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Thom Hartmann on the News for April 16, 2012 Charter for Compassion

Dan Rather Was Right About George W. Bush By Joe Hagan,

Texas MonthlyPosted on April 16, 2012

Former President George W. Bush speaks at the Summit to Save Lives in Washington, DC,

09/13/11. (photo: Getty Images)

Source: Reader Supported News

16 April 12

Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the AirNational Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be

the legendary newsmans finest hour. Instead, it blew up in his face,

tarnishing his career forever and casting a dark cloud of doubt and

suspicion over his reporting and that of every other journalist on the case.

This month, as Rather returns with a new memoir, Joe Hagan finally gets to

the bottom of the greatest untold story in modern Texas politics, with

exclusive, never-before-seen details that shed fresh light on who was right,

who was wrong, and what really happened.

ere it is, on a coat hook in midtown Manhattan: the Army-issue green shirt, with CBS

NEWS written in white letters on the ID tag, that Dan Rather wore in 1966 while

hunkered down in rice paddies along the Cambodian border. It would be one of the

legendary network anchors most famous assignments: dispatching dramatic reports on

the Vietnam conflict for millions of Americans sitting down to the evening news. In 16mm

films you can see him, young and square-jawed, hair thick and black, barking into a

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microphone and recoiling from machine guns that rat-a-tat-tat behind him.

Its a little tighter than it used to be, says Rather, considering the shirt now.

Hes sitting under a still-life painting of a fishing rod and tackle in his modest, somewhat

shabby little office on Forty-second Street, a place hidden at the far end of a long hallway

where youd least expect to find the former anchor. His lower lip bulges, as if swollen from

a punch to the mouth, with a pinch of tobacco, a vestigial habit from his teenage years

working on Tex as oil rigs. Craggy, gray- haired, and in need of hearing aids, Rather is stillanimated by his glory days, the details of which have long since solidified into a personal

mythology. It s the epic story of the hustling correspondent from Wharton who reported

the death of President John F. Kennedy as a young CBS correspondent, who brought

Vietnam into American living rooms, who stood toe-to-toe with Richard Nixon during

Watergate, and who nudged aside Walter Cronkite to become one of the most trusted and

iconic voices of his day.

By all rights, Rather, who turns 81 this year, should be enjoying a few victory laps at the

close of a remarkable career. And he would be, except for one report that he will never

forget, because no one will ever let him: the botched 60 Minutes segment in 2004 on

George W. Bushs Texas Air National Guard service. The report, which lasted fifteenminutes, forever damaged Rathers reputation and ended his network TV career after

forty years. Its claims were potentially explosive that Bush had received preferential

treatment to enter the National Guard in 1968 in order to avoid the Vietnam draft and that

he had then shirked his duty without repercussion. As ev idence, Rather produced six

documents that described the alleged political pressure Bushs commanding officer was

under to sugarcoat possibly embarrassing moments in Bushs record, specifically his

failure to show up for a flight physical and his loss of flight status. In a presidential

campaign that had become a referendum on who had the credibility to take control of the

quagmire in Iraq, Rathers report could have seriously damaged Bushs reelection effort.

But he went at the king and he missed.

Almost as soon as the broadcast aired, a swarm of right-wing blogs assailed Rathers

documents, claiming their typeface and spacing was inconsistent with any known

typewriter of the early seventies. Within days CBS was reeling as Bush allies accused

Rather and his longtime producer, Mary Mapes, of using forgeries to tip a presidential

election in favor of the Democrats. Twelve days after the story aired, CBS backed down,

forced Rather to apologize, and established a special panel to invest igate what went wrong.

Forty-three days later, Bush was reelected, beating Senator John Kerry by a two-point

margin in the pivotal swing state of Ohio. By the t ime Mapes and three other producers

were ousted by CBS, the Bush National Guard story was dead and buried, with Rathers

reputation as the tombstone.

Eight years later, Bush is back in Texas, keeping a low profile and building his presidential

library. Rather is still a newsman, hosting a program called Dan Rather Reports on HDNet,

a niche cable and satellite channel. But he is also a man who cannot stop reliving his worst

moment. T his month he will publish Rather Outspoken: My Life in News, his fourth

memoir but the first since his downfall. Not surprisingly, he uses the book to defend the

details of his report, sharpening his ax for Bush, as well as former colleagues at CBS and its

parent company at the time, Viacom, whom Rather believes caved under political pressure

from the Bush White House.

The story we reported has never been denied by George W. Bush, by anyone in his closecircles, including his family, says Rather. They have never denied the bulwark of the

story, the spine of the story, the thrust of the story. (In fact, Bush officials have indeed

denied it, repeatedly. I n a conversation I had with former White House director of

communications Dan Bartlett in 2007, he told me, We believe the story is inaccurate, both

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.

Rather tried making his case in a 2007 lawsuit against his former bosses, but it was thrown

out of court two years later. Nonetheless, he remains convinced that he did nothing wrong.

I believed at the time that the documents were genuine, Rather says, and Ive never

ceased believing that they are genuine.

This is nearly impossible to know. The documents were Xerox copies, which in forensics is

a dead end nothing can be proved, or disproved, without an original. Since the report,

Rather has hired lawyers and private investigators to get to the bottom of the mystery, to

no avail. Strangely, he has made only one attempt to contact the man who initially gave the

documents to CBS, the former Guardsman and West T exas rancher Bill Burkett, who, after

initially lying about where he got them, told a dubious tale of receiving them from shadowy

characters at a cattle show in Houston and then went stone silent. Burkett refused to talk

to Rather.

But the CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and have always been, a

red herring. The real story, assembled here for the first time in a single narrative,

featuring new witnesses and never-reported details, is far more complex than what Rather

and Mapes rushed onto the air in 2004. At the time, so much rancorous political

gamesmanship surrounded Bushs military history that it was impossible to report clearly

(and Rathers flawed report effectively ended further investigations). But with Bush out of

office, this is no longer a problem. Ive been reporting this story since it first broke, and

today there is more cooperation and willingness to speak on the record than ever before.

The picture that emerges is remarkable. Beyond the haze of elaborately revised fictions

from both the political left and the political right is a bizarre account that has remained,

until now, the great untold story of modern Texas politics. For 36 years, it made its way

through the swamps of state government as it led up to the collision between two powerful

Texans on the national stage.

And by the time it was over, no one not Dan Rather, not George W. Bush would be leftunbloodied.

The Beginning

It was the 1988 presidential campaign of Bushs father that first raised the issue of a

privileged son from Texas getting special access to the National Guard only the

privileged son wasnt a Bush. Michael Dukakis, the elder Bushs opponent, had recently

chosen Senator Lloyd Bentsen, of Houston, as his running mate. One Sunday morning in

August of that year, George H.W. Bushs campaign co-chairman, New Hampshire governor

John Sununu, went on TV to attack Bentsen for allegedly helping his son, Lloyd Bentsen

III, enter the Texas Air National Guard in 1968. Someone called Senator Bentsen to pointout to him that this special slot, which was rare, came open, said Sununu, and Bentsen

ran to get his son to fill that.

This was the first presidential election in which candidates Vietnam-era decisions were

resonating among the electorate. The question of who did what in the sixties, when an

unpopular war divided the nation, had become a litmus test . (Incidentally, this was also the

year that Dan Rather established himself as a Bush family enemy by needling thenvice

president Bush with questions about his role in the Iran-Contra affair in an infamous live

interview on CBS.) With Democrats attacking the elder Bushs own running mate, Dan

Quayle, for joining the Indiana National Guard during Vietnam, Sununus claim was a

natural counteroffensive. But it boomeranged. It turned out that George W. Bush, at the

time a senior staff member in his fathers campaign, had served in the same Houston unit

as Lloyd Bentsen III and was recruited the same year by the same man, Colonel Walter

Buck Staudt. That unit, the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, tasked with defending the

Gulf Coast, was well-known as a champagne unit because it housed not only Bentsen and

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Bush but a number of other sons of the Tex as elite, such as John Connally II I, son of the

former Texas governor and Nixon treasury secretary; Al Hill, the grandson of oil tycoon

H.L. Hunt; and several members of the Dallas Cowboys.

Sununus attacks died after Bentsen and Staudt denied the allegations, but the issue had

been introduced, and the timing and circumstances of Bushs entry into the Guard were

enough to raise eyebrows. In February 1968, three months before Bush graduated from

Yale, the T et offensive left more than five hundred U.S. soldiers dead in a single week.

That same month, Walter Cronkite famously declared the Vietnam War mired instalemate just as President Lyndon Johnson canceled draft deferments for most graduate

students. Days before he would become subject to the draft, Bush, whose father was then a

U.S. congressman from Houston, won a coveted slot as a pilot in the 1 47th.

Bush maintains he simply interviewed with Staudt and was accepted on the spot. That may

be true, but it would be hard to argue that there werent more-qualified candidates: Bush

received the lowest acceptable score on his pilot aptitude test.

In 1988 Staudt, by most accounts a bullying, cigar-chomping autocrat, told reporters that

there had been no hanky-panky involved in getting Bush and Bentsen into the Guard,

and he repeated that defense in 2000. But suspicion was not unwarranted. There was along list of men trying to get into the T exas National Guard. And several months after Bush

entered, Staudt paid a visit to Washington, D.C., and lobbied the elder Bush for funding for

Ellington Air Force Base, in Houston, making sure to update him on how well his son was

doing.

Control over entry into the National Guard was a hotly fought-over lever of power in

Texas. Staudt had considerable influence in Houston, but in a state still dominated by

Democrats, the ultimate gatekeeper was his commanding officer and internal rival,

Brigadier General James Rose. A Democrat, Rose was a handsome and sophisticated

political operator whod managed to become head of the Texas Air National Guard despite

never having been a pilot. Rose had a close political bond with the man who would sit at the

center of the Guard story: Ben Barnes, then the Speaker of the Texas House of

Representatives.

A fair-haired wunderkind whod been elected a state representative while still in college,

Barnes was widely considered a potential future governor and perhaps even a presidential

contender. He was a protg of President Johnsons and counted him as a close friend. And

he had learned from his mentor the art of collecting political chits as a way of life. Barnes

has said he regularly fielded requests for entry into the National Guard, and after assessing

the trade-in value of the favor, he would pass them on to Rose to sign off on.

Barnes knew how to work the press too: he was a regular source for the man who was then

the CBS White House correspondent, Dan Rather.

Barnes would travel a rocky road after the Johnson era. He was elected lieutenant

governor in 1968, but several years later, the Sharpstown stock-fraud scandal erupted,

taking down much of the states Democratic power structure. Though Barnes was never

charged, the scandal effectively ended his political career (and that of Governor Preston

Smith and House Speaker Gus Mutscher). Out of office, he evolved into the kind of

omnipresent backroom figure everyone either loves or hates, a charming and cunning

wheeler-dealer with a huge grin, a firm handshake, and a finger in every pot. Ugly as a

cedar post, says Houston lawyer Dick DeGuerin, but he shakes your hand and you knowyour hands been shook.

It was on Rathers infamous 60 Minutes segment, in 2004, that Barnes first publicly

recounted how he had called General Rose on behalf of George W. Bush in the spring of

1968. Barnes claimed he had received a call from Sid Adger, an oilman in Houston who was

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a close friend of the elder Bushs. As it happened, both of Adgers sons were also in the Air

National Guard in Houston, under Staudts command. Barnes told me that in the late

seventies, while he and Adger served on the board of Texas International Airlines, Adger

personally thanked him for helping Bush. We both knew I had done him that favor, he

said.

Barness story has never been corroborated because both Rose and Adger were dead by

the time he first told it publicly. The elder Bush has said he doesnt recall asking Adger for

help, and the younger Bush has denied knowledge of it. But during the 1988 campaign,Rose and his son Mark happened to be watching television together when a report came on

about the Bush-Quayle campaigns attacks on Bentsen. According to Mark Rose, who has

never spoken about it on the record before now, his father admitted to him that hed

helped both Bush and Bentsen into the Guard.

My dad looked at me and said, I signed off on Bentsens son going into the Guard, and I

signed off on Bushs son going into the Guard, said Rose, a former Austin city councilman

who is now an energy executive living in Bastrop.

He added, [George W. Bush] cant say, I didnt have any help. Staudt didnt work that

way. My dad didnt work that way.

Bushs onetime expert and advocate on his National Guard service, a former personnel

officer named Albert Lloyd, agreed with Rose. In an interv iew conducted shortly before his

death, in March, he said that General Rose, who was Lloyds direct boss in the sixties, had

to have been aware of whose son he was admitting to the Guard and that Ben Barnes was

the likely broker.

Governor Bush

None of this, however, was being reported in 1988, and after the elder Bush won the White

House, the story died down. No one thought much about George W. Bushs military records

until he decided to run for governor in 1994 against the incumbent, Democrat Ann

Richards. The first mention came from a TV reporter for Houston station KHOU named

Jim Moore. During a debate in October, Moore asked Bush whether hed received

preferential treatment to get into the National Guard in 1968. Bush replied that most

Guard assignments were for only six months and nobody else wanted to spend the extra

time it took to train on a jet fighter. My father, just like my commanding officer said, had

nothing to do with getting me in that unit, he said.

Governor Richards knew there was more to it than that. She had privately asked Barnes

about the rumor that he had helped Bush get into the Guard, and Barnes told her that hehad. Robert Spellings, who was Barness chief of staff in the late sixties (his future wife,

Margaret Spellings, would later become Bushs Secretary of Education), also told Richards

he recalled getting Bush in. But Spellings didnt remember ex actly how it was done and

advised Barnes against going public, because Barnes had no real evidence. Richards, who

had opposed the Vietnam War, didnt push it.

