The Family (39 page)

Lest George feel slighted, Prescott stated that he had appointed his second son an alternate executor, “soley because of his remote residence and in order to simplify the administration of my estate and of the trust.”

In the fall of 1972 Prescott entered Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital for tests. “I have deep worry about him,” George wrote in his diary. “He seems instantly old, unlike his old self in many ways.”

Dorothy Bush moved into the Ambassador’s residence at the Waldorf-Astoria and spent every day at her husband’s bedside. After he complained of several restless nights, she told his doctors she longed to spend a night with him because she felt he would rest better. They agreed and she slept in his room. The next day, October 8, 1972, he died peacefully. He was seventy-seven years old.

Flags throughout Connecticut were lowered to half-staff on the day of his funeral, and wires poured in from the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Dorothy instructed her family not to wear black. “Bright colors only,” she said. “This is to be a joyous celebration of your father’s life.” She told them they were not to sit with her in Christ Church. “I want everyone to see you sitting with your lovely families because that is a public tribute to your father.” She insisted that the grandsons be pallbearers and join her in the front pew. She asked the Westminster Choir College of New Jersey to come to Connecticut to sing. She informed the Reverend Bradford Hastings that he was to read the eulogy she had written.

The governor of Connecticut arrived with Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker and Representative Stewart B. McKinney, New York City’s Mayor John Lindsay, Yale’s President Kingman Brewster, Averell Harriman, and all the partners of Brown Brothers Harriman. Everyone crowded into the small Episcopal church in Greenwich to hear “a tribute to Prescott Bush from the one who knew him best and loved him the most.”

Dotty’s eulogy, lovingly sentimental, enshrined her husband and extolled their marriage: “When he stood at the altar 51 years ago and promised to ‘Keep thee only unto her as long as you both shall live,’ he was making a pledge to God that he never for one moment forgot, and gave his wife the most joyous life that any woman could experience.”

Prescott Sheldon Bush was laid to rest in Putnam Cemetery, where a small American flag adorned his tombstone.

That evening George wrote in his diary: “My father, my mentor, my hero died.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well-placed . . . managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units . . . Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal.”

—COLIN L. POWELL,
My American Journey
, 1995

G
eorge Herbert Walker Bush vigorously supported sending other men’s sons to Vietnam, but not his own. In 1968 he made sure his firstborn would not be drafted. He did this with one telephone call to Sidney Adger, a Houston businessman and Bush family friend. Adger called Ben Barnes, the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and Barnes called the head of the Texas National Guard, Brigadier General James Rose. Rose called the commanding officer of the unit, Lieutenant Colonel Buck Staudt.

In February 1968 young George, a senior at Yale, took an Air Force officers test. “I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment,” he said. “Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.” He scored the lowest possible passing grade on pilot aptitude. Yet, because of his father’s influence, he was accepted into the Air National Guard. “They took me because they could sense I would be one of the great pilots of all time,” he told
The Houston Chronicle
. He also said he “just happened” to get the coveted slot twelve days before he was eligible to be drafted. “I think they needed pilots.”

“That is so disingenuous,” said Mark Soler. “You didn’t just happen into the Guard in those days or fall upon a slot in the Reserves. You had to sign up early because it took months and months to get in; then you had to wait until there was an opening. At that time there was a national waiting list of 100,000. The waiting was agony. Unless, of course, you had someone to pull strings for you . . . I didn’t have that kind of pull. I had to wait to get into the Reserves, which is how I ended up not being drafted. I never considered that I served in the military in any way that was especially patriotic . . . I had to go weekends for six years, but it was a way of not being drafted. To say otherwise is willful denial. When we graduated from Yale in 1968, if you didn’t get into the Reserve or the Guard, or get a deferment, or become a conscientious objector, or go to Canada, then you were headed for downtown Da Nang.”

George enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard on May 27, 1968, and became a member of the 147th Fighter Group, known as “the Champagne Unit,” because it included the sons of Lloyd Bentsen, John Connally, and several Dallas Cowboys. George pledged to perform two years of active service, plus four years of reserve duty, which meant he was obligated to fly one weekend a month and spend two weeks at military camp every summer.

The unsettling parts of this scenario begin with his father’s lie that he did not use his influence to get his son a berth in the National Guard, followed by his son’s claim that he did not join simply to avoid the draft. “Hell, no,” George W. told
Texas Monthly
in 1994. “Do you think I’m going to admit that . . . I just wanted to fly jets.” He admitted he had no desire “to be an infantry guy as a private in Vietnam.” But he denied trying to avoid combat. “One could argue that I was trying to avoid being an infantryman,” he told
The New York Times
in 1999, “but my attitude was I’m taking the first opportunity to become a pilot and jumped on that and did my time.”

