Truth or Consequences: The bizarre postscript to George W. Bush's military service.

[salvorhardin]

Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the Air National Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be the legendary newsman’s finest hour. Instead, it blew up in his face, tarnishing his career forever and casting a dark cloud of doubt and suspicion over his reporting—and that of every other journalist on the case. This month, as Rather returns with a new memoir, Joe Hagan finally gets to the bottom of the greatest untold story in modern Texas politics, with exclusive, never-before-seen details that shed fresh light on who was right, who was wrong, and what really happened.

...

...the CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and have always been, a red herring. The real story, assembled here for the first time in a single narrative, featuring new witnesses and never-reported details, is far more complex than what Rather and Mapes rushed onto the air in 2004. At the time, so much rancorous political gamesmanship surrounded Bush’s military history that it was impossible to report clearly (and Rather’s flawed report effectively ended further investigations). But with Bush out of office, this is no longer a problem. I’ve been reporting this story since it first broke, and today there is more cooperation and willingness to speak on the record than ever before. The picture that emerges is remarkable. Beyond the haze of elaborately revised fictions from both the political left and the political right is a bizarre account that has remained, until now, the great untold story of modern Texas politics. For 36 years, it made its way through the swamps of state government as it led up to the collision between two powerful Texans on the national stage.

...

No one thought much about George W. Bush’s military records until he decided to run for governor in 1994 against the incumbent, Democrat Ann Richards. The first mention came from a TV reporter for Houston station KHOU named Jim Moore. During a debate in October, Moore asked Bush whether he’d received preferential treatment to get into the National Guard in 1968. Bush replied that most Guard assignments were for only six months and nobody else wanted to spend the extra time it took to train on a jet fighter. “My father, just like my commanding officer said, had nothing to do with getting me in that unit,” he said.

Governor Richards knew there was more to it than that. She had privately asked Barnes about the rumor that he had helped Bush get into the Guard, and Barnes told her that he had. Robert Spellings, who was Barnes’s chief of staff in the late sixties (his future wife, Margaret Spellings, would later become Bush’s Secretary of Education), also told Richards he recalled getting Bush in. But Spellings didn’t remember exactly how it was done and advised Barnes against going public, because Barnes had no real evidence. Richards, who had opposed the Vietnam War, didn’t push it.

But after Bush won the election, Barnes’s story spiked in political value. What was to unfold in Texas over the next five years was a political power struggle, at the center of which was Barnes and his claim about Bush’s military history. It began, of all places, at the Texas Lottery Commission.

Full story (Very long! ~10,000 words): http://www.texasmonthly.com/cms/printthis.php?file=feature.php&issue=2012-05-01

[appleannie1]

1. Texas dirty politics as usual. Interesting that the same names are still operational.

[Doc Holliday]

5. Aw, now.

Texas politics isn't "dirty." More like incestuous. You get used to it.

[northoftheborder]

2. still lots of gaps in this story which still enrages me

[riderinthestorm]

3. Wow, really powerful read. I hope everyone goes through this. A LOT of important info

too much to include in just short bits.

Another snip from the article:

It was on Rather’s infamous 60 Minutes segment, in 2004, that Barnes first publicly recounted how he had called General Rose on behalf of George W. Bush in the spring of 1968. Barnes claimed he had received a call from Sid Adger, an oilman in Houston who was a close friend of the elder Bush’s. As it happened, both of Adger’s sons were also in the Air National Guard in Houston, under Staudt’s command. Barnes told me that in the late seventies, while he and Adger served on the board of Texas International Airlines, Adger personally thanked him for helping Bush. “We both knew I had done him that favor,” he said.

Barnes’s story has never been corroborated because both Rose and Adger were dead by the time he first told it publicly. The elder Bush has said he doesn’t recall asking Adger for help, and the younger Bush has denied knowledge of it. But during the 1988 campaign, Rose and his son Mark happened to be watching television together when a report came on about the Bush-Quayle campaign’s attacks on Bentsen. According to Mark Rose, who has never spoken about it on the record before now, his father admitted to him that he’d helped both Bush and Bentsen into the Guard.

“My dad looked at me and said, ‘I signed off on Bentsen’s son going into the Guard, and I signed off on Bush’s son going into the Guard,” said Rose, a former Austin city councilman who is now an energy executive living in Bastrop. He added, “[George W. Bush] can’t say, ‘I didn’t have any help.’ Staudt didn’t work that way. My dad didn’t work that way.”

