24-12-2008, 07:48 PM
(This post was last modified: 24-12-2008, 07:55 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
This one looks 'hot' to me.....! [and while he doesn't mention it here, it has material on GHWB's relationship to Dallas!]
One of the fastest ways to raise eyebrows in politically savvy company is to suggest that Richard Nixon was not the villain of Watergate. Everyone knows that Nixon himself set loose the Watergate burglars and then oversaw the attempted cover-up that followed. We know this because the most famous journalists of the last fifty years – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – made their careers on that story. I thought I knew it too.
Then I began the research that led to my new book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. I had no intention, when I started, of re-opening the Watergate inquiries. But the trail led there, as I sought to answer a question that somehow has escaped careful attention. Why did Richard Nixon repeatedly promote George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr., or Poppy, as he is known) for important political posts despite both his apparent lack of qualifications and Nixon's own privately-expressed doubts about Bush's mettle? Why, even when Nixon became so wary of so many of his appointees that he fired cabinet members en masse, did he continue to be solicitous of Bush Sr.?
Nixon named the obscure Poppy to be UN ambassador in 1970 and then chairman of the national Republican Party in 1972. Even earlier, in 1968, Nixon actually put Bush Sr. on his list of vice presidential running mate prospects – this not long after Poppy was first elected to the House of Representatives. Similarly, Nixon's replacement, Gerald Ford, sent Poppy off as envoy to China and later made him CIA director, though by most accounts he was an odd choice for both of these sensitive jobs.
In short, in the Nixon era, Poppy Bush was the man who always seemed to be around, yet also managed to stay out of the main story. Digging way back, I came upon evidence that Nixon felt beholden to the Bush family and to the interests it represented. The reason: Bush Sr.'s father, Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, apparently helped launch Nixon's political career in 1946 as a way of destroying his first opponent, liberal congressman Jerry Voorhis, an outspoken critic of the excesses of bankers and financiers. Given the current Wall Street disasters, and the role of Prescott's grandson in enabling them, this revelation has obvious contemporary relevance.
Once I understood this special Nixon-Bush relationship, which is basically missing from all major Nixon biographies, I began to ask what exactly Poppy had been doing during the Watergate years. This led to the discovery that the Watergate break-in was almost certainly just one of a series of illegal acts that were engineered by people around Nixon, but not by Nixon himself. Far from defending Nixon's interests, these people had been privately frustrated with him on a variety of fronts and were now looking to take him down.
Simply put, once Nixon attained the presidency, he struggled for his independence, and began doing things that displeased his former sponsors.
I explored in particular a little-known matter called the Townhouse Affair. It turns out to be an important precursor to Watergate. Townhouse and Watergate both had earmarks of involvement by CIA figures.
And I looked at something that has barely emerged in public, but which was discussed by Nixon and his advisers: his ongoing struggle with the CIA. Combined with other evidence I developed of Poppy Bush's longstanding involvement with the CIA (back to the 1950s), it becomes apparent that there was more to Watergate than Richard Nixon's paranoia. There is not space here for all the particulars I lay out in Family of Secrets. But a few highlights:
Townhouse appears in retrospect to be an elaborate effort to frame Nixon for financial wrongdoing, by orchestrating a ridiculously shady-looking fundraising operation (and purported political blackmail scheme) headquartered in a basement office in a D.C. townhouse. The people who conjured up and ran Townhouse were tied to Poppy Bush.
Wealthy independent oilmen who backed Bush felt anger and distrust toward Nixon, who proved to be less than entirely reliable on their key issues, such as a tax giveaway called the Oil Depletion Allowance.
Many figures in Nixon's White House had CIA ties, and appear to have been keeping an eye on him, even as they worked for him. (The role of the security services raises suggestive questions as a new president prepares to take office – namely, how free is any president to pursue the agenda he promised the voters? The ghosts of the Bushes and what they represent will hang over a new President Obama in ways we have never imagined.)
Poppy Bush had extensive secret ties to the intelligence apparatus before he became CIA director in 1976. This connection has not previously been reported, and it provides an answer to a question that puzzled observers at the time – namely, what had Poppy Bush ever done to prepare him to lead the nation's premier spy agency?
