Via Jesse Singal at the Washington Monthly, the Texas Monthly‘s Joe Hagan does a longform retelling of George W. Bush’s first big signature screwup (and the blowback that’s distorted American politics ever since):
… It was the 1988 presidential campaign of Bush’s father that first raised the issue of a privileged son from Texas getting special access to the National Guard—only the privileged son wasn’t a Bush. Michael Dukakis, the elder Bush’s opponent, had recently chosen Senator Lloyd Bentsen, of Houston, as his running mate. One Sunday morning in August of that year, George H. W. Bush’s campaign co-chairman, New Hampshire governor John Sununu, went on TV to attack Bentsen for allegedly helping his son, Lloyd Bentsen III, enter the Texas Air National Guard in 1968. “Someone called Senator Bentsen to point out to him that this special slot, which was rare, came open,” said Sununu, and Bentsen “ran to get his son to fill that.”
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This was the first presidential election in which candidates’ Vietnam-era decisions were resonating among the electorate. The question of who did what in the sixties, when an unpopular war divided the nation, had become a litmus test. (Incidentally, this was also the year that Dan Rather established himself as a Bush family enemy by needling then–vice president Bush with questions about his role in the Iran-Contra affair in an infamous live interview on CBS.) With Democrats attacking the elder Bush’s own running mate, Dan Quayle, for joining the Indiana National Guard during Vietnam, Sununu’s claim was a natural counteroffensive. But it boomeranged. It turned out that George W. Bush, at the time a senior staff member in his father’s campaign, had served in the same Houston unit as Lloyd Bentsen III and was recruited the same year by the same man, Colonel Walter “Buck” Staudt. That unit, the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, tasked with defending the Gulf Coast, was well-known as a “champagne unit” because it housed not only Bentsen and Bush but a number of other sