8/2/2019 Dan Rather
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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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4/19
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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5/19
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
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(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!!!
8/2/2019 Dan Rather
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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
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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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