After being named Republican national chairman, Poppy Bush used that position to monitor and help shape the unfolding Watergate affair.
John Dean was much more than a whistleblower. It appears that he was aware of or even a key figure in the White House covert activities that brought Nixon down, yet encouraged Nixon to take the blame for them.
There is evidence suggesting a connection between Poppy Bush and Dean. Records show that Bush actually called the then-obscure Dean from his UN office in New York during the earliest days of these events. Why would the UN ambassador be speaking to a White House counsel?
The rookie reporter Bob Woodward began working at the Washington Post, and on Watergate in particular, with job recommendations from high officials in the White House who knew him from his days in Naval intelligence work.
A handful of famous Watergate tape excerpts were misconstrued – or in some cases, misleadingly edited – by some in academic, media, legislative and judicial arenas to convey a false impression of what Richard Nixon actually knew – and of how culpable he was.
Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a key figure in the ousting of Nixon, was a close Texas friend of Poppy Bush – and steered clear of evidence that pointed to Poppy's involvement.
Even the notion of "Deep Throat," purportedly Woodward's main source (identified as the recently-deceased FBI man W. Mark Felt), may have been part of a CIA-style "psyops" scheme to create the impression of Nixon's culpability. Some key figures claim that there was in fact no "Deep Throat" at all.
Nixon suspected the CIA of surrounding him and then setting him up. From his own days supervising covert operations as vice president, he recognized that the Watergate burglars and their bosses were seasoned CIA hardliners with ties to the Bay of Pigs invasion and events linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon battled the CIA for files on what he called the "Bay of Pigs thing," but never could get access to them.
In sum, I found that the very people who created Nixon and used him to advance their own political interests ended up destroying him. Nixon's famous paranoia, in other words, had a basis in reality.
All of this, and much more, arose directly from my research, which is carefully documented in Family of Secrets and in more than 1000 source notes.
Even before George W. Bush attained his first public office, his handlers were aware of a skeleton rattling noisily in his closet. It was one that undercut the legend of principle and duty -- the story of a man's man and patriot. It would have to be disposed of.
At a televised debate in 1994 between incumbent Texas governor Ann Richards and challenger George W., Austin television reporter Jim Moore asked Bush to explain how he had gotten so quickly and easily into National Guard pilot training as an alternative to serving in Vietnam. Candidate Bush simply asserted that favoritism had played no role and that he had honorably served. End of discussion. There were no follow-up questions.
But the moment the debate was over, Bush's communications director, Karen Hughes, came at the journalist. "Karen just makes a beeline for me and gets in my face and tries to separate me from the crowd," Moore said. "Then she starts a rant. 'What kind of question is that? Why did you ask that question? Who do you think you are? That's just not relevant to being governor of Texas. He's not trying to run the federal government. He's going to run the state of Texas. What does his service in the National Guard have to do with anything? He doesn't have an army to run here in Texas. Why would you ask such a question, Jim?'" (Some years later, when Bush actually was running an army, each time a reporter asked the same question, he or she was told that it had been "asked and answered" long ago.) In response to Hughes, Moore said, "It's about character, Karen. It's about his generation and mine coming of age, and how we dealt with what we all viewed as a bad war."
As the reporter was turning to go file his story, Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, came at him next. "'What was that question, Moore?' And I said, 'Well, you know what it was, Karl.' I said it's a fair question. And he said, 'It wasn't fair. It doesn't have anything to do with anything.' And his rant was less energized than Karen's, but it was the same thing -- trying to say, 'You're stupid. You're a yokel local and you're stupid and you don't know what you're doing.'"
Bush's handlers thought they could get reporters off a story by intimidating them. Often they turned out to be right. It sometimes seems that the entire story of George W. Bush's life has been rewritten by hired hands. As each exaggeration, distortion, or factual error is uncovered, Bush has ducked and bobbed; only rarely has he been forced to concede anything.
Just one of hundreds of such examples: During his unsuccessful Midland congressional bid in 1978, W.'s campaign literature described his war time service as "Air Force" -- a claim also made for him in Poppy's autobiography. Presumably both men knew the difference between the National Guard and the Air Force. Nevertheless, that claim remained in W.'s official biography until the 2000 presidential campaign, at which point the correction was quietly made.
