BoatBanter.com - A truly great man!

He got into no trouble because his daddy was an important guy.
So, he's lazy, stupid, a former drunk, and a liar. What a great
guy!

"two wheels" wrote in message
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A little remedial education:

A "fact" has to be true.

GW was never AWOL. If it's not in his military records, it didn't
happen. No superior of his (in a position to know) said that his
absences were without leave.

And, as for the flying:

They were about to "mothball" the F-102 Delta Dagger interceptor
that Bush had been trained on. It was obsolete. The F-102 was
designed to intercept Soviet bombers. So, if he wanted to continue
flying, he'd have to train on the new-generation replacement
jet--all over again. This was before simulators. Training took a
lot of tedious flight time and GW wasn't interested in flying any
more than he had to. He was lazy. That's his crime. Being in the
Air National Guard was not his dream job. Call it special treament,
but he was able to fill out his National Guard commitment and get
his honorable discharge with ground duty, and that's what he did.
Remember, the National Guard duty allows you to continue with your
civilian pursuits too. It's not 24/7 military service. GW did what
he was allowed to do, and therefore got in NO trouble for doing it.

two wheels

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 23:51:42 -0800, "Jonathan Ganz"
wrote:

He was awol. It's a fact. Sorry, but you must be influenced by the
right wing press.

"two wheels" wrote in
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Not if the truth matters, he wasn't. New York Times did the
research
too. There is no there there. Someone is either AWOL, or they're
not.
It's not a subjective thing. It's like having a conviction for
burglary. Either you were convicted or you weren't.

two wheels

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 17:57:37 -0800, "Jonathan Ganz"
wrote:

Sorry, but he *was* AWOL. Thanks for the link though.

"two wheels" wrote in
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On Sat, 29 Nov 2003 20:52:17 -0800, "Jonathan Ganz"
wrote:

Actually, he was.

For the third or fourth time, here's the research done by
professional reporters, and not just extrapolated BS from
scraps of
irrelevant data by some Bush-hating morons:

George magazine is no longer around, but this is from a
contemporaneous cut and paste of the online version of the
mag:

http://tinyurl.com/x221

- From an Oct. 2000 issue of George Magazine:
================================================== ==

The Real Military Record of George W. Bush: Not Heroic, but
Not
AWOL, Either

By Peter Keating and Karthik Thyagarajan

For more than a year, controversy about George W. Bush's
Air
National Guard record has bubbled through the press. Interest
in the
topic has spiked in recent days, as at least two websites
have
launched stories essentially calling Bush AWOL in 1972 and
1973. For
example, in "Finally, the Truth about Bush's Military Record"
on
TomPaine.com, Marty Heldt writes, "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... Nothing indicates in the records that he ever
made up
the time he missed."

And in Bush's Military Record Reveals Grounding and
Absence
for Two Full Years" on Democrats.com, Robert A. Rogers
states: "Bush
never actually reported in person for the last two years of
his
service - in direct violation of two separate written
orders."

Neither is correct. It's time to set the record
straight. The
following analysis, which relies on National Guard documents,
extensive interviews with military officials and previously
unpublished evidence of Bush's whereabouts in the summer and
fall of
1972, is the first full chronology of Bush's military record.
Its
basic conclusions: Bush may have received favorable treatment
to get
into the Guard, served irregularly after the spring of 1972
and got
an expedited discharge, but he did accumulate the days of
service
required of him for his ultimate honorable discharge.

The younger Bush fulfilled two years of active duty and
completed pilot training in June 1970. During that time and
in the
two years that followed, Bush flew the F-102, an interceptor
jet
equipped with heat-seeking missiles that could shoot down
enemy
planes. His commanding officers and peers regarded Bush as a
competent pilot and enthusiastic Guard member. In March 1970,
the
Texas Air National Guard issued a press release trumpeting
his
performance: "Lt. Bush recently became the first Houston
pilot to be
trained by the 147th [Fighter Group] and to solo in the
F-102... Lt.
Bush said his father was just as excited and enthusiastic
about his
solo flight as he was." In Bush's evaluation for the period
May 1,
1971 through April 30, 1972, then-Colonel Bobby Hodges, his
commanding officer, stated, "I have personally observed his
participation, and without exception, his performance has
been
noteworthy." In the spring of 1972, however, National Guard
records
show a sudden dropoff in Bush's military activity.

Though trained as a pilot at considerable government
expense,
Bush stopped flying in April 1972 and never flew for the
Guard
again.

Around that time, Bush decided to go to work for Winton
"Red"
Blount, a Republican running for the U.S. Senate, in Alabama.
Documents from Ellington Air Force Base in Houston state that
Bush
"cleared this base on 15 May." Shortly afterward, he applied
for
assignment to the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron in
Montgomery,
Ala., a unit that required minimal duty and offered no pay.
Although
that unit's commander was willing to welcome him, on May 31
higher-ups at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver
rejected
Bush's request to serve at the 9921st, because it did not
offer duty
equivalent to his service in Texas. "[A]n obligated Reservist
[in
this case, Bush] can be assigned to a specific Ready Reserve
position only," noted the disapproval memo, a copy of which
was sent
to Bush. "Therefore, he is ineligible for assignment to an
Air
Reserve Squadron."

