’s staff to review his Guard records—that they were seeking information to include in his “autobiogra-phy”— proved suspect. When the book, A Charge to Keep, finally appeared, all mentions of his Guard duty were couched in the vaguest possible language. “It was exciting the first time I flew and it was exciting the last time . . . I continued flying with my unit for the next several years . . . My fellow pilots were interesting people . . . We were different, but we worked well together . . .”13
From the moment journalists started to look into Bush’s military records, it was clear that some essential documents were missing.14 But after initial Freedom of Information requests had elicited the “complete record,” other documents—such as laudatory press releases—were mysteriously supplied in response to later rounds of FOIA requests. There was no adequate explanation of where these new documents came from.
Bush Accused: The Lottery Gambit
In 1996, an anonymous letter reached the U.S. attorney in Austin. The letter, whose existence was revealed in a later legal proceeding, was apparently written by someone with knowledge of the situation. The letter referred to former Texas house speaker Ben Barnes, and alleged that in 1968 Barnes knew about or was involved with favoritism in dispensing of coveted Guard slots, including Bush’s. According to the letter writer, Governor Bush had been so desperate to suppress information about his admission to the Guard that he had rewarded Barnes with a lucrative contract.15
The letter alleges that the situation unfolded in the following way:
The state of Texas had, under Democrat Ann Richards, awarded the lucrative state lottery contract to GTech Corporation, which was represented by Barnes, who had signed a lifetime deal with the company. It gave Barnes a percentage of revenues generated by the lottery; the arrangement, worth millions, made him the highest-paid lobbyist in Texas history.16
When Bush came into office, he appointed his attorney Harriet Miers to head the Lottery Commission. Miers, consulting closely with Karl Rove, went right to work scrutinizing the GTech deal and quickly decided the state could do better than continue with the firm appointed by a Democratic predecessor. “The time has come,” Miers wrote in a February 18, 1997, memo. “I am convinced the Texas Lottery Commission and the State of Texas will be best served by the re-bid of the Lottery Operator contract as soon as possible.”17
The commission hired a lottery expert, Larry Littwin, who moved aggressively for rebidding. At that point, according to the anonymous letter writer, Bush’s aide Reggie Bashur got Barnes to agree—in return for GTech keeping the lucrative lottery contract—not to talk about Bush’s fortuitous admission to the Champagne Unit. Added the letter writer: “Governor Bush knows his election campaign might have had a different result if this story had been confirmed at the time.”18 Littwin was abruptly fired by the commission after he resisted renewing the GTech contract. He then filed a wrongful termination suit. In court pleadings at the time of the lawsuit, Barnes and his attorneys described the notion that the contract renewal was a favor repaid as “fanciful and preposterous.”
After being deposed as part of Littwin’s lawsuit, Barnes issued a statement saying that “neither Bush’s father nor any other member of the Bush family” asked Barnes for help getting W. into the Guard. Instead, Barnes indicated in his written statement that he had been contacted by a third party, Houston businessman Sidney Adger, a wealthy friend of George H. W. Bush’s, who, Barnes claimed, had asked him to recommend the younger Bush “for a pilot position at the Air National Guard.” Barnes said he did just that.
In September 1999, at the time Littwin’s lawsuit was being adjudicated, the Dallas Morning News published the more benign Adger narrative. “Former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes has told friends that in the late 1960s, a well-known Houston oilman asked him to help George W. Bush get a spot in the Texas Air National Guard,” the newspaper story reported. “Two of those friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in recent interviews that Mr. Barnes identified the oilman as Sidney A. Adger, a longtime Bush family acquaintance who died in 1996.”
And there was a requisite nondenial denial. “ ‘All I know is anybody named George Bush did not ask [Barnes] for help,’ said the governor and GOP presidential front-runner while campaigning in New Hampshire.”
It was a wonderful nonstory—a dead man had supposedly called someone to request assistance in gaining W. admission to a unit filled with children of privilege who had gotten into it through connections. In another break for W., though copies of the accusatory anonymous letter were leaked to a few Texas reporters, they were never published.
As part of the cleanup operation on Bush’s Guard years, Don Evans, who ran Governor Bush’s 1998 reelection effort and chaired his presidential campaign, was dispatched for a chat with Barnes. The purpose was to dispel a rumor that the senior Bush had solicited Barnes’s help during an encounter in a private box at the Bluebonnet Bowl football game in December 1967.19 Evans returned with word that Barnes had no memory of the elder Bush asking for any such consideration. W. wrote Barnes personally to express his thanks and also to add another denial to the paper trail. “Dear Ben,” Bush wrote, “Don Evans reported your conversation. Thank you for your candor and for killing the rumor about you and dad ever discussing my status. Like you, he never remembered any conversation. I appreciate your help.”
Why did Bush choose Don Evans for this sensitive mission? The most likely explanation seems to be a prior connection between Evans and Barnes, one that was carefully guarded for many years.