Snip

"And that is when a mysterious document began circulating in Austin that would serve as the Rosetta stone of the Bush National Guard controversy. The document, a single-page letter written by an anonymous author and addressed to a U.S. attorney, described an alleged secret deal struck between George W. Bush and Ben Barnes in which Barnes agreed to withhold the story of getting the governor into the Guard in exchange for Bush’s securing the GTECH contract against competing bidders."

http://www.texasmonthly.com/cms/printthis.php?file=feature.php&issue=2012-05-01

[salvorhardin]

6. No kidding!

I wonder if things would've turned out differently if Dan Rather hadn't rushed to air, and had took the time to go for the deeper story?

[badhair77]

4. It is worth the time required to read it.

There are a lot of slimy Republicans in Texas.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Almost everything in this story was published by the TO years ago ...

and still no one has faced charges.

[UTUSN]

10. R#45 & K for, I read the whole thing, and it's all been out there, and RATHER was railroaded.

Shrub must have a ghostwriter who has compiled his real accomplishments in life: Getting even with everybody who ever crossed him and his B.F.E.E.::

* Getting even with Poppy for Poppy's disapproval of him and preference for Jeb Crow Shrub, two terms to Poppy's one.

* Getting even with Jeb Crow Shrub.

* Getting even with Saddam for family cartel reasons.

* Getting even with Dan RATHER.


And on and on. I'm sure that others can add to this list.

[creeksneakers2]

8. An explosive new fact that bolsters the theory

that the Bush White House was well aware that the documents were forgeries hours before the story aired, but let CBS swallow the hook. The White House plotted to get Dan Rather and they succeeded.

From the Texas monthly piece:

"The morning before the broadcast was scheduled to air, CBS showed the memos to the White House for a response. Dan Bartlett was the network’s contact. Before Bartlett was interviewed, he emailed copies of the memos to Albert Lloyd, Bush’s longtime National Guard expert. In an interview in 2008, Lloyd told me he immediately recognized them as forgeries: “I looked at them and I said, ‘Don’t do a damned thing with these, because these are fake.’  Bartlett, however, appears to have ignored Lloyd’s assessment."

Bartlett possessed the documents by 7AM the morning before the story aired. After the story blew up, Bartlett was quoted in at least one newspaper saying that he showed the documents to Bush that morning and Bush said some of what was in the documents was true but that he had never been ordered to take a physical. I can't find links to any of those articles, probably because they no longer exist. But I do have:

"He also disclosed that he had shown the documents that morning to President Bush. "He had no recollection of these specific documents," Bartlett said, though the president said some of the information seemed accurate. For instance, he did go to Alabama. But he denied having defied orders from his superiors, Bartlett said."

http://articles.latimes.com/2004/sep/18/nation/na-cbs18

If Bartlett knew that events in the documents never really happened, he must have known the documents were forgeries. For example, if someone claimed to have a fan letter written by Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lindsay Lohan, it wouldn't take a document expert to instantly realize the letter was a forgery. Likewise, Bartlett must have known instantly.

Bartlett was interviewed by CBS before the story and never let on anything about the possibility that the documents were forgeries.

What is even more incriminating from the TexasMonthly piece is:

"Bartlett told me that the online attacks began “before I started any outreach” to the press. He added that Bush himself didn't learn of the Killian memos until after the segment had already aired, because Bartlett felt the documents didn't show anything revelatory. He initially dismissed them as “old news.”

So Bartlett has completely changed his story since its been realized that Bartlett must have known the memos were forgeries. Bartlett now says he didn't discuss the documents with Bush at all in advance.

One more bit of evidence that the White House knew in advance the documents were forgeries, the USA today timeline of events. The Bush/Guard story aired at 8:00 on September 8th, 2004. By 9:30 the same evening, the White House had E-mailed copies of the documents to editors and reporters all over the country. Reports at the time said 500 copies went out. If the White House thought that the documents were incriminating, why would they send them out? They must have known what was coming, and that they could make the whole story backfire on CBS. The White House must have started discussing releasing the documents before 9:30, probably for some time considering the size of the risk. So the White House knew well before doubts about the authenticity of the documents gained steam on the blogs.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-09-21-guard-scoops-skepticism_x.htm

One person who agrees with the theory that the White House let Rather swallow the hook on the guard story is Albert Lloyd, quoted in the TexasMonthly article:

"When I asked Lloyd why Bartlett ignored his assessment, he said, “I guess he was trying to set Rather up for getting mauled.”

[Thinkingabout]

9. When George W moved to a home near Wescott

To establish residency to run for governor in Texas I researched his record. I did not like the information I found and have not to this day voted for him. Failed companies and selling shares by an executive without proper notice and dear old dad had connections with SEC whose job to oversee these transactions would never take action on him. He used the excuse it was the fault of accountants and legal. He was not equiped to be president and SC gave him his first term as president. There was information of coke parties but everything was sealed before he ran for president. He missed physicals required for his reserve service but nothing happened to him.