But after Bush won the election, Barness story spiked in political value. What was to unfold

in Texas over the next five years was a political power struggle, at the center of which was

Barnes and his claim about Bushs military history. It began, of all places, at the Texas

Lottery Commission.

Barnes was the chief lobbyist for the corporation under contract to operate the lottery in

Texas, a multinational gaming services and technology company called GTECH. He and a

partner had cut a sweetheart deal in 1992, when the state launched the lottery, to collect 4

percent of GTECHs Texas revenue in exchange for maintaining the massive state


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contract, which was worth about $150 million annually. The deal made him enormously

influential as a fundraiser for Democrats. In the mid-nineties, he bought a house on

Nantucket and befriended the Kennedy family and John Kerry. T o maintain his power and

influence, Barnes just needed to protect the GTECH contract.

But when Bush took office, Barnes became a target. Bushs political architect, Karl Rove,

and his chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, took a keen interest in the lottery s machinations,

requesting that minutes from lottery meetings and weekly reports be sent to them

regularly. The Bushes were paranoid about the lottery, says George Kuempel, whocovered the agency for the Dallas Morning News. Rove wanted to f Barnes.

Bush appointed his own lawyer, Harriet Miers, as chair of the Texas Lottery Commission.

As soon as she arrived, Miers began studying the possibility of opening the GTECH

contract to new bidders. Suddenly, Barnes needed all the leverage he could get, and one

thing he had was the story about how Bush got into the Guard.

About two years after Bush took power in Austin, the Lottery Commission became

embroiled in a controversy that finally caused this tension to spill out into the open. A press

leak in late 1996 revealed that the Lottery Commissions executive director, a Democratic

appointee named Nora Linares, was carry ing on an extramarital affair with a GTECHconsultant a major conflict of interest that provided the perfect opportunity for the Bush

camp to sweep Democrats from the lottery. Miers promptly fired Linares.

And that is when a mysterious document began circulating in Austin that would serve as

the Rosetta stone of the Bush National Guard controversy. The document, a single-page

letter written by an anonymous author and addressed to a U.S. attorney, described an

alleged secret deal struck between George W. Bush and Ben Barnes in which Barnes agreed

to withhold the story of getting the governor into the Guard in exchange for Bushs

securing the GT ECH contract against competing bidders.

The memo fingered a Bush aide named Reggie Bashur as the one who brokered the alleged

quid pro quo: Bashur was sent to talk to Barnes who agreed never to confirm the story

and the Governor talked to [Miers] two days later and she then agreed to support letting

GTech keep the contract without a bid. And indeed, the previous summer, Miers had

renewed the GTECH contract without a bid, against the wishes of state Republicans.

The memo also claimed that Bush had lied to Jim Moore when he said in the 1 994 debate

that hed received no help securing a slot in the Guard. According to the memo, Barness

former assistant Nick Krajl had personally called General Rose on Bushs behalf. At this

time I cant release my name, the memos author wrote, but at the proper time I will

come forward and show this story to be true.

Initially, no one could figure out who wrote the memo. But in early 1997 Linares brought a

lawsuit against GTECH for allegedly helping engineer her ouster, and her lawyer, Charles

Soechting, the former chairman of the Texas Democratic party , decided to investigate the

memos origins. He tracked it to a copy center in Austin, subpoenaed the tape from the

centers security camera, and invited some local political figures and the senior captain of

the Texas Rangers to identify the man who appeared to be faxing it. Though the man wore

an L.A. Lakers cap and dark glasses, witnesses all agreed it was T om Duffy, the chief of

staff for Democrat John Sharp, the state comptroller.

Everyone in the room, in unison, started laughing and said, Duffy! recalled Soechting.Everybody knew he had one thing in life he does, and thats take care of John.

But why would Sharp have had the memo sent? A possible motive became clearer in

hindsight: Sharp was preparing to run for lieutenant governor in 1998 against Rick Perry,

who would have Bush at the top of the ballot to help him out. Sharp had also been a


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longtime critic of state-sponsored gaming, the establishment of which had put him directly

at odds with Barnes. It would be a three-birds-with-one-stone political hit.

In an interview, Sharp told me he had nothing to do with the memo and implicated Duffy

as acting independently. When I asked about it, he said hes not interested in talking

about it and appreciated it if I wouldnt ask about it again, Sharp said. I take that to

mean Id better not ask him about it again.

Duffy declined comment, but he was in an unusually compromised position at the time: hisgirlfriend was a top executive at the Texas Lottery Commission and a close ally of

Linaress.

In any case, everyone mentioned in the memo denies the story it tells. Barnes calls it a lot

of malarkey and argues that because Rove was actively trying to get rid of him, Rove

must not have feared any story that Barnes could reveal in retaliation.

Soon after, Barnes was implicated in an elaborate GTECH kickback scheme in New Jersey ,

where the company had another lottery contract. These allegations were ev entually

retracted, and the federal prosecutor who brought them was forced to issue an apology,

but Barnes agreed to part ways with the company not long after. His exit package was an

eye-popping $23 million. To many observers in Texas, it looked more like a pay off than a

buyout. As one former Bush aide told me, It didnt smell right to anyone who was paying

attention.

The following year, yet another turn in the GTECH story fanned the theory that Barnes

had engineered a deal to cover up Bushs Guard history. Following Linaress departure, the

lottery commissioners decided to open up the bidding. To signal a fresh start, they hired a

complete outsider as their new executive director Larry Littwin, a short, unassuming

New Yorker who had rarely set foot in Tex as. He began by launching a complex

investigation into illegal GTECH contributions to Texas lawmakers. But only five months

after he took the post, Miers decided hed gone rogue, stirring up paranoia among

legislators from whom Bush needed cooperation on other matters and angering GTECH

executives. Miers fired him without ex planation, and the bidding was shut down, with

GTECH retaining its contract.

Like Linares before him, Littwin sued GT ECH for allegedly exerting political influence over

the state agency to get him fired. To prove it, Littwins lawyers also focused on the alleged

Barnes-Bush handshake deal described in the anonymous memo from 1996.

Legitimate or not, the t iming of the Littwin suit was conspicuously poor for Bush: in 1 998

he was running for reelection and laying the groundwork for a presidential run, polishingup his rsum and shaping the contours of his life into a political memoir. That year Bushs

campaign paid Miers $19,000 to examine his Guard record for vulnerabilities, according

to a Newsweek report from July 2000. The central problem that Miers identified: rumors

that Bush had help from his father in getting into the National Guard in 1968.

For Bush, the most irksome version of the rumor had it that his father had personally

asked Barnes for help. In order to put the matter to rest, Bush sent his 1998 campaign

manager (and future Secretary of Commerce), Don Evans, to talk to Barnes, who later told

me, I got the impression they were very worried. Barnes reassured Evans, telling him

that hed never spoken to the elder Bush directly about his son. Subsequently, Barnes

received a solicitous letter, signed by Bush, which is now framed in Barness office: DearBen, Don Evans reported your conversation. Thank you for y our 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.