Despite the military's decision, Bush moved to Alabama.
Records
obtained by Georegemag.com show that the Blount Senate
campaign paid
Bush about $900 a month from mid-May through mid-November to
do
advance work and organize events. Neither Bush's annual
evaluation
nor the Air National Guard's overall chronological listing of
his
service contain any evidence that he performed Guard duties
during
that summer.

On or around his 27th birthday, July 6, 1972, Bush did
not take
his required annual medical exam at his Texas unit. As a
consequence, he was suspended from flying military jets. Bush
spokesperson Dan Bartlett told Georgemag.com: "You take that
exam
because you are flying, and he was not flying. The paperwork
uses
the phrase 'suspended from flying,' but he had no intention
of
flying at that time."

Some media reports have speculated that Bush took and
failed
his physical, or that he was grounded as a result of
substance
abuse. Bush's vagueness on the subject of his past drug use
has only
abetted such rumors. Bush's commanding officer in Texas,
however,
denies the charges. "His flying status was suspended because
he
didn't take the exam, not because he couldn't pass," says
Hodges.
Asked whether Bush was ever disciplined for using alcohol or
illicit
drugs, Hodges replied: "No."

On September 5, Bush wrote to then-Colonel Jerry Killian
at his
original unit in Texas, requesting permission to serve with
the
187th Tactical Reconnaisance Group, another Alabama-based
unit.
"This duty would be for the months of September, October, and
November," wrote Bush.

This time his request was approved: 10 days later, the
Alabama
Guard ordered Bush to report to then-Lieutenant Colonel
William
Turnipseed at Dannelly Air Force Base in Montgomery on
October 7th
and 8th. The memo noted that "Lieutenant Bush will not be
able to
satisfy his flight requirements with our group," since the
187th did
not fly F-102s.

The question of whether Bush ever actually served in
Alabama has
become an issue in the 2000 campaign-the Air Force Times
recently
reported that "the GOP is trying to locate people who served
with
Bush in late 1972 ... to see if they can confirm that Bush
briefly
served with the Alabama Air National Guard." Bush's records
contain
no evidence that he reported to Dannelly in October. And in
telephone interviews with Georgemag.com, neither Turnipseed,
Bush's
commanding officer, nor Kenneth Lott, then chief personnel
officer
of the 187th, remembered Bush serving with their unit. "I
don't
think he showed up," Turnipseed said.

Bush maintains he did serve in Alabama. "Governor Bush
specifically remembers pulling duty in Montgomery and
respectfully
disagrees with the Colonel," says Bartlett. "There's no
question it
wasn't memorable, because he wasn't flying." In July, the
Decatur
Daily reported that two former Blount campaign workers recall
Bush
serving in the Alabama Air National Guard in the fall of
1972. "I
remember he actually came back to Alabama for about a week to
10
days several weeks after the campaign was over to complete
his Guard
duty in the state," stated Emily Martin, a former Alabama
resident
who said she dated Bush during the time he spent in that
state.

After the 1972 election, which Blount lost, Bush moved
back to
Houston and subsequently began working at P.U.L.L., a
community
service center for disadvantaged youths. This period of time
has
also become a matter of controversy, because even though
Bush's
original unit had been placed on alert duty in October 1972,
his
superiors in Texas lost track of his whereabouts. On May 2,
1973,
Bush's squadron leader in the 147th, Lieutenant Colonel
William
Harris, Jr. wrote: "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this
unit" for
the past year. Harris incorrectly assumed that Bush had been
reporting for duty in Alabama all along. He wrote that Bush
"has
been performing equivalent training in a non-flying status
with the
187 Tac Recon Gp, Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama." Base
commander
Hodges says of Bush's return to Texas: "All I remember is
someone
saying he came back and made up his days."

Two documents obtained by Georgemag.com indicate that
Bush did
make up the time he missed during the summer and autumn of
1972. One
is an April 23, 1973 order for Bush to report to annual
active duty
training the following month; the other is an Air National
Guard
statement of days served by Bush that is torn and undated but
contains entries that correspond to the first. Taken
together, they
appear to establish that Bush reported for duty on nine
occasions
between November 29, 1972-when he could have been in
Alabama-and May
24, 1973. Bush still wasn't flying, but over this span, he
did earn
nine points of National Guard service from days of active
duty and
32 from inactive duty. When added to the 15 so-called
"gratuitous"
points that every member of the Guard got per year, Bush
accumulated
56 points, more than the 50 that he needed by the end of May
1973 to
maintain his standing as a Guardsman.

On May 1, Bush was ordered to report for further active
duty
training, and documents show that he proceeded to cram in
another 10
sessions over the next two months. Ultimately, he racked up
19
active duty points of service and 16 inactive duty points by
July
30-which, added to his 15 gratuitous points, achieved the
requisite
total of 50 for the year ending in May 1974.