The delicacy of Evans’s position became apparent when Fox News’ Brit Hume was interviewing him at the 2000 convention.
Only an extremely observant viewer might have noticed how evasive Evans was on a particular point: the exact year he had first come to know George W. Bush. Here’s a transcript excerpt from Fox:
HUME: And awaiting Texas’ turn to finally cast its votes, we are joined by Governor George W. Bush’s very good friend and campaign chairman, Don Evans, a fellow Texan. Known him for what 30, 31 years?
EVANS: About 30 years . . . He’s a guy that I knew early on. And we met in 1975 really is when we became great friends. [italics added]
Evans starts to say that he met Bush in 1975, then realizes that he can’t say that because it is not true. Midsentence, he makes a subtle shift: 1975 is when the two really became great friends. It is not when they first met. The distinction might seem trivial. But consider the backstory.
It turns out that Evans, the man most responsible for raising the massive sums that made W. president, had firsthand knowledge of W.’s National Guard saga. Back in 1968, Evans was attending the University of Texas at Austin and dating the woman who would become his wife, Susie Marinis. A childhood friend and neighbor of George W. Bush’s, Marinis would stay with the Bush family when visiting Houston from Midland. But most significant of all is this: Susie Marinis was Ben Barnes’s secretary. Ben Barnes confirmed this to me in 2004. He said that he remembered Don Evans from those early days, and recalled congratulating Evans on his engagement to Marinis, while grousing good-naturedly that Evans was “taking her from him.” Thus, Marinis is the reason that Evans and Bush knew each other in the first place—and the glue between Barnes and Bush.
Whatever Evans knew about Bush’s activities in 1968, he and Bush quickly became fast friends. The two would move to Midland about the same time, with Evans quickly being placed on the executive track of Tom Brown, Inc., a drilling company run by an old friend of the Bush family. Soon Bush would be running for Congress, with Evans playing a central role. As Bush set up his own oil business, and Evans rose at Tom Brown, Evans would join Bush’s company board. And Evans, now president of Tom Brown, would put Bush on his own board.
Meanwhile, Susie Marinis’s brother (Don Evans’s brother-in-law) Thomas Marinis would go on to become the head of the political action committee at Vinson and Elkins, the powerful Houston law firm that repre
sented Enron and became one of the largest corporate bundlers of funds to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.20 Evans himself would become W.’s secretary of commerce soon after the 2000 election.
Ultimately, the most telling detail may be the simple fact that at the time Ben Barnes helped George W. Bush get into the National Guard, his secretary was Bush’s childhood friend. With connections like that, who needed a phone call from Sid Adger? In 2004, when Barnes finally “went public” with what he knew on CBS’s 60 Minutes II, that point about Marinis and Evans was never raised.
Spelling W.
Another person who figures in the Bush Guard story is Robert Spellings, who in 1968 was Ben Barnes’s chief of staff. According to the anonymous letter sent to the U.S. attorney in 1996, Spellings not only knew about the favoritism shown to W., but in the midnineties was gossiping about it. “Robert Spellings also knows about this and began telling the story which made a lot of people nervous,” wrote the informant. “I am told that Spellings was also an aide to Barnes at the time this took place.”
The authorship of the letter never was determined. But one of its effects was to give a boost to Spellings’s personal fortunes. After leaving government, Spellings had been through a lot of ups and downs, both in his personal life and in his work as a lobbyist. He had gained clout with the 1990 victory of Ann Richards, with whom he had been close. But when Bush beat Richards, Spellings was on the outs—a bad position for a lobbyist. Soon after the letter arrived at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, however, Spellings’s luck and life changed dramatically.
Spellings was introduced to Margaret LaMontagne, a longtime Karl Rove protégé serving as an adviser to Governor Bush. The two, both previously married, began dating. Spellings’s new clients included the Texas Thoroughbred Association, one of whose directors was John Adger, a friend and former Champagne Unit colleague of George W. Bush’s, and the son of the man Barnes claimed he had called to get W. preferential treatment in the National Guard.21
With W.’s 2000 victory, LaMontagne moved to Washington, where as assistant to the president for domestic policy, she helped create the “No Child Left Behind” program.22 In 2005 Bush named her secretary of education. In 2001, Spellings and LaMontagne were married—after he proposed to her over the microphone at an Austin dinner held, fittingly, to honor Karl Rove.
Perhaps Rove’s involvement in this political love match was no more than that of a friend. But it also served a larger purpose: once Spellings became La-Montagne’s boyfriend and then husband, he was effectively removed as a witness to the suppression of Bush’s National Guard service story—an obvious political time bomb for Governor Bush.
Spellings is sensitive about inquiries. When he heard that I had been asking questions about him, he called me and demanded to know why. I arranged to see him at the Washington law firm he had joined after marrying LaMontagne, and through which he works as a lobbyist. When I arrived at his offices with a colleague in December 2006, he ushered us into a conference room, spent the first minutes or so in a tirade against the press, and then insisted he would only consent to an interview if he was allowed to videotape me—so that he could “study my body language” later.
