FINALLY, THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH'S MILITARY SERVICE RECORD
A meticulous examination of Bush's guard records by Gerald Lechliter, a retired Army colonel.

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"I heard George W. Bush get up there and say, 'I served in the 187th Air National Guard in Montgomery, Alabama.' I said, 'Really, that was my unit? And I don't remember seeing you there.' " - Bob Mintz, former Alabama Guardsmen who says Bush was a no-show who had the connections to cover it up.

Records Say Bush Balked at Order

National Guard Commander Suspended Him From Flying

George Bush failed to carry out a direct order from his superior in the Texas Air National Guard in May 1972 to undertake a medical examination that was necessary for him to remain a qualified pilot, according to documents made public on September 8, 2004.

Documents obtained by the CBS News program "60 Minutes" shed new light on one of the most controversial episodes in Bush's military service, when he abruptly stopped flying and moved from Texas to Alabama to work on a political campaign. The documents include a memo from Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, ordering Bush "to be suspended from flight status for failure to perform" to U.S. Air Force and National Guard standards and failure to take his annual physical "as ordered."

The new documents surfaced as the Bush administration released for the first time the president's personal flight logs, which have been the focus of repeated archival searches and Freedom of Information Act requests dating to the 2000 presidential campaign. The logs show that Bush stopped flying in April 1972 after accumulating more than 570 hours of flight time between 1969 and 1972, much of it on an F-102 interceptor jet.

The new documents suggest that Bush's transfer to non-flight duties in Alabama was the subject of arguments between his National Guard superiors.

A spokeswoman for "60 Minutes," Kelli Edwards, declined to say exactly how the new documents were obtained other than that CBS News understood they had been taken from Killian's "personal office file." In addition to the order to Bush to report for a physical, the documents include various memos from Killian describing his conversations with Bush and other National Guard officers about Bush's attempts to secure a transfer to Alabama. Killian died in 1984.

"Phone call from Bush," Killian recorded in a "memo to file" dated May 19, 1972. "Discussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November."

According to "60 Minutes," Killian's personal files show that he ordered Bush "suspended from flight status" on Aug. 1, 1972. National Guard documents already released by the White House and the Pentagon show that Bush was suspended from flight status on that day for "failure to accomplish annual medical examination" but do not mention his alleged failure to comply with National Guard and Air Force standards.

In another "memo to file," dated Aug. 18, 1973, Killian complained that he was under pressure from his superior, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, to "sugar coat" Bush's officer evaluations. "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," he wrote in a memo titled "CYA." "I will not rate."

Excerpts from memos written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, commander of the Texas Air National Guard unit that then-Lt. George Bush was a member of during the Vietnam War:

“Discussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November. … Says he wants to transfer to Alabama to any unit he can get in to. Says that he is working on another campaign for his dad. … ”

“We talked about him getting his flight physical situation fixed … Says he will do that in Alabama if he stays in flight status. He has this campaign to do and other things that will follow and may not have the time. I advised him of our investment in him and his commitment. … I told him I had to have written acceptance before he would be transferred, but think he's also talking to someone upstairs.”

— From a May 19, 1972, memo to Killian's file recounting a phone conversation with Bush

“On this date I ordered that 1st Lt. Bush be suspended from flight status due to failure to perform to … standards and failure to meet annual physical examination (flight) as ordered …

“Officer has made no attempt to meet his training certification or flight physical. Officer expresses desire to transfer out of state including assignment to non-flying billets.

“I also suggested that we fill this critical billet with a more seasoned pilot from the list of qualified Vietnam pilots that have rotated.”

— From a memo Aug. 1, 1972, for the record

“(Col. Walter “Buck”) Staudt has obviously pressured (Lt. Col. Bobby) Hodges more about Bush. I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job.”

— From a memo to file dated Aug. 18, 1973, with the subject line “CYA.”

ON GUARD -- OR AWOL?

Former Alabama Guardsmen, Bob Mintz and flying mate Paul Bishop, looked forward to greeting George W. Bush at Montgomery, Alabama, Dannelly ANG base in 1972 – but never saw him because George had the connections to cover it up his AWOL status.

Two members of the Air National Guard unit that President George W. Bush allegedly served with as a young Guard flyer in 1972 had been told to expect him late in that year and were on the lookout for him. He never showed, however; of that both Bob Mintz and Paul Bishop are certain.

The question of Bush’s presence in 1972 at Dannelly Air National Guard base in Montgomery, Alabama – or the lack of it – has become an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. And that issue, which picked up steam last week, continues to rage.

Recalls Memphian Mintz, now 62: “I remember that I heard someone was coming to drill with us from Texas. And it was implied that it was somebody with political influence. I was a young bachelor then. I was looking for somebody to prowl around with.” But, says Mintz, that “somebody” -- better known to the world now as the president of the United States -- never showed up at Dannelly in 1972. Nor in 1973, nor at any time that Mintz, a FedEx pilot now and an Eastern Airlines pilot then, when he was a reserve first lieutenant at Dannelly, can remember.

“And I was looking for him,” repeated Mintz, who said that he assumed that Bush “changed his mind and went somewhere else” to do his substitute drill. It was not “somewhere else,” however, but the 187th Air National Guard Tactical squadron at Dannelly to which the young Texas flyer had requested transfer from his regular Texas unit – the reason being Bush’s wish to work in Alabama on the ultimately unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of family friend Winton "Red" Blount.

It is the 187th, Mintz’s unit, which was cited, during the 2000 presidential campaign, as the place where Bush completed his military obligation. And it is the 187th that the White House continues to contend that Bush belonged to – as recently as last week, when presidential spokesman Scott McClellan released payroll records and, later, evidence suggesting that Bush’s dental records might be on file at Dannelly.

Late last weekend, the White House even made available what it said was the entirety of Bush’s service record. Even so, the mystery of the young lieutenant’s whereabouts in late 1972 remains.

“THERE’S NO WAY WE WOULDN’T HAVE NOTICED a strange rooster in the henhouse, especially since we were looking for him,” insists Mintz, who has begun poring over such documents relating to the matter as are now making their way around the Internet. One of these is a piece of correspondence addressed to the 187th’s commanding officer, then Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, concerning Bush’s redeployment.

Mintz remembers a good deal of base scuttlebutt at the time about the letter, which clearly identifies Bush as the transferring party. “It couldn’t be anybody else. No one ever did that again, as far as I know.” In any case, he is certain that nobody else in that time frame, 1972-73, requested such a transfer into Dannelly.

Mintz, who at one time was a registered Republican and in recent years has cast votes in presidential elections for independent Ross Perot and Democrat Al Gore, confesses to “a negative reaction” to what he sees as out-and-out dissembling on President Bush’s part. “You don’t do that as an officer, you don’t do that as a pilot, you don’t do it as an important person, and you don’t do it as a citizen. This guy’s got a lot of nerve.”

Though some accounts reckon the total personnel component of the 187th as consisting of several hundred, the actual flying squadron – that to which Bush was reassigned – numbered only “25 to 30 pilots,” Mintz said. “There’s no doubt. I would have heard of him, seen him, whatever.”

Even if Bush, who was trained on a slightly different aircraft than the F4 Phantom jets flown by the squadron, opted not to fly with the unit, he would have had to encounter the rest of the flying personnel at some point, in non-flying formations or drills. “And if he did any flying at all, on whatever kind of craft, that would have involved a great number of supportive personnel. It takes a lot of people to get a plane into the air. But nobody I can think of remembers him.

“I talked to one of my buddies the other day and asked if he could remember Bush at drill at any time, and he said, ‘Naw, ol’ George wasn’t there. And he wasn’t at the Pit, either.’”

The “Pit” was The Snake Pit, a nearby bistro where the squadron’s pilots would gather for frequent after-hours revelry. And the buddy was Bishop, then a lieutenant at Dannelly and now a pilot for Kalitta, a charter airline that in recent months has been flying war materiel into the Iraq Theater of Operations

“I never saw hide nor hair of Mr. Bush,” confirms Bishop. . "In fact," he quips, mindful of the current political frame of reference, "I saw more of Al Sharpton at the base than I did of George W. Bush."

IN AIR NATIONAL GUARD CIRCLES, BISHOP, who now lives in Goldsboro, N.C., is something of a legendary figure. Known to his mates as “Papa Whiskey” (for “P.W.”) Bishop, he is a veteran of Gulf War I, a conflict in which he was the ranking reservist. During the current conflict, on behalf of Kalitta, Bishop has flown frequent supply missions into military facilities at Kuwait...

Some years ago, he flew a Kalitta aircraft, painted over with Air Force One markings, in the movie Air Force One starring Harrison Ford. Bishop did the rolls, tumbles, and other stunt maneuvers that looked in the movie like stressful motions afflicting the hijacked and embattled plane.

Bishop voted for Bush in 2000 and believes that the Iraq war has served some useful purposes – citing, as the White House does, disarmament actions since pursued by Libyan president Moammar Khadaffi – but he is disgruntled both about aspects of the war and about what he sees as Bush’s lack of truthfulness about his military record.

“I think a commander in chief who sends his men off to war ought to be a veteran who has seen the sting of battle,” Bishop says. “In Iraq: we have a bunch of great soldiers, but they are not policemen. I don’t think he [the president] was well advised; right now it’s costing us an American life a day. I’m not a peacenik, but what really bothers me is that of the 500 or so that we’ve lost almost 80 of them were reservists. We’ve got an over-extended Guard and reserve.”

Part of the problem, Bishop thinks, is a disconnect resulting from the president’s own inexperience with combat operations. And he is well beyond annoyed at the White House’s persistent claims that Bush did indeed serve time at Dannelly. Bishop didn’t pay much attention to the claim when candidate Bush first offered it in 2000. But he did after the second Iraq war started and the issue came front and center.

“It bothered me that he wouldn’t ‘fess up and say, Okay, guys, I cut out when the rest of you did your time. He shouldn’t have tried to dance around the subject. I take great exception to that. I spent 39 years defending my country.”

Like his old comrade Mintz, Bishop, now 65, was a pilot for Eastern Airlines during their reserve service in 1972 at Dannelly. Mintz then lived in Montgomery; Bishop commuted from Atlanta, a two-hour drive away. Mintz and Bishop retired from the Guard with the ranks of lieutenant colonel and colonel, respectively.

BOTH MEN KNEW JOHN “BILL” CALHOUN, the Atlanta businessman who was flight safety officer for the 187th in 1972 and who subsequently retired as a lieutenant colonel. Calhoun created something of a sensation late last week when he came forward at the apparent prompting of the administration to claim that he did in fact remember Lt. Bush, that the young officer has met with him during drill weekends, largely spending his time reading safety manuals in the 187th’s safety office.

Even in media venues sympathetic to the president, doubt was cast almost immediately on aspects of Calhoun’s statement – particularly his claim that Lt. Bush was at the 187th during spring and early summer of 1972, periods when the White House itself does not claim the young lieutenant had yet arrived at Dannelly.

Mintz and Bishop are both skeptical, as well.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t possible, but I can’t imagine Bill not introducing him around,” Mintz said. “Unless he [Bush] was an introvert back then, which I don’t think he was, he’d have spent some time out in the mainstream, in the dining hall or wherever. He’d have spent some time with us. Unless he was trying to avoid publicity. But he wasn’t well known at all then. It all seems a bit unusual.”

Bishop was even more explicit. “I’m glad he [Calhoun] remembered being with Lt. Bush and Lt. Bush’s eating sandwiches and looking at manuals. It seems a little strange that one man saw an individual, and all the rest of them did not. Because it was such a small organization. Usually, we all had lunch together.

“Maybe we’re all getting old and senile,” Bishop said with obvious sarcasm. “I don’t want to second-guess Mr. Calhoun’s memory and I would hate to impugn the integrity of a fellow officer, but I know the rest of us didn’t see Lt. Bush.” As Bishop (corroborated by Mintz) described the physical environment, the safety office where the meetings between Major Calhoun and Lt. Bush allegedly took place was on the second floor of the unit’s hangar, a relatively small structure itself... It was a very close-quarters situation “ It would have been “virtually impossible,” said Bishop, for an officer to go in and out of the safety office for eight hours a month several months in a row and be unseen by anybody except then Major Calhoun.

As Bishop noted, “Fighter pilots, and that’s what we were, have situational awareness. They know everything about their environment – whether it’s an enemy plane creeping up or a stranger in their hangar.”

In any case, said Bishop, “If what he [Calhoun] says is true, there would be documentation of the fact in point summaries and pay documents.”

AND THAT’S ANOTHER MYSTERY.

Yet another veteran of the 187th is Wayne Rambo of Montgomery, who as a lieutenant served as the unit’s chief administrative until April of 1972. That was a few months prior to Bush’s alleged service, which Rambo, who continued to drill with the 187th, also cannot remember.

Rambo was, however, able to shed some light on the Guard practice, then and now, of assigning annual service “points” to members, based on their record of attendance and participation. The bare minimum number is 50, and reservists meeting standard are said to have had “a good year,” Rambo said. Less than that amount to an “unsatisfactory” year – one calling for penalties assessed against the reservist’ retirement fund and, more immediately, for disciplinary or other corrective action. Such deficits can be written off only on the basis of a “commander’s call,” Rambo said – and only then because of certifiable illness or some other clearly plausible reason.

“The 50-point minimum has always been taken very seriously, especially for pilots,” says Rambo. “The reason is that it takes a lot of taxpayer money to train a pilot, and you don’t want to see it wasted.”

For whatever reason, the elusive Lt. George W. Bush was awarded 41 actual points for his service in both Texas and Alabama during 1972 – though he apparently was given 15 “gratuitous” points -- presumably by his original Texas command -- enough to bring him up from substandard. That would have been a decided violation of the norm, according to Rambo, who stresses that the awarding of gratuitous points was clearly meant only as a reward to reservists for meeting their bottom line

“You had to get to 50 to get the gratuitous points, which applied toward your retirement benefits,” the former chief administrative officer recalls. “If you were 49, you stayed at 49; if you were 50, you got up to 65.”

Bishop raises yet another issue about Bush’s ANG tenure – the cancellation after 1972 of the final year of his six-year obligation – ostensibly to pursue a post-graduate business degree at Yale.

That didn’t sit well with the veteran pilot. “When you accept a flying slot with the Air National Guard, you’re obligated for six years,” Bishop said. “Even if you grant him credit for that missing year in Alabama which none of us remember, he still failed to serve his full commitment. Even graduate school, for which he was supposedly released, is attended during the week usually. It wouldn’t have conflicted with drill weekends, whether he was in Connecticut or Massachusetts or wherever. There would have been no need for an early release.”

Bishop paused. “Maybe they do things differently in Texas. I don’t want to malign the commander-in-chief, but this is an issue of duty, honor country. You must have integrity.”

BISHOP, ESPECIALLY, IS BITTER ABOUT THE FATE of Eastern Airlines, which went bankrupt during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, the current incumbent’s father. “I watched my company dissolve under his policies. They let the airline fall victim to a hostile takeover,” Bishop said. Both Bushes were “children of privilege,” unlike himself and Mintz.

“Our fathers were poor dirt farmers. We would not have been given the same considerations he and his father were,” says Bishop, who maintains that, just as the junior Bush used family and political influence to jump himself ahead of 500 other flight training applicants, the senior Bush "apparently" did something similar when he became a naval aviator during World War Two. “I applaud him for volunteering, but he should have waited his turn like everybody else.”

But, says Bishop, “At least I can give him credit for serving his country.” That is more, he suggested, than can be granted the younger Bush.

Would he consider voting for the president’s reelection? “Naw, this goes to an integrity issue. I like either [John] Kerry or [John] Edwards better.” And who would Mintz be voting for? “Not for any Texas politicians,” was the Memphian’s sardonic answer.

Bush fell short on duty at Guard
Records show  pledges unmet

In February, 2004, when the White House made public hundreds of pages of President Bush's military records, White House officials repeatedly insisted that the records prove that Bush fulfilled his military commitment in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service -- first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School -- Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty.

He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice.

On July 30, 1973, shortly before he moved from Houston to Cambridge, Bush signed a document that declared, ''It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit or mobilization augmentation position. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months. . . " Under Guard regulations, Bush had 60 days to locate a new unit.

But Bush never signed up with a Boston-area unit. In 1999, Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett told the Washington Post that Bush finished his six-year commitment at a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit after he left Houston. Not so, Bartlett now concedes. ''I must have misspoke," Bartlett, who is now the White House communications director, said in a recent interview.

And early in his Guard service, on May 27, 1968, Bush signed a ''statement of understanding" pledging to achieve ''satisfactory participation" that included attendance at 24 days of annual weekend duty -- usually involving two weekend days each month -- and 15 days of annual active duty. ''I understand that I may be ordered to active duty for a period not to exceed 24 months for unsatisfactory participation," the statement reads.

Yet Bush, a fighter-interceptor pilot, performed no service for one six-month period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months in 1973, the records show.

The reexamination of Bush's records by the Globe, along with interviews with military specialists who have reviewed regulations from that era, show that Bush's attendance at required training drills was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973, or 1974. But they did neither. In fact, Bush's unit certified in late 1973 that his service had been ''satisfactory" -- just four months after Bush's commanding officer wrote that Bush had not been seen at his unit for the previous 12 months.

Bartlett, in a statement to the Globe last night, sidestepped questions about Bush's record. In the statement, Bartlett asserted again that Bush would not have been honorably discharged if he had not ''met all his requirements." In a follow-up e-mail, Bartlett declared: ''And if he hadn't met his requirements you point to, they would have called him up for active duty for up to two years."

That assertion by the White House spokesman infuriates retired Army Colonel Gerald A. Lechliter, one of a number of retired military officers who have studied Bush's records and old National Guard regulations, and reached different conclusions.

''He broke his contract with the United States government -- without any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to happen," Lechliter said in an interview yesterday. ''He was a pilot. It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard."

Even retired Lieutenant Colonel Albert C. Lloyd Jr., a former Texas Air National Guard personnel chief who vouched for Bush at the White House's request in February, agreed that Bush walked away from his obligation to join a reserve unit in the Boston area when he moved to Cambridge in September 1973. By not joining a unit in Massachusetts, Lloyd said in an interview last month, Bush ''took a chance that he could be called up for active duty. But the war was winding down, and he probably knew that the Air Force was not enforcing the penalty."

But Lloyd said that singling out Bush for criticism is unfair. ''There were hundreds of guys like him who did the same thing," he said.

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs in the Reagan administration, said after studying many of the documents that it is clear to him that Bush ''gamed the system." And he agreed with Lloyd that Bush was not alone in doing so. ''If I cheat on my income tax and don't get caught, I'm still cheating on my income tax," Korb said.

After his own review, Korb said Bush could have been ordered to active duty for missing more than 10 percent of his required drills in any given year. Bush, according to the records, fell shy of that obligation in two successive fiscal years.

Korb said Bush also made a commitment to complete his six-year obligation when he moved to Cambridge, a transfer the Guard often allowed to accommodate Guardsmen who had to move elsewhere. ''He had a responsibility to find a unit in Boston and attend drills," said Korb, who is now affiliated with a liberal Washington think tank. ''I see no evidence or indication in the documents that he was given permission to forgo training before the end of his obligation. If he signed that document, he should have fulfilled his obligation." 

The documents Bush signed only add to evidence that the future president -- then the son of Houston's congressman -- received favorable treatment when he joined the Guard after graduating from Yale in 1968. Ben Barnes, who was speaker of the Texas House of Representatives in 1968, said in a deposition in 2000 that he placed a call to get young Bush a coveted slot in the Guard at the request of a Bush family friend.

Bush was given an automatic commission as a second lieutenant, and dispatched to flight school in Georgia for 13 months. In June 1970, after five additional months of specialized training in F-102 fighter-interceptor, Bush began what should have been a four-year assignment with the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron.

In May 1972, Bush was given permission to move to Alabama temporarily to work on a US Senate campaign, with the provision that he do equivalent training with a unit in Montgomery. But Bush's service records do not show him logging any service in Alabama until October of that year.

And even that service is in doubt. Since the Globe first reported Bush's spotty attendance record in May 2000, no one has come forward with any credible recollection of having witnessed Bush performing guard service in Alabama or after he returned to Houston in 1973. While Bush was in Alabama, he was removed from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical in July 1972. On May 1, 1973, Bush's superior officers wrote that they could not complete his annual performance review because he had not been observed at the Houston base during the prior 12 months.

Although the records of Bush's service in 1973 are contradictory, some of them suggest that he did a flurry of drills in 1973 in Houston -- a weekend in April and then 38 days of training crammed into May, June, and July. But Lechliter, the retired colonel, concluded after reviewing National Guard regulations that Bush should not have received credit -- or pay -- for many of those days either. The regulations, Lechliter and others said, required that any scheduled drills that Bush missed be made up either within 15 days before or 30 days after the date of the drill.

Lechliter said the records push him to conclude that Bush had little interest in fulfilling his obligation, and his superiors preferred to look the other way. Others agree. ''It appears that no one wanted to hold him accountable," said retired Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr., who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's director of the Air National Guard.

George W.'s Missing Year

Nearly two hundred manila wrapped pages of George Walker Bush's service records came to me like some sort of giant banana stuffed into my mailbox.

I had been seeking more information about his military record to find out what he did during what I think of as his "missing year," when he failed to show up for duty as a member of the Air National Guard, as the Boston Globe first reported.

The initial page I examined is a chronological listing of Bush's service record. This document charts active duty days served from the time of his enlistment. His first year, a period of extensive training, young Bush is credited with serving 226 days. In his second year in the Guard, Bush is shown to have logged a total of 313 days. After Bush got his wings in June 1970 until May 1971, he is credited with a total of 46 days of active duty. From May 1971 to May 1972, he logged 22 days of active duty.

Then something happened. From May 1, 1972 until April 30, 1973 -- a period of twelve months -- there are no days shown, though Bush should have logged at least thirty-six days service (a weekend per month in addition to two weeks at camp).

I found out that for the first four months of this time period, when Bush was working on the U.S. Senate campaign of Winton Blount in Alabama, that he did not have orders to be at any unit anywhere.

On May 24, 1972, Bush had applied for a transfer from the Texas Air National Guard to Montgomery, Alabama. On his transfer request Bush noted that he was seeking a "no pay" position with the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron. The commanding officer of the Montgomery unit, Lieutenant Colonel Reese R. Bricken, promptly accepted Bush's request to do temporary duty under his command.

But Bush never received orders for the 9921st in Alabama. Such decisions were under the jurisdiction of the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver, Colorado, and the Center disallowed the transfer. The Director of Personnel Resources at the Denver headquarters noted in his rejection that Bush had a "Military Service Obligation until 26 May 1974." As an "obligated reservist," Bush was ineligible to serve his time in what amounted to a paper unit with few responsibilities. As the unit's leader, Lieutenant Colonel Bricken recently explained to the Boston Globe, ''We met just one weeknight a month. We were only a postal unit. We had no airplanes. We had no pilots. We had no nothing.''

The headquarters document rejecting Bush's requested Alabama transfer was dated May 31, 1972. This transfer refusal left Bush still obligated to attend drills with his regular unit, the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron stationed at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston. However, Bush had already left Texas two weeks earlier and was now working on Winton Blount's campaign staff in Alabama.

In his annual evaluation report, Bush's two supervising officers, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, made it clear that Bush had "not been observed at" his Texas unit "during the period of report" -- the twelve month period from May 1972 through the end of April 1973.

In the comments section of this evaluation report Lieutenant Colonel Harris notes that Bush had "cleared this base on 15 May 1972, and has been performing equivalent training in a non flying role with the 187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama" (the Air National Guard Tactical Reconnaissance Group at Dannelly Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama).

This was incorrect. Bush didn't apply for duty at Dannelly Air Force Base until September 1972. From May until September he was in limbo, his temporary orders having been rejected. And when his orders to appear at Dannelly came through he still didn't appear. Although his instructions clearly directed Bush to report to Lieutenant Colonel William Turnipseed on the dates of "7-8 October 0730-1600, and 4-5 November 0730-1600," he never did. In interviews conducted with the Boston Globe earlier this year, both General Turnipseed and his former administration officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lott, said that Bush never put in an appearance.

The lack of regular attendance goes against the basic concept of a National Guard kept strong by citizen soldiers who maintain their skills through regular training.

Bush campaign aides claim, according to a report in the New York Times, that Bush in fact served a single day -- November 29,1972 -- with the Alabama unit. If this is so it means that for a period of six weeks Lieutenant George W. Bush ignored direct instructions from headquarters to report for duty. But it looks even worse for Lieutenant Bush if the memory of Turnipseed and Lott are correct and Bush never reported at all.

After the election was over (candidate Blount lost), Bush was to have returned to Texas and the 111th at Ellington Air Force Base. Bush did return to Houston, where he worked for an inner-city youth organization, Project P.U.L.L. But, as I mentioned already, his annual evaluation report states that he had not been observed at his unit during the twelve months ending May 1973. This means that there were another five months, after he left Alabama, during which Bush did not fulfill any of his obligations as a Guardsman.

In fact, during the final four months of this period, December 1972 through May 29, 1973, neither Bush nor his aides have ever tried to claim attendance at any guard activities. So, incredibly, for a period of one year beginning May 1, 1972, there is just one day, November 29th, on which Bush claims to have performed duty for the Air National Guard. There are no dates of service for 1973 mentioned in Bush's "Chronological Service Listing."

Bush's long absence from the records comes to an end one week after he failed to comply with an order to attend "Annual Active Duty Training" starting at the end of May 1973. He then began serving irregularly with his unit. Nothing indicates in the records that he ever made up the time he missed.

Early in September 1973, Bush submitted a request seeking to be discharged from the Texas Air National Guard and to be transferred to the Air Reserve Personnel Center. This transfer to the inactive reserves would effectively end any requirements to attend monthly drills. The request -- despite Bush's record -- was approved. That fall Bush enrolled in Harvard Business School.

Both Bush and his aides have made numerous statements to the effect that Bush fulfilled all of his guard obligations. They point to Bush's honorable discharge as proof of this. But the records indicate that George W Bush missed a year of service. This lack of regular attendance goes against the basic concept of a National Guard kept strong by citizen soldiers who maintain their skills and preparedness through regular training.

And we know that Bush understood that regular attendance was essential to the proficiency of the National Guard. In the Winter 1998 issue of the National Guard Review Bush is quoted as saying "I can remember walking up to my F-102 fighter and seeing the mechanics there. I was on the same team as them, and I relied on them to make sure that I wasn't jumping out of an airplane. There was a sense of shared responsibility in that case. The responsibility to get the airplane down. The responsibility to show up and do your job."

Bush has found military readiness to be a handy campaign issue.

Bush's unsatisfactory attendance could have resulted in being ordered to active duty for a period up to two years -- including a tour in Vietnam. Lieutenant Bush would have been aware of this as he had signed a statement which listed the penalties for poor attendance and unsatisfactory participation. Bush could also have faced a general court martial. But this was unlikely as it would have also meant dragging in the two officers who had signed off on his annual evaluation.

Going after officers in this way would have been outside the norm. Most often an officer would be subject to career damaging letters of reprimand and poor Officers Effectiveness Ratings. These types of punishment would often result in the resignation of the officer. In Bush's case, as someone who still had a commitment for time not served, he could have been brought back and made to do drills. But this would have been a further embarrassment to the service as it would have made it semi-public that a Lieutenant Colonel and squadron commander had let one of his subordinates go missing for a year.

For the Guard, for the ranking officers involved and for Lieutenant Bush the easiest and quietest thing to do was adding time onto his commitment and placing that time in the inactive reserves.

Among these old documents there is a single clue as to how Bush finally fulfilled his obligations and made up for those missed drill days. In my first request for information I received a small three-page document containing the "Military Biography Of George Walker Bush." This was sent from the Headquarters Air Reserve Personnel Center (ARPC) in Denver Colorado.

In this official summary of Bush's military service, I found something that was not mentioned in Bush's records from the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Virginia. When Bush enlisted his commitment ran until May 26, 1974. This was the separation date shown on all documents as late as October 1973, when Bush was transferred to the inactive reserves at Denver, Colorado. But the date of final separation shown on the official summary from Denver, is November 21, 1974. The ARPC had tacked an extra six months on to Bush's commitment.

Bush may have finally "made-up" his missed days. But he did so not by attending drills -- in fact he never attended drills again after he enrolled at Harvard. Instead, he had his name added to the roster of a paper unit in Denver, Colorado, a paper unit where he had no responsibility to show up and do a job.

Bush has found military readiness to be a handy campaign issue. Yet even though more than two decades have passed since Bush left the Air National Guard, some military sources still bristle at his service record -- and what effect it had on readiness. "In short, for the several hundred thousand dollars we tax payers spent on getting [Bush] trained as a fighter jock, he repaid us with sixty-eight days of active duty. And God only knows if and when he ever flew on those days," concludes a military source. "I've spent more time cleaning up latrines than he did flying."

George W. Bush's Lost Year in 1972

The result of an investigation into George W. Bush's lost year in 1972 reveals a cocky privileged son who used his family connections to avoid military service in Vietnam and spend seven months in Alabama partying. He clearly skipped out on National Guard duty and avoided a mandatory drug test, all while learning the politics of "dirty tricks," deception and coded racism in the land of George Wallace.

    It was the year Wallace, the spunky Alabama governor and presidential candidate, was gunned down in a Maryland parking lot, the year of the Watergate break in and the beginning of the end for "Tricky Dick" Nixon. It was also the last year for segregationists to openly fight integration of the public schools, a time when racism went underground in American politics in the form of a "Dixie Strategy." And it was the beginning of a major political realignment that transformed the American South from a one-party Democratic stronghold into a solid block for the GOP.

    Bush made the move to Alabama in May to work on Winton "Red" Blount's campaign for the U.S. Senate against Southern Democrat John Sparkman. The lessons of that year were not lost on Bush or his political adviser Karl Rove, who also cut his political teeth in 1972. Their path to electoral success is a lesson in itself about the state of American Democracy, an issue suitable for an H.L. Mencken-style analysis.

Privileged Son

Those who encountered Bush in Alabama remember him as an affable social drinker who acted younger than his 26 years. Referred to as George Bush, Jr. by newspapers in those days, sources say he also tended to show up late every day, around noon or one, at Blount's campaign headquarters in Montgomery. They say Bush would prop his cowboy boots on a desk and brag about how much he drank the night before.

    They also remember Bush's stories about how the New Haven, Connecticut police always let him go, after he told them his name, when they stopped him "all the time" for driving drunk as a student at Yale in the late 1960s. Bush told this story to others working in the campaign "what seemed like a hundred times," says Red Blount's nephew C. Murphy Archibald, now an attorney in Charlotte, N.C., who also worked on the Blount campaign and said he had "vivid memories" of that time.

    "He would laugh uproariously as though there was something funny about this. To me, that was pretty memorable, because here he is, a number of years out of college, talking about this to people he doesn't know," Archibald said. "He just struck me as a guy who really had an idea of himself as very much a child of privilege, that he wasn't operating by the same rules."

    During this period Bush often socialized with the young ladies of Huntingdon College, located in the Old Cloverdale historic neighborhood where he stayed. Bush even dated Nixon's daughter Tricia in the early 1970s, according to newspaper accounts. Bush was described as "young and personable" by the Montgomery Independent society columnist, and seen dancing at the Whitley Hotel on election night November 7 with "the blonde, pretty Emily Marks."

    During the 2000 campaign, the Boston Globe named Marks as one of Bush's former girlfriends. But she and several other women who dated him during that time refused to say anything bad on the record about Bush, now a sitting president.

    Many of those who came into close contact with Bush say he liked to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey, and to eat fist-fulls of peanuts, and Executive burgers, at the Cloverdale Grill. They also say he liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the head for a line of cocaine. The newspapers that year are full of stories about the scourges of cocaine and heroin making their way into the U.S. from abroad in the early days of the so-called "war on drugs." Remember the French Connection?

    According to Cathy Donelson, a daughter of old Montgomery but one of the toughest investigative reporters to work for newspapers in Alabama over the years, the 1960s came to Old Cloverdale in the early 1970s about the time of Bush's arrival.

    "We did a lot of drugs in those days," she said. "The 1970s are a blur."

    The top radio hits in 1972 included "My Ding-A-Ling" by Chuck Berry, "Honky Cat" by Elton John, "Long Cool Woman" by the Hollies and "Feeling Alright" by Joe Cocker, along with "I Am Woman" by Helen Reddy, "Heart of Gold" by Neil Young, "Ben" by Michael Jackson and "Black and White" by Three Dog Night.

It was that kind of year.

    To "Blount's Belles," a group of young Republican women and Montgomery debutantes working for the Blount campaign, Bush is remembered showing up in "denim" and cowboy boots. To one who talked about those times but requested anonymity, "We thought he was to die for."

    Winton Bount's son Tom, an accomplished architect who designed the Shakespeare Festival Theater in Montgomery, remembers well his encounter with Bush. He recently co-produced and underwrote a telling movie called The Trip, set in the period from 1973 to the early 1980s, about a young gay Texan and his conservative Republican lover. The son known as "Tommy" said he ended up in the same car with Bush, with Bush driving, on election night.

    "He was an attractive person, kind of a 'frat boy,'" Blount said. "I didn't like him."

    He remembers thinking to himself, "This guy thinks he is such a cuntsman, God's gift to women," he said. "He was all duded up in his cowboy boots. It was sort of annoying seeing all these people who thought they were hot shit just because they were from Texas."

    Bush also made an impression on the "Blue-Haired Platoon," a group of older Republican Women working for Blount. Behind his back they called him "the Texas soufflé," Archibald said, because he was "all puffed up and full of hot air."

    Archibald was recruited by Blount's Washington staff for his administrative skills after returning home from a tour of duty as a lieutenant in Vietnam.

Failure of Duty

Bush avoided Vietnam by using family connections to move ahead in line for acceptance into the National Guard in Texas. He was assigned to train as a pilot on the F-102 Delta Dagger, a plane scheduled for the scrap heap, guaranteeing Bush would never have to fly in Vietnam himself.

    That May, Bush first requested a transfer from his Texas unit to the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron at Maxwell Air Force Base, a postal unit, after he had already moved to Alabama to work on Blount's campaign. The transfer was approved by his superiors in Houston, after the fact, but ultimately denied up the chain of command, since the unit only met one weekend night a month and had no airplanes. Bush was finally approved for a transfer on Sept. 5, five months after he had already established a residence in Alabama, to the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery. His orders, available on the Net, required him to report to the unit commander, Gen. William Turnipseed. He is named in the orders.

    In interviews with the Boston Globe in 2000, Turnipseed and his administrative officer in 1972, Kenneth K. Lott, said they had no memory of Bush ever reporting, and could produce no documentation that he ever even checked in.

    ''Had he reported in, I would have had some recall, and I do not,'' Turnipseed said. ''I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered.''

    In a follow-up interview, Turnipseed acted like he wished the story would go away, but said, "Yes, I think I would have remembered."

    Rewards offered by veterans groups in Alabama and Texas for any proof that Bush showed up have never been claimed. There were 700 active guardsmen in Alabama at that time and not one who saw him on the base has come forward. Even an extensive investigation by the president's campaign staff could not turn up a shred of evidence that Bush pulled any duty, according to newspaper accounts. [Note: This story was published Feb. 2, before the onslaught of records. Watch this site for developing news.].

    Perhaps the reason he didn't log any time toward his six-year commitment was because the base had no Delta Daggers, although that would not explain why he was granted an after-the-fact transfer there in the first place. Or perhaps it had something to do with the military's new policy of mandatory drug screening, implemented in April. Bush's required physical exam officially came up in August due to his birth date, but records indicate he never showed up for a physical in Montgomery or when he returned to Houston after the election.