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About a year later, after resisting a subpoena for several weeks in the Littwin case, Barnes

was forced to give what would become his official version of the story: that Sid Adger, the

Houston oilman and friend of the elder Bushs, had called Barnes on behalf of Bush and

asked if he could help get his son into the Guard. Soon after, GTECH settled with Littwin,

paying him $300,000 and demanding that Barness deposition be destroyed and that

Littwin never talk about it again.

The 2000 Election

With the presidential campaign about to begin, it was now open season on the Guard story,

which had still never drawn a sustained national investigation. Two TV producers pursued

Barnes for his first on-air interview: Mary Mapes, Rathers 60 Minutes producer at CBS,

and David Bloom, the NBC correspondent who later died in Iraq. Mapes courted Barnes for

months. Bloom spent two weeks in Austin, including a night drinking at Barness estate,

trying to cajole him into appearing on NBC.

Barnes basked in the attention but had no intention of elevating his court admission to a

political attack. When I asked Barnes why a Democratic fund-raiser with a damaging story

about the Republican presidential nominee wouldnt help his party in the close 2000

election, he said that Al Gore didnt ask him for help. But Barness friends say he was justhedging his bets: if he told his story and Bush won the presidency, Barnes would have a

powerful political enemy in the White House. (And not for the first time: Barnes believes to

this day that Richard Nixon was responsible for a politically motivated investigation that

led to the Sharpstown scandal and his downfall.)

But apart from Barnes, Littwins lawyers had inadvertently opened a second and more

controversial chapter of the Bush Guard story. As part of their research, they obtained the

most thorough and least redacted copy of Bushs military file that anyone had yet seen.

They obtained it not from the T exas National Guard archives, which were then controlled

by a Bush appointee, but from the National Guard headquarters, in Arlington, Virginia.

Littwins Dallas lawyers recruited a local Air Force veteran to interpret the file. He was a

Bush antagonist still agitated by medical issues from his service, but he was an expert in

the military jargon of the time. I was stunned at what I saw, explained the man, who

requested anonymity for fear of retribution. It was full of inconsistencies. As

compensation, the man asked Littwins lawyers if he could keep a photocopy of Bushs

record, then made an appointment to go see someone at the Dallas bureau of CBS News.

That person was Mary Mapes.

It would take her four years of obsessive pursuit myopic zeal, as the special CBS panel

would later describe it to get a story on the air, but this was the ex act moment when

Rathers destiny was set in motion.

A few days later, the Air Force veteran decided to contact a Boston Globe reporter named

Walter V. Robinson, who was covering the Guard story. Robinson immediately flew to

Texas and spent several days studying Bushs military records. What followed was a

painstaking investigation by the Boston Globe, unrivaled in its detail, which put the Bush

campaign on the defensive and inspired other reporters to focus on Bushs lost y ear.

After training at Moody Air Force Base, in Georgia from which a military aircraft once

ferried him to Washington for a date with T ricia Nixon Bush was assigned in 1970 to

flying duty as a pilot of the F- 102 jet fighter at Ellington Air Force Base, in Houston. He hadan apartment at the Chateau Dijon complex, an enclave of affluence where he played

volleyball, barbecued, drank beer, and chased girls among the citys oil-industry elite. He

drove a Triumph sports car, his buzz cut and flight jacket obscuring his Andover-to-Y ale

background. An aide who worked with Bush in later years recalled his simply say ing, I

was a badass back then.


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But after receiving relatively high marks as a pilot of the F-102, Bush suddenly stopped

flying in the spring of 1972. Despite the declaration in his 1999 memoir, A Charge to Keep,

that he flew jets for several years starting in 1970, his flying career actually ended two

years later. T hat was the y ear he left Houston to work on the long-shot Senate bid of

Winton Red Blount, a candidate from Alabama whose campaign manager, Jimmy Allison,

was an old Bush family friend. Bush had committed to continuing his Guard service with a

unit based in Montgomery, but nobody from that unit remembered seeing him, including

the commander of the base. As the Globe story reported, Bushs next documented duty inthe National Guard was a year later, back in Houston. It seemed that not only had Bush

avoided Vietnam by entering the Guard, but he may have simply disappeared for a spell,

failing to fulfill his duty to fly planes for a full six years.

The Globe story whipped the national media into a frenzy. The gaps that it revealed in

Bushs record and his campaigns inconsistent and sometimes discredited explanations

for those gaps prompted persistent questions about whether he had gone AWOL or ev en

deserted the military for a time. In particular, reporters zeroed in on a document showing

that Bush had lost his flight status in August 1972 for failing to take a flight physical, a

serious offense.

As it happened, another pilot listed on the same document also lost his right to fly for the

same reason and at around the same time. That name was initially redacted on copies of

Bushs military record released by the Texas National Guard, even though a dozen other

names on the document were not. When a clean copy turned up, the name that had been

blacked out was revealed to be that of James R. Bath, a close pal of Bushs who would later

become a business adviser to the bin Laden family in Texas as well as Bushs business

partner in his failed oil venture, Arbusto Energy.

Bath declined to comment on his loss of flight status, but his military file shows that, like

Bush, he didnt fly again for the National Guard after 1972 and was discharged one year

later. Many investigative reporters, fed stories by Texas Democrats, became convinced,

even obsessively so, that some specific incident had occurred to precipitate this unusual

coincidence. Soon every major media outlet in the country was circling around the gaps in

Bushs record.

The Bush team knew it had to respond to the stories. Campaign spokesman Dan Bartlett

explained that the reason Bush stopped flying in 1972 was that he was in Alabama and his

family doctor wasnt available to give him a physical. When it was pointed out that only a

military physician could perform a pilots flight physical, Bartletts story shifted. He said

the Guard was phasing out the F-102 on which Bush had trained, and therefore Bush had

opted out of flying altogether. Reporters countered that the plane continued to fly atEllington Air Force Base until 1974. The Bush campaign tweaked the explanation yet again,

saying that the Air National Guard in Alabama didnt have the F-102, so he saw no reason

to maintain his flight status during his transfer.

These shifting explanations only intensified the scrutiny and led to questions about what

else could have caused Bushs loss of flight status. One possible answer was offered much

later, in 2004, by a woman named Janet Linke. After Bush left for Alabama, her husband,

Jan Peter Linke, was transferred to Houston to replace him on the F-1 02, which

apparently still needed pilots, despite the phaseout. While the Linkes were there, Bushs

former commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, allegedly told them that Bush

had stopped flying because he became afraid to land the plane. He was mucking up bad,Killian told us, Janet said to a Florida newspaper. (Jan Peter died in a car accident in

1973.)

But by the time Linke went public with her allegation, the press had already abandoned


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the Bush National Guard story for the Dan Rather controversy. Also ignored was some

possible corroborating evidence: an Associated Press investigation uncovered Bushs

original flight logs, which showed that after flying for hundreds of hours on the F-102, Bush

suddenly began flying a two-seat T -33 training jet and spent more time in a flight

simulator in the months preceding his departure for Alabama. The logs also showed

instances of his having to make multiple passes at the landing strip.

The White House said that Bush was try ing to rack up required flight hours in advance of

his absence in Alabama. But the flight entries in question precede Bushs application for atransfer to Alabama.

The landing issue remains mired in ambiguous records and the selective memory of people

who were there. Whats clear, however, is that Bushs superiors made it unusually easy for

him to quit flying and leave Houston. They first attempted to sign him up for a postal unit

in Alabama that met once a month. (The commander of the outfit told Bush he couldnt

guarantee that the group would even exist in three months but added, Were glad to have

you!) When Bush was informed that he couldnt fulfill his duty by doing that, he sent a

letter requesting equivalent duty with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group, at

Dannelly Air Base, in Montgomery. The unit commander, in official memos, said Bush could

start by attending two drills in September 1972. He didnt show up for the drills.

When Bush lost his flight status, in August 1972, the official military protocol of the Texas

Air National Guard was to open an internal investigation and review why the pilot didnt

show up for his physical. It say s so on Bushs own documents. That never happened.

Bushs go-to expert on his military record, Albert Lloyd, said a report wasnt necessary

because Bushs commanders knew he had stopped flying to go to work in Alabama proof

only that the Air National Guard blew off the rules when it came to Bush. When I

mentioned this to Lloyd in 2008, he growled that pilots hate paperwork.

Throughout 2000, the Bush campaign sought to settle the matter of his time in Alabama,

but it struggled to provide reporters with anyone who could remember seeing him there.

While Bush managed to find two ex-girlfriends who would vouch for him, neither saw him

in uniform, and both said that they knew of his duty only because he told them.

One man from the Montgomery unit remembered seeing Bush, but he was a political

supporter in Georgia who had his details mangled, recalling Bush sightings months before

Bush claims to have served there. A $50,000 reward by a nonprofit group called Texans

for Truth seeking anyone who could prove Bush fulfilled his Guard duty in Alabama was

never collected (nor was cartoonist Garry Trudeaus $10,000 reward for the same

information). No paper records exist in the National Guard archives in Texas or Alabama

that corroborate Bushs service in Montgomery, and the personnel officer in Alabama at

the time said it was up to his counterparts in Texas to keep track of Bush. Judging by his

military files, they didnt.

Bush moved back to Houston after the November 1972 election, which Red Blount lost

badly. During the holidays, he visited his parents house in D.C. and, after drinking with his

brother Marv in, drove his car into a neighbors garbage can. His father demanded to see

him in the den, where the younger Bush challenged his father to go mano a mano. The

showdown, part of Bush family lore, was defused when Jeb Bush announced that George

had been accepted to Harvard Business School (though he had applied only to prove to his

father that he could get in, George declared indignantly).

The next month, the elder Bush was named head of the Republican National Committee.

According to George W. Bushs official time line, this was also the month that his father

enlisted him in volunteer work at a nonprofit poverty program for youths in Houstons

Third Ward. It was called Project PULL (Professionals United Leadership League), and his


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father was an honorary board member.

In 2004 Knight Ridder newspapers interviewed several people who had worked at PULL

while Bush was there. One of them, Althia Turner, fearful of telling what she knew, agreed

to an interview only after a call to her pastor. She said Bush had come to the program

because he had been in trouble, a fact she learned as the secretary to John White, the

programs founder, who died in 1988. We didnt know what kind of trouble hed been in,

only that hed done something that required him to put in the time, she said, later adding

that Bush had to sign in and out of PULL offices so White could keep a tally of his hours.

Regardless of the motives behind Bushs volunteer work, however, there is a problem with

this time line. His military file shows that he didnt return to the National Guard base in

Houston until May 1973, four months after hed supposedly started working for PULL, in

January. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Killian, signed off on a May 2, 1973,

report that said Bush hadnt been seen for a full year: Lt. Bush has not been observed at

this unit during the period of the report. . . . He cleared this base on 15 May 1972.

Under pressure in 2004 to explain the gap, the White House produced as evidence of

Bushs service a military dental exam from January 6, 1973 in Montgomery, not

Houston. It also released a computerized summary of his pay records from the period

(discovered in a Denver repository after the Bush campaign had previously declared them

lost in a fire), and the dates showed that Bush was paid for attending drills in Alabama in

January and again in April of 1973.

Apparently, while he was volunteering in the Third Ward in Houston, he was also pulling

Guard duty six hundred miles away, in Montgomery or at least getting paid for it

despite the fact that his home base, Ellington, was right across town.

Compounding the mystery , one of Bushs ex -girlfriends, Nee Bear, who worked on the

Blount campaign and later moved to Houston and dated Bush in the summer of 1973, said

she never saw him in Alabama after the election. She claims she would have been aware

had he returned. We would have all known about it, said Bear. We all kept in touch.

In 2004 White House spokesman Scott McClellan very carefully answered questions about

this period with the time-blurring catchall statement, He does remember serving in

Alabama and Texas. During that entire time, he was a member of the Texas Air National

Guard.

Heres what we can say for sure. In the spring of 1972, Ellington Air Force Base was

becoming a hub for pilot training. Bush could reasonably argue, as he did, that fewer planes

were av ailable for him to fly, and he opted against training on the next generation fighter,the F-101.

That explanation, however, doesnt negate the other evidence but rather dovetails with it:

as the Vietnam War wound down and Bush became less and less focused on flying (his

annual performance review turned distinctly lackluster in 1972, and Bear said Bush was

terribly adrift when she first met him in Alabama), an opportunity to duck out presented

itself and he took it. There were ten other pilots who dropped out that same year all

much older men who had more than two decades worth of experience. That Bushs

commanders let the y oung pilot bow out early and arranged the paperwork accordingly

wasnt necessarily nefarious, but just the way things worked in the loosely regulated

fiefdom of the T exas Air National Guard in 1972, especially for a son of wealth and powerlike Bush. Pilots didnt like paperwork and neither did National Guard commanders who

coveted political influence in Texas.

This story, taken as a whole, isnt particularly damning; it was typical for young men of


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Bushs social standing. But it fundamentally undermines an element of Bushs political

identity: the badass jet pilot for whom flying was a lifetime pursuit, as he once put it.

And because of Bushs stonewalling on the issue, the power of the unanswered questions

about this period of his life would take on a life of their own.

Case in point: a story that seemed to tie together all the questions hanging over Bushs

Guard service appeared in the controversial book Fortunate Son, by J.H. Hatfield, during

the 2000 campaign. In the book, Hatfield made the incendiary claim that Bush had been

arrested in 1972 for cocaine possession but had had his record expunged through hisfathers political influence with a state judge in exchange for community service at PULL.

