Bush hit by claims of 'lost weekends' in Mexico

             Tom Rhodes, New York 

 A BOOK to be published this week about George W Bush,
 the Republican frontrunner, claims his father's chief of staff
 admitted in 1998 that the candidate had taken cocaine during
 the 1970s. 

 Michael Dannenhauer, chief of staff to former president
 George Bush, is said to have told Toby Rogers, a journalist
 with the Houston Public News, a newspaper in Texas
 (where Bush Jr is governor), that the politician was "out of
 control" from the time he attended Yale University. 

 "There was cocaine use, lots of women, but the drinking was
 the worst," the aide is alleged to have said. 

 Dannenhauer purportedly also told Rogers of an admission
 by the former president that his son experienced "lost
 weekends in Mexico". 

 Rumours of drug abuse have plagued Bush Jr for months
 since he declared himself a candidate in the presidential race.
 Since character is an important election issue, the latest
 claims are bound to rekindle interest in Bush's past. He has
 admitted to a "misspent youth", but has repeatedly evaded
 questions about cocaine. 

 The claims will come under intense scrutiny. They were
 never published by the Houston newspaper, which has since
 closed. 

 The story was briefly aired on September 13 last year by
 The Greenwich Village Gazette, an internet magazine in New
 York, but was pulled from its website. The publisher was
 concerned about legal action and the absence of any second
 source to support the allegation that Bush had started to use
 cocaine "some time before 1977". 

 In a taped conversation with Rogers, Dannenhauer
 subsequently called the allegations a "total lie". He initially
 denied they had met, then claimed the interview had taken
 place years earlier. 

 Rogers, now a freelance contributor to various publications
 including The Village Voice, the respected liberal paper in
 New York, claims a photograph apparently showing the two
 men together was taken on April 21, 1998. The allegations
 appear in the introduction to a revised biography of Bush by
 J H Hatfield, a Texan writer. 

 The first imprint of his book, Fortunate Son, published in
 October last year, was withdrawn from shops after it
 emerged that Hatfield had served a five-year prison sentence
 for soliciting the attempted murder of his boss at a finance
 company in 1987. 

 The book, with additional material from Rogers, is now
 being reissued by Soft Skull, a radical publishing company
 based in New York. 

 It retains hotly disputed accusations made in the earlier
 version, which cited claims by three anonymous sources -
 one of them identified as a former Bush contemporary at
 Yale and another said to be an unofficial political adviser -
 that Bush was arrested in 1972 for cocaine possession. 

 The book alleges that the record was expunged by a friendly
 judge as a favour to Bush Sr. 

 Both father and son strenuously deny the claims. Last night
 Scott McClellan, the Bush presidential campaign
 spokesman, said: "This book belongs to science fiction. All
 allegations in it are ridiculous, false and libellous." 

 Hatfield alleges that in return for a clean slate the judge
 ordered Bush to perform community service as a youth
 counsellor at the Professionals United for Leadership League
 (Pull), an urban poverty programme in Houston. 

 The former president, however, has said he referred his son
 to the youth centre after an incident in which Bush drove
 drunk with his brother as a passenger. 

 Sixty Minutes, the CBS documentary show, is due to
 broadcast an interview with Hatfield next month, raising the
 prospect that his allegations will attract further attention as
 the primaries get under way.                 

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Choice #2

New Bio Alledges Gore Used Marijuana Regularly For Years

A DRCNet Exclusive by Adam J. Smith 

                  A DRCNet Exclusive
                  By Adam J. Smith

                  The Week Online with DRCNet (stopthedrugwar.org) has learned that
                  Newsweek Magazine decided late Friday to postpone publication of an
                  excerpt of a Gore biography featuring eyewitness accounts of Al
                  Gore's regular and continued drug use over a period of years. The
                  drug use covers a period of Gore's life from his days at Harvard up
                  until the very week he declared his candidacy for Congress in 1976,
                  sources told The Week Online. The book, by Bill Turque of Newsweek's
                  Washington bureau, quotes both named and unnamed sources,
                  including John Warnecke, son of John Carl Warnecke – architect of
                  the John F. Kennedy grave site, and a long-time friend of the Gores.
                  An exclusive interview with Mr. Warnecke follows this story. 

                  The excerpt had been scheduled to run in Newsweek's January 18th
                  issue, just days before the start of the Democratic primaries. A
                  previous excerpt from the book appeared in the December 6 issue. In
                  that excerpt, which covered Gore's Vietnam experience, Tipper Gore
                  was said to have spent considerable time, distraught with worry for
                  her husband's safety, at Warnecke's house while Gore was overseas. 

                  The Gore biography, to be published by Houghton-Mifflin, was itself
                  originally scheduled for a January release, but that too has been
                  delayed until March 23. A spokesman for Houghton-Mifflin told The
                  Week Online that the delay was "normal." 

                  Al Gore has previously admitted using marijuana, but those admissions
                  fall well short of the type of regular, even chronic use described by
                  Warnecke. Warnecke also says that Gore used marijuana regularly for
                  at least four years after the Vice-President claims to have stopped. 

                  On November 7, 1987, in the wake of Douglas H. Ginsburg's failed
                  Supreme Court nomination, Gore told the Bergen County Record that
                  he had smoked marijuana in college and in the army but had not used
                  it in the past fifteen years. The New York Times reported on
                  November 8, 1987: 

                  Mr. Gore said he last used marijuana when he was 24. He said he first
                  tried the drug at the end of his junior year at Harvard and used it
                  again at the beginning of his senior year the next fall. He also said he
                  used the drug "once or twice" while off-duty in an Army tour at Bien
                  Hoa, Vietnam; on several occasions while he was in graduate school
                  at Vanderbilt University and when he was an employee of a Nashville
                  newspaper (The Nashville Tennessean). On November 11, 1987, Gore
                  was quoted in UPI, saying "We have to be honest and candid and
                  open in dealing with the (drug) problem." 

                  Mr. Turque refused to comment to The Week Online. Roy Burnett, a
                  spokesman for Newsweek, acknowledged that the magazine was
                  preparing to run a new excerpt from the book "in the coming weeks."
                  Asked whether there in fact had been a delay, and if so, the reasons
                  behind it, Burnett would say only that it is Newsweek's policy not to
                  discuss its editorial practices. 

                  Gore, as part of the Clinton Administration, has presided over a drug
                  war policy that has led to the arrest and incarceration of record
                  numbers of non-violent drug offenders. In 1998, according to the
                  Justice Department, there were 682,885 Americans arrested on
                  marijuana charges, 88% of whom were arrested for possession. A
                  recent study by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
                  (www.cjcj.org) reported that the incarcerated population of the U.S.
                  will reach two million on or around February 15, 2000. Of those, more
                  than half are non-violent offenders according to CJCJ. 

                  On February 8, 1999, Vice President Gore personally presented the
                  administration's Drug Control Strategy at a Washington, DC press
                  conference. During his remarks, Gore spoke about the "spiritual
                  problem" of drug abuse and about the need for more positive
                  opportunities for young people. Despite this, however, the strategy
                  allocates approximately 2/3 of the federal drug budget on
                  enforcement, with less than one third to be spent on treatment and
                  education combined. 

                  At that press conference, Gore, perhaps inadvertently, pointed out
                  the very problem inherent in a class of political leaders who prosecute
                  a failing drug war while hiding their own experiences with illicit drugs,
                  and the message that sends to young people. 

                  "And if young people… feel there's phoniness and hypocrisy and
                  corruption and immorality," Gore said, "then they are much more
                  vulnerable to the drug dealers, to the peers who tempt them with
                  messages that are part of a larger entity of evil."