Studying body language is a favorite gambit of George W. Bush, as Ron Suskind recounts in The One Percent Doctrine.23 It is not clear whether Spellings picked it up from the president. But videotaping a private meeting with a print journalist in which note taking and audio recording are the norm seemed in this instance an effort to intimidate. When Spellings insisted on this, I left.24
MORE THAN ANY other president in history, Bush would embrace the title “commander in chief” and wrap himself in the raiment of military service. This was evident long before 9/11 and the Iraq War, and long before he became unpopular. But this tendency was not apparent during his six years as Texas governor. Then, he steered clear of the base where his Guard secrets happened to be buried.
Texas governors from Republican Bill Clements to Democrat Ann Richards routinely visited Guard headquarters at Camp Mabry. All except George W. Bush. “In his eight years as governor, he never one time went to Camp Mabry,” said one Mabry veteran. “How far was it from the office? A five-minute drive if you are driving in a normal car. If you had an escort, it’s a three-minute drive. You could almost hit it with a tank round.”
A Flight of Fancy
All this makes doubly interesting a lengthy anecdote Evans shared during Bush’s first presidential race.25 According to Evans, during the summer of 1976, in Midland, W. took Evans up in a Cessna. Evans chortled over Bush’s problems with the controls—though Bush’s original flight training was in a Cessna. Evans actually had to issue instructions: “Give it some gas!” It was a heart-stopping landing and—according to Texas reporter and author Bill Minutaglio—“the last time [Bush] flew a plane.”
Evans told this story to Minutaglio in June 1998, at the precise time that Evans and his team were busy cleaning up the messy spots in Bush’s résumé, especially his National Guard service. In their world of deception, calculation and counter-calculation, it is impossible to know with certainty why Evans thought it important to share this seemingly embarrassing story about his friend and candidate with a reporter, or whether it simply slipped out. Nevertheless, while this story presents W. as a bumbler, it also appears to refute the evidence that W. never flew again after walking away from his duty as an Air National Guard pilot in 1972. That’s important, because of Janet Linke’s story, recounted in chapter 8, about W. being afraid to fly and having trouble handling the controls of his jet—a story that could have been politically damaging if it gained momentum.
And they cannot have it both ways. If the Evans story of W.’s shaky performance in a small, simple civilian plane were true, it would cast doubt upon the carefully choreographed moment in which Bush emerged in pilot’s garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to celebrate “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The image—instantly telegraphed around the globe and reinforced by subsequent White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit—created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in flying the craft.
A Charge to Keep
During his presidential campaign, W. collaborated with a professional writer on A Charge to Keep, a book that was intended to introduce the candidate to the American public. Mickey Herskowitz was a longtime Texas journalist, known both as a sports columnist and as a prolific ghostwriter of biographies. He had worked with a wide range of political, media, and sports figures, including Texas governor John Connally, Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle, Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, and newsman Dan Rather.
The project originally had been his agent’s idea. Herskowitz considered himself a friend of the Bush family, and has been a guest at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport. In the late 1960s, Herskowitz designated President Bush’s father, then-congressman George H. W. Bush, to replace him briefly as a guest sports columnist at the Houston Chronicle, and the two had remained close since.
In 1999, when Herskowitz called the George W. Bush presidential campaign, to propose a book “by W.,” it was supposed to be Karl Rove’s decision on whether to green-light the book project. But Rove was busy with other things, and he said that if it was okay with W., it was okay with him. W. said he was amenable as long as he didn’t have to do too much. Most of all, he wanted to know how much money was involved. Herskowitz, whom I interviewed in 2004, said that he and Bush quickly arrived at an agreement in which they would split the proceeds.
W. did have one other concern: he worried whether there would be enough content for such a book. He openly fretted to Herskowitz: what had he accomplished that was worth talking about? Bush thought it a better idea for the book to focus on his policy objectives. And what might those be? Herskowitz inquired. Ask Karl, Bush replied.
Finally, though, the two began what would total approximately twenty meetings so Bush could share his thoughts. As a writer, Herskowitz knew that too much
canned, self-serving material could be commercially toxic. Even in a book intended to be self-serving, it could destroy the credibility— and hence the marketability—of the product. So he hoped to tease out some unguarded revelations, on the assumption that these would simply humanize his subject. At the beginning, Herskowitz had no idea the extent to which W. was treading on eggshells.
According to Herskowitz, W. was a confusing combination of cautious and candid. Sometimes, he would say something in an offhanded way that would later prove to be explosive. One such bombshell concerned his military service.
Herskowitz says that Bush was reluctant to discuss his time in the Texas Air National Guard—and inconsistent when he did so. Among other things, he provided conflicting explanations of how he came to bypass a waiting list and obtain a coveted Guard slot as a domestic alternative to Vietnam.