    Bush was never punished for skirting Guard requirements, even though the military had passed a rule in 1969 warning volunteers that failure to fulfill the contract would result in immediate selection for active duty in Vietnam. For not taking a physical, though, he was grounded that August and never flew again, records show, until last year when he reportedly says he took the "stick" in a Navy plane on his way to declare "mission accomplished" over Iraq on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

    The gap in Bush's military records for 1972, and his lack of a full answer to the question about his drug use, generated stories during the 2000 campaign. Bush refused for months to say whether he had ever used illegal drugs. Then he changed his stance, according to the Boston Globe, saying he had not used illegal drugs "since 1974."

    Two books now contain the charge that Bush was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1972 in Texas, most likely in late November or December after his stint in Alabama. Bush was allowed to perform community service in 1973 by working for a minority children's program in Houston, Professionals United for Leadership League (PULL), chaired by his father. The record of that arrest was expunged, meaning he apparently received the equivalent of Youthful Offender status at the age of 26.

    There are several possible interpretations of whether Bush can be called AWOL during that period, or even a Deserter. Activist film maker Michael Moore's claim that George W. Bush was a Deserter when he skipped out on National Guard duty in 1972 is one interpretation, but is not entirely based on the facts or a correct interpretation of military regulations.

    According to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a soldier would be considered Absent Without Leave (AWOL) if missing from his unit for 30 days or less. If absent for more than 30 days, a soldier would be considered a Deserter, if he had "no intention of returning."

    But Bush's superiors, at least in Houston, knew where he was. He did come back and received an honorable discharge.

    Moore's claim was dodged by Democratic candidate for president Wesley Clark during a New Hampshire debate on Fox News in January, in response to pointed questions by Peter Jennings of ABC and Britt Hume of Fox in response to Moore's endorsement of Clark the previous week.

    The debate about whether Bush was AWOL, as the Boston Globe reported, or deserves Deserter status, as claimed by Moore, may be missing the point. It may be more accurate to say that while Bush was not technically AWOL or a Deserter, he was allowed to do things no average member of the National Guard would ever be allowed to do. Any other member of the Guard, without Bush's family connections, would be expected to wait until a transfer approval went through before leaving town, much less moving four states away to work for a political campaign. Also, the military does not usually grant transfers to soldiers to units that have a purpose with no resemblance to their training.

    So the point is, Bush is no military hero. He is no Wesley Clark, or John Kerry, both of whom earned purple hearts and other medals for being injured in the line of duty.

Dirty Tricks

It is also apparent that Bush learned one of his first lessons in the politics of "dirty tricks," deception and coded racism in 1972. It was the biggest year for "Tricky Dick" style dirty tricks in American politics. A group of Cubans working secretly for the Committee to Reelect the President, otherwise known as CREEP, broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington on June 17.

    Just prior to the day on May 15 when Alabama Governor and presidential candidate George Wallace took a bullet in a Maryland parking lot — a shock but a political relief for President Richard Nixon and Democratic candidate George McGovern in a race for the White House themselves — Bush was recruited for the Blount campaign by another Texan and Bush family friend named Jimmy Allison.

    In several documented accounts, Allison is described as the original Republican political pro who may have inspired Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan's gung-ho political director, and Karl Rove, who is credited with orchestrating Bush's successful run for the White House in 2000. Atwater and Rove are reported to have taken a drive together across the South in 1972 campaigning for Rove's bid to lead the College Republicans, so it is safe to say they cut their political teeth that year as well as Bush.

    Rove won that bid and dropped out of the University of Utah, then moved to Washington to become executive director of the College Republicans, even though he was accused of dirty tricks during that campaign. The Republican National Committee, chaired at that time by Bush's father, investigated but eventually cleared Rove of any wrong doing, even though Rove admitted using a false identity to gain entry to the campaign offices of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon. He admitted stealing letterhead stationary and sending out 1,000 fake invitations to the campaign headquarters opening, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing."

    Allison had managed the senior Bush's campaigns for Congress and served as vice chairman of the Republican National Committee. Archibald remembers being impressed with the "Allisons," thinking he would see more of Jimmy and his wife in the future, certainly more than Bush.

    "Allison was extremely bright and a well organized political operative," he said.

    Archibald remembers one speech Allison delivered to the campaign staff and a group of British students. He said Allison talked about Wallace's domination of state politics since his first election as governor in 1962, and his "racist appeal." Some in the campaign were hoping to portray Blount as a pro-business moderate, Archibald said. But Tom Blount remembers his dad, who died two years ago, having regrets about the dirty campaign tactics. Dividing people by coded racism became a staple of the Southern Strategy leading up to Willie Horton ads used successfully by the first Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988, and the junior Bush's smear campaign against Sen. John McCain's adopted interracial child during the 2000 Republican primary.

    One of Bush's duties as "campaign coordinator," according to his official title in the newspapers, was to stay in contact by phone with campaign managers in Alabama's 67 counties, and to handle the distribution of all campaign materials, Archibald says. That material included a pamphlet accusing Sparkman of being soft on the race issue. It also included a doctored tape from a radio debate distorting Sparkman's position on busing.

    Sparkman was forced to deny a series of false charges linking him with McGovern, the South Dakota presidential candidate who became the first in the modern era to be tainted and stomped as a "liberal." The pamphlet distributed to campaign workers and leaked to the press charged Sparkman with favoring drastic defense cuts, big federal spending, abandoning American POWs in Vietnam, a guaranteed wage for every American, relaxing drug laws, amnesty for draft dodgers ­ and "forced busing."

    The Birmingham News ran the transcript of the doctored radio tape on November 6, the day before the election, which made it appear Sparkman was in favor of busing black and white children miles across towns to "mix" the public schools. The literature of the campaign echoed the winning conservative Senate race of Ed Gurney in Florida, also dreamed up by Allison and company. Blount's campaign, awash in cash with twice the money of Sparkman's, paid for billboards across the state proclaiming: "A vote for Red Blount is a vote against forced busing . . . against coddling criminals . . . against welfare freeloaders."