On October 1, 1973, First Lieutenant George W. Bush
received an
early honorable discharge so that he could attend Harvard
Business
School. He was credited with five years, four months and five
days
of service toward his six-year service obligation.

================================================== ==

tw

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For completeness:
- -----------------------------------

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...s/wh2000/stori
es/bush072899.htm

At Height of Vietnam, Bush Picks Guard
By George Lardner Jr. and Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 28, 1999; Page A1

Fourth of seven articles

Two weeks before he was to graduate from Yale, George Walker Bush
stepped into the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at
Ellington Field outside Houston and announced that he wanted to sign
up for pilot training.
It was May 27, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Bush was 12
days away from losing his student deferment from the draft at a time
when Americans were dying in combat at the rate of 350 a week. The
unit Bush wanted to join offered him the chance to fulfill his
military commitment at a base in Texas. It was seen as an escape
route from Vietnam by many men his age, and usually had a long
waiting list.

Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the
lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from
Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an
appreciation of politics.

Bush was sworn in as an airman the same day he applied. His
commander, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, was apparently so pleased
to have a VIP's son in his unit that he later staged a special
ceremony so he could have his picture taken administering the oath,
instead of the captain who actually had sworn Bush in. Later, when
Bush was commissioned a second lieutenant by another subordinate,
Staudt again staged a special ceremony for the cameras, this time
with Bush's father the congressman – a supporter of the Vietnam War
– standing proudly in the background.

Bush's father went on to run for senator in 1970 against Lloyd
Bentsen Jr. – a prominent Texas Democrat whose own son had been
placed in the same Texas Guard unit by the same Col. Staudt around
the same time as Bush. On Election Day, before the polls closed,
Guard commanders nominated both George W. Bush and Lloyd Bentsen III
for promotion to first lieutenant – even as the elder Bentsen was
defeating the elder Bush.

Three decades later, as Bush begins a campaign for the presidency
that has invited new scrutiny of his life, Staudt and other Guard
commanders insist no favoritism was shown to him. But others active
in Texas politics in the 1960s say the Texas National Guard was open
to string-pulling by the well-connected, and there are charges that
the then-speaker of the Texas legislature helped George W. gain
admittance.

Vietnam was clearly a crucible for Bush, as it was for Bill Clinton,
Al Gore and most other men who left college in the late 1960s. Bush
maintains that he joined the National Guard not to avoid service in
Vietnam but because he wanted to be a fighter pilot. Rather than be
drafted and serve in the infantry – an assignment Bush has
acknowledged he did not want – he agreed to spend almost two years
in flight training and another four years in part-time service.

That commitment, in turn, was to frame a period of aimlessness and
drift that Bush now calls his "nomadic" years: As the war and the
youth culture of the 1960s rocked America, Bush partied and dated
with gusto, dabbled half-heartedly in business and politics, and
flew jets part time. Apart from his Guard commitment, he was
unemployed for stretches that lasted for months. His last job before
he returned to the East to attend Harvard Business School, as a
social worker helping poor children, was arranged by his father
after George W. drunkenly confronted him one night and challenged
him to a fight.

Even after returning to the elite classrooms of the Ivy League, Bush
seemed adrift compared with his classmates. But Harvard offered the
beginnings of a self-discipline – his mother called it "structure" –
that was to propel him back to Texas with an ambition to build his
own future.

As he drifted, Bush struggled with his own feelings about Vietnam
and the turmoil he saw around him in America. Over time, he now
says, he became disillusioned with the war, even as he believed that
he should support the government that waged it. "In a sense he was
trying to remain a centrist in a time when there wasn't anything
left at the center," said Craig Stapleton, who is married to Bush's
cousin and has been a confidant of Bush's for 25 years. "All of the
sudden everybody moves and you're still standing in the center. He
didn't dodge the military. But he didn't volunteer to go to Vietnam
and get killed, either."

Grabbing a Slot In the National Guard

Bush learned that there were pilot openings in the Texas Air
National Guard during Christmas vacation of his senior year at Yale,
when he called Staudt, the commander of the 147th Fighter Group,
and, he said, "found out what it took to apply."
"He recalls hearing from friends while he was home over the
Christmas break that the Guard was looking for pilots and that
Colonel Staudt was the person to contact," said his communications
director, Karen Hughes. She said Bush did not recall who those
friends were.

Retired Col. Rufus G. Martin, then personnel officer in charge of
the 147th Fighter Group, said the unit was short of its authorized
strength, but still had a long waiting list, because of the
difficulty getting slots in basic training for recruits at Lackland
Air Force Base in San Antonio. Martin said four openings for pilots
were available in the 147th in 1968, and that Bush got the last one.

Staudt, the colonel who twice had himself photographed with Bush,
said his status as a congressman's son "didn't cut any ice." But
others say that it was not uncommon for well-connected Texans to
obtain special consideration for Air Guard slots. In addition to
Bush and Bentsen, many socially or politically prominent young men
were admitted to the Air Guard, according to former officials; they
included the son of then-Sen. John Tower and at least seven members
of the Dallas Cowboys.

"The well-to-do kids had enough sense to get on the waiting list,"
Martin said. "Some [applicants] thought they could just walk in the
door and sign up."

One address for those seeking help getting in was Ben Barnes, a
Democrat who was then the speaker of the Texas House and a protege
of Gov. John B. Connally. A top aide to Barnes, Nick Kralj,
simultaneously served as aide to the head of the Texas Air National
Guard, the late Brig. Gen. James M. Rose.

An anonymous letter addressed to a U.S. attorney in Texas, produced
in a discovery proceeding for an ongoing lawsuit, charged that
Barnes assisted Bush in getting into the Guard. The suit was brought
by the former director of the Texas Lottery Commission, who believes
Barnes, now a lobbyist, may have played a role in his dismissal.

In a deposition for the suit, Kralj confirmed that he would get
calls from Barnes or his chief of staff, Robert Spelling, "saying
so-and-so is interested in getting in the Guard." Kralj said he
would then forward the names to Gen. Rose.

In an interview, Barnes also acknowledged that he sometimes received
requests for help in obtaining Guard slots. He said he never
received such a call from then-Rep. Bush or anyone in the Bush
family.

However, when asked if an intermediary or friend of the Bush family
had ever asked him to intercede on George W.'s behalf, Barnes
declined to comment. Kralj, in his deposition, said he could not
recall any of the names he gave to Gen. Rose.

Hughes, Bush's spokeswoman, said: "The governor has no knowledge of
anyone making inquiries on his behalf."

Martin and others said Bush was quickly accepted because he was
willing to sign up for the intensive training and six years of
service required of fighter pilots. "It was very difficult to find
someone who would commit himself to the rigorous training that was
required," says Martin.

Bush, said Staudt, "said he wanted to fly just like his daddy."

Bush's father had volunteered for service in World War II at the age
of 18 and was shot down while flying combat missions in the Pacific
theater. By enlisting in the Guard, his son not only avoided Vietnam
but was able to spend much of his time on active duty in his home
town of Houston, flying F-102 fighter interceptors out of Ellington
Air Force Base.

In discussing his own decision, he has always said his main
consideration was that he wanted to be a pilot, and the National
Guard gave him a chance to do that. In 1989 he tried to describe his
own thought process to a Texas interviewer. "I'm saying to myself,
'What do I want to do?' I think I don't want to be an infantry guy
as a private in Vietnam. What I do decide to want to do is learn to
fly."

Asked in a recent interview whether he was avoiding the draft, Bush
said, "No, I was becoming a pilot."

Four months before enlisting, Bush reported at Westover Air Force
Base in Massachusetts to take the Air Force Officers Qualification
Test. While scoring 25 percent for pilot aptitude – "about as low as
you could get and be accepted," according to Martin – and 50 percent
for navigator aptitude in his initial testing, he scored 95 percent
on questions designed to reflect "officer quality," compared with a
current-day average of 88 percent.

Among the questions Bush had to answer on his application forms was
whether he wanted to go overseas. Bush checked the box that said:
"do not volunteer."

Bush said in an interview that he did not recall checking the box.
Two weeks later, his office provided a statement from a former,
state-level Air Guard personnel officer, asserting that since Bush
"was applying for a specific position with the 147th Fighter Group,
it would have been inappropriate for him to have volunteered for an
overseas assignment and he probably was so advised by the military
personnel clerk assisting him in completing the form."

During a second interview, Bush himself raised the issue.

"Had my unit been called up, I'd have gone . . . to Vietnam," Bush
said. "I was prepared to go."

But there was no chance Bush's unit would be ordered overseas. Bush
says that toward the end of his training in 1970, he tried to
volunteer for overseas duty, asking a commander to put his name on
the list for a "Palace Alert" program, which dispatched qualified
F-102 pilots in the Guard to the Europe and the Far East,
occasionally to Vietnam, on three- to six-month assignments.

He was turned down on the spot. "I did [ask] – and I was told,
'You're not going,' " Bush said.

Only pilots with extensive flying time – at the outset, 1,000 hours
were required – were sent overseas under the voluntary program. The
Air Force, moreover, was retiring the aging F-102s and had ordered
all overseas F-102 units closed down as of June 30, 1970.

After basic training at Lackland and his commissioning as a second
lieutenant in 1968, Bush got what amounted to a two-month-plus
vacation that enabled him to head to Florida to work for a
Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Edward J. Gurney. Put on
inactive duty status, Bush arrived in early September and stayed
through Election Day, riding the press plane, handing out releases,
and making sure traveling reporters woke up in time. He occasionally
returned to Houston for weekend Guard duty.

In late November, Bush was sent to Moody Air Force Base outside
Valdosta, Ga., for year-long undergraduate flight school. Bush
impressed fellow trainees with the way he learned to handle a plane,
but he became a celebrity for something else. In the middle of his
training, President Richard M. Nixon sent a plane down to fetch him
for an introductory date with his older daughter Tricia, according
to fellow trainee Joseph A. Chaney. It did not lead to another date,
but the story lives on. So does memory of the graduation ceremony:
Rep. Bush gave the commencement speech.

