by Russ Baker
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.
I witnessed the governor’s office call to the adjutant general of the Texas National Guard, [giving him] a directive to gather the files. And then the subscript to that was make sure there was nothing there that would embarrass the governor . . .
I witnessed that in fact there was some activity under way with some files of—some personal files of “Bush, George W., First Lieutenant,” “1LT” as it was put in handwriting at the top of files within a trash can . . .
The orders came in a telephone call with Mr. Joe Allbaugh, chief of staff of the governor’s office. Mr. Dan Bartlett [Bush’s communications director] was also on that telephone call.8
Bartlett denied the allegations, and Allbaugh called them “hogwash,” but they reinforced the sense of sketchiness about the president’s version. If he had done his duty, why had so few people actually seen him? The Burkett story soon jumped into the print media, where the New York Times noted that Burkett had first made the allegation way back in 1998 in a letter to a Texas state senator. Then the story made the CBS Evening News.
A distraction was urgently needed, and the White House dug deep. Within minutes of the Burkett Hardball appearance, it came up with a new military record, this one purporting to show that Bush had visited a dentist, Dr. John Andrew Harris, at Dannelly Field Air National Guard Base in Montgomery on January 6, 1973—well after he had finished working on the Alabama campaign and returned to Texas.
The dentist visit became important corroboration—if not that Bush had done his Guard duty in Alabama during the summer and fall of 1972, at least that he had been present on an Alabama base at some point. The following day, building on the dental visit record, Scott McClellan declared that Bush now recalled returning to Alabama for additional Guard service even though he was no longer living there.9 As reported by the New York Times:
Asked about the 16 members of the 187th who do not remember Mr. Bush serving in Alabama, Mr. McClellan responded that Mr. Bush’s dental examination “demonstrates that he was serving in Alabama.”10
A high school reporter might have had some questions. Yet it seemed to satisfy the major media. ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings took the new White House bait. Terry Moran reported, “That puts Mr. Bush in Alabama, on duty, and seems to disprove the charge by Democratic Party leader Terry McAuliffe and others that the president was AWOL at that time.”11
The same night, NBC Nightly News reported: “The White House has released a copy of a dental exam from January 1973 that they say confirms President Bush served at an Alabama air base.”12
But there was more to work with in McClellan’s press conference (again, the New York Times):
Mr. McClellan also said that at least two people recalled Mr. Bush serving in Alabama, among them Joe Holcombe, who worked on the Senate campaign with Mr. Bush, and Emily Marks Curtis, who has said she briefly dated Mr. Bush in Alabama.13
So now McClellan had folded in Holcombe, despite the gauziness of his claim—and gotten it into the New York Times. An
d now there was a girlfriend too.
At that press conference, McClellan pointed to an article that had just appeared in the Times Daily, an Alabama newspaper (and in its sister papers, including the Tuscaloosa News). The article quotes Emily Marks Curtis talking about Bush and his Guard service.
The substance of her brief remarks got a vigorous buffing. First, the Alabama newspaper misrepresented what she said. Then McClellan cited that misrepresen tation, and finally it was accepted by the New York Times and other media organizations.
Here’s how the Tuscaloosa News opened its story, headlined “Friend: Bush Did Duty in Alabama”:
A friend of President Bush on Wednesday corroborated Bush’s contention that he reported for National Guard training in Alabama in 1972, despite the lack of official supporting records.
In fact, the quote from Emily Marks Curtis did not corroborate Bush in any way. Rather, it suggested the need for further inquiry that might have found that Bush had in fact not done his Alabama Guard service:
“The thing I know about George is that after the election was over in November, George left and he said he came back to Montgomery to do his guard duty,” Curtis said. She said she and Bush, then a first lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard, dated briefly.14
Her statement actually said that Bush left Alabama as soon as the election was over, then returned some time later, at which time he told Emily Marks Curtis that he had come back to do his Guard duty. As the Bush-friendly interpretation gained circulation, Emily Marks Curtis would often be characterized as Bush’s girlfriend. That seemed to give greater credibility to her ability to vouch for Bush, since, presumably, a girlfriend would know whether he had actually been doing military service. Seven months later, with the 2004 general election nearing, she was still being presented that way.
Here’s the New York Times on September 20, 2004:
Ms. Marks, the daughter of an old Montgomery family, was dating George Bush, and she remembers that he was in the Guard but could offer no detailed recollections. “A lot of people were doing Guard duty,” she said in an interview.15
Yet Emily Marks Curtis had not been Bush’s girlfriend. The two had not even dated during the six months they both worked on the Blount campaign. Several campaign staffers, including Devere McLennan, who was friendly with Bush, confirmed that to me. In fact, the only time the two went out was during that brief period when Bush came back to Alabama—in early January 1973.
So here’s the full extent of the Emily Marks Curtis–dental connection: When Bush returned briefly to Alabama, he did three things. He called up Emily Marks and asked her out. He told her he was in town for Guard duty. And he went to get a dental checkup.
For the complete story, you’d have to ask Poppy Bush. As noted in chapter 8, the events in this period suggest that it was the father’s idea that his son go to Alabama in the first place, and his idea also that his son go back to Alabama and have the dental checkup at the military base—along with a “date” with a local girl to confirm his presence in the state.