(The book also claimed the arrest file was stowed in a safe in Harriet Mierss law office in

Dallas.)

This story did a lot of work: it explained why Bush stopped flying, why he lit out for

Alabama, and why he ended up at PULL when he got back to Houston. Within days of the

books publication, however, a newspaper discovered that Hatfield had served five years in

prison for hiring a hit man to kill a former colleague. The publisher, St. Martins Press,

quickly pulled the book from the shelves, and, under pressure to reveal his sources,

Hatfield claimed that Karl Rove himself had confirmed the story during a fishing trip. Rove

denied all such claims. A small publisher in New York later reissued the book, offering asevidence of Hatfields honesty some phone records showing a two-minute call to Roves

home before the original publication.

A year later, Hatfield died of a drug overdose in an apparent suicide. Hatfields defenders

came to believe hed been set up by Rove as the dupe messenger who could be easily

destroyed. And with that, the Bush Guard story officially took on the dark aspects of a

conspiracy: a puzzle in which the missing pieces became the story.

The 2004 Election

By 2004 Dan Rather was the lowest rated of the three network evening-news anchors. He

had, over the years, established himself as a reliable bogeyman for the Republican party

and for George W. Bush in particular. That spring, he and Mary Mapes broke the story

that U.S. soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, seriously tarnishing Bushs war in

Iraq. And Mapes had yet another story in the pipeline: ever since the Air Force vet had

dropped off Bushs military file at CBS News in Dallas, in 1999, she had been accumulating

documents and interv iewing retired Guard employees, building a case that Bush had

received preferential treatment and possibly gone AWOL.

But Mapes wasnt the only one who had continued to develop the National Guard story.

One of the journalists working the story throughout Bushs ascent from governor to

president was Jim Moore, the KHOU TV reporter whod originally asked Bush about his

service during the gubernatorial debate in 1994. Now, ten y ears later, Moore published

everything hed found in a book called Bushs War for Reelection. Among other things, the

book publicized the claims of Bill Burkett, a grizzled lieutenant colonel in the Texas National

Guard who said that in 1997 he had overheard Bush advisers Joe Allbaugh and Dan

Bartlett asking Bushs top Guard appointee in Texas to dispose of embarrassments in

Bushs file. (Allbaugh and Bartlett deny this.) Burkett also said he later saw some of Bushs

military records in a trash can.

Under media scrutiny, Burkett, a yellow-dog Democrat, changed important details of his

story, and Bush aides easily dismissed him as a disgruntled Bush hater, who was angryover medical bills the National Guard refused to pay . But he had just enough of his facts

straight to make his claim plausible. For one, the papers he said were destroyed were the

same ones that reporters found to be missing, including performance reviews and pay

records from Bushs later years in the Guard.


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And Allbaugh and Bartlett had indeed been assigned to manage the National Guard story .

Bartlett, who began working for Karl Rove when he was 23, became Bushs liaison to the

Texas National Guard during the year Burkett said the files were scrubbed, and he later

assisted Harriet Miers in her firms examination of Bushs military file in the lead-up to the

presidential run.

The current archivist of the Texas National Guard, James Shive, told me that he

personally examined Bushs file in 1992, before Bush ran for office, and found nothing

damning in it. He did say, however, that Bushs file had unusual gaps in it, referring inparticular to an annotated history of his time in the Guard, typed up in the early seventies,

that didnt record Bushs loss of flight status or any subsequent reassignment. But a

scrubbing incident by state officials as late as 1997, he said, wasnt plausible. Instead, Shive

questioned whether anything negative would have been inserted into Bushs record to

begin with, given the political influence of his father in the early seventies.

Burketts allegations nonetheless spurred probes by several news organizations. In

February 2004 he was invited on MSNBC, where he was asked by Chris Matthews

whether he was willing to testify under oath that Bushs aides discussed destroying his

military records. Burketts reply was tricky: Im swearing to you on camera, and Im

swearing to the American people. And God is my pilot on this. And I have sworn this all

along.

The scrutiny on Bushs past increased. Later that month, under pressure from Tim

Russert on NBCs Meet the Press, the president told the host he would release his entire

military file, including pay records. But the release of pay dates from a computer database

only spurred more questions: Why didnt the pay records from 1973 match Bushs official

biography?

At first, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed the attacks as attempts to stir

up old news, pointing out that the Democratic National Committee had launched a special

investigation called Operation Fortunate Son, which he noted was the name of a book by

an ex- convict that was widely discredited in the 2000 campaign.

But McClellan had no idea what he was talking about. While trying to field press queries, he

had asked Dan Bartlett, who had a thick notebook dedicated to the Guard issue, if he could

study the book to help defend the presidents record. He said, No, I think youve got

everything you need, recalled McClellan. I didnt have all the facts. I would have

preferred to look at the records myself, but I was denied access. So most of what I had was

either what I was told by Dan or what the president confirmed in the presence of Dan.

Bartlett, he said, probably remembers better than the president. McClellan explained

that a tight lid had been kept on the Bush National Guard issue, with access limited toRove, Miers, and Bartlett. It raises questions when youre not open and candid about

things, McClellan said, and this is something that has been closely held for a long time.

(When I asked Bartlett about this, he explained that the notebook wasnt a formal dossier.

It was a mixture of crib notes Id taken over the years. It made sense to me, but not to

other people.)

Bush and his inner circle didnt want to help the press expand on the Guard issue; they

wanted it to go away. So when the Associated Press sought additional documents, the

Pentagon denied the news agency for several months. The AP was forced to sue both the

U.S. Department of Defense and the Air Force for access. Even then, the White Housepushed back: in a phone conversation with the APs Washington bureau, Bartlett

questioned the political leanings of the APs lawyer, David Schulz, detailing his Democratic

campaign contributions. Why in the world is the AP using a liberal lawyer? Bartlett

asked, according to Schulz. Bartlett then suggested the AP was letting Senator Kerry off


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the hook. It was all-out war against the AP, recalled Schulz.

But the APs efforts ultimately unearthed Bushs flight logs, which prompted new questions

about the abrupt end of his flying career. John Solomon, the editor who headed the APs

investigation and later became the ex ecutive editor of the Washington Times, said, There

was one big question left unanswered. He had been flying in a regular fighter jet for quite

some time and scoring well, then this abrupt shift, and suddenly he dropped back to the

trainers plane, which experts told us was very unusual. That was one of those unresolved

questions.

But before those questions would have their day, another report would blow them off the

map.

In August 2004 the Guard story suddenly became vitally important to Senator Kerrys

campaign because of the blistering attacks on his Vietnam service by the Swift Boat

Veterans for Truth. A related book, Unfit for Command, co-written by John ONeill and

conservative writer Jerome Corsi, questioned whether Kerrys Purple Hearts and Bronze

and Silver Stars were legitimate, calling him a liar and a fraud. After two weeks of

attacks, Kerry was desperate to strike back. At a campaign meeting on his wifes farm in

Pennsylvania, he tapped a member of his finance committee whom he believed could helphim retaliate: Ben Barnes.