In December 1969, George W. returned to Houston to hone his skills
and eventually fly solo on the all-weather F-102, firing its weapons
and conducting intercept missions against supersonic targets. He
learned with a verve that impressed his superiors, becoming the the
first hometown graduate of the 147th's newly established Combat Crew
Training School. The group's public relations office celebrated his
solo flight in March 1970 with a press release that began:

"George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation who
doesn't get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed. . . . As far as
kicks are concerned, Lt. Bush gets his from the roaring afterburner
of the F-102."

Brig. Gen. John Scribner, director of the Texas Military Forces
Museum in Austin, said it was only natural that the Guard would have
publicized Bush's service with special ceremonies and press
releases. "That's how they do things, play it up big, especially
since he was a congressman's son. That was important to the Guard,"
he said.

No Career in Mind, No Rush to Settle Down

Bush graduated from Combat Crew Training School on June 23, 1970,
having fulfilled his two years of active duty. But he still flew the
F-102 Delta Daggers a few times a month; his unit kept two of the
fighters, fully armed, on round-the-clock alert and needed the
pilots to man them. With no career in mind, Bush was still
"looking," as his mother said – looking for work and looking for his
road. He seemed to be in no rush to settle down, which his mother
said was fine by his parents.
Barbara Bush said she recalled that her father-in-law, Prescott
Bush, came to Yale in the late 1940s and told her husband that "
'you don't have to make up your mind now what you're going to be
when you grow up.' " She added: "I think we told our children that.
.. . . I'm sure George did."

George W. promptly took a one-bedroom apartment at one of the most
attractive complexes in Houston at the time, the Chateaux Dijon. A
popular spot for singles, it offered fancy street lamps and striped
awnings and six pools filled with ambitious secretaries, students
and young businessmen. Bush relished his bachelor life there. He
played hard, plunging into all-day water volleyball games, but left
frequently for 24-hour flight duty in the alert shack at Ellington
Field.

"He did some night-flying as I recall," said Don Ensenat, a Yale
classmate who lived with him in Houston. "No alcohol 24 hours
before. They had to keep planes on alert all the time." Bush had to
be ready to scramble in his F-102 after any flying objects that Air
Force radars couldn't figure out.

Coincidentally, Bush's future wife, Laura Welch, a public school
librarian, lived at the Chateaux Dijon too, but they didn't meet.
Bush dated other women frequently, but none steadily.

"He had a couple of girls that were more than one date, but nothing
that looked like a serious romance," Ensenat said. "Dates and the
opposite sex were always high on the agenda. He was always enjoyable
to be around. But we didn't do anything anybody else in their
twenties didn't do."

Ensenat said he never saw Bush use illegal drugs.

That fall, as his father raced Bentsen for the Senate seat, both
Bush and Ensenat, who had already entered law school at the
University of Houston, applied for admission to the University of
Texas law school. Both were rejected, though Ensenat later became a
lawyer. Then, after losing to Bentsen, Bush's father was named
ambassador to the United Nations by President Nixon. The Bushes
moved to New York, leaving their eldest son to rely on his family's
old school and corporate ties to find a job.

Bush called Robert H. Gow, a Yale man who had roomed with the senior
Bush's cousin Ray in college and who had been an executive at the
senior Bush's Zapata Off-Shore Co. In 1969, Gow left Zapata and
started Stratford of Texas, a Houston-based agricultural company
with diverse interests: from cattle to chickens to indoor,
non-blooming tropical plants.

"We weren't looking for someone, but I thought this would be a
talented guy we should hire, and he was available," Gow said. In
early 1971, Gow gave Bush a job as a management trainee. He was
required to wear a coat and tie and dispatched around the country
and even to Central America, looking for plant nurseries that
Stratford might acquire. The newly buttoned-down businessman also
moved into a garage apartment that he shared with Ensenat off
Houston's North Boulevard, an old 1920s neighborhood close to
downtown.

"We traveled to all kinds of peculiar places, like Apopka, Florida,
which was named the foliage capital of the world," said Peter C.
Knudtzon, another Zapata alumnus who was Stratford's executive vice
president and Bush's immediate boss.

Once or twice a month, Bush would announce that he had flight duty
and off he would go, sometimes taking his F-102 from Houston to
Orlando and back. "It was really quite amazing," Knudtzon said.
"Here was this young guy making acquisitions of tropical plants and
then up and leaving to fly fighter planes."

Bush learned the ropes quickly, putting in long hours, and fitting
in smoothly – but this wasn't the place for the impatient young man.
He would later refer to his time at Stratford as a dull coat-and-tie
job. Within weeks he was talking to Gow and Knudtzon about his
future, questioning, searching – but never coming to any firm
conclusion. His bosses recall today that he was weighing whether he
should pursue public service or stick it out in the business arena
to build some security.

