Multimedia at work! "60 Minutes" Wed night, the "Times" in the morning.
Ben Barnes and Dan Rather on "60 Minutes II"
Bill Dyer - Beldar blog
I'm repeating myself. I didn't intend to write about this again, so soon. But while I don't have the exact quote — and didn't have my videotape running, unfortunately, and missed the first few minutes of the segment — Dan Rather told a whopper on "60 Minutes II" tonight when he said (quoting from memory) that "Ben Barnes hasn't told this story before tonight."
Dan, as the WaPo noted last week, as part of the breathless buildup to your new exposé — Ben Barnes told this same story, and actually gave an affidavit to the same effect, in 1999.
Barnes thinks he did a favor to get young Dubya into the Texas Air National Guard. He didn't say in 1999 — and he again didn't say tonight — that anyone from the Bush family asked him to do so. Nor has it been established that without Barnes' unsought intercession, Dubya wouldn't have gotten into the same spot in which he ended up. And the unit for which Dubya signed up had pilots flying in combat over Southeast Asia at that moment. Even stateside Guard service flying an F-102 was dangerous duty — certainly at least as dangerous, and similarly honorable, as serving as a junior officer aboard a guilded missile friggate.
But Barnes almost wept on camera tonight — oh the guilt! The anguish! Barnes says he had the power of life or death, and ignobly chose to save Dubya from death! Why, if that's so, it's a wonder lightning doesn't jump out of the Vietnam Memorial and strike Barnes down!
Except he didn't have that power, and the spot he thinks he got Bush into wasn't safe, or even safe from combat. And neither young Bush, nor Poppy and Barb, had anything to do with whatever it was that Barnes thinks he did.
But wait! There's more! CBS' crack investigative reporters turned up previously unreleased documents "from the personal files of [the late] Col. Jerry Killian, Mr. Bush's squadron commander." And — I know you're holding your breath for this — they say the same thing the previously released documents said! That is, that Bush sought permission from the TANG to move briefly to Alabama to work on a political campaign. From CBS' website:
Another memo refers to a phone call from the lieutenant in which he and his commander "discussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November." And that due to other commitments "he may not have time."
Well, hell. He asks for permission, and gets it. There's a new document that refers to the discussions when he asked for permission. This is AWOL? This is news? (CBS hasn't posted the new documents — we just have to take their word for what they say, since after all, CBS is the oracle of truth and knowledge for the free world.)
And yes, we know Dubya didn't maintain his flight status and didn't take the physical that would have been necessary to do so. We've known that for years, as we've also known that Dubya wouldn't have been flying one way or the other during that period because the TANG had more pilots than they had planes for. I don't know whether to yawn or retch.
The website story doesn't mention Barnes' heavy personal contributions to, and fundraising for, the Kerry campaign. I don't know if that was in the portion of tonight's broadcast that I missed — perhaps my readers can address that in comments — but if it wasn't, it should've been. Likewise, the fact that nobody in the Bush family asked Barnes to do whatever he did should've been highlighted in the broadcast, but it certainly isn't in the website story. We're talking minimum standards of objectivity here; but is anyone surprised that CBS and Dan Rather are unacquainted with those standards?
Ben Barnes is still famous here in Texas — as a scoundrel thrown out of office after the Sharpstown Scandal. Texas native Dan Rather seems to be working hard to earn the same reputation with the few fair-minded people who haven't already reached that conclusion.
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Update (Wed Sep 8 @ 9:45pm): Seventeen paragraphs down, the NYT tucks this into its Thursday-edition story about Barnes' "60 Minutes II" appearance and his contemporaneous interview with the NYT (boldface added):
Mr. Barnes maintained, as he has since 1999, that he had contacted his friend who headed the Texas Air National Guard, Brig. Gen. James Rose, not at the behest of anyone in the Bush family, but rather a Houston businessman, Sidney A. Adger, a friend of the Bushes who has died.
