The Family (40 page)

Throughout that year George had worked on his father’s campaign for Senate. Shortly after his dad’s bitter defeat, George and his Yale classmate Don Ensenat applied to University of Texas Law School. Neither was accepted, although Ensenat eventually became a lawyer. Page Keeton, then dean of the Law School, wrote to one of the people who had recommended George. Without a sterling academic record to emphasize, the writer had stressed George’s immense likability, which left the dean unimpressed: “I am sure young Mr. Bush has all the many amiable qualities you describe, and so will find a place at one of many fine institutions around the country. But not at the University of Texas.”

His mother recalled her son’s first big rejection as slightly unnerving. “I think that got under his skin a bit,” Barbara said, “because I don’t think he was used to not doing what he wanted to do.”

Without graduate school or a full-time job, George idled his days around the pool of the Chateaux Dijon, the expensive apartment complex he had moved to in Houston.

Finally his father, who had gotten him every job he had ever had, stepped in again. This time big George called Robert H. Gow, who had been an officer of Zapata Offshore when George was running the company. Gow, who was a member of Yale’s class of 1955 and of Skull and Bones and a roommate of George’s cousin Ray Walker, had left Zapata to start Stratford of Texas, an agricultural conglomerate. As a favor to George senior, Gow hired young George as a management trainee.

“We weren’t looking for someone,” Gow told
The Washington Post
in 1999, “but I thought this would be a talented guy we should hire, and he was available.”

George joked about his new job to friends. “I’m now wearing a suit and tie and selling chicken shit,” he said.

When he wasn’t traveling for the company, he was sitting in the boss’s office.

“George liked to talk,” said Gow. “He was searching for what to do. He was constantly wanting to talk about what to do with his life.”

He lasted nine months before he quit in boredom. “I didn’t mind the chicken shit,” George said, “just the suit and tie.”

For a while in 1971 he flirted with the idea of running for the state legislature, but he changed his mind.

“He may have decided he wasn’t ready,” said Don Ensenat. “The role model he saw in his father was that you go out and make a name for yourself outside the political arena first.” The Texas Legislature, which meets only 140 days every two years, is not considered full-time employment, so candidates are expected to be established members of the community when they run.

George remained unemployed for several months and lived off his trust fund—the $10,000 left in the educational trust set up by his paternal grandparents. He put in haphazard hours with the Guard, but not enough to meet his requirements. By April 1972, he was lagging behind. That same month the Air Force began executing random drug tests, which meant that any pilot or mechanic could be requested on the spot to submit to urinalysis, blood tests, or examination of the nasal passages. On April 17, 1972, George W. Bush made his last recorded flight before disappearing from the official records until October 1972.

By then the psychedelic sixties had spun into the seventies, affecting even the military. Few families, including the Bushes and their relatives—the Walkers and the Ellises—went untouched by the influence of drugs, whether marijuana, amphetamines, or cocaine.

Jeb Bush, an Andover student in those days, described himself as a “cynical little turd at a cynical little school” who smoked pot and inhaled.

Josiah Wear Ellis, known to his friends as Joey, snorted cocaine regularly at Colorado College. “I was living on the top floor of the house where Joey Ellis and the child of a noted member of the Federal judiciary would come to buy their coke,” said Bill Penrose, who also attended Colorado College. “He was a cocky, smug guy, utterly indifferent to people less well off than him. Joey was totally into the Bush thing. ‘We’re-in-charge-and-we-should-be. We’re entitled.’”

Joey Ellis’s brother John does not deny the family’s struggle with drug abuse. “We all got hit,” John told Beverly Jackson of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Our family suffered terribly.” John Ellis, the son of Nancy Bush Ellis and a first cousin of the Bushes, admitted going into Hazelton in 1988 for drug rehabilitation. He later tried to launch a magazine called
Fix
as a support tool for people trying to conquer their addictions.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Bushes, like other families, coped with the drug scourge and the cross-addiction of alcohol. As recently as 2003, one of W.’s younger brothers, Marvin, was getting illegal prescriptions from a Virginia dentist named Denis Peper for narcotic substances. Peper told a close friend that he wrote “off the books” prescriptions for Marvin. The dentist’s license was suspended on October 17, 2003, by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

“The Ellis family and the Bush family have had serious problems with booze,” said Marylouise Oates, a writer and Democratic activist. “I remember when John Ellis called to say he couldn’t come to my wedding because he was going into Hazelden. He was taking Antabuse and still drinking then . . . I’ll bet George W. went to Hazelden, too, but I can’t prove it.”

While there is no indication that George W. Bush was institutionalized for substance abuse, legitimate speculation arose after he failed to show up in 1972 for his annual physical with the National Guard and was suspended from flying. This raised the question of whether he had been reported for drug abuse and, if so, whether he had been disciplined or treated.

Such information would be contained in the report of the Flight Inquiry Board, which routinely conducts an official review of the reasons for suspension and then determines appropriate action. The report of the Flight Inquiry Board is missing from the military records of George W. Bush that were released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2000 and from the records released by the White House in 2004. After two records’ releases, the report of the Flight Inquiry Board is still missing.

“Bush’s ‘failure to accomplish annual medical examination,’ as the record states, could not have been either casual or accidental,” said retired First Lieutenant Robert Rogers. “There is circumstantial evidence pointing to substance abuse by Bush during this period . . . Is it unreasonable to raise the possibility that he was suspended from flying as a direct or indirect consequence of substance abuse? It might be if there was no way for Bush to prove his innocence. But George W. Bush can readily defend himself, if he so chooses, simply by voluntarily releasing his complete military records, which he has refused to do.”

Bill L. Burkett, a retired state plans officer with the Texas National Guard, claimed that in 1997 the Texas National Guard Archives had been “scrubbed” by order of then-Governor Bush’s staff to protect the governor. Burkett said he was present when certain members of Bush’s staff contacted the Guard. One he specifically identified was Dan Bartlett, then the governor’s liaison to the Texas National Guard. Burkett said that after Bartlett’s call to Major General Daniel James III, the documents were shredded. James was the adjutant general for the state of Texas at the time and denied Burkett’s allegation. On June 3, 2002, James was appointed national director of the Air National Guard by President George W. Bush.

In the spring of 1972, George W. embarked on what he would later describe as his “nomadic years.” Seeing him adrift, his father stepped in again to get him another job with Jimmy Allison, who was running Republican Winton “Red” Blount’s campaign for Senate in Alabama against Democratic Senator John Sparkman.

In his UN diary George senior mentioned Blount, a multimillionaire builder who had resigned as Nixon’s Postmaster General to run for office. “I like him,” George wrote. “He is strong—a real man.”

After George senior called Jimmy Allison, young George was hired in May 1972 for nine hundred dollars a month to work in what was considered an impossible campaign against an unbeatable incumbent. After Blount announced his candidacy, one Alabama columnist noted, “It’s as good a time as any to go over Niagara in a barrel.”

Republicans were still a rare species in the South. “At that time in Alabama, people would spit on you if you were a Republican,” recalled Nee Bear, one of several women George dated during the Blount campaign. Even President Nixon, a fellow Republican, would not step forward to support his Postmaster General. “Sparkman was a leading senator,” Red Blount recalled, “and the President needed his support.”

George’s job was to monitor the polls, but he kept the bad news to himself. On Election Day, his roommate, Devere McLennan, was preparing for a victory-night party. “That’s when George explained to me we weren’t going to win,” he said.

It was a monumental loss. “Red got 36 percent of the vote, compared to 72 percent for Richard Nixon,” George recalled. “The ticket splitting was phenomenal.”

Those who worked with George at that time remember him as an affable social drinker who acted much younger than his twenty-six years. They recall that he liked to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey, and to eat fistfuls of peanuts, and Executive burgers, at the Cloverdale Grill in Birmingham. They also say George liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the bathroom for a line of cocaine. The newspapers in Birmingham for that year carried many stories about the scourge of cocaine from Vietnam and China, much of it imported by the French.

George, according to the recollections of others, tended to show up late every day for work, “around noon,” come into the office, prop his cowboy boots on a desk, and start bragging about how much he had drunk the night before.

Red Blount’s nephew C. Murphy Archibald, an attorney in Charlotte, North Carolina, remembered George telling stories about how the New Haven 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 1960s. Bush told this story—“what seemed like a hundred times”—to others working in the campaign, said Archibald.

“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. 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 the Blount campaign, George spent a great deal of time with “Blount’s Belles,” a group of young Republican women and Montgomery debutantes who worked for the campaign. Red Blount’s son, Tom, at the time an architect in Montgomery, recalled his encounter with Bush: “He was an attractive person, kind of a ‘frat boy,’” Tom said. “I didn’t like him.”

Tom recalled thinking to himself, “This guy thinks he is such a cuntsman, God’s gift to women. 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.”

Behind his back they called George “the Texas soufflé,” because, as Archibald said, “he was all puffed up and full of hot air.”

As “campaign coordinator,” his official title in the newspapers, Bush was supposed to stay in phone contact with campaign managers in Alabama’s sixty-seven counties and handle the distribution of all campaign materials. These materials included a pamphlet accusing Blount’s opponent, Sparkman, of being soft on race. The material also included a doctored tape from a radio debate distorting Sparkman’s position on busing, making him look as if he favored forced busing. Such a position in the Deep South at that time was political suicide. Sparkman was forced to deny a series of false charges linking him to George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate tainted as a “liberal.” The race-baiting tactics would be repeated years later when George joined forces with Lee Atwater to run his father’s campaign in 1988, which featured the Willie Horton ads, and again when George ran against John McCain in the South Carolina primary.

As an “obligated reservist” in 1972, George was required to continue his duty in the National Guard no matter where he was living. Weeks after he moved to Alabama, he applied for transfer from Texas to an Air Reserve squadron in Montgomery, but his application was rejected. The Alabama outfit did not fly and did no drills. “We met just one weeknight a month,” said the commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Reese R. Bricken. “We were only a postal unit. We had no airplanes. We had no pilots. We had no nothing.”

This left George without a Guard unit in Montgomery. So he did nothing for May, June, July, and August of 1972. “He should have commuted back to Houston to perform his duty,” said Robert Rogers. “That’s what other Guardsmen did in the same situation.”

Bush knew he could not fly again until he took a physical, so he requested a nonflying transfer of duties for September, October, and November 1972 to the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery. Permission was granted, and he was ordered to report to Lieutenant Colonel William Turnipseed. But George never showed up. Neither Colonel Turnipseed nor his administrative officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lott, remembered First Lieutenant Bush.

“Had he reported in, I would have had some recollection and I do not,” Turnipseed told
The Boston Globe
. “I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered.”

The Texas Air National Guard assumed that George was reporting in Alabama. In an annual evaluation report for May 1972 through April 1973, one of his supervising officers, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr., wrote: “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report.” He noted 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.” Bush’s second supervising officer in Texas, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, wrote: “I concur with the comments of the reporting official.” The Albama National Guard has no documents pertaining to George W. Bush and no reports of him ever performing his Guard duty.