Bush was AWOL in 1972; Repeatedly misled press, public about Guard service
By John Byrne | Raw Story Editor
A four-month investigation conducted by a Philadelphia researcher and independently confirmed by RAW STORY finally proves that President George W. Bush did not successfully complete his service with the Texas Air National Guard.
The president’s own payroll records — recently released by the White House in an effort to discredit claims that the president had failed to meet Guard requirements — instead indicate that he was absent without leave (AWOL) in 1972, and should have been placed on active duty for nearly four months.
“If you don’t show up, you’re absent without leave, by definition,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics under Ronald Reagan from 1981-1985, Lawrence J. Korb. “You would be put on active duty and sent wherever they needed you.”
Korb examined Bush’s payroll records Monday. Asked if he thought Bush was AWOL, he said, “Based on these payroll records, unless he had permission, it would be.”
Bush could not have gotten permission, which he would have needed to get in advance, because he did not yet know of the months he was going to miss until May 1972. It not until May 1972 that he was offered a position to campaign in an Alabama Senate campaign – well after all the trainings that he might have applied.
Further, transferring credits from year to year is in violation of military law. It is also in violation of the Uniform Code of Airforce Policy, which states that duty must be served 15 days before or 30 days after the scheduled service date.
Korb added that President Bush should have been mandated to serve active duty if he missed even two months of service in a fiscal year — 24 months of active duty minus the amount of active duty already served.
For Bush, this would have amounted to 113 days. How this number was derived can be seen here.
White House deceived press, public
The White House’s chief spokesman said Bush attended enough training during other months to fulfill his service commitment for that year, contradicting President Bush’s statement to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” that he in fact attended Guard drills during the 12 months beginning May 1972.
“I did report; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been honorably discharged,” Bush said.
“It just kind of amazes me that some will now say they want more information, after the payroll records and the point summaries have all been released to show that he met his requirements and to show that he fulfilled his duties,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said during his press briefing Feb. 10. “If I recall, some were using the comment, ‘deserter’ or ‘AWOL’… that is outrageous; it is baseless.”
In his briefing, McClellan repeated more than 25 times Bush fulfilled his duties or variations to that effect.
Both statements — that he attended or made up the missing months — are false.
Their assertion is based on “point summaries” that the Guard employs to calculate when a guardsman is eligible for retirement. Federal law, however, reveals that the White House’s statement is purposely misleading.
The points system is irrelevant of the fact that Bush never completed five months of duty.
An apt comparison would be if someone failed to show up for work for five months but had still been listed as an employee. They might get a year’s credit towards retirement, but they would certainly be in breach of their contractual agreement to show up.
Federal law mandates that a Guard officer miss no more than 10 percent of training sessions in a given fiscal year. In fiscal year 1973, which started July 1, 1972 and ran through June 30, 1973, Bush missed 25 percent of training sessions.
Bush was nearly drafted, but father was congressman
On May 27, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War when American casualties amounted to 350 men each week, Bush was just 12 days away from losing his student deferment from the draft. On that day – despite a long waiting list – he was miraculously accepted into the Texas Air National Guard.
The Air National Guard offered Bush a low-key alternative to the jungles of Vietnam. Guardsmen only had to serve one weekend a month, plus fifteen days of active duty each year.
“Bush had scored only 25 percent on a ‘pilot aptitude’ test, the lowest acceptable grade,” the Washington Post wrote in 1999, as part of a series of articles on the then-presidential candidate. “But his father was then a [U.S.] congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics.”
Former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes stated in a written deposition in September 1999 that then-Gov. George W. Bush was given a slot in the Guard at the request of a Bush family friend, Houston businessman Sid Adger, according to an article published Sept. 28, 1999 in the Dallas Morning News.
Source documents show proof
Bush’s payroll records — released by the White House in an effort to debunk charges that Bush hadn’t fulfilled his Guard service — show that the President missed five months of service in 1972. They further show that he did not complete these months at a later time, either in 1972 or 1973.
The full archive of research, conducted and and assembled by Paul Lukasiak, can be found at his website.
Each month, guardsmen were expected to earn four points — for the four hours of training they were expected to put in each month.
The records show that he earned no credit for attendance in April, May, June, July, August or September of 1973. They also demonstrate that the Guard credited him for other months he served in advance of months he planned to miss — such as 8 points in November 1972 for December of that year, and 12 points in January 1973 for February and March of 1973.
The images below are close-cropped to show the dates and the attendance points earned. You can see Bush’s full payroll record here. Click on the images below to see the full record for that year. Note that the 1972 payroll was generated before all credits were applied; it has been compiled from the original record.
He also served three months of service in July 1973, before departing for Harvard Business School. A fuller explanation of the missed months appears here.
Evidence that the Guard actively took part in fraud
Bush’s Guard records also show that as much as 60 percent of Bush’s substitute training sessions that he did attend were invalid under Air Force regulations because they were conducted more than 15 days in advance of his scheduled training. While a major story in and of itself, it provides evidence that the Air Force took an active role in giving a congressman’s son preferential treatment.
He was also paid for each of these invalid “makeup sessions,” according to the documents released by the White House.
On one weekend in 1972, and four weekends in 1973, according to documents released by the White House, Bush attended makeup training sessions for sessions he intended to miss. Each of those makeup sessions, credited for the days beginning 11/13/72, 1/06/73, 1/09/73, 7/16/73 and 7/18/73, were scheduled more than 15 days before the scheduled service date. Further documentation can be found here.
Under Air Force policy, all “substitute training” at the time had to be performed “within 15 days immediately before or 30 days immediately after the regularly scheduled (service date, a.k.a. UTA).”
Charges that Guard was lenient debunked
At the time Bush was serving in the Texas Air National Guard, former Secretary Korb was serving in the Naval Reserve, the Navy’s equivalent of the National Guard, where he served from 1966 to 1985. He dismisses suggestions that the Guard was being lenient about service at the time.
“At that time they were very strict about fulfilling their obligations — and we don’t like to say it — because this was a way to avoid the draft and going to Vietnam.”
He was unable to examine Bush’s payroll records at his home on Friday, but is expected to formally confirm that Bush had failed to complete his required duty in 1972, therefore rendering him AWOL, at his office Monday.
Korb currently serves as a Senior Analyst at the Center for Defense Information and a Senior Fellow at the progressive thinktank, the Center for American Progress.
He has written more than 100 editorials in major publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and has appeared more than a thousand times as a commentator on television on shows such as Larry King Live, Good Morning America and The O’Reilly Factor.
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