Bush stayed at Stratford only about nine months, and by fall 1971 he
was flirting – albeit very briefly – with running for the state
legislature. The Houston Post reported the possibility in a story
that misnamed him "George Bush Jr."

In the late spring of 1972, Bush was again looking, when he joined
another political campaign. This time he helped longtime family
friend Jimmy Allisonwork in Alabama on the U.S. Senate campaign of
Republican Winton M. "Red" Blount against longtime Democratic
incumbent John J. Sparkman. Bush moved to Alabama and worked until
November as political director for Blount, who lost by a wide
margin.

By the end of 1972, Bush's father was mulling over a new job offer
from Nixon – to be chairman of the Republican National Committee.
With his parents back in Washington, Bush went to stay with them for
the holidays and was involved in one of the most notorious incidents
of his "nomadic" years. He took his 16-year-old brother Marvin out
drinking, ran over a neighbor's garbage cans on the way home, and
when his father confronted him, challenged him to go "mano a mano"
outside.

There was no fight, and Bush was apparently able to mollify his
father with the news that he had been accepted for the following
fall at Harvard Business School. But with nothing to do until then,
his father decided it was time to give this restless young man some
broader exposure to real life.

Shortly after Christmas, Bush began working as a counselor with
black youngsters in Houston's Third Ward in a program called PULL
(Professionals United for Leadership) for Youth. The brainchild of
the late John L. White, a former professional football player and
civic leader, it was set up for kids up to 17 in a warehouse on
McGowen Street and it offered sports, crafts, field trips and
big-name mentors from the athletic, entertainment and business
worlds.

Bush and his brother Marvin, who tagged along for the summer weeks,
were the only whites in the place. "They stood out like a sore
thumb," said Muriel Simmons Henderson, who was one of PULL's senior
counselors. "John White was a good friend of their father. He told
us that the father wanted George W. to see the other side of life.
He asked John if he would put him in there."

Dressed in khaki, with his pants torn at the knees, Bush managed to
fit right in. He "came early and stayed late," in the words of one
former employee, playing basketball and wrestling with the
youngsters, taking them on field trips to juvenile prisons so they
could see that side of life and resolve not to end up there
themselves. He also taught them not to run when a police cruiser
came by.

"He was a super, super guy," said "Big Cat" Ernie Ladd, a 6-foot-9,
320-pound pro football great and PULL luminary who stopped by
frequently. "If he was a stinker, I'd say he was a stinker. But
everybody loved him so much. He had a way with people. . . . They
didn't want him to leave." One little boy in particular, a
6-or-maybe-7-year-old named Jimmy Dean, made a special connection
with Bush. "He was an adorable kid," said Edgar Arnold, PULL's
operating director. "Everybody liked him, but he bypassed all these
famous athletes, all these giants, and picked out George Bush, and
vice versa." The two became inseparable. If George was a little
late, Jimmy would wait for him on the stoop. "At business meetings,"
Arnold said, "that kid would be on top of George, head on his
shoulders." When Jimmy showed up shoeless, George bought him shoes.

Bush says he heard many years later that little Jimmy Dean was
killed by gunfire as a teenager. "He was like my adopted little
brother."

In keeping with family tradition, Bush did not boast of his
pedigree, or even mention it, to others at PULL. "I didn't know he
was of a silver spoon nature," Henderson said.

His car, like his clothes, carried no hint of it. "He had a bomb of
a car," she remembered. "It was the pits . . . always full of stuff,
clothes, papers. No one could ride in it with him. . . . He never
put himself in the position of looking down his nose at someone,
like, 'I've got all this money, my father is George Bush.' He never
talked about his father. He was so down to earth. . . . You could
not help liking him. He was always fun."

Back to New England And Another School

To start at Harvard, Bush needed early release from Guard duty in
Texas, and he got it easily, about eight months short of a full six
years. A Bush spokesman, Dan Bartlett, said early departures were
quite common and, in Bush's case, appropriate because his unit had
phased out the F-102s. Bush was transferred to a reserve unit in
Boston for the rest of his time, Bartlett noted.
Arriving in Cambridge in September 1973 in his spray-painted Cutlass
and scruffy clothes, Bush was not at all what his classmates
expected when the word spread that he was indeed the son of the
Republican National Committee chairman.

"One of my first recollections of him," says classmate Marty Kahn,
"was sitting in class and hearing the unmistakable sound of someone
spitting tobacco. I turned around and there was George sitting in
the back of the room in his [National Guard] bomber jacket spitting
in a cup. You have to remember this was Harvard Business School. You
just didn't see that kind of thing."

Classmates vividly remember Bush as an iconoclast and a character,
someone who didn't fit the tailored mold of business students in the
nation's premier graduate program. Many of the students who arrived
that fall, like Bush, had been out of college and working a few
years. But unlike Bush, a good number were returning to school with
a road map of where they were heading: Wall Street.

Bush's entry into the program came five years after his graduation
from Yale, and after a series of dead-end or unfulfilling jobs. He
was 27 and clearly had not found his niche yet. "A lot of people
went to Harvard Business School . . . for a job and all that. I went
there to actually learn. And did," says Bush.

Indeed, many of those closest to him, including his mother, believe
Harvard's rigorous academic demands brought his life and potential
career into focus. "Harvard was a great turning point for him. I
don't think he'd say that as much as I would," said Barbara Bush. "I
think he learned what is that word? Structure."

Bush shrugged off the trappings of Harvard and avoided the official
clubs that would showcase him in the yearbook and look good on his
resume. Instead, he showed up for class looking like he had just
rolled out of bed in the morning, often sat in the back of the room
chewing gum or dipping snuff and made it clear to everyone he had no
interest in Wall Street.

He was one of the few people who posed for his yearbook mug shot in
a sports shirt, a wrinkled one at that. The other prominent picture
of him in the book showed him sitting in the back row of class with
longish hair blowing a huge bubble.

"This was HBS and people were fooling around with the accouterments
of money and power," recalled April Foley, who dated Bush for a
brief period and has remained friends with him. "While they were
drinking Chivas Regal, he was drinking Wild Turkey. They were
smoking Benson and Hedges and he's dipping Copenhagen, and while
they were going to the opera he was listen to Johnny Rodriguez over
and over and over and over."

What Bush wanted to get out of Harvard were some practical business
fundamentals. He wanted to do something entrepreneurial, he told his
pals, but he wasn't sure what. He mused about running for office but
told friends he had to make some money first. Of this everyone was
certain: George W. Bush would never end up on the East Coast. He was
going back to Texas.

Staff researchers Nathan Abse, Madonna Lebling and Mary Lou White
contributed to this report.

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 05:14:34 GMT, two wheels
wrote:

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On Sat, 29 Nov 2003 20:52:17 -0800, "Jonathan Ganz"
wrote:

Actually, he was.

For the third or fourth time, here's the research done by
professional
reporters, and not just extrapolated BS from scraps of irrelevant
data
by some Bush-hating morons:

George magazine is no longer around, but this is from a
contemporaneous
cut and paste of the online version of the mag:

http://tinyurl.com/x221

- From an Oct. 2000 issue of George Magazine:
================================================= ===

The Real Military Record of George W. Bush: Not Heroic, but Not
AWOL,
Either

By Peter Keating and Karthik Thyagarajan

For more than a year, controversy about George W. Bush's Air
National Guard record has bubbled through the press. Interest in
the
topic has spiked in recent days, as at least two websites have
launched stories essentially calling Bush AWOL in 1972 and 1973.
For
example, in "Finally, the Truth about Bush's Military Record" on
TomPaine.com, Marty Heldt writes, "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... Nothing indicates in the records that he ever made up
the time he missed."

And in Bush's Military Record Reveals Grounding and Absence
for Two Full Years" on Democrats.com, Robert A. Rogers states:
"Bush
never actually reported in person for the last two years of his
service - in direct violation of two separate written orders."

Neither is correct. It's time to set the record straight. The
following analysis, which relies on National Guard documents,
extensive interviews with military officials and previously
unpublished evidence of Bush's whereabouts in the summer and fall
of
1972, is the first full chronology of Bush's military record. Its
basic conclusions: Bush may have received favorable treatment to
get
into the Guard, served irregularly after the spring of 1972 and got
an expedited discharge, but he did accumulate the days of service
required of him for his ultimate honorable discharge.

The younger Bush fulfilled two years of active duty and
completed pilot training in June 1970. During that time and in the
two years that followed, Bush flew the F-102, an interceptor jet
equipped with heat-seeking missiles that could shoot down enemy
planes. His commanding officers and peers regarded Bush as a
competent pilot and enthusiastic Guard member. In March 1970, the
Texas Air National Guard issued a press release trumpeting his
performance: "Lt. Bush recently became the first Houston pilot to
be
trained by the 147th [Fighter Group] and to solo in the F-102...
Lt.
Bush said his father was just as excited and enthusiastic about his
solo flight as he was." In Bush's evaluation for the period May 1,
1971 through April 30, 1972, then-Colonel Bobby Hodges, his
commanding officer, stated, "I have personally observed his
participation, and without exception, his performance has been
noteworthy." In the spring of 1972, however, National Guard records
show a sudden dropoff in Bush's military activity.

Though trained as a pilot at considerable government expense,
Bush stopped flying in April 1972 and never flew for the Guard
again.

Around that time, Bush decided to go to work for Winton "Red"
Blount, a Republican running for the U.S. Senate, in Alabama.
Documents from Ellington Air Force Base in Houston state that Bush
"cleared this base on 15 May." Shortly afterward, he applied for
assignment to the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron in Montgomery,
Ala., a unit that required minimal duty and offered no pay.
Although
that unit's commander was willing to welcome him, on May 31
higher-ups at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver rejected
Bush's request to serve at the 9921st, because it did not offer
duty
equivalent to his service in Texas. "[A]n obligated Reservist [in
this case, Bush] can be assigned to a specific Ready Reserve
position only," noted the disapproval memo, a copy of which was
sent
to Bush. "Therefore, he is ineligible for assignment to an Air
Reserve Squadron."

Despite the military's decision, Bush moved to Alabama. Records
obtained by Georegemag.com show that the Blount Senate campaign
paid
Bush about $900 a month from mid-May through mid-November to do
advance work and organize events. Neither Bush's annual evaluation
nor the Air National Guard's overall chronological listing of his
service contain any evidence that he performed Guard duties during
that summer.

On or around his 27th birthday, July 6, 1972, Bush did not
take
his required annual medical exam at his Texas unit. As a
consequence, he was suspended from flying military jets. Bush
spokesperson Dan Bartlett told Georgemag.com: "You take that exam
because you are flying, and he was not flying. The paperwork uses
the phrase 'suspended from flying,' but he had no intention of
flying at that time."

Some media reports have speculated that Bush took and failed
his physical, or that he was grounded as a result of substance
abuse. Bush's vagueness on the subject of his past drug use has
only
abetted such rumors. Bush's commanding officer in Texas, however,
denies the charges. "His flying status was suspended because he
didn't take the exam, not because he couldn't pass," says Hodges.
Asked whether Bush was ever disciplined for using alcohol or
illicit
drugs, Hodges replied: "No."

On September 5, Bush wrote to then-Colonel Jerry Killian at
his
original unit in Texas, requesting permission to serve with the
187th Tactical Reconnaisance Group, another Alabama-based unit.
"This duty would be for the months of September, October, and
November," wrote Bush.

This time his request was approved: 10 days later, the Alabama
Guard ordered Bush to report to then-Lieutenant Colonel William
Turnipseed at Dannelly Air Force Base in Montgomery on October 7th
and 8th. The memo noted that "Lieutenant Bush will not be able to
satisfy his flight requirements with our group," since the 187th
did
not fly F-102s.

The question of whether Bush ever actually served in Alabama
has
become an issue in the 2000 campaign-the Air Force Times recently
reported that "the GOP is trying to locate people who served with
Bush in late 1972 ... to see if they can confirm that Bush briefly
served with the Alabama Air National Guard." Bush's records contain
no evidence that he reported to Dannelly in October. And in
telephone interviews with Georgemag.com, neither Turnipseed, Bush's
commanding officer, nor Kenneth Lott, then chief personnel officer
of the 187th, remembered Bush serving with their unit. "I don't
think he showed up," Turnipseed said.

Bush maintains he did serve in Alabama. "Governor Bush
specifically remembers pulling duty in Montgomery and respectfully
disagrees with the Colonel," says Bartlett. "There's no question it
wasn't memorable, because he wasn't flying." In July, the Decatur
Daily reported that two former Blount campaign workers recall Bush
serving in the Alabama Air National Guard in the fall of 1972. "I
remember he actually came back to Alabama for about a week to 10
days several weeks after the campaign was over to complete his
Guard
duty in the state," stated Emily Martin, a former Alabama resident
who said she dated Bush during the time he spent in that state.

After the 1972 election, which Blount lost, Bush moved back to
Houston and subsequently began working at P.U.L.L., a community
service center for disadvantaged youths. This period of time has
also become a matter of controversy, because even though Bush's
original unit had been placed on alert duty in October 1972, his
superiors in Texas lost track of his whereabouts. On May 2, 1973,
Bush's squadron leader in the 147th, Lieutenant Colonel William
Harris, Jr. wrote: "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit"
for
the past year. Harris incorrectly assumed that Bush had been
reporting for duty in Alabama all along. He wrote that Bush "has
been performing equivalent training in a non-flying status with the
187 Tac Recon Gp, Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama." Base commander
Hodges says of Bush's return to Texas: "All I remember is someone
saying he came back and made up his days."

Two documents obtained by Georgemag.com indicate that Bush did
make up the time he missed during the summer and autumn of 1972.
One
is an April 23, 1973 order for Bush to report to annual active duty
training the following month; the other is an Air National Guard
statement of days served by Bush that is torn and undated but
contains entries that correspond to the first. Taken together, they
appear to establish that Bush reported for duty on nine occasions
between November 29, 1972-when he could have been in Alabama-and
May
24, 1973. Bush still wasn't flying, but over this span, he did earn
nine points of National Guard service from days of active duty and
32 from inactive duty. When added to the 15 so-called "gratuitous"
points that every member of the Guard got per year, Bush
accumulated
56 points, more than the 50 that he needed by the end of May 1973
to
maintain his standing as a Guardsman.

On May 1, Bush was ordered to report for further active duty
training, and documents show that he proceeded to cram in another
10
sessions over the next two months. Ultimately, he racked up 19
active duty points of service and 16 inactive duty points by July
30-which, added to his 15 gratuitous points, achieved the requisite
total of 50 for the year ending in May 1974.

On October 1, 1973, First Lieutenant George W. Bush received
an
early honorable discharge so that he could attend Harvard Business
School. He was credited with five years, four months and five days
of service toward his six-year service obligation.

================================================= ===

tw

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