Kerry knew that in a private fund-raising speech earlier that year, Barnes had told how he

visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington one night and grew ashamed at

having helped sons of privilege into the Guard while others died in their places. He knew

that in the same speech, Barnes had recounted for the first time since the Littwin

deposition how hed personally helped Bush avoid Vietnam at the request of Sid Adger.

After the campaign meeting, Kerry grabbed Barness arm. Youve got to help me, he

said. What are we going to do about this?

Thats when Barnes agreed, five years after Mapes began trying to persuade him, to finally

tell his story on 60 Minutes. Two weeks later , Mapes finagled a meeting with Bill Burkett

to acquire what looked like another bombshell scoop: a set of never- before-seen memos

about Bushs Guard career that seemed to fill in the blanks. They were said to be from the

personal files of Bushs commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, dating from

the spring of 1972 to the late summer of 1973. One of them, a typed letter labeled CYA

(Cover Y our Ass), from August 1973, had Killian describing the political pressure he was

under from Buck Staudt to sugarcoat one of Bushs performance rev iews even though

there was no evidence that Bush had fulfilled his duty . Im having trouble running

interference and doing my job, the letter said. Staudt is pushing to sugarcoat it. Bush

wasnt here during rating period, and I dont have any feedback from the 187th in

Alabama. I will not rate. Austin is not happy today either.

Over several days of questioning, Burkett told Mapes hed gotten the documents from a

former Guard colleague named George Conn, who had previously v ouched for Burketts

credibility in press reports. But Mapes never found Conn to corroborate the story . And

document analysts hired by CBS were conflicted over the authenticity of the documents,

unable to confirm Xerox copies with 100 percent accuracy. There were other niggling

issues: Staudt, who allegedly pressured Bushs commanding officer in 1973, was no longer

the head of the Guard at the time (later Mapes would argue that Staudt still wielded

influence, even after he retired).

Solomon, the AP editor, told Mapes that new documents were about to emerge from the

APs lawsuit, but CBS was under competitive pressure to air its report as soon as possible.

USA Today, after courting Burkett for three years, was on the verge of also obtaining the

four controversial memos said to be produced by Killian.


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The morning before the broadcast was scheduled to air, CBS showed the memos to the

White House for a response. Dan Bartlett was the networks contact. Before Bartlett was

interviewed, he emailed copies of the memos to Albert Lloyd, Bushs longtime National

Guard expert. In an interview in 2008, Lloyd told me he immediately recognized them as

forgeries: I looked at them and I said, Dont do a damned thing with these, because these

are fake.

Bartlett, however, appears to have ignored Lloyds assessment. When asked by CBSwhether he doubted the authenticity of the memos, Bartlett replied, Im not saying that at

all, adding that he only questioned the timing of their release. His interpretation of the

memos, in fact, was that they reaffirm what weve said all along.

And so, on September 8, Rathers report aired on the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes.

The first person to publicly question the memos was an Air Force officer in Montgomery

named Paul Boley, who posted on the conservative online forum Free Republic under the

handle TankerKC. Boleys comment popped up while the program was still going on.

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry

MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed

the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night.

He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that

didnt exist on typewriters of the early seventies.

A conspiracy theory has since arisen that Bartlett, knowing in advance that the documents

were forgeries and, in some fevered imaginations, knowing his boss Karl Rove was the

source of them tipped off right-wing surrogates to attack the documents.

When I asked Lloyd why Bartlett ignored his assessment, he said, I guess he was try ing to

set Rather up for getting mauled.

Bartlett told me that the online attacks began before I started any outreach to the press.

He added that Bush himself didnt learn of the Killian memos until after the segment had

already aired, because Bartlett felt the documents didnt show anything revelatory. He

initially dismissed them as old news.

In any case, MacDougalds arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate.

He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that

same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report,

said, Its ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewritersthat did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that

these are copies, its really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like

they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didnt seem as though they

would hold up.

Nevertheless, the controversy exploded in the press, catalyzed by a report in the

Washington Post that aggregated all the criticism from the blogosphere and laid it at the

doorstep of Rather and CBS. Bartlett coordinated with several former Guardsmen,

including Killians son, to follow suit and attack the CBS report.

Rather was forced to respond, giving newspaper interviews defending the report andeventually addressing the controversy directly on the evening news, offering up new

interviews and evidence meant to buttress his initial claims (most famously, he

interviewed Killians former secretary , who said the content of the memos was accurate

but the memos themselves were fake).


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The day after the CBS broadcast, USA Today published the exact same memos in a news

report. But instead of going on defense, as CBS did, the newspaper responded to criticisms

by getting Burkett to reveal himself and explain how he had come by the documents. The

explanation was like something out of a Carl Hiaasen novel: Burkett said hed received a

call from a woman named Lucy Ramirez, who saw him on MSNBC. They arranged a secret

handoff of documents at a cattle show in Houston. A man in a cowboy hat gave Burkett a

manila envelope. The instructions, claimed Burkett, were to copy the memos inside and

burn the originals so there would be no DNA evidence to identify the true source. USA

Today scoured the country for a Lucy Ramirez fitting Burketts description (he said shed

called him from a Holiday Inn), but no such person was ever found.

While trying to sort fact from fiction, CBS kept defending its report. After twelve days of

intense pummeling by conservatives, the network finally gave up the ghost and forced a

frantic and exhausted Rather to apologize. The president of CBS, Les Moonves, promised

Rather hed survive the fallout. A special panel was established to investigate errors in the

story, but before the panel report was completed, Bush won reelection. The Swift Boaters

had waylaid Kerry, but Democrats were never able to return to the Guard story as a

legitimate line of attack against Bush. After the Rather thing happened, [it was] pretty

tough to carry the story politically, said Jason Miner, who was an opposition researcher

for the DNC tasked with bringing Bushs Guard record to the presss attention. Whos

going to stand up there?

Walter V. Robinson, the Boston Globe reporter whose 2000 investigation had triggered

much of the subsequent reporting, agreed. The CBS story, and the furor that caused,

buried the story so deeply that y ou couldnt possibly disinter it in 2004, he told me.

Inev itably, the only candidate who ended up with a serious credibility problem about his

military service was John Kerry, who had absolutely nothing to hide or be ashamed of. To

me, in a close election and it was a close election who knows, that could have been the

difference.

The Legacy

When the panel report finally came out in January 2005, it did not determine whether the

documents were real, but it did blame Mapes and three other CBS producers for failing to

properly vet them. CBS fired Mapes and asked the three others to resign. All three

threatened to sue and were subsequently paid settlements to stay quiet about the story.