    Sparkman was a moderate on the race issue compared to Wallace, and got the support of African Americans who only had the right to vote for seven years. But he not only voted for the anti-forced busing bill. He co-sponsored it and spoke against busing on the Senate floor. The measure, which would have blocked busing and killed desegregation for all practical purposes, died a few weeks later when the Republicans and Southern Democrats in the Senate could not garner enough votes for cloture. It was the last gasp on the part of segregationists to prevent the federal courts from enforcing desegregation of the public schools, a fight that started in earnest with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. (Topeka, Kansas) Board of Education.

    Archibald says Allison called him aside and asked him quietly to take over some of Bush's campaign duties, so he ended up handling the Republican women and the counties in the final days of the campaign. Apparently Bush was more interested in hanging out with "Blount's Belles."

    Some of the women, young and old, came from Union Springs, where Archibald grew up in the enviable position of being the nephew of Blount, also originally from Union Springs, just a short drive southeast of Montgomery. It is a land of rolling hills, lakes, forests and wide cow pastures, where the mostly African American population of Bullock County is largely made up of descendents of slaves, and a few slave owners. Little white churches are almost as common as white-tailed deer on the run from hunters in camouflage and bright orange. During the past century, pine plantations for paper and wood products replaced cotton as the chief agricultural crop.

    Blount's construction and manufacturing empire prospered in the new industrial economy here. The first big construction deal for Blount Brother's construction was signed with the Saudi government. On one occasion Archibald's uncle banked a check for $334 million to build a university in Saudi Arabia. The check is on display in Blount's ghostwritten biography in the Shakespeare theater box office and gift shop on Vaughn Road. In the caption, Blount brags about how he rushed the check into the bank to get that $200,000 a day in interest flowing "as quickly as possible."

    Winton Blount IV now carries on the family tradition, according to newspaper accounts, subcontracting for the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel in Saudi Arabia and Iraq today.

    The "interlocking directorates" of the Bush family, their friends and this administration is documented by conservative Republican author Kevin Phillips in his book American Dynasty, although he doesn't deal with the Blount connection in detail. George H. W. Bush and Winton Blount met and became tight in Washington during the Nixon years, according to published accounts, when they were sometimes invited by the White House to play doubles together on the south lawn tennis court.

    Blount had served as southeastern campaign chair for Nixon in his run against John Kennedy in 1960. He served as president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1969 before accepting Nixon's appointment as Postmaster General in 1970, where he generated a major national controversy by laying off 33,000 postal workers. He quit that job to run for office and try to help capture the Senate for the Republican Party in 1972, but lost by a 24-point margin, in spite of the political pros from Texas, and the deceptive campaign practices.

    Nixon appointed Bush's daddy Ambassador to the United Nations in 1972, a well publicized fact that was known to campaign workers and Guard personnel in Alabama. He would be appointed by President Gerald Ford as head of the CIA in 1976 and go on to serve as Ronald Reagan's vice president, then as president in his own right for one term. Bush Jr's. granddaddy Prescott Bush was a successful industrialist from Kennebunkport, Maine, who served as a U.S. Senator. Since leaving public office, the former President Bush now sits on the board of the Carlyle Group, which has been accused of profiteering off the war his son started, doing business with Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other oil-rich countries in the Middle East.

    It is worth noting in this context that several members of Osama bin Laden's family from Saudi Arabia were onboard the only plane allowed to fly around the country after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, an incident that has never been adequately explained by the Bush administration or the commission investigating the attacks.

    All of these connections and events have weighed heavily on the mind of retired attorney Lewis Odom, a veteran himself who managed Senator Sparkman's winning campaign in 1972. He was Allison's counterpart, though he never met Bush personally during the campaign. But he does remember being aware of a group of political pros from Texas in Alabama working for Blount, and being appalled at the deceptions of the campaign.

    Odom, who served as a JAG officer in Korea and as a member of the Alabama Air National Guard, only learned later that Bush was in the state working for Blount while skipping out on Vietnam and his Guard duties. But he remembers the radio tape and transcript.

    "It was doctored to make it appear as if Sparkman was in favor of forced-busing, which in Alabama at the time was political death," he said.

    Odom said the Bush campaign has tried to dismiss the president's early transgressions since they happened so long ago, although he points out that Bill Clinton did not get a "free ride" on the issue of his own history as a so-called "draft dodger" and "womanizer," even impeached in his second term.

Why is Bush's past important to examine now?

    "It seems to me to be important because Bush is willing to send our boys and girls over there to get shot, killed and wounded, to lose their arms and legs," Odom said. "Then in his own life, he did what he could to avoid it (going to war). And then later, he presents himself as a fighter pilot, parading around on that flight deck with his fighter pilot jacket on with 'Commander In Chief'' on it."

    Odom said the Guard probably spent a half a million dollars training Bush, then he wouldn't even take his flight exam and failed to check the box on the form making himself available for active duty. Later, Bush was transferred on paper to a Guard unit in Colorado prior to his early release to attend Harvard Business School.

    "I see him out parading around as if he was some sort of a military hero, when the truth about the matter is, he used his father's prestige in the community to get into the Guard in the first place," Odom said. "And then he used it to get himself transferred to Alabama to work on a political campaign."

State of Democracy

Many Americans, including Odom and a lot of combat veterans, wonder how things might have been handled differently if only Bush had served real time in the military and not skated because of his privileged son status. Would he have been as likely to go to war in Iraq so quickly and on such flimsy evidence, bringing the world to the brink of an all out religious war between Christians and Jews against the Muslim world and turning much of Europe and the rest of the world against the U.S.?

    That is a question that cannot be answered in hindsight. But in a democracy, it is not supposed to matter what bloodline you come from or what religion you practice. What should matter — to a candidate for the highest office in the most powerful country in the world — is the quality of his life, work and character.

What does Bush's success say about the state of American Democracy?

    The Bush White House openly promotes democracy around the world, committing the full force of American military power to try creating a capitalist democracy in Iraq. Yet Bush's entire history of success fosters the mentality of a Royal Monarchy at home.
An attorney, who wishes to remain anonymous, helped research and vet this report.