by Russ Baker
These things matter not only in a symbolic way. Had the true story been told earlier, the history of Bush’s eight-year presidency might have been substantially different—indeed there likely would have been no such presidency—and thousands of American fighting men and women might still be alive, along with untold numbers of Iraqis.
The Champagne Unit
George W. Bush has always claimed that he got into the Guard like anyone else—he applied, qualified, and was admitted. Specifically, Bush claims that during his 1967 Christmas break, he heard that there might be openings in the Houston-based 147th Fighter Wing of the Texas Air National Guard. According to W., he talked with the unit’s commander, Lieutenant Colo nel Walter “Buck” Staudt, who confirmed that there were positions available for pilots.10
In fact, there was no shortage of pilots. Tom Hail, a historian for the Texas National Guard, was asked in the late 1990s to prepare a special museum display on then-governor Bush’s Guard service. He discovered records establishing that while there were two empty slots at the time, there were also two other pilots ready to fill those slots.11 More generally, there were thousands of eager applicants on Guard waiting lists nationwide—and many of the applicants to the 147th were considerably more qualified than Bush.
But there are qualifications, and then there are qualifications. The 147th was known locally as the “champagne unit” because of its high-society roster. Among its members were scions of great wealth and privilege—a grandson of the oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, the sons of Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen and governor John Connally, and an heir to the Houston-based Sakowitz department store fortune. Clint Murchison Jr., owner of the Dallas Cowboys, had gotten seven of his players out of Vietnam service and into the unit. Most of the members didn’t even fly, but rather served in support capacities, according to former naval fighter pilot Bill White, who later spent years as a business partner to Jim Bath, a Guardsman who served as the 147th’s spokesman. “They created a bunch of slots,” White told me, “[like] ‘finance officer,’ that didn’t really exist, just to create a home for these guys, the politicians’ kids.”12 For W., being admitted to the 147th was like getting into Yale as a legacy.
Years later, Ben Barnes, who was Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives in 1968, would publicly admit that he had helped Bush gain admittance to the Texas Air National Guard. Barnes would tell the story to Dan Rather on 60 Minutes II in 2004. What Barnes did not mention was that a childhood friend of Bush’s had been working as his secretary at the time he helped Bush. Nor did he note that the woman’s boyfriend would go on to become one of the most important figures in Bush’s life—the man who would lead the fund-raising for all of W.’s campaigns. Indeed, everyone involved would take care to hide this early web of connections—though it will be detailed in chapter 20.
Clearly, favoritism in admission was the norm for the 147th Fighter Wing, but special treatment for George W. Bush didn’t end there. The Guard also took the unusual step of arranging special flight training for W. Typically, the Guard sought to piggyback off the regular military services by enrolling trained Air Force pilots who had flown jets in combat or in overseas support capacities and were now happy to join Guard units to make a little extra money. Yet U.S. taxpayers paid over one million dollars to train George W. Bush to fly, as though he would be going overseas—when those in charge had to have known that he would not.
The fact that George W. Bush—who had never flown a plane and had no officer training—was brought into the Guard as a pilot was something of an anomaly to begin with. He stuck out during his flight training at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia as the only Guardsman among some two hundred Air Force pilots. On top of that, he had scored a dismal 25 percent on his initial pilot aptitude tests—a score that later prompted Bush to say, with his typical self-deprecating humor, “They could sense I would be one of the great pilots of all time.”13
W. was so wired that he did not even have to bother with standard requirements, essentially becoming an officer by fiat. In a show of truly extraordinary favoritism, W. had been granted an unusual direct commission as a second lieutenant. “I’ve never heard of that,” said Guard historian Tom Hail. “Generally they did that for doctors only, mostly because we needed extra flight surgeons.”14 Ordinarily, to obtain a second lieutenant’s rank, one would need to attend officer training school, pull eighteen prior months of military service, or have eight semesters of ROTC. Bush had done none of these.
The Top Gun
Hardly any accounts of George W. Bush’s life explain what role, if any, his father played in his youthful adventures. Given what we know about the meddling by powerful parents of other luminaries, such as the Kennedys, this is a striking omission. Because of it, one has a sense that the father was absent throughout and that W. was making good (or bad) on his own.
Fostering this impression was consistent with Poppy’s no-fingerprints modus operandi. In reality, though, officials in W.’s Guard unit knew exactly who the new recruit’s father was. Several months after Bush received his commission, his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Staudt, had the ceremony reenacted so that he could be photographed with W. and his congressman father. Even Mrs. Staudt crowded into the photo. A year later, when a round of congressional base-closing decisions threatened Ellington Field, where the 147th was located, Congressman George H. W. Bush helped keep it open.
No sooner had W. obtained these unusual perquisites on his way in than he got permission to opt out: at least temporarily. Following six weeks of basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, W. took an extraordinary two-month leave to work on the Senate campaign of Florida congressman Edward Gurney, which was being run by Poppy Bush’s lieutenant Jimmy Allison.15 Along with Texas, Florida was a crucial part of Nixon’s Southern strategy, and Poppy poured an army of Allisons and Bushes into the mix.
Only after Gurney was elected, in November, did W. move on to Moody Air Force Base near Valdosta, Georgia, where he would be taught to fly a plane. For nearly a year, W. took lessons in a basic commercial Cessna, as most beginners do, and learned about jets on a simulator. Then he returned to the Houston area and Ellington Field, for the far more daunting task of learning to fly a real fighter jet.
SHORTLY AFTER HIS return from Georgia, in November 1969, while drinking at the bar of the officers’ club, Bush cast his eye on Inge Honneus, a striking Danish émigré.16 As Honneus would recount to me in a 2006 interview, she had come to the United States to work for NASA in Florida and had a short-lived marriage to an American. She had just transferred to the Houston area, where she worked for the LTV Corporation, a subcontractor for NASA’s LBJ Space Center, which was about five miles south of Ellington Field.17 Honneus’s account of her experiences with Bush—which is, to be sure, one woman’s side of the story—has not been previously published. There seems to be little doubt that Honneus was in Houston and around Bush’s base in that period, as attested by a clipping from a local newspaper showing her at a party surrounded by Air Force officers.
Honneus’s story makes a striking contrast to the oddly bland, published interviews with Houston society women who described their interactions with Bush in those days. Most portray W. as a decent, polite man who would never have pushed himself on a woman. In one instance, a self-described former girlfriend was struck by the fact that Bush always brought a male friend along on dates.
As Honneus tells it, the night they met at the officers’ club, W. looked sharp in his officers’ whites and tried to make himself even more appealing by pretending he was in the Air Force. “He proceeded to tell me that he was a pilot, his father was a senator [sic], and blah blah blah,” Honneus recalled.
“I wasn’t that impressed. It just seemed that he thought he could do anything, be anything, say anything, because his father was a senator . . . Then he ran after me for about three or four months. I wouldn’t really give him the time of day. He pretty much wined and dined me, we got to be friends, and later on
in life I realized he’d lied to me about being an officer in the Air Force.”
Although Bush pursued her relentlessly, she kept rebuffing his advances. She was going through a divorce, had a four-year-old daughter, and just was not interested in a romance. “I was doing quite well for myself . . . I felt that, next time I have a relationship with anybody, it’d better be a little bit more stable than the relationship I’d had with my daughter’s father.”
Still, Bush was charming and persistent, and they soon fell into what Honneus characterized as a nonintimate friendship. Typically, she said, he would pick her up in his sporty dark-green Datsun 240, and they would drive around Houston while he got things off his chest. Honneus remembered Bush predicting that, because his parents made things so easy for him, he would never amount to anything.
Honneus said W. once, briefly, took her to his parents’ house, where she remembered meeting a brother. She also recalled that W. seemed reluctant to introduce her to his relatives since she wasn’t from an affluent or prominent family.
Things abruptly intensified between the two. At eleven o’clock one night, there was a knock on her door. Standing there, clad in his flight suit, was George W. Bush. He told Inge he couldn’t live without her. She let him in, quickly excusing herself to put on something more presentable than a nightgown. When she returned a few minutes later, she got quite a shock. There, on her couch, was W. in all his primal glory: Bush-naked from head to toe. Whether she was allured, or simply worn down by his full-frontal advances, Honneus let Bush spend the night. He left at six A.M. and promised to call the next day.
After three or four days without word, Honneus asked her girlfriends whether any of them had seen him. One suggested that she visit the officers’ club that evening to quiz his buddies there.
As she described this encounter to me, Honneus searched for the right words. “Do you remember the movie Top Gun—they were standing at the bar, all in their white coats, looking absolutely gorgeous, and Tom Cruise was like the center of attention? Well, that was George! He was standing with his back to me, laughing and joking and drinking with his buddies, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, there’s George. Why didn’t he call me?’ I run over there, young of course, young and excited. I tap him on the shoulder, and I say, ‘George, where have you been?’ And he turned around, looked at me and said: ‘Do . . . I . . . know . . . you?’
“And everybody laughed. They thought it was so funny. ‘Who are you?’— straight to my face. I don’t know what my response was, other than I was gone out of Texas the next day. Never to return.” Literally. Honneus was so devastated that within twenty-four hours, she had left the state for good, moving to California, where she is now a software engineer.
Though Honneus told me she didn’t consider herself overly sensitive, what she found so troubling was the complete disconnect between Bush’s assiduous three-month courtship and his abrupt and cruel public rejection of her once he had achieved his goal. She was reticent to go into greater detail regarding her night with Bush, but she did say that soon after it, she felt ill and went to the doctor. The result, she said, was a miscarriage.18 Because she never spoke again with Bush, he would not learn the outcome of his exertions.
WHILE GEORGE W. BUSH was thus occupied, the Bushes, father and son, were being showered with favorable publicity. W.’s return to Houston from flight training in Georgia in November 1969 had come at a convenient time for Poppy, who was embarking on his second run for the U.S. Senate. As eldest son, W. was naturally expected to do his part. In March 1970, with the Republican primary less than two months away, Poppy Bush’s campaign office began directing a barrage of press releases at local media outlets. At the same time, another press release reached media outlets from the Texas National Guard, touting George Walker Bush as “one member of the younger generation [who] doesn’t get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed. Oh, he gets high, all right, but not from narcotics.”19 The press release, delivered to the Houston dailies, went on to describe Bush’s first solo flight and the thrill he got from his jet engine’s afterburners.
Weekend Warrior
In June 1970, after George W. had completed his jet pilot training in Houston, his full-time obligation with the Guard gave way to the part-time status commonly referred to as “weekend warrior.” For many, this meant time to go back to work. For W., it meant more time for water volleyball and alcoholic refreshment. Again jumping the line, he rented a place at the Chateaux Dijon, an exclusive apartment complex with 353 castle-motif dwellings. It was a famous playground for the children of Houston’s upper crust, and as with the 147th Guard unit, you had to know someone to get in.
Other members and alumni of the 147th Fighter Wing lived at the Chateaux. And many good buddies who did not live there, like Bush’s friend Jim Bath, were constantly stopping by. “The scene around the pool was awe inspiring,” Bath once told an interviewer.20 “Lots and lots of great-looking girls and people barbecuing and drinking beers.” At Chateaux Dijon, W. would come in contact with many figures who would later play significant roles in his life. Fellow Midlander and future wife Laura Welch lived nearby in the complex, although both Laura and George have consistently maintained that they never met during that period.
W. and his closest peers belonged to something called the Master’s Club. It included nearly one hundred bachelors who enjoyed wearing tuxedos and smoking cigars and who held a fancy-dress dance once a year. The club and its dances provided what Jim Woodson, the club’s organizer, called “a controlled atmosphere. You knew who was dancing next to you.”21 The exclusivity ensured that only a certain kind of person got close to these young knights, and that nothing would come back to haunt them as they assumed their places in society.
In later years, when reporters raised questions about Bush’s past behavior, his campaign sought to convey the impression that his oft-cited misdeeds during these years centered on excessive drink. Inge Honneus said Bush drank quite a bit, but added that he was not exceptional in this regard: “That was our social niche. You know, we didn’t go to church on Sundays; we went to barbecues and had beer. I would say he drank about as much as anybody else drank [back then]. And you’ve got to understand something too: It was NASA, the space program—everybody drank. Everybody drank and drove. It was the thing to do.”
Bush has generally hedged on the question of drug use. Asked about it during his first presidential campaign, W. insisted that he could have passed the same background screening his father underwent before Poppy’s inauguration in 1989, which certifies no illegal drug use during the fifteen preceding years. This evasive answer certainly left open the possibility that he used illegal drugs prior to 1974.22
Some sources who are now pillars of Houston society claim to remember W. indulging in cocaine, but because none will go on the record this cannot be considered reliable. Yet there is little doubt that the upright voters who would later support W. politically would have been mightily displeased by the moral atmosphere at Chateaux Dijon. Even Laura Welch reportedly enjoyed a good time, which in those days often meant smoking marijuana. Kitty Kelley quotes Robert Nash, an Austin friend of many of Laura’s Southern Methodist University peers, as recalling that Laura partook of pot.23
One pastime that definitely appealed to many in Bush’s circle was political campaigning. Texas politician Lloyd Bentsen’s two sons served in Bush’s Guard unit, and one was a neighbor of Bush’s. After Poppy Bush announced his intention to run for Senate in 1970, the Bentsen boys’ father announced that he too would seek the seat—as a Democrat. The contest provided much excitement for the privileged denizens of Chateaux Dijon. W. frequently served as surrogate speaker for his father. His friend and neighbor Robert Chandler took a campaign staff position, and Jim Bath frequently had strategy lunches with Poppy. Before the polls closed on election day—and before it was known that the elder Bentsen had defeated the elder Bush—a press release from the Texas Guard announced the promotions of George W. Bush and Lloyd Bentsen II
I to the rank of first lieutenant.24 It seemed as if the brass was hedging its bets: promote them both, and the Guard would win either way.
With the end of the campaign, Bush had little to occupy his time besides the Chateaux’s attractive young ladies. For six months, he had been dating Robin Lowman, one of the best-looking women in the complex.25 What exactly transpired between Bush and Lowman would become the subject of extensive reporting by several journalists, working for publications that ranged from the New York Times and Vanity Fair to the National Enquirer. Like many of the more potentially radioactive stories about the Bushes, none of these ever saw print.
One magazine was ready to publish an article in 2004 but pulled it after the public uproar following the 60 Minutes II debacle over Bush’s Guard record. The reasons the others did not run the story varied, but ranged from the reticence of the publisher to a generalized sense that such a story had a high risk factor for retribution, both from the candidate’s staff and from a public intrigued yet repulsed by coverage of such topics—especially in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky saga.
Nevertheless, four reporters who worked on these articles had been persuaded about the fundamental truth of the underlying story; they shared their experiences and detailed source notes with me. Their cumulative narrative—which in certain respects has echoes of the story Inge Honneus told me about her own Bush experience—is as follows:
