by Russ Baker
Michele Perry, who was dating W.’s friend Robert Chandler in early 1971, claimed to have been present in his apartment one day when he received a panicked phone call from George W. Bush. Perry heard Chandler say, “Calm down. We can take care of it.” She soon learned what W. was so worked up about: Lowman was pregnant. Chandler then sprang into action, calling a doctor friend of his to arrange an abortion.
Lowman was taken to Houston’s Twelve Oaks Hospital (now the Bayou City Medical Center), where a surgeon friend of Chandler’s attended to her. Since abortion was illegal in Texas, and would be until Roe v. Wade was decided two years later, the doctor diagnosed a miscarriage, which would then necessitate a procedure called a D&C—often a euphemism for an early-term abortion. Perry and Chandler visited Lowman at the hospital after the procedure, and had to break the news that W. himself would not be coming there to see her.26
In reporting this story, one news organization obtained a tape in which Perry calls Lowman and tries to get her to confirm the matter. In the taped call, Lowman confirms that she had been dating Bush, and admits to going into the hospital in that period for a procedure. However, she insisted that it was not an abortion but a “D&C.” In the call, Lowman mentions that after the procedure she never saw Bush again.
The doctor, who declined to confirm or deny to journalists whether he performed the procedure—as would be standard practice to protect patient confidentiality—donated a thousand dollars to Bush in 2000 and two thousand dollars, the maximum, in 2004. Chandler also declined to confirm or deny the story. My efforts to speak with Lowman were unsuccessful.
One journalist got a chance to raise the matter, at least obliquely, with Bush himself. During the 2000 campaign, New York Times reporter Jo Thomas, who had explored the abortion story, mentioned Lowman’s name to Bush while interviewing him on the campaign plane on June 28, 2000, during a flight from Cleveland to Austin in the company of her editor, Jim Roberts, and Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes. In a 2004 meeting at her home in Syracuse, New York, Thomas, who was by then serving as associate chancellor of Syracuse University, consented to provide me with a detailed account of that Bush interview, including notes and a tape. In the conversation, Thomas can be heard reciting a list of the names of women whom Bush knew and was said to have dated. Bush briefly acknowledges knowing each one. Then she mentions Lowman by name, says that she had called her, and begins to explain what transpired: “She just said . . .” Bush cuts her off, midsentence, and artfully poses his own question to Thomas, putting her on the defensive. It is clear that the subject is out of bounds, and Lowman is never mentioned again. “When I read Robin Lowman’s name, his face shattered,” Thomas recalled.27
The story has a certain resonance primarily because Bush’s political success was predicated in part on appealing to those who oppose a woman’s right to an abortion. As president, Bush promulgated tough new policies that withheld U.S. funds not only to programs and countries that permitted abortions, but even to those that advocated contraception as opposed to abstinence. Moreover, his appointments to the Supreme Court put the panel on the verge of reversing Roe v. Wade. Like his insistence on long prison sentences for first-time drug offenders and his support for military action, his own behavior in regard to sexual responsibility and abortion could be considered relevant—and revealing.
ALTHOUGH THE ELDER Bush’s name never comes up in reference to this episode or its resolution, he knew the players, including Chandler, quite well. Not surprisingly, he seems to have stepped in to assume what would be an increasingly common role: cleaning up after his son in a dicey situation. Soon after the alleged Lowman incident, W. was yanked from his beloved pleasure dome and moved into a garage apartment behind the house of family friends in a sedate residential neighborhood of Houston. There, he was given a roommate who could keep an eye on him: Don Ensenat, a Louisiana native and Delta Kappa Epsilon brother. After graduating from Yale, Ensenat had worked on Poppy’s 1970 campaign. Later, he would be rewarded for his services with an appointment by President George H. W. Bush as ambassador to Brunei, and by President George W. Bush as the United States chief of protocol.
George W. not only needed looking after; he needed to be kept occupied. He grudgingly reported for work at Stratford of Texas, a global agricultural conglomerate run by Bob Gow, Poppy Bush’s former lieutenant. Gow would tell reporters that Bush had shown up on his own, but a friend of Gow’s remembers otherwise. David Klausmeyer told me in a 2006 interview at his Houston home, “I knew why he was there. His dad got him the job.”28
Stratford was located in the Tenneco Building in the heart of Houston’s financial and oil center. It was a small outfit, with about a dozen employees on the management team. “That’s when I first met George W. Bush,” recalled Klausmeyer, a consultant who worked in the office. “He was a trainee, more or less. He was killing time.” Actually it was one of W.’s longer stints of employment. But if his duties were a mystery, so too was his abrupt departure.
In later conversations with reporters, Bush would dismiss his tenure at Stratford as an inconsequential, “stupid coat-and-tie job” that he quit, after less than a year, out of boredom.29 Reporters generally took the assertion at face value. In fact, Stratford—and Bush’s time there—deserves a second look.
Like Zapata, Stratford had a complex financial structure and unprofitable foreign operations. While working there, George W. was exposed to a range of international assignments, in places like Jamaica and Guatemala, that he has never spoken about. Years later, when W. was a presidential candidate, he would be accused of lacking foreign policy credentials, with the evidence being that he had apparently never even traveled abroad. He could have countered these accusations by drawing attention to the trips he undertook while working for Stratford, but he chose not to—a curious omission unless he did not want anyone looking into these trips.
Trouble in the Cockpit
Whatever the true reason for his departure from the full-time Stratford job and his return to leisure-filled unemployment, during this same period something went wrong with his part-time career as a military pilot.
Records show that in early 1972, W. began having difficulties in the cockpit. His flight logs from that year show that he was ordered to return to a two-Pilot training plane—the very sort from which he had graduated two years before. This was after he had logged more than two hundred hours in his single-seat jet fighter—a remarkable comedown for the unit’s onetime poster boy. Although reported by the Associated Press in 2004 after it obtained the records in a long-running lawsuit, this revelation never gained traction with the media.
According to the flight logs, Bush’s friend Jim Bath, a former Air Force pilot, went up with him on some of these retraining flights, perhaps to boost his confidence. But even this friendly assistance does not seem to have helped. Back in his own F-102, Bush on one occasion needed three passes before he could make a landing. Even in a flight simulator, it took multiple attempts before he succeeded in landing his virtual plane.30
Because fighter jets fly in tight formation, Bush’s difficulties were everyone’s problems. That may explain why, on April 16, 1972, he flew for the last time. And soon he was gone altogether from the unit and the state. In military records, his departure was explained as due to a career opportunity— W. had landed a management position with the U.S. senatorial campaign of Winton “Red” Blount, Nixon’s postmaster general and a friend of Poppy’s. As his Texas Air National Guard supervisors, presumably relying on what Bush told them, would write in a report the following year: “A civilian occupation made it necessary for him to move to Montgomery, Alabama.”
Whistling Dixie
By the time George W. Bush arrived in Montgomery, Blount’s run for the U.S. Senate was well under way. The campaign manager was Poppy’s longtime aide Jimmy Allison; he and his wife, Linda, had been in Alabama since the beginning of the year.31 Nevertheless, a seemingly significant position was created for W. As the Washingt
on Post noted in a February 2004 profile, “Although a relative newcomer to political campaigns, Bush was given a title—assistant campaign manager—and responsibility . . . He was charged with developing county organizations, particularly in the hilly northern part of the state, and he impressed people with his energy.”32
In fact, the campaign had three other individuals whose responsibilities entailed coordinating county organizations—with each responsible for one third of the state. What this left for Bush to “coordinate” is hard to say. He was designated as a sort of liaison between Allison and other campaign staff, but his responsibilities remained rather vague. According to several campaign staffers with whom I spoke, Bush worked irregularly, showing up late much of the time, often well into the afternoon. His specific duties ranged from affixing bumper stickers to transporting boxes of literature for a campaign known from the start to be a losing cause.33
Indeed, W. had not even chosen to go to Alabama. He had been ordered to go by his father. Linda Allison, Jimmy’s widow, would later describe to me how sometime in the late spring of 1972 her husband received a phone call from Poppy, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “Big George called Jimmy and said, ‘He’s killing us in Houston. Take him down there and let him work on that campaign.’ The tenor was, ‘Georgie is in and out of trouble seven days a week down here, and would you take him up there with you?’ ”34
This scenario tracks with other evidence. W. had cleared out of Houston so fast that several of his friends said they didn’t even recall knowing that he was leaving town. Bush had asked permission from his Guard superiors to do “equivalent duty” in Alabama, and he did apply to join an Alabama Guard unit. The unit he chose, the Montgomery-based 9921st Air Reserve Squadron, was weak tea compared with the 147th Fighter Wing in Texas, and it was certainly an unusual choice for a pilot. It was, in fact, a postal unit that met but one night a month; the rumor was that it would soon be shut down altogether. As the unit’s head, Colonel Reese H. Bricken, later put it: “We had no airplanes. We had no pilots. We had no nothing.”35
Unfortunately for Bush, the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver nixed the transfer.36 Bush would eventually get a more appropriate assignment, the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance unit, located at Montgomery’s Dannelly Field Air Guard Station. His acceptance into the 187th is a documented fact. Beyond that, Bush’s military service simply vanishes into the fog. Despite the efforts of journalists and investigators throughout his presidency, the military has been unable to locate records documenting his complete service.
In 2000, it would be a Republican and Bush supporter, former Dannelly commander Ret. General William Turnipseed, who would put W. in the hot seat by telling the media: “I’m dead-certain he didn’t show up.”37 Bush claimed to remember performing his Guard duty as required while in Alabama, but no credible records or eyewitnesses ever emerged to back him up. Indeed, in 2004, former members of the Alabama National Guard ran repeated notices in the Guard publication Interceptor Magazine soliciting any evidence of Bush’s presence with the 187th. None was forthcoming; the posted rewards were never claimed.
Despite W.’s lackluster performance on the Blount campaign, the local press took a shine to him from the start. An August 11, 1972, the Montgomery Independent society column noted the arrival in Alabama of the campaign’s “coordinator”—“young, personable George Bush, 26.” The next and only mention in the Independent describes the election-night party at the Whitley Hotel. Among those holding forth on the dance floor was “handsome, bright, young George Bush, son of the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.” It was apparently quite a party. Two eyewitnesses described to me a drunken Bush screaming at police officers. “He was down in the parking lot, just railing on these cops,” recalled one. “I couldn’t believe they didn’t throw him in jail.”38
Young Bush enjoyed regaling associates with accounts of his drinking exploits. Blount’s nephew, C. Murphy Archibald, remembers W. telling one particular story “what seemed like a hundred times . . . He would laugh uproariously as though there was something funny about this. To me, that was pretty memorable, because here he is, a number of years out of college, talking about this to people he doesn’t know. He just struck me as a guy who really had an idea of himself as very much a child of privilege, that he wasn’t operating by the same rules.”39 W. also enjoyed recounting his adventures at Yale—how he got stopped by police officers there “all the time” for driving drunk but always got off when they learned who he was.
Two unconnected acquaintances of a well-known male Montgomery socialite, now deceased, recounted to me a story told to them by the socialite. In this account, the man had been partying with Bush at the Montgomery Country Club, combining drinking with illicit drugs. The socialite had told them that when the two made a brief stop at W.’s cottage so he could change clothes, Bush complained about the brightness, climbed up on a table, and smashed the chandelier with a baseball bat. Indeed, the family that rented Bush the cottage told me that he left extensive damage, including a smashed chandelier, and that he ignored two bills they sent him. The total came to about nine hundred dollars, a considerable sum in 1972.
A Guarded Assessment
The scenario in which W. fled Texas because he was having flying problems was confirmed to me when I spoke with Janet Linke. She is the widow of Jan Peter Linke, an Air Force pilot who had been flying an F-102 for the Florida Air National Guard and was brought in to take Bush’s place in the 147th Fighter Wing. In a 2004 interview, Mrs. Linke told me of a conversation that she and her husband had with Bush’s commanding officer, not long after they arrived at Ellington. According to Linke, “[Bush] was mucking up bad. [Lieutenant Colonel Jerry] Killian told us he just became afraid to fly.” Linke also recalled that Killian told them Bush “was having trouble landing, and that possibly there was a drinking problem involved in that.”40
Even at the time, Janet Linke realized that Killian meant something out of the ordinary. She knew from personal experience that drinking was commonplace among pilots during that period. Within a year after her husband took Bush’s place, Jan Peter Linke died when his car went off a road and plunged into a lake. Authorities concluded that Linke had been drinking and fell asleep at the wheel. This left Janet Linke a twenty-seven-year-old widow with a three-year-old son. Another member of the unit, Dr. Richard Mayo, said of drinking among the pilots: “I think we all did, yeah. There’s a great correlation between fighter pilots and alcohol. I mean, beer call was mandatory.”41
In summary: W. left his Houston Guard unit under a cloud, then apparently failed to show up for equivalent duty in Alabama. In Montgomery, his drunken exploits as a campaign staffer were known among the staff and others, but in print he was described as a prince. And while all this was going on, his father, named to head the national Republican Party at the end of 1972, finally seemed on an upward track commensurate with his ambitions. Clearly, the problems with his eldest son could not be allowed to thwart those ambitions.
X-Ray Optional
After Blount’s defeat in early November 1972, W. packed up and returned to Texas. But he did not report back to his unit at Ellington as he was required to do.
That December, the Bush annual holiday gathering was held in Washington, D.C., where Poppy was taking over the helm of the embattled Republican Party. The GOP was then in the midst of the Watergate affair, with new revelations unfolding daily. According to a story that has become a staple in the media narrative, W. had an altercation with his father around this time. Supposedly, W. had taken his younger brother Marvin to visit the Allisons— who had a house in the capital from the time Jimmy had worked at the Republican National Committee. After leaving the Allisons’ house, W. drove home drunk and managed to mow down some garbage cans in the process. In a scene beloved of the media, when the father tried to confront his son, W. challenged him to a fight, “mano a mano.”42
The story leaves a vivid impression of a rebellious young man wh
o was beyond his family’s control—a part the legendary James Dean might have played. In reality, W. may have been out of control and under the influence of alcohol, but the proverbial acorn never strayed far from the tree. During the preceding six months, while apparently failing to perform his Guard duty, W. had been in regular contact with his parents. He and his father had been together at the GOP convention in August 1972 in Miami; in October at his grandfather Prescott’s funeral in Connecticut and at the parents’ apartment at the Waldorf Towers in New York City; and finally for this extended visit over the 1972–73 holidays.
Of course the incoming chairman of the Republican Party could ill afford any embarrassment concerning his son’s military service. So the stories of W.’s antagonism toward Poppy were useful in this regard. If the young rebel had indeed acted independently of his father, then the latter was off the hook for what had happened. I could find no evidence that Poppy has ever been pressed to say what he knew about these matters, and he declined interview requests relating to his son during W.’s presidency.
From their holiday gathering in Washington, the Bush clan repaired for New Year’s 1973 to their winter home on Florida’s exclusive Hobe Sound. There they were joined by the Allisons. W. continued to show a lack of maturity. One day, as his mother attempted to drive several miles to the country club where she and Mrs. Allison were to join their husbands, “Georgie,” twenty-six years old, drove in front of them in another car, keeping at a crawl the entire distance, and forcing his mother’s vehicle to stall numerous times. “Bar[bara] was grim,” Mrs. Allison recalled.43
