Recent Presidential Elections

2004 Election

Bush and the Air National Guard

February 12, 2004. Great Britain’s The Guardian printed the following:

… the Bush administration's efforts to produce documentation that the president did fulfill his duty in the Texas air national guard more than 30 years ago were overwhelmed by a new round of damaging disclosures.

Led by USA Today, a number of US newspapers yesterday accused Mr. Bush and his advisers of seeking to purge his military records before his run for the presidency in 2000 to cover up any record of his youthful arrests.

The drip feed of new information about President Bush's stint in the guard has confounded White House efforts to close a chapter on the Vietnam war era.

Instead, White House spokesmen have spent most of the week trying to satisfy reporters' demands to explain the president's whereabouts during a one-year period beginning in May 1972.

Hours after the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, released a record of Mr Bush's annual dental examination at an Alabama air base, he was forced to answer new allegations that Republican operatives had doctored the president's military records.

In the USA Today account, a senior member of the Texas air national guard said that Republican operatives blacked out sections of Mr. Bush's military records before the 2000 elections.

The operatives apparently wanted to remove any reference to Mr. Bush's youthful arrests.

Although Mr Bush has admitted to being arrested twice for rowdiness, violations for alcohol or drugs would have made him ineligible for the national guard.

Meanwhile, several members of the national guard have come forward to say they have no recollection of seeing Mr. Bush in Alabama.

He has previously said that he transferred his duties from Texas to Alabama where he was working on a Senate election campaign.

"I don't remember seeing him. That does not mean he was not there," Wayne Rambo, who was a first lieutenant with the 187th Supply Squadron at the time, told the Associated Press.

The AP contacted more than a dozen former members of the unit on Wednesday, and none could recall ever running into Mr. Bush (Goldenberg, “Doubts” 1-3).

The following is part of an article printed March 4 in The Guardian that brought criticism of the Bush administration unrelated to the Texas National Guard issue.

One of the 30-second commercials includes a brief clip of a body, wrapped in the American flag, being lifted from the wreckage of New York's World Trade Centre. Firefighters, who emerged as heroes of the rescue effort, also feature in the adverts.

But the campaign appeared to have backfired badly today as relatives of those killed on September 11 accused the president of exploiting the tragedy to boost his political career.

"It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people. It is unconscionable," said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the attacks on the twin towers.

Tom Roger, whose daughter was a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, said: "I would be less offended if he showed a picture of himself in front of the Statue of Liberty. But to show the horror of 9/11 in the background, that's just some advertising agency's attempt to grab people by the throat," he told the New York Daily News.

Firefighter Tommy Fee called the adverts "sick", adding: "The image of firefighters at Ground Zero should not be used for this stuff, for politics."

The intended message of the adverts is "steady leadership in times of change". To stirring music, Mr Bush tells viewers: "I know exactly what we need to do to make the world more free and peaceful."

…

… in a speech at a Republican fund-raiser in Los Angeles , … Mr Bush said the 19-year Senate veteran [John Kerry] had been "in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue".

He said the election, which will be held in November, provided a choice "between an America that leads the world with strength and confidence, or an America that is uncertain in the face of danger" (Staff 1-2).

A September 10 Guardian article narrated how doubts about George Bush’s service in the National Guard had evolved into a GOP election crisis.

… memos, apparently from the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian of the Texas air national guard, urged Mr Bush's replacement by "a more seasoned pilot", because of his "failure to perform" to the required standards.

A senior officer had been "pushing to sugar-coat" Mr Bush's official evaluation, the memos said, voicing a suspicion that the young pilot had been "talking to someone upstairs" to facilitate his eventual transfer to Alabama.

Mr. Bush subsequently stopped showing up in Texas, but the Alabama unit's then commander has claimed that he did not report for duty in that state either. The White House insists that he did.

The CBS TV network has obtained the documents. It also showed an interview with a powerful Texas politician who said he had pulled strings on behalf of a friend of the family to get Mr. Bush into the national guard, so that he might avoid service in Vietnam.

"I was maybe determining life or death, and that's not a power that I want to have," said Ben Barnes, a former speaker of the Texas house of representatives.

"I've thought about it an awful lot. You walk through the Vietnam memorial, and I tell you, you'll think about it a long time."

Mr. Barnes confessed that he had abused his position of power in acceding to the request from Sid Adger, an oil baron, to allow Mr. Bush to jump the queue.

"I was a young, ambitious politician, doing what I thought was acceptable, that was important to make friends ... I would describe it as preferential treatment," he said.

His story is technically consistent with the Bush administration line that no member of the family tried to exert improper influence.

But the perception that the president drew on his connections is likely to be strengthened by an advert due to be shown next week, paid for by a group called Texans for Truth, questioning whether Mr. Bush ever appeared at his Alabama unit.

Last week, the widow of another family friend said the young Mr. Bush had been sent to Alabama because he was "getting in trouble and embarrassing the family" in Texas. The ad will provide a campaign counterweight to efforts in recent weeks by Republican supporters to cast doubt on John Kerry's war record.

