Not denied by ALL in the know though (you wouldn't expect those few surviving draft board members to go against the power of the Bushes AND admit to a crime, now would you?)
Sid Adger, a Texas oilman and Bush family crony, Ben Barnes, then Speaker of the House in Texas, and Gen. James Rose, former commander of the Texas Air National Guard, were the string-pullers. (Nice pals, if your family can afford them):
The early winter of 1968 was a season of acute anxiety for the young George W. Bush. As his academic career at Yale sputtered to an inglorious denouement, the war in Vietnam was hurtling forward at full-bore with the onset of the Tet Offensive. In those perilous months, there were 350,000 US troops in Vietnam, dying at a rate of more than 350 a week. From Bush's perch in New Haven, elite hamlet of his birth, the draft loomed, casting a chill shadow over his future.
Bush faced limited options. Unlike his warden-to-be Dick Cheney, this randy bon vivant wasn't prepared to anchor himself down in early wedlock, which would have entitled him to a marriage deferment. There were too many oats yet to be sown. How many seeds in how many fields? Tough to say precisely, but in the ripe phrase of one of Bush's drinking buddies from the 1970s: "he bedded nearly every bimbo in West Texas, married or not."
Alas, the remedial scholar's grades at Yale, already puffed-up beyond all merit courtesy of his legacy admission, proved to be so paltry that the escape hatch of graduate school was out of the question, too.
Only one sure sanctuary remained: the National Guard.
In January of 1968, Bush sent enquiries to the National Guard. It seems Bush had had an epiphany: he wante to be a pilot, just like his dad. Well, not exactly like Pappy, who was shot down flying a fighter in World War II. Yes, Lil' Bush wanted to fly fighter jets, but not in dicey combat situations. That, naturally, would defeat the entire purpose of joining the Guard.
In 1989, Bush explained the coarse calculus behind his decision to a reporter from the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, "I'm saying to myself, 'What do I want to do?' I think, I don't want to be an infantry guy as a pilot in Vietnam. What I do decide to want to do [sic] is learn to fly."
The National Guard commanders responded warmly to Bush's initial probings, but noted, somewhat ominously for the fratboy flier, that before his application could be accepted he had to submit to a battery of physical and mental tests. Damn, Bush must have shivered, more exams and no helpful tutors from the egghead division of Skull and Bones to guide him through the intellectual shoals!
At the time Bush applied to the National Guard, there were 100,000 other young men in line before him, stalled on a crowded waiting list hoping their number would be called before they were sucked up by the draft and dropped onto the killing fields of the Mekong Delta. In Texas alone, there were 500 applicants frantically vying for only four open slots for fighter pilot-training in the Air National Guard.
At first blush, Bush didn't seem to have much of a shot at landing one of those choice positions. First, he flunked his medical test. Then he flunked his dental exam. And finally, as Ian Williams reveals in Deserter, his merciless indictment of Bush's disappearing act in the National Guard, he scores a rock-bottom 25 percent on his pilot aptitude examination. That's one out of four correct answers, a ratio that is not even a credible mark in cluster-bombing class. To put this achievement in perspective, the average score of applicants taking the pilot aptitude test was 77 percent, a whopping fifty-two percent higher than the proud product of the Yale ancestral admissions program. More than 95 percent of the testers scored higher than Bush, the Ivy Leaguer.
Aptitude for piloting a fighter jet notwithstanding, on May 27, 1968, just nervy twelve days before the expiration of his student deferment, Bush the Younger was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard. On his application form under the heading "Background Qualifications," Bush declares in a refreshing spurt of honesty "None."
In those days National Guard squadrons were generally not being sent off to the frontlines in Vietnam. But just to be sure, Bush checked the box on his enlistment form saying he was unwilling to do time overseas.
He duly submitted to the Guard brass a "Statement of Intent," pledging that he had "applied for pilot training with the goal of making flying a lifetime pursuit and I believe that I can best accomplish this to my own satisfaction as a member of the Air National Guard as long as possible."
In 1994, the gunshy Bush fessed up to the Houston Chronicle that being sent to Vietnam was simply not an option for him: "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I choose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanesI don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching when I wasn't. It was either Canada or the service. Somebody said the Guard was looking for pilots. All I know is, there weren't that many people trying to be pilots."
As we now know, there were more than 500 people looking to be pilots in Texas alone, nearly all of them more qualified for the slots than Bush.
So how did this miraculous induction come about? Bush has long denied he got any favored treatment, which would seem unmanly. But there's now little doubt that the draft evader benefited from at least three pairs of helping hands: Sid Adger, a Texas oilman and Bush family crony, Ben Barnes, then Speaker of the House in Texas, and Gen. James Rose, former commander of the Texas Air National Guard.
The truth began to trickle out in 1999, when Barnes, then a top lobbyist and political fixer in Austin, became a witness in a lawsuit by Laurence Littwin. Littwin was suing the State of Texas for firing him as lottery directory, which he claimed was politically motivated. The Littwin lawsuit is a complex and confusing affair that provides a glimpse at the baseline of corruption pullulating through the Texas political system.
In sum, Littwin claimed that he was forced to hire a company called GTech to run the Texas lottery in order to suppress the real story of how Bush won entry into the Guard-namely that Ben Barnes had pulled strings with Gen. Rose. In the 1990s, Barnes worked a lobbyist for GTech. Indeed, GTech had paid Barnes $23 million for his expert services.
In his deposition, Barnes denied blackmailing Littwin into giving GTech the lucrative contract. But he confessed, with the haughty sense of accomplishment that only an apex politico can impart, that he had indeed opened the backdoor for Bush into the Air National Guard. Barnes said that he responded to a distress beacon from Bush intimate Sid Adger, a now dead Texas oil tycoon, and prevailed on Gen. Rose to adopt the young Bush as a member of the Guard's flying elite, which then included the war aversive sons of Gov. John Connelly and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. It helped that Barnes's chief of staff, Nick Kralj, also served as a top aide-de-camp to the general. Mission accomplished.
But the handouts didn't stop there. Bush didn't want to remain a lowly private or corporal in those drab uniforms. He saw himself as officer material. Yet, he had no desire to subject himself to the mental and physical rigors of Officer Candidate School. In his mind, he was a birthright officer. And so it came to be. After a mere six weeks of training, Bush was promoted to the rank 2nd Lieutenant. He didn't even have his pilot's license.
In the wake of this astounding achievement, Bush felt it was time for a breather. He abandoned his training with the Guard for two months, hightailing it to the beaches and bars of Florida, where he claimed to have occasionally lent the services of his agile political mind to the senatorial campaign of rightwing, neo-segregationist congressman Ed Gurney, a favorite of Richard Nixon. Gurney won, but his victory was short lived. Gurney was later indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of political corruption, bribery and perjury. He walked away a free man courtesy of a hung jury.... |