The Bush family lies, sometimes called “misstatements” by Bush family spokesmen, made aspects of George W. Bush’s military record open to question later on, particularly the last two years, when he flew sporadically. According to one set of records, he was all but unaccounted for. Those documents, released in 2000, showed no record by any National Guard unit that George W. Bush ever showed up between May 1972 and May 1973 for scheduled weekend flights, summer military training, or the periodic drills required of part-time Guardsmen. Four years later, in February 2004, after a spate of criticism, the White House released a document indicating the Guard had given George credit for sufficient hours to fulfill his duty during the questionable period of May 27, 1972, to May 26, 1973. The 2004 document raised questions about the previously released record, which showed no Guard credit for May 1972 through May 1973. Equally puzzling, if George did fly all his required hours, is why his superiors in Texas did not fill out a required evaluation form. They maintained they had not seen him on base and thought he was still in Alabama.

Retired First Lieutenant Robert A. Rogers, an eleven-year veteran of the Air National Guard, said the document released in 2004 showing George W.’s intermittent Guard service from October 1972 through May 1973 is not a National Guard document. Rather, the document is an “ARF [Air Reserve Force] Statement of Points Earned.” The 2004 document released by the White House is like the document released in 2000 by the Bush campaign that supposedly showed George W. had performed duty from the end of May through July 1973. These two documents show Air Reserve Force credits, which are not given for active service and were not accepted by the Texas Air National Guard.

“The lack of punishment for his misconduct represents the crowning achievement of a military career distinguished only by favoritism,” said Rogers. “Bush had a solid record up to April 17, 1972. In fact, he was a poster boy for the Texas National Guard because of who his father was. But then he disappeared. He did not attend any unit he was supposed to from April 17, 1972, through May 28, 1974. He just walked away. As a result, he got ‘ARFed,’ which is what we call the penalty applied by the Air Reserve Force for nonattendance. Bush was subjected to disciplinary action and slapped with six additional months in which he was eligible to be called up to active duty in the Army . . . That’s a big thing in time of war. As a result of that disciplinary action, he did not receive his honorable discharge from the Air Reserve Force until November 1974. Had he not been delinquent, he would have been honorably discharged in May 1974, six years after his enlistment.”

George W. was finally released from the Reserves in November 1974, six years and six months after he had joined the National Guard. His six-month penalty was never reported by the press, but no one realized then that he would one day be sending American forces into combat to do what he would not do: become cannon fodder. By the time he was in line to run for national office, his medical records from the military had been sealed for privacy reasons, and the Bush family lies had hardened enough to provide the rock of credibility he needed to send U.S. troops into war.

In 1968 registering for the draft was mandatory for all males eighteen years old. Being subject to the draft was a duty that healthy young men with no deferment had to bear. At that time such service usually meant a tour in Vietnam. This accounted for the high number of antiwar demonstrations on college campuses.

“I guess guys like George didn’t have to worry because they knew they were never going to have to fight,” said Mark Soler.

George’s fraternity brother and later his business partner Roland Betts said that George faced a different kind of pressure. “He felt in order not to derail his father’s political career he had to be in military service of some kind.”

Members of the Yale class of 1968 were surprised when George said he didn’t remember any antiwar disturbances on campus. “I know that’s what he claimed, and God knows the guy did a lot of drinking in college, but he just couldn’t have been that drunk,” said Christopher Byron. “Vietnam was the terror of our lives . . . There was an antiwar march or antiwar meeting or protest at least once a week at Yale . . . and every time Reverend Coffin opened his mouth there were camera crews crawling all over that campus.”

Others in the class of 1968, including Mark Soler, share similar recollections. “All we ever talked about at Yale then was school, sex, and the war in Vietnam,” he said, “and not always in that order.”

After graduating from Yale in June 1968, George reported to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, and then took his six weeks of basic airman training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Upon completing it in September 1968, he was commissioned a second lieutenant. He returned to Ellington, where the Texas Air National Guard staged a special ceremony so that Congressman Bush could be photographed pinning second-lieutenant bars on his son. “That’s how they do things,” said Brigadier General John Scribner, director of the Texas Military Forces Museum in Austin, “play it up big, especially since he was a congressman’s son. That was important to the Guard.”

George received his commission without ever attending Officers’ Training School. “I’ve never heard of that,” said Tom Hail, a historian for the Texas National Guard. “Generally they did that for doctors only, mostly because they needed flight surgeons.” Normally such a commission required eight full semesters (four years) of college ROTC courses or eighteen months of military service or the completion of Air Force Officer Candidate School.

With his commission in hand, George went on inactive duty in September 1968 to work in the political campaign of his father’s friend Representative Edward Gurney, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida. Jimmy Allison, the media strategist who had helped the senior Bush get elected to Congress and had worked for him against Ralph Yarborough, was going to run a similar campaign for Gurney against LeRoy Collins, the former governor of Florida.

“The race was getting so much attention we decided we needed a press plane and someone to take care of reporters,” recalled James L. Martin, then Gurney’s top aide. “That’s when Jimmy said young George Bush was available.”

“Telephone calls were exchanged,” said Pete Barr, another campaign media strategist, “and young George came to Orlando . . . to sheepdog the press . . . He always said he was the pillow-toter.”

The “pillow” was essential equipment for the candidate. Gurney, who fought in World War II, had suffered a bullet wound to the spine and needed to sit on a soft feather cushion, which George dutifully carried for him. The wound made campaigning arduous, so Gurney periodically retired to his home in Winter Haven to rest. George whiled away the time with Pete Barr.

“We would play a lot of tennis and drink a lot of beer,” said Barr, “and talk a lot of politics.”

Gurney’s opponent, LeRoy Collins, had been the first elected politician in the South to declare publicly that segregation was “unfair and morally wrong.” Ed Gurney hammered him the same way George Bush had hammered Ralph Yarborough. Gurney branded Collins “Liberal LeRoy,” distributed photographs of him meeting with Martin Luther King, and bashed him as a radical, an agitator, and a race mixer.

Gurney won by 300,000 votes. Political analysts recognized that he had sailed into office on the jet stream of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” a thinly disguised appeal to white bigotry.

Second Lieutenant Bush witnessed the noxious efficacy of stirring racial hatred, which, unfortunately, became a hallmark of his family’s future campaigns. His father’s presidential campaign in 1988 used a vicious race commercial to win, as did George’s 2000 primary campaign in South Carolina. The end result for both Bushes was victory at the expense of decency.

Many years after the Gurney campaign, a curious circle of history drew George W. Bush near the legendary Florida governor he had worked so hard to defeat. On December 10, 2000, George, then governor of Texas, watched the Florida recount begin that would determine his presidency. The hand count commenced in the LeRoy Collins Public Library in Tallahassee, where Governor Collins’s retort to a rabid segregationist was inscribed on the wall: “I don’t have to get re-elected, but I do have to live with myself.”

Ed Gurney’s victory in 1968 had made him Florida’s first Republican senator since the Civil War and given George Herbert Walker Bush renewed hope that he could win the Senate seat in Texas in 1970.

After the Gurney campaign, Second Lieutenant Bush returned to full-time active duty in the National Guard. He was assigned to flight school at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia, where he learned to fly the T-38 Talon.

“I gave then-Lieutenant Bush two of his check rides, including his final instrument and navigation flight check,” said Jim Wilkes. “He was an excellent pilot and so graded.”

George received his silver wings in December 1969 and returned to Ellington, where he trained to fly the missile-armed supersonic F-102 Delta Dart jet fighter called the Voodoo. Retired Colonel Maurice H. Udell, who instructed him, was impressed by his attitude. “He had his boots shined, his uniform pressed, his hair cut, and he said, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir,’” he recalled. “I would rank him in the top 5 percent of pilots I knew. And in the thinking department, he was in the top 1 percent. He was very capable and tough as a boot.”

On March 24, 1970, the Guard issued a press release to the Houston papers praising their “first hometown student” as an exemplary citizen soldier: “George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation who doesn’t get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed. Oh, he gets high, all right, but not from narcotics . . . As far as kicks are concerned, Lt. Bush gets his from the roaring afterburner of the F-102.”

Three months later the Guard issued another press release when George graduated from training school. The press office included a photo of George with his father and a photo of Congressman Bush shaking hands with the commanding officer, Buck Staudt. Another press release followed in July 1970, when George completed a successful deployment to Tyndall Air Force Base Florida and fired a missile from his F-102. On Election Day in November 1970 before the polls closed, the Guard issued yet another press release to announce the promotions of George W. Bush and Lloyd Bentsen III to first lieutenant even as the elder Bentsen was defeating the elder Bush.