The Bush camp would insist that the dental visit established Bush’s presence on an Alabama base on a single day, and thus somehow supported his claim to have done his Guard service. Despite the meagerness of the evidence, much of the media was apparently persuaded, with the result that the Guard story seemed to gradually die down at that point.
When I talked to people who worked in the dental clinic, they could not remember such a routine exam from decades ago, which was not surprising. However, I did learn that they would have treated anyone who walked in wearing a flight jacket (Bush never relinquished his and liked to wear it publicly for many years thereafter). They would not have required him to present evidence that he was serving in an Alabama Guard unit, or even that he had done so in the past.
So the dental exam proved only that W. had a flight jacket and was wearing it on a particular day in Alabama. Yet the media reported the story as though it corroborated Bush’s account.
Within a couple of weeks of that media frenzy in February 2004, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau upped the ante. In his syndicated newspaper comic strip, he offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who claimed he or she had “personally witnessed” Bush reporting for drills at Dannelly Air National Guard base in Alabama between May and November 1972. No one did so. (Seven months later, in September 2004, a group called Texans for Truth went further and offered fifty thousand dollars to anyone who could prove President Bush had fulfilled his service requirements, including mandatory duties and drills, in the Alabama Air National Guard in 1972. No one claimed that either. This reward was offered just as Bush traveled to Las Vegas to address the National Guard Association’s convention.)
By March 2004, Texas television reporter James Moore published Bush’s War for Reelection: Iraq, the White House and the People. The new book examined Burkett’s allegations and explored in the most detail ever the specific documentation surrounding Bush’s service record. Moore, too, concluded that Bush had been AWOL beginning in May 1972.
Eyewitness News
More than anything, Bush needed former members of the Champagne Unit to assert that he had been an exemplary airman until the moment he left for Alabama. This would suggest that there was nothing questionable about his abrupt departure and justify his honorable discharge. For that, he had a core group that he had been cultivating since his early days as governor, through help with legal and personal problems, among other things. Four men would supply most of the quotes on Bush’s service.16 A fifth witness was Jim Bath, Bush’s fellow pilot, drinking buddy, and later, business investor, who provided early quotes and then essentially went underground. Unlike the others, Bath was close enough to both George Bushes that he needed no cue cards to know what to say. But Bath had so many liabilities himself that eventually he was removed from the witness list.
Certainly the most interesting of Bush’s witnesses were Major Dean Roome and Colonel Maury H. Udell. Together they did much to keep a lid on the Guard story straight through the 2004 election. Roome, who claimed to have been Bush’s formation flying partner and roommate during full-time fighter pilot training, provided journalists, including myself, with bland accounts of a fellow who never did anything interesting. “He was very friendly, and outgoing, affable, fun to be around, and, uh, just an overall super good guy,” Roome told me.17
Roome’s sidekick, Maury Udell, had been George Bush’s flight instructor at Ellington Field. Bush would devote only a few pages to his Guard service in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep, but Udell was singled out for praise. Bush described him as a tough and exacting instructor, a “270-pound black belt in judo” who required “blindfold” position checks for the plane’s instruments. While Bush’s flattering autobiography was in the works, Udell in turn was ladling out admiring reports on Bush to reporters. “He had his boots shined, his uniform pressed, his hair cut and he said, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir,’ Udell would recall. “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.”18
Reporters who quoted Roome, Udell, and Walter “Buck” Staudt, Bush’s top commanding officer, did not know that they were not independent witnesses. Besides being avid Bush boosters, Roome and Udell were hoping that Governor Bush would help them address lingering problems with the Texas National Guard, while Staudt was embroiled in his own little scandal.19
The three stayed in regular contact with Bush’s staff, and reported any and all inquiries from the media. Roome in particular became part of an e-mail chain that served as a nerve center and feedback loop. It included Bush campaign (and later White House) staff as well as top Guard officials. The e-mail chain could give Bush’s operatives information on media inquiries and stories in the works, and also receive “talking points” and defensive strategies. The list, with blind copies to recipients, grew to the extent that the talking points were being shared not only with pilots b
ut with many of the country’s top conservative talk show hosts as well.
A Roome with a View
The story that became colloquially known as “Memogate” or “Rathergate” is understood by many people as about a news organization that used phony documents to tar President Bush’s military service record. It was, in this telling, a prime example of media bias. What actually happened was that an accusation against Bush—probably an accurate one—was used to hang his accusers. It was a brilliant exercise in disinformation; and like so many matters we have encountered, it has “covert operation” written all over it.
It began in March 2004, when, with John Kerry holding an eight-point lead in the polls, W. flew to Houston to reinvigorate his base.20 The scene was quintessentially Texan: the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. “I thought there was a lot of bull in Washington,” W. chortled, donning the obligatory cowboy hat and gazing admiringly at prize heifers.21 W. also attended a fund-raiser at a nearby Hilton Hotel. But two events not on the press itinerary were more significant and telling. In a private Hilton suite away from prying eyes, W. held court with some old buddies he hadn’t seen in a long while: his former fellow pilots from the Texas National Guard.