On no subject were Bush and his team more intransigent than on the particulars of his military ser vice. One cosmetic concern was that the favoritism shown young Bush in his National Guard assignment did not fit the legend Karl Rove was developing for him. This was the tough, no bullshit, "mano a mano" kind of guy, the cocky kid who challenged his famous father to a fight, the self-made oilman in flight jacket and cowboy boots, the straight-talking "ranch hand" with the John Wayne swagger ("in Texas, we call that walking"). Even the name of his campaign plane (Accountability One) was crafted to the image. He could not be seen as someone who used family connections to get a cushy home-front assignment while thousands of his peers went off to die in Vietnam.
After Bush's election as governor in 1994, his political team worked to inoculate their man against further inquiries into his Guard service. Dan Bartlett, an eager staff aide then in his twenties, and with no military service of his own, was named as liaison between the governor and the National Guard. And Bush replaced Texas's adjutant general Sam Turk, the administrative head of the Guard, who had been appointed by Governor Richards, with General Daniel James.
Cleaning up the Texas Guard records became a lot easier once W. was the titular commander in chief of the state's National Guard units. The effort got under way just months after Bush's inauguration. On May 16, 1995, Joe Allbaugh, by then Bush's chief of staff, met with Guard officials and asked to see Bush's personnel records. Three days later, they were sent over to the governor's office from the office of the outgoing adjutant general. "I am enclosing copies of the Texas Air National Guard personnel records for Mr. Daniel O. Shelley and Governor George W. Bush," wrote Turk. It is not clear why Shelley's records were also requested, except that he was about to be named Bush's legislative director. In any case, asking for two records rather than one likely was a form of cover -- comparable to what happened in 1972 when George W. Bush failed to take his mandatory National Guard physical and was joined in this violation by his friend Jim Bath. In each instance, the special treatment accorded W. was made to seem more "routine" by the fact that at least one other person was included.
That the people around the governor were concerned was evident when Dan Bartlett traveled to Denver to personally review the microfiche copy of Bush's records on file at the Air Reserve Personnel Center. Although Bartlett had little or no knowledge of the military, he would turn out to be a good man for the job. As was true of most Bush appointees, his primary qualification was loyalty. Bartlett had gone to work for Karl Rove's political consulting business in 1992, right out of college, and so by the 2000 presidential campaign, his entire adult life had been in service to Rove and Bush.
In 1996, the new adjutant general, Daniel James, hired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, a former Guardsman and tough cattle rancher who doubled as a private management con sul tant, to lead a task force assessing the state of the organization. Even the top brass believed it had become lax and inefficient; Burkett's mission was to create a strategic plan to bring the Guard back into fighting trim. Burkett returned several months later with a devastating report, documenting how outmoded, inefficient, unprepared, and even corrupt the service was. The report suggested sweeping reforms.
What Burkett and his team discovered went way beyond unjustified promotions of politically connected officers, as bad as those were. (One officer whose promotion was judged improper nevertheless went on to head a unit that was sent to Iraq in 2004.) They also uncovered that the Texas Guard rolls were full of "ghost soldiers," military personnel kept on the books after they had left the unit to justify the continued flow of money allocated for their pay. Equally important, the ghost numbers made units appear to be at authorized troop levels when reviewed by state and federal authorities.
Burkett and his team believed their findings were so important and so sensitive that they had to take them straight to the top. Not knowing who was responsible for the fraud, "we decided we had to go to the boss," Burkett recalled. But James, the man governor Bush had handpicked to run the Guard, seemed far more upset about the breach of military procedure in reporting the news of corruption and malfeasance than in the news itself. According to Burkett, James responded: "Now guys, I want to know what I'm supposed to tell the chief of staff, Colonel Goodwin, when he wants to have your heads 'cause you violated the chain of command and came in here over his head."
When Burkett asked for -- and received -- a promise of funding from the Clinton-Gore administration to begin repairing holes in the Guard, Governor Bush angrily declined the help. According to Burkett, Bush's chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, informed General James that henceforth his primary function was to ensure that Bill Burkett be kept as far as possible from the media.
Meanwhile, according to Burkett, there was discussion of Bush's impending presidential bid and how it would become a priority for state officials. One day in 1997, Burkett said, he was in the vicinity of General James's office when a call came in. James took it on the speakerphone. It was Joe Allbaugh, with Bush's Guard liaison Dan Bartlett on the line. According to Burkett, Allbaugh told James that Karen Hughes and Bartlett would be coming out to Camp Mabry, which was on the outskirts of Austin, to comb through the records in preparation for a book on Bush, and he instructed the general to have the records prescreened. According to Burkett, Allbaugh said, "Just get rid of the embarrassments."
About ten days after Allbaugh's call, Burkett claims, he came upon Guard officials going through Bush's records and observed a trash can nearby that included between twenty and forty pages of Bush's military documents. Burkett had a few moments to see what they contained. Another Guard officer and friend of Burkett's, George Conn, would later corroborate much of this story, but then withdraw confirmation while steadfastly maintaining that Burkett was an honorable and truthful man. Clearly, Conn was in a difficult position, working for the military on a civilian contract, while his wife served as head of the secretarial pool for a large law firm that was a leading bundler of campaign contributions to the Bush campaigns.
"I was there. I know what I saw in the trash. I know what actions I saw taking place," Burkett told me during one of several lengthy conversations. One of the documents that has been missing from the released files, Burkett claims, is a "counseling statement" from a senior officer to Bush, explaining why he was grounded and the changes to his assignment, slot, and pay rate. Burkett told me he glimpsed Bush's counseling statement at the top of the discard stack, but did not have time to read it through. "In a perfect world, I guess I should have just stepped up and grabbed the files and made a federal case of it all right there," he said. "Looking back, I probably would have. It would have been simpler to have confronted the whole mess right then and there."
Copyright © 2008 Russ Baker
The above is an excerpt from the book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America by Russ Baker (Published by Bloomsbury Press; December 2008; 978-1596915572). This excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.<.em>
Copyright © 2008 Russ Baker
####
Russ Baker is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (Published by Bloomsbury Press; 978-1596915572). For more information on his book and the research behind it, please visit http://www.familyofsecrets.com. As an award-winning investigative reporter, Baker has a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush's military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.
One of the fastest ways to raise eyebrows in politically savvy company is to suggest that Richard Nixon was not the villain of Watergate. Everyone knows that Nixon himself set loose the Watergate burglars and then oversaw the attempted cover-up that followed. We know this because the most famous journalists of the last fifty years – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – made their careers on that story. I thought I knew it too.
Then I began the research that led to my new book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. I had no intention, when I started, of re-opening the Watergate inquiries. But the trail led there, as I sought to answer a question that somehow has escaped careful attention. Why did Richard Nixon repeatedly promote George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr., or Poppy, as he is known) for important political posts despite both his apparent lack of qualifications and Nixon's own privately-expressed doubts about Bush's mettle? Why, even when Nixon became so wary of so many of his appointees that he fired cabinet members en masse, did he continue to be solicitous of Bush Sr.?
Nixon named the obscure Poppy to be UN ambassador in 1970 and then chairman of the national Republican Party in 1972. Even earlier, in 1968, Nixon actually put Bush Sr. on his list of vice presidential running mate prospects – this not long after Poppy was first elected to the House of Representatives. Similarly, Nixon's replacement, Gerald Ford, sent Poppy off as envoy to China and later made him CIA director, though by most accounts he was an odd choice for both of these sensitive jobs.
In short, in the Nixon era, Poppy Bush was the man who always seemed to be around, yet also managed to stay out of the main story. Digging way back, I came upon evidence that Nixon felt beholden to the Bush family and to the interests it represented. The reason: Bush Sr.'s father, Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, apparently helped launch Nixon's political career in 1946 as a way of destroying his first opponent, liberal congressman Jerry Voorhis, an outspoken critic of the excesses of bankers and financiers. Given the current Wall Street disasters, and the role of Prescott's grandson in enabling them, this revelation has obvious contemporary relevance.
Once I understood this special Nixon-Bush relationship, which is basically missing from all major Nixon biographies, I began to ask what exactly Poppy had been doing during the Watergate years. This led to the discovery that the Watergate break-in was almost certainly just one of a series of illegal acts that were engineered by people around Nixon, but not by Nixon himself. Far from defending Nixon's interests, these people had been privately frustrated with him on a variety of fronts and were now looking to take him down.
Simply put, once Nixon attained the presidency, he struggled for his independence, and began doing things that displeased his former sponsors.
I explored in particular a little-known matter called the Townhouse Affair. It turns out to be an important precursor to Watergate. Townhouse and Watergate both had earmarks of involvement by CIA figures.
And I looked at something that has barely emerged in public, but which was discussed by Nixon and his advisers: his ongoing struggle with the CIA. Combined with other evidence I developed of Poppy Bush's longstanding involvement with the CIA (back to the 1950s), it becomes apparent that there was more to Watergate than Richard Nixon's paranoia. There is not space here for all the particulars I lay out in Family of Secrets. But a few highlights:
Townhouse appears in retrospect to be an elaborate effort to frame Nixon for financial wrongdoing, by orchestrating a ridiculously shady-looking fundraising operation (and purported political blackmail scheme) headquartered in a basement office in a D.C. townhouse. The people who conjured up and ran Townhouse were tied to Poppy Bush.
Wealthy independent oilmen who backed Bush felt anger and distrust toward Nixon, who proved to be less than entirely reliable on their key issues, such as a tax giveaway called the Oil Depletion Allowance.
Many figures in Nixon's White House had CIA ties, and appear to have been keeping an eye on him, even as they worked for him. (The role of the security services raises suggestive questions as a new president prepares to take office – namely, how free is any president to pursue the agenda he promised the voters? The ghosts of the Bushes and what they represent will hang over a new President Obama in ways we have never imagined.)
Poppy Bush had extensive secret ties to the intelligence apparatus before he became CIA director in 1976. This connection has not previously been reported, and it provides an answer to a question that puzzled observers at the time – namely, what had Poppy Bush ever done to prepare him to lead the nation's premier spy agency?
After being named Republican national chairman, Poppy Bush used that position to monitor and help shape the unfolding Watergate affair.
John Dean was much more than a whistleblower. It appears that he was aware of or even a key figure in the White House covert activities that brought Nixon down, yet encouraged Nixon to take the blame for them.
There is evidence suggesting a connection between Poppy Bush and Dean. Records show that Bush actually called the then-obscure Dean from his UN office in New York during the earliest days of these events. Why would the UN ambassador be speaking to a White House counsel?
The rookie reporter Bob Woodward began working at the Washington Post, and on Watergate in particular, with job recommendations from high officials in the White House who knew him from his days in Naval intelligence work.
A handful of famous Watergate tape excerpts were misconstrued – or in some cases, misleadingly edited – by some in academic, media, legislative and judicial arenas to convey a false impression of what Richard Nixon actually knew – and of how culpable he was.
Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a key figure in the ousting of Nixon, was a close Texas friend of Poppy Bush – and steered clear of evidence that pointed to Poppy's involvement.
Even the notion of "Deep Throat," purportedly Woodward's main source (identified as the recently-deceased FBI man W. Mark Felt), may have been part of a CIA-style "psyops" scheme to create the impression of Nixon's culpability. Some key figures claim that there was in fact no "Deep Throat" at all.
Nixon suspected the CIA of surrounding him and then setting him up. From his own days supervising covert operations as vice president, he recognized that the Watergate burglars and their bosses were seasoned CIA hardliners with ties to the Bay of Pigs invasion and events linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon battled the CIA for files on what he called the "Bay of Pigs thing," but never could get access to them.
In sum, I found that the very people who created Nixon and used him to advance their own political interests ended up destroying him. Nixon's famous paranoia, in other words, had a basis in reality.
All of this, and much more, arose directly from my research, which is carefully documented in Family of Secrets and in more than 1000 source notes.
Even before George W. Bush attained his first public office, his handlers were aware of a skeleton rattling noisily in his closet. It was one that undercut the legend of principle and duty -- the story of a man's man and patriot. It would have to be disposed of.
At a televised debate in 1994 between incumbent Texas governor Ann Richards and challenger George W., Austin television reporter Jim Moore asked Bush to explain how he had gotten so quickly and easily into National Guard pilot training as an alternative to serving in Vietnam. Candidate Bush simply asserted that favoritism had played no role and that he had honorably served. End of discussion. There were no follow-up questions.
But the moment the debate was over, Bush's communications director, Karen Hughes, came at the journalist. "Karen just makes a beeline for me and gets in my face and tries to separate me from the crowd," Moore said. "Then she starts a rant. 'What kind of question is that? Why did you ask that question? Who do you think you are? That's just not relevant to being governor of Texas. He's not trying to run the federal government. He's going to run the state of Texas. What does his service in the National Guard have to do with anything? He doesn't have an army to run here in Texas. Why would you ask such a question, Jim?'" (Some years later, when Bush actually was running an army, each time a reporter asked the same question, he or she was told that it had been "asked and answered" long ago.) In response to Hughes, Moore said, "It's about character, Karen. It's about his generation and mine coming of age, and how we dealt with what we all viewed as a bad war."
As the reporter was turning to go file his story, Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, came at him next. "'What was that question, Moore?' And I said, 'Well, you know what it was, Karl.' I said it's a fair question. And he said, 'It wasn't fair. It doesn't have anything to do with anything.' And his rant was less energized than Karen's, but it was the same thing -- trying to say, 'You're stupid. You're a yokel local and you're stupid and you don't know what you're doing.'"
Bush's handlers thought they could get reporters off a story by intimidating them. Often they turned out to be right. It sometimes seems that the entire story of George W. Bush's life has been rewritten by hired hands. As each exaggeration, distortion, or factual error is uncovered, Bush has ducked and bobbed; only rarely has he been forced to concede anything.
Just one of hundreds of such examples: During his unsuccessful Midland congressional bid in 1978, W.'s campaign literature described his war time service as "Air Force" -- a claim also made for him in Poppy's autobiography. Presumably both men knew the difference between the National Guard and the Air Force. Nevertheless, that claim remained in W.'s official biography until the 2000 presidential campaign, at which point the correction was quietly made.
On no subject were Bush and his team more intransigent than on the particulars of his military ser vice. One cosmetic concern was that the favoritism shown young Bush in his National Guard assignment did not fit the legend Karl Rove was developing for him. This was the tough, no bullshit, "mano a mano" kind of guy, the cocky kid who challenged his famous father to a fight, the self-made oilman in flight jacket and cowboy boots, the straight-talking "ranch hand" with the John Wayne swagger ("in Texas, we call that walking"). Even the name of his campaign plane (Accountability One) was crafted to the image. He could not be seen as someone who used family connections to get a cushy home-front assignment while thousands of his peers went off to die in Vietnam.
After Bush's election as governor in 1994, his political team worked to inoculate their man against further inquiries into his Guard service. Dan Bartlett, an eager staff aide then in his twenties, and with no military service of his own, was named as liaison between the governor and the National Guard. And Bush replaced Texas's adjutant general Sam Turk, the administrative head of the Guard, who had been appointed by Governor Richards, with General Daniel James.
Cleaning up the Texas Guard records became a lot easier once W. was the titular commander in chief of the state's National Guard units. The effort got under way just months after Bush's inauguration. On May 16, 1995, Joe Allbaugh, by then Bush's chief of staff, met with Guard officials and asked to see Bush's personnel records. Three days later, they were sent over to the governor's office from the office of the outgoing adjutant general. "I am enclosing copies of the Texas Air National Guard personnel records for Mr. Daniel O. Shelley and Governor George W. Bush," wrote Turk. It is not clear why Shelley's records were also requested, except that he was about to be named Bush's legislative director. In any case, asking for two records rather than one likely was a form of cover -- comparable to what happened in 1972 when George W. Bush failed to take his mandatory National Guard physical and was joined in this violation by his friend Jim Bath. In each instance, the special treatment accorded W. was made to seem more "routine" by the fact that at least one other person was included.
That the people around the governor were concerned was evident when Dan Bartlett traveled to Denver to personally review the microfiche copy of Bush's records on file at the Air Reserve Personnel Center. Although Bartlett had little or no knowledge of the military, he would turn out to be a good man for the job. As was true of most Bush appointees, his primary qualification was loyalty. Bartlett had gone to work for Karl Rove's political consulting business in 1992, right out of college, and so by the 2000 presidential campaign, his entire adult life had been in service to Rove and Bush.
In 1996, the new adjutant general, Daniel James, hired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, a former Guardsman and tough cattle rancher who doubled as a private management con sul tant, to lead a task force assessing the state of the organization. Even the top brass believed it had become lax and inefficient; Burkett's mission was to create a strategic plan to bring the Guard back into fighting trim. Burkett returned several months later with a devastating report, documenting how outmoded, inefficient, unprepared, and even corrupt the service was. The report suggested sweeping reforms.
What Burkett and his team discovered went way beyond unjustified promotions of politically connected officers, as bad as those were. (One officer whose promotion was judged improper nevertheless went on to head a unit that was sent to Iraq in 2004.) They also uncovered that the Texas Guard rolls were full of "ghost soldiers," military personnel kept on the books after they had left the unit to justify the continued flow of money allocated for their pay. Equally important, the ghost numbers made units appear to be at authorized troop levels when reviewed by state and federal authorities.
Burkett and his team believed their findings were so important and so sensitive that they had to take them straight to the top. Not knowing who was responsible for the fraud, "we decided we had to go to the boss," Burkett recalled. But James, the man governor Bush had handpicked to run the Guard, seemed far more upset about the breach of military procedure in reporting the news of corruption and malfeasance than in the news itself. According to Burkett, James responded: "Now guys, I want to know what I'm supposed to tell the chief of staff, Colonel Goodwin, when he wants to have your heads 'cause you violated the chain of command and came in here over his head."
When Burkett asked for -- and received -- a promise of funding from the Clinton-Gore administration to begin repairing holes in the Guard, Governor Bush angrily declined the help. According to Burkett, Bush's chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, informed General James that henceforth his primary function was to ensure that Bill Burkett be kept as far as possible from the media.
Meanwhile, according to Burkett, there was discussion of Bush's impending presidential bid and how it would become a priority for state officials. One day in 1997, Burkett said, he was in the vicinity of General James's office when a call came in. James took it on the speakerphone. It was Joe Allbaugh, with Bush's Guard liaison Dan Bartlett on the line. According to Burkett, Allbaugh told James that Karen Hughes and Bartlett would be coming out to Camp Mabry, which was on the outskirts of Austin, to comb through the records in preparation for a book on Bush, and he instructed the general to have the records prescreened. According to Burkett, Allbaugh said, "Just get rid of the embarrassments."
About ten days after Allbaugh's call, Burkett claims, he came upon Guard officials going through Bush's records and observed a trash can nearby that included between twenty and forty pages of Bush's military documents. Burkett had a few moments to see what they contained. Another Guard officer and friend of Burkett's, George Conn, would later corroborate much of this story, but then withdraw confirmation while steadfastly maintaining that Burkett was an honorable and truthful man. Clearly, Conn was in a difficult position, working for the military on a civilian contract, while his wife served as head of the secretarial pool for a large law firm that was a leading bundler of campaign contributions to the Bush campaigns.
"I was there. I know what I saw in the trash. I know what actions I saw taking place," Burkett told me during one of several lengthy conversations. One of the documents that has been missing from the released files, Burkett claims, is a "counseling statement" from a senior officer to Bush, explaining why he was grounded and the changes to his assignment, slot, and pay rate. Burkett told me he glimpsed Bush's counseling statement at the top of the discard stack, but did not have time to read it through. "In a perfect world, I guess I should have just stepped up and grabbed the files and made a federal case of it all right there," he said. "Looking back, I probably would have. It would have been simpler to have confronted the whole mess right then and there."
Copyright © 2008 Russ Baker
The above is an excerpt from the book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America by Russ Baker (Published by Bloomsbury Press; December 2008; 978-1596915572). This excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.<.em>
Copyright © 2008 Russ Baker
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Russ Baker is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (Published by Bloomsbury Press; 978-1596915572). For more information on his book and the research behind it, please visit http://www.familyofsecrets.com. As an award-winning investigative reporter, Baker has a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush's military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.