And the NYT also described "Mr. Barnes, 66, [as] an adviser to Senator John Kerry's campaign and an influential lobbyist with offices in Austin and Washington." No mention of the $464,250 in contributions to Kerry attributed to Barnes' efforts from 1999-2004. I suppose that detail isn't part of "the news that's fit to print," but it's a sad commentary on CBS that the NYT looks (relatively) objective in contrast.
Regarding whether Mr. Barnes' unsolicited efforts had any effect, here's what the Dallas Morning News reported (.pdf of Lexis/Nexis download) in 1999 — still unrebutted to the best of my knowledge:
Records provided to The News by Tom Hail, a historian for the Texas Air National Guard, show that the unit Mr. Bush signed up for was not filled. In mid-1968, the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, based in Houston, had 156 openings among its authorized staff of 925 military personnel.
Of those, 26 openings were for officer slots, such as that filled by Mr. Bush, and 130 were for enlisted men and women. Also, several former Air Force pilots who served in the unit said that they were recruited from elsewhere to fly for the Texas Guard.
Officers who supervised Mr. Bush and approved his admission to the Guard said they were never contacted by anyone on Mr. Bush's behalf.
"He didn't have any strings pulled, because there weren't any strings to pull," said Leroy Thompson of Brownwood, who commanded the squadron that kept the waiting list for the guard at Ellington Air Force Base. "Our practices were under incredible scrutiny then. It was a very ticklish time." ...
According to several former officers, the openings in the unit were filled from a waiting list kept in the base safe of Rufus G. Martin, then an Air National Guard personnel officer.
In a recent interview, Mr. Martin of San Antonio said the list was kept on computer and in a bound volume, which was periodically inspected by outside agencies to make sure the list was kept properly.
Mr. Bush said he sought the Guard position on his own, before graduating from Yale University in 1968. He personally met with Col. Walter B. Staudt, commander of the 147th group.
In an interview, Mr. Bush said he walked into Col. Staudt's Houston office and told him he wanted to be a fighter pilot.
"He told me they were looking for pilots," Mr. Bush said. He said he was told that there were five or six flying slots available, and he got one of them.
While Guard slots generally were coveted, pilot positions required superior education, physical fitness and the willingness to spend more than a year in full-time training.
"If somebody like that came along, you'd snatch them up," said the former commander, who retired as a general. "He took no advantage. It wouldn't have made any difference whether his daddy was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."
Such old non-news. I can't bring myself to retch — yawning is indeed appropriate, though. (Hat-tip to QandO, which has more links and info.)
Update (Wed Sep 8 @ 9:45pm): Just in case you haven't figured out Mr. Barnes' angle on all this, here's more (.pdf from Lexis/Nexis download) from the Dallas Morning News on July 29, 2004, describing a lobbyist party at Sen. Kerry's nominating convention, to help you get the flavor:
Federal law sharply restricts the size of contributions to candidates and political parties, but there are no limits on donations to the convention's host committee (which collected $40 million in donations, some $1 million each).
And businesses and lobbyists are free to spend whatever they want on private parties.
Texas lobbyist Ben Barnes' invitation-only reception at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Venetian-style palace housing 600 years of priceless art, attracted enough members of the Senate to hold a committee meeting. The event was a fund-raiser for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and Mr. Barnes had invited a host of high rollers.
"There's nobody here who can't give $25,000," Mr. Barnes said, standing in a courtyard resplendent with flowers and ancient sculpture.
Guests walked among the Botticellis and Manets and sipped champagne.
Trial lawyers John O'Quinn of Houston and Wayne Reaud of Beaumont, who shared in the state's $17 billion tobacco settlement, chatted by the sculpture of Horas. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont glided past the Renaissance art, shaking hands.
Sen. Jon Corzine of New Jersey greeted Mr. Barnes warmly in the atrium, which soared four stories overhead.
"I've never had anybody reach out and help me more than Ben Barnes," Mr. Corzine said.
Then he threw his arms around Mr. Barnes, the lawmaker and the lobbyist.
Pretty tall cotton for one of Texas' most famous bankrupts. And hey — John Kerry can sure count on Ben Barnes to reach out and help him, too! (More on Barnes, albeit from a partisan source, via this link sent by one of my readers.)
Update (Wed Sep 8 @ 11:40pm): WaPo's Dobbs is still ignoring Kerry's cover-up and recycling this old news, but does manage to point out that "Barnes has raised money for Democrat John F. Kerry's presidential campaign," and that
[Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt] has insisted that he was not influenced by Bush's status as the son of George H.W. Bush (R), a Texas congressman in 1968 and later head of the CIA. He has also rejected claims by former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes (D) that he intervened with the head of the Texas Air National Guard to secure a position for Bush there at the request of a Bush family friend.
Meanwhile, CBS, to its credit, now has up a transcript of the segment, plus links to .pdf files with the new documents (here, here, here, and here). I'll take a close look and may post another update, or a new post, depending on whether there's any "there" there. (I'm pretty sure I've caught one error in the transcript, where Rather refers to Barnes' predecessor as Texas Lieutenant-Governor as "Preston Smith, communist governor Preston Smith as lieutenant governor." But with Rather, who knows?
beldar.blogs.com
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September 9, 2004
Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and RALPH BLUMENTHAL
ASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - President Bush's Vietnam-era service in the National Guard came under renewed scrutiny on Wednesday as newfound documents emerged from his squadron commander's file that suggested favorable treatment.
At the same time, a once powerful Texas Democrat came forward to say that he had "abused my position of power" by helping Mr. Bush and others join the Guard.
Democrats also worked to stoke the issue with a new advertisement by a Texas group that featured a former lieutenant colonel, Bob Mintz, who said he never saw Mr. Bush in the period he transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama Air National Guard.
The documents, obtained by the "60 Minutes" program at CBS News from the personal files of the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Mr. Bush's squadron commander in Texas, suggest that Lieutenant Bush did not meet his performance standards and received favorable treatment.
One document, a "memo to file" dated May 1972 , refers to a conversation between Colonel Killian and Lieutenant Bush when they "discussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November," because the lieutenant "may not have time."
The memo said the commander had worked to come up with options, "but I think he's also talking to someone upstairs."
Colonel Killian wrote in another report, dated Aug. 1, 1972, that he ordered Lieutenant Bush "suspended from flight status" because he failed to perform to standards of the Air Force and Texas Air National Guard and "failure to meet annual physical examination (flight) as ordered."
Colonel Killian also wrote in a memo that his superiors were forcing him to give Lieutenant Bush a favorable review, but that he refused.
"I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," he wrote.
CBS, which reported on the memos on "The CBS Evening News" and "60 Minutes," declined to say how it obtained the documents.
Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in an interview with CBS, the full transcript of which the White House released on Wednesday night, that Mr. Bush had fulfilled his service and received an honorable discharge. Mr. Bartlett did not dispute the authenticity of the memos but said, "When you are talking about a memo to somebody's self - this is a memo to his own file - people are trying to read the mind of somebody who is no longer with us."
He called the release of the files politically motivated.
"Every time President Bush gets near another election, all the innuendo and rumors about President Bush's service in the National Guard come to the forefront," he said.
Separately, former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes of Texas voiced regret for what he said was helping the privileged escape service in Vietnam.
"I'm not particularly proud of what I did," said Mr. Barnes, who in the 1960's was speaker of the Texas House at 26 and lieutenant governor at 30. "While I understand why parents wanted to shield their sons from danger, I abused my position of power by helping only those who knew me or had access to me."
Mr. Barnes, 66, an adviser to Senator John Kerry's campaign and an influential lobbyist with offices in Austin and Washington, said in a interview with The New York Times that he had intervened to get Mr. Bush, as well as other well-connected young men, into the Guard in 1968. He made similar comments on "60 Minutes" on Wednesday.
Mr. Barnes maintained, as he has since 1999, that he had contacted his friend who headed the Texas Air National Guard, Brig. Gen. James Rose, not at the behest of anyone in the Bush family, but rather a Houston businessman, Sidney A. Adger, a friend of the Bushes who has died.
"Yes, I called Rose to get George Bush into the Guard, I've said that," Mr. Barnes said in his office last week in Austin. "I called Rose for other sons of prominent families, and I'm not proud of it now."
Anticipating his remarks, Republicans worked to discredit Mr. Barnes as a partisan Democrat and large contributor to Mr. Kerry. The events created a new round of scrutiny for Mr. Bush, after a month in which Mr. Kerry's Vietnam service dominated the campaign because of veterans with longstanding anger at how Mr. Kerry, who was a decorated veteran, came home and turned against the war. With advertisements, through a book and on talk shows, the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, leveled largely unsubstantiated accusations about Mr. Kerry's record and told how his antiwar statements had demoralized veterans.
Democrats were unabashed in turning the spotlight on Mr. Bush. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic chairman, said in a conference call with reporters the party would keep Mr. Bush's record before the public.
The events unfolded a day after the Pentagon, prompted by a lawsuit filed by The Associated Press, released a series of records on Mr. Bush's service, even though the White House had said this year that it had released all the records.
Mr. Bartlett said that the documents "demonstrate that he served his country, he logged hundreds and hundreds of hours as a fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard."
Mr. Bartlett rejected the suggestion based on Colonel Killian's files that Mr. Bush did not meet the performance standards. He said Mr. Bush did not have a physical examination because he was not going to be flying planes anymore, because his unit no longer flew the planes that Mr. Bush was trained on.
"Every step of the way, President Bush was meeting his requirements, granted permission to meet his requirements," Mr. Bartlett said.
A new commercial, produced by a group of Democrats, Texans for Truth, is to begin on Monday in five swing states that have lost high numbers of soldiers in Iraq. It features a former lieutenant colonel in the Alabama Guard, Bob Mintz, who lives in Tennessee. He told a columnist for The New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof, for a column published on Wednesday, that he was actively looking for Lieutenant Bush at the Alabama base in the 1970's, because he had heard that Lieutenant Bush was a fellow bachelor who might like to party with him and other pilots. In the spot, Mr. Mintz said neither he nor his friends ever saw Mr. Bush.
"It would be impossible to be unseen in a unit of that size," he says.
The unit had 20 to 30 pilots.
In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Mintz was pressed about his recollections and whether he might have missed seeing Mr. Bush, possibly because Mr. Bush was no longer flying at that point and was working in an office position. Mr. Mintz said repeatedly he never saw Lieutenant Bush.
Asked for friends' names who could vouch that they never saw Lieutenant Bush, Mr. Mintz declined, saying he did not have their permission to make their names public.
Glenn Smith, the main figure in Texans for Truth, said he wanted to make the spot because he was angry over the Swift Boat veterans.
Steve Schmidt of the Bush campaign said that Texans for Truth was linked to the Kerry campaign in potential violation of campaign finance laws, saying the group was "made possible by contributions" from Moveon.org, another advocacy group that opposes Mr. Bush.
Mr. Smith said that Moveon.org had financed another group that he had founded, Drivedemocracy.org, but that neither had given money to the Texans, though he said that Moveon.org had a link on its Web site to the Texans and sent e-mail messages to its Texas members urging them to give to the Texans.
Mr. Smith said the Texans raised more than $300,000 in 24 hours, with one contribution for $100,000 and most of the rest in $25 donations.
Adding to the picture of Mr. Bush's service, The Boston Globe reported on Wednesday that he fell short of meeting his military requirements and was not disciplined despite irregular attendance at required drills.
The paper said Mr. Bush signed documents in July 1973, before he left Houston for the Harvard Business School, promising to meet his training commitments or be punished by being called up to active duty.
Mr. Bartlett said on Wednesday that Mr. Bush was given permission to attend Harvard. He said that if there were any requirements Mr. Bush was not meeting, "the National Guard at the federal level, the state level and the local level, they all knew where he was."
Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Washingtonfor this article, and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston. Raymond Bonner contributed reporting from Houston.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
