Bush is living in a glass house
Nicholas D. Kristof NYT Thursday, September 16, 2004
NEW YORK President George W. Bush's paramount problem with his National Guard years is not that he took shortcuts in 1972. The problem is that he still refuses to come clean about it.
.
So as America gets caught up in the furor over the CBS documents showing favoritism in Bush's National Guard career, let's bear a couple of points in mind.
.
First, there's reason to be suspicious of some of those CBS documents. For starters, a Guard veteran who worked with the supposed author, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, tells me that abbreviations in the documents are wrong. He says group should be "GP" rather than "GRP," there should be no period after "Lt," and Bush's Social Security number should have been used rather than his old service number.
.
Second, we shouldn't be distracted by doubts about the CBS documents. There's no doubt that Bush benefited from favoritism. The speaker of the Texas House has acknowledged making the call to get Bush into the National Guard.
.
Does any of this matter? What troubles me is less Bush's advantage three decades ago and more his denial today. Bush's own route to avoid the draft underscores the disparities in America, yet his policies seem based on a kind of social Darwinism in which the successful make their own opportunities. His tax cuts and entire outlook seem rooted in ideas not of noblesse oblige, but of noblesse entitlement.
.
One autumn day in 1973, when Bush was a new student at Harvard Business School, he was wearing a Guard jacket when he ran into one of his professors. The professor, Yoshi Tsurumi, says he asked Bush how he wangled a spot in the Guard.
.
"He said his daddy had good friends who got him in despite the long waiting list," recalls Tsurumi, who is now at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. Tsurumi says he next asked Bush how he could have already finished his National Guard commitment. "He said he'd gotten an early honorable discharge," Tsurumi recalls. "I said, 'How did you manage that?'"
.
"He said, Oh, his daddy had a good friend," Tsurumi said. "Then we started talking about the Vietnam War. He was all for fighting it."
.
<b.Tsurumi says he remembers Bush so vividly because he was always making outrageous statements: denouncing the New Deal as socialist, calling the Securities and Exchange Commission an impediment to business, referring to the civil rights movement as "socialist/communist," and declaring that "people are poor because they're lazy." (Dan Bartlett, an aide to Bush, denies that the president ever made these statements.)
.
So in this muddle of competing witnesses and suspect documents, what do we actually know about Bush and the Air National Guard?
.
It's pretty clear that Bush got into the Guard because of his name but did a fine job in his first few years. "He was rock-solid as a pilot," Dean Roome, a pilot in the same unit who was briefly Bush's roommate, told me. Roome adds that Bush inquired in 1970 about the possibility of transferring to Vietnam but was turned down - and, if so, that's a credit to him.
.
Then in 1972, something went badly wrong. My hunch is that Bush went through personal difficulties that he's embarrassed to talk about today. In addition, Roome suggests that changes at the Texas air base were making it more difficult for junior pilots, so sometimes Bush's only chance to fly was as a target for student pilots - not the most thrilling duty.
.
<b.For whatever reason, Bush's performance ratings deteriorated, he skipped his flight physical, he stopped flying military planes forever, he transferred to Alabama, and he did not report to certain drills there as ordered. The pilots I interviewed who were in Alabama then are pretty sure that Bush was a no-show at required drills.
.
The next year Bush skipped off to Harvard Business School. He still had almost another year in the Guard he had promised to serve, but he drifted away, after taxpayers had spent $1 million training him, and he never entirely fulfilled his obligations.
.
More than three decades later, that shouldn't be a big deal. What worries me more is the lack of honesty today about that past - and the way Bush is hurling stones without the self-awareness to realize that he's living in a glass house.
.
iht.com |
