Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

by Russ Baker

  Wead recalls that sometimes during the 1980s he would be talking on the phone with Poppy Bush and Poppy would say that he wanted to ring off and call Wead back on the “secure phone”—though what they were discussing was inherently political and in no way dealt with national security.

  W. was sometimes more careless than his father, but he was always vigorous about cleaning up after the fact. This appears to have been the case in a previously undisclosed arrangement he made with Wead to safeguard tapes of conversations between the two aboard campaign planes in the 2000 election period.

  During the 1980s, Wead had routinely taped some conversations with Poppy with the elder Bush’s permission. He had also instinctively taped his discussions with W. more than a decade later, for reasons Wead says were benign—a capturing of history, and a means of retaining a record of W.’s sentiments and instructions. But he had neglected to tell W. Those tapes would provoke a brief scandal some years later.

  In 2005, the New York Times persuaded Wead, a self-styled presidential historian, to play snippets of those tapes, and the result was a front-page story—and a huge row with the White House. The excerpts Wead had chosen to play were largely benign, and featured W. discussing faith, politics, and the weaknesses of rival candidates—without making too many major gaffes. Yet the White House reacted with anger. In an unusual step, Laura Bush was sent out to chastise Wead and nip the story in the bud. With the resulting media hullabaloo, Wead was faced with a difficult decision. He told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he’d had lucrative offers to sell the tapes: “Tonight, my agent called me and said, ‘Well, do you want to retire a multimillionaire?’ ” But ultimately, Wead decided to hand the tapes back to the White House. “History can wait,” he said.18

  What was not reported at the time was what else was on the tapes—or what became of them. I asked Wead, and he told me. “It’s a president speaking. He’s talking and he’s strategizing and he’s talking about rumors about his sex life, why they’re not true and details about his life and reporters and how he reacts to them and he’s putting me on assignment to go and put out some of these stories.”

  Understandably, the White House did not want Wead sharing any more of their content than he already had, and he quickly heard from W.’s personal attorney, Jim Sharp. “He’d come out here, and we’d meet and talk and I gave him the tapes, and Bush listened to them . . .”

  Wead and Bush signed an agreement that they would jointly own the tapes. The White House people proposed that Wead turn over the tapes, and that they be stored in a box to which he would have a key. But Wead’s son, an attorney, proposed instead that the parties get a safe that required two keys to open: “He said, ‘No, no, no, get a safe that has two keys, one for the president and one for you.’ And Sharp said, ‘We can’t do that, there is no such thing.’ And he insisted, ‘The president wants this resolved right away.’ And I go back to my son, and he says ‘There is too such thing.’ ”

  And indeed there was. “We found that safe. My wife and I went to downtown Washington with the tapes, and we deposited them in a satchel. We locked the satchel, put it in the safe, and locked the keys. [Sharp] took it to the president, and I locked my key and I took that for me. And rolled it down the street to a bank.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The Skeleton in W.’s Closet

  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.”1

  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.’ ”2

  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 wartime 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.3

  On no subject were Bush and his team more intransigent than on the particulars of his military service. 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 reco
rds 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.4 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 consultant, 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.5

  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,” Bur-kett 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.”6

  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.7 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.”8

  Burkett, whose claims would surface publicly on a Web site for a Texas veterans’ group in 2000 and were subsequently detailed in Jim Moore’s 2004 book, Bush’s War for Reelection, first made his allegations within Guard circles in 1997. The next year he laid them out in letters to state legislators and in eight missives to Bush himself, addressing broad problems with the Guard, as well as in sworn public testimony. “Dan Bartlett knew about it,” Burkett said. “I called Dan in May or June 1998. I told him it’s gotten to the point where you need a new [National Guard] adjutant general.”

  Burkett was pulled away to other projects, and then in 1998 abruptly and unexpectedly dispatched on federal orders to Panama. On his trip home, he fell seriously ill. It was when he had trouble receiving proper medical care under his benefits package that he tried to use his knowledge of the destruction of Bush’s military record as leverage. Even efforts by Texas congressman Charles Stenholm and the surgeon general to arrange hospital care for Burkett were rebuffed by Guard headquarters.9 Two close friends of Burkett’s within the Guard who tried to get him help for emergency medical bills—George Conn and Harvey Gough—would themselves be fired from the Guard.10

  To this day, it remains unclear whether the treatment of Burkett was retribution for embarrassing the Guard with claims of corruption and of the destruction of documents concerning George W. Bush’s service. The undeniable fact is that essential paperwork one would expect to find in W.’s file somehow was missing. This included records of how the military handled Bush’s transfer to Alabama, documentation of additional service after May 1972 or an explanation of why no such evidence existed, and a report from the panel that typically convened when a pilot stopped flying prematurely. However it happened, it certainly would appear that someone purged parts of the governor’s National Guard file.

  Circa 1997, the same year as the trash-can incident, microfilm containing military pay records for hundreds of Guardsmen, including Bush, was irreversibly damaged at a national records center. When the government finally acknowledged the incident seven years later, it was described as an accident during a routine “restoration” effort.

  Until May 23, 2000, the efforts of Bush’s team to keep their man’s military record from public view seemed to be succeeding. Then, with Bush closing in on the GOP presidential nomination, the Boston Globe ran a story headlined 1-YEAR GAP IN BUSH’S GUARD DUTY: NO RECORD OF AIRMAN AT DRILLS IN 1972–73. Reporter Walter Robinson had obtained and reviewed 160 pages of military documents. It was Robinson who first interviewed Bush’s former commanders, only to discover that none could recall Bush performing service during that period.

  The Globe’s revelations gave rise to a veritable cottage industry of bloggers, with citizen journalists launching their own inquiries, complete with their own Freedom of Information requests.11 Together they provided sophisticated, rigorous analysis of the fine points of military procedure and record keeping.

  The Bush camp swung into damage-control mode. Bartlett called in the retired Guard
personnel director, General Albert Lloyd, and asked him to review W.’s record to look for any proof of his service. Armed with a request letter from Bush for access to his files, and, as he confirmed to me, left alone in the records room at Camp Mabry, Lloyd found a torn piece of paper with Bush’s social security number and a series of numbers.12 Though no one explained why the paper had come to be torn, or established the authenticity or validity of the document, it would be turned over to news organizations and the visible partial-date information extrapolated upon as evidence of service.

  BUSH CARRIED INTO the White House with him an official biography that by now reflected an already thoroughly discredited scenario: “George W. Bush was commissioned as second lieutenant and spent two years on active duty, flying F-102 fighter interceptors. For almost four years after that, he was on a part-time status, flying occasional missions to help the Air National Guard keep two of its F-102s on round-the-clock service.” Yet, in actuality, after he went on part-time status, Bush did not fly for four more years, but rather just one year and nine months.

  Since that time, the White House has, without acknowledging or explaining the changes, repeatedly revised the script. Ultimately, the latter period of Bush’s Guard service would be presented this way: after April 1972 the high-flying and highly visible pilot suddenly becomes a ground-hugging reservist reading manuals in back offices both in Alabama and in Texas, unobserved by his former flight mates, and therefore unnoticed and unremembered. The personable Bush, once nicknamed “the Lip” and “the Bombastic Bushkin,” had disappeared into a cubbyhole. In spite of this, when he became governor, his F-102 was symbolically refurbished like new, and a ceremony honoring his service was held, featuring Bush-supplied promotional materials containing the misleading biographical information.