Rather was spared (a humiliating forensic examination revealed his virtual absence from

the reporting process), but he agreed to resign from the CBS Evening News in the spring.

Mapes went home to Dallas and began writing her book-length defense.

But the CBS episode wasnt quite the end of the Guard story. There was a bizarre

postscript: the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. One

year after the fateful 60 Minutes segment aired, two FBI agents paid a visit to the

Manhattan apartment of Larry Littwin, the former Lottery Commission executive

director. If he were cleared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the agents

asked, what might he say about Mierss involvement with GTECH during her t ime as chair

of the commission? According to Jerome Corsi, who had resurfaced, post-Kerry, as one of

Mierss fiercest critics, what Littwin proposed to allege was quite a lot: that more than

$160,000 in legal fees Miers collected from Bush in the nineties were a de facto payoff for

maintaining the quid pro quo agreement with Ben Barnes and GTECH.

Regardless of the legitimacy of these allegations, White House officials were paying

attention, in part because they were coming from the right. Mierss nomination was

already in deep trouble by the time Littwin emerged. But Corsi remains convinced to this

day that the threat of Littwins testimony was the last straw for Miers. According to him, it


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Share this:

Like this: One blogger likes this post.

Thom Hartmann on the News for April 16, 2012 Charter for Compassion

was the GT ECH deal, and not the CBS memos, that could have been the real smoking gun

against Bush. The day after they validated that Littwin was going to be called to the

Senate Judiciary Committee, thats when she pulled her nomination, Corsi told me.

In 2007 Rather filed his own lawsuit, implicating Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and

CBS president Les Moonves in a vast corporate cover-up to make the Guard story go

away, placate the Bush White House, and put a troublesome newsman out to pasture. He

asked for $70 million. The money, however, was largely sy mbolic. More than anything,

Rather hoped the lawsuit would finally prove that he had been unfairly hung out to dry.

When it was dismissed, in 2009, he was devastated. He maintains a smoldering anger for

CBS News. But Rather says he remains optimistic that somebody, somewhere, will one

day come forward and reveal the truth of what happened. Theyre out there, he says.

Lets set the record straight.

And what about George W. Bush? It s unclear how the curators of his presidential library ,

which is slated to open next year at Southern Methodist University , will treat the ex-

presidents life from 1968 to 1973. They re unlikely to explore the finer details of his flight

logs or offer any further information about his lost year. But his time flying planes in

Texas during the height of the Vietnam War remains a defining part of his politicalbiography nonetheless, a chapter he proudly referenced in 2003, when he landed in a jet

plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier to declare the end of major combat operations in

Iraq right before the country sank into a bloody, years-long war that would divide the

United States and claim tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives. Bush has said

history will be the judge. And so it will.

Related articles

Truth Or Consequences: Bush National Guard Story Reexamined

(kaystreet.wordpress.com)

George Bush: I wish they werent called the Bush tax cuts(theleagueofaggressiveprogressives.wordpress.com)

British member of Parliament announces bounty on Obama and George Bush.

(wellthisiswhatithink.wordpress.com)

Peer Suspended Over President Obama Bounty (news.sky.com)

This ent ry was po sted in Financial/economic information, Illuminati/Terrorism/Corruption, Po litical and tagged Bush,

CBS, Dan Rather, Geo rge W Bush, John F. Kennedy, John Kerry, Mary Mapes, Texas. Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to Dan Rather Was Right About George W. Bush

By Joe Hagan, Texas Monthly

chicago dreamersays:

April 16, 2012 at 3:29 pm

WHOA!!! Bless you for this one! You are finding some MAGNIFICENT things!!!

Thank you so much! Its finally coming out ~ that tells me the Bushes are finally

getting de-fanged. More, please!!!

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mike0vsays:

April 16, 2012 at 5:39 pm

Can you imagine the karmic debt the Bushes will have to repay ?

Wow.

MV

Reply

ickytwerp39says:

April 16, 2012 at 10:48 pm

Speaking of the Bushs: Old man Bush was allegedly a pilot in WW2. By my math

he was only 21 years old at the end of the war. How does that work?Did they let 19

year olds fly those expensive planes? I

Reply

Mitch Cloggsays:

April 17, 2012 at 7 :37 pm

G.H.W. Bush flew combat missions in the Pacific during WWII. He is accused of 1)

strafing Japanese seamen, struggling to survive after their ship was sunk and 2)

bailing out of his bomber after it was hit by enemy fire and burning, leaving his

crew to die. Whatever the truth of these stories (Ive read alleged eyewitness

accounts. I personally believe them.), at least G.H.W. went in harms way . His son

totally wimped out.

Reply

ickytwerp39says:

April 18, 2012 at 3:40 am

I dont think so. I think that is a cover story. Bush was only 21 years old when the

war ended. They only let officers fly planes. So he would have had to earn a

commission, go through flight training,

get a plane (with a crew). All by that tender age? That doesnt pass the smell test.

By the late stages of the war it was the Axis who were out of pilots. By the ending

stages of the war we had plenty of planes and pilots. There was no need to press

kids into service as pilots of CREWED combat aircraft. They may have let him fly

beer and pinball machines from the rear to the front.

Reply

Dave Atxsays:

April 19, 2012 at 10:51 pm

Sorry, but Dan Rather was/is still very wrong. This article doesnt mention that

fact that NUMEROUS typography and document experts (not hired by CBS)

stated the Killian documents were fake. Anyone can do this simple experiment to

prove it themselves the Killian docs are still available online. Print one out thentype it out yourself in MS Word and print it out as a transparency.overlay it to

the Killian document.it matches EXACTLY and PERFECTLY. And CBS lawyer

Mike Missal says he FOUND one of these magical typewriters from the early 70s

that could type superscripts and proportional fonts, but wouldnt show it to the

author of this article or an of us? Not even tell us the brand or model so we could

http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/?ref=PDFhttp://www.web2pdfconvert.com/?ref=PDFhttp://jhaines6.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/dan-rather-was-right-about-george-w-bush-by-joe-hagan-texas-monthly/?replytocom=26293#respondhttp://lutherheggs/http://jhaines6.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/dan-rather-was-right-about-george-w-bush-by-joe-hagan-texas-monthly/?replytocom=26254#respondhttp://jhaines6.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/dan-rather-was-right-about-george-w-bush-by-joe-hagan-texas-monthly/?replytocom=26143#respondhttp://lutherheggs/http://jhaines6.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/dan-rather-was-right-about-george-w-bush-by-joe-hagan-texas-monthly/?replytocom=26099#respondhttp://nomoresleeping.wordpress.com/

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2012: What's the 'real' truth?

look it up ourselves? Sorry, but I call BS. There was even a reward offered to

anyone who could reproduce the Killian documents using ty pewriters from that era

it went unclaimed. The memos are fake, Dan Rather is fake, and anyone who still

believes those documents are real has a screw loose.

Reply

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