Republicans lost no time in suggesting that Texans for Truth might have direct links to the Kerry campaign, nor in pointing out that Mr. Barnes was a Democratic fundraiser and campaign adviser.

This would put a new perspective on the Kerry campaign's stated intent to move beyond Vietnam, to concentrate on domestic economic issues.

As for Lt Col Killian's memos, said the president's spokesman, Dan Bartlett, "I chalk it down to politics. They play dirty down in Texas ... For anybody to try to interpret or presume they know what somebody who is now dead was thinking in any of these memos - I think is very difficult to do" (Burkeman “Documents” 1-2).

Here is part of a September 16 article printed in The Guardian.

The memos appear to be signed by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Mr Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard, who died 20 years ago. They rail against the young pilot and ambassador's son for failing to attend a compulsory physical examination and complain about pressure from senior officers to "sugar coat" his performance evaluation.

Since their publication, several experts have questioned whether they could have been produced on typewriters available at that time, although the technical evidence is not conclusive.

Yesterday, to cloud an already murky picture, Lt Col Killian's former secretary declared that the documents were forged, but were factually correct.

"These are not real. They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him," the former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told the Dallas Morning News.

However, Ms Knox added: "The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real [documents]."

Both she and another former colleague of Lt Col Killian, Richard Via, recalled that he had kept careful notes on Mr Bush's shortcomings and transgressions as a pilot and stored them in a locked filing cabinet, the contents of which have since gone missing.

…

Senator Kerry's aides argue their campaign has suffered because the US media has focused more on sideshows such as the row over the documents than on substantive issues such as Iraq, unemployment and healthcare.

They also point out that the Democratic candidate's gaffes seem to get more of an airing than those of the president. Last month, Senator Kerry got the name of a stadium wrong in football-mad Wisconsin. His mistake has been broadcast relentlessly since, even becoming the subject of a Washington Post article yesterday, weeks after the slip (Borger “Forgerry” 1-3).

The Guardian’s narration of the air national guard story was updated September 21.

CBS television issued a humbling apology yesterday for a report on an investigative programme, saying that its story claiming that George Bush had been given special treatment during his stint in the Texas air national guard was deeply flawed and should not have gone on air.

It abruptly changed course after days of expressing confidence in the report on “60 Minutes,” which relied heavily on four memos purportedly written by a now dead commander in the guard to show that Mr Bush received special treatment during his military service.

"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," a statement by the president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, said.

Dan Rather, the anchorman who presented the story and defended it for nearly two weeks, issued a separate apology.

"We made a mistake in judgment and for that I am sorry," he said.

The statement from Rather, an American television idol for 20 years, went on to make the embarrassing admission that the programme's producers had been duped by a disgrunted former member of the Texas national guard, who had provided the documents.

The network did not say the documents were forgeries, but after further investigation of the story at the weekend Rather concluded: "I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers.

"That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where - if I knew then what I know now - I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question."

Since the programme was shown on September 8, Rather has become a lightning rod for Republican and right wing outrage, and the subject of increasingly uncomfortable scrutiny by media commentators.

A number of leading Republicans accused him of bias.

Yesterday he said the reporting for the programme had been done in good faith.

The programme was based primarily on four memos from the early 1970s, allegedly from the private files of Mr Bush's squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian.

In one of the most damaging of the purported memos, the late Col Killian complained that Mr Bush disobeyed a direct order to submit to a medical exam.

The story also included a claim by a former Texas lieutenant governor, Ben Barnes, that he had pulled strings to get Mr Bush into the guard, and so spare him from being sent to Vietnam.

Within minutes of the broadcast doubts about the documents began circulating on the internet, claiming that the memos were fake.

Document experts said that the print on the memos did not correspond to that of the typewriters in use at the time but did seem suspiciously close to Windows computer programmes.

CBS stood by its story, even though two document specialists raised doubts about the authenticity of the memos before the story went on air.

Although Rather conceded in a report last week that the documents may appear fake, he insisted that Col Killian's frustration with Mr Bush was all too real, and he brought on the late commander's former secretary to substantiate the assertion (Goldenberg “CBS” 1-3).

Works cited:

Borger, Julian, “Forgery Row Threatens to Derail Kerry.” The Guardian. September 16, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/uselections2004.usa

Burkeman, Oliver, “Documents Put Bush's Vietnam Role Back on Election Agenda.” The Guardian, September 10, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/10/uselections2004.usa1

Goldenberg, Suzanne, “Doubts about His Vietnam Record Dog Bush. The Guardian, February 12, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/feb/13/uselections2004.usa

Goldenberg, Suzanne, “CBS Apologises for ‘Mistaken’ Story of Bush’s Military Service.” The Guardian, September 21, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/sep/21/tvnews.uselections2004

Staff and Agencies, “Bush 9/11 Ads Spark Anger.” The Guardian, March 4, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/04/uselections2004.usa4