Bush’s military record under fire

WASHINGTON – President Bush’s commander in the Texas Air National Guard concluded that Bush was failing to meet standards for fighter pilots, but the commander felt pressure from superiors to “sugar coat” his judgments, according to newly disclosed documents.

The memos, obtained by USA Today and also reported Wednesday on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” reveal that Bush’s commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, was critical of Bush’s performance as a pilot in the latter years of his Vietnam-era Guard career. Killian cited Bush for “failure to perform” to Air Force and Air National Guard standards and called for him to be replaced “with a more seasoned pilot.”

The conclusions by Killian, who died in 1984, show Bush’s performance declining between his 1971 pilot evaluation, which was glowing, and the time in 1972 when records show he began failing to show up for duty and failed to take a medical exam that was required for him to keep flying.

Disclosure of the documents raised questions about why the reports have not turned up until now. The White House has said repeatedly that it has made public everything that is available. White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said the documents were in Killian’s files and not part of Bush’s record. He called the charges “old, recycled attacks that have already been discredited.”

Bartlett did not dispute the documents’ authenticity. Killian’s signatures on the memos match those on many of Bush’s publicly released records.

The military service histories of Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry have become a central issue in the 2004 presidential race. An anti-Bush group, Texans for Truth, is to begin airing an ad on Monday in which a former lieutenant colonel in the Alabama Air National Guard says neither he nor his friends saw Bush in 1972, when the future president was supposed to be training with their unit.

Ben Barnes, a former speaker of the Texas House and former lieutenant governor, told CBS that he was responsible for getting Bush into the Guard ahead of several hundred men on a waiting list. He said he now regrets the favors done for Bush and others from powerful families. Joining the National Guard was a way to avoid the military draft, which was the primary source of troops for the Vietnam War.

“I was maybe determining life or death, and that’s not a power that I want to have,” Barnes said. “But it happened, and it’s not … something I’m necessarily proud of.” Barnes is now a lobbyist and has been a major fund-raiser for Kerry’s campaign.

Bush has denied that his family sought favorable treatment for him, and Barnes offered no evidence of that. Barnes repeated past assertions that a Bush family friend, Sid Adger, approached him about helping Bush.

The CBS report came a week after the widow of another family friend told the online magazine Salon that her husband agreed in 1972 to take Bush from Texas to Alabama to work on a U.S. Senate campaign in that state.

Linda Allison, the widow of Jimmy Allison, whose family owned the newspaper in Midland, Texas, where the Bushes once lived, said Bush’s father asked her husband to take the younger Bush with him because he was “getting in trouble and embarrassing the family” in Texas. Linda Allison declined USA Today’s request for an interview.

Her account and Killian’s memos contradict answers by Bush, his friends and campaign officials to questions about why he stopped flying fighter jets and moved to Alabama in May 1972. The president has maintained through advisers and in two biographies that the reason he left a coveted pilot slot in the Texas Air National Guard was to learn the trade of political campaigning from Allison.

Questions about Bush’s Guard tenure have lingered for more than four years.

Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968-‘73. The Boston Globe reported in 2000 that Bush vaulted over hundreds of applicants to get a coveted slot in the Guard during the Vietnam War and was immediately awarded a competitive pilot position despite low qualifying scores on aptitude tests and four misdemeanor citations.

Bush’s military records show gaps in drill attendance from May 1, 1972, to April 30, 1973, when his Texas supervisors could not account for his whereabouts and said so in his last written evaluation. During that time, Bush lived briefly in Alabama, where he worked for the Senate campaign of Winton “Red” Blount. He returned to Texas to work in a Houston program for troubled youth.

C. Murphy Archibald, who worked on the Blount campaign, said that in the fall of 1972, Bush frequently was late for work on the Alabama campaign and often bragged about how much he drank the night before.

“I was bowled over by the competence of this guy Allison, but perplexed by how he had brought this young guy along who seemed to have so little interest in the campaign,” Archibald recalled. On most days, Archibald said, Bush arrived at campaign headquarters around noon or 1 p.m. and left around 5:30 or 6 p.m., leaving assigned duties unfinished.

Bush, who quit drinking in 1986, the year he turned 40, has said that he sometimes behaved irresponsibly when he was young. At a campaign news conference in 1999 he said, “I made mistakes 20 or 30 years ago, but I’ve learned from my mistakes.”

Bush has steered clear of discussing his military career. He addresses it only when asked by reporters and then in brief answers.

Requests for his military records under the Freedom of Information Act have hung in limbo for months. The White House counsel’s office has become involved in answering the requests even though they were filed with the Pentagon. In recent months, Pentagon officials have been ordered not to discuss the matter with reporters.

“I served my country,” Bush said in an NBC interview on Aug. 28. “Had my unit been called up (to Vietnam), I would have gone.” Aides have pointed to his honorable discharge from the Guard as evidence that he fulfilled his service obligation.

Many of Bush’s former comrades in the Texas Air National Guard defend his service and say there was nothing unusual about it. They say Bush seemed like a dependable squadron mate.

Bush’s military files are filled with inconsistencies, according to former Air National Guard, Air Force and Army officers who have reviewed them.

Gerald Lechliter, a retired Army colonel and a member of Veterans against the Iraq War, compared Bush’s publicly released records with military procedures manuals from that era. He concluded that Bush’s superiors failed to follow proper procedures when he missed required training and when he failed to take his flight physical.

Bush’s officer performance report for 1972 “was a clear and unmistakable indication that his performance had declined from the annual 1971 report,” Lechliter wrote in an analysis of the records. “The report was the kiss of death before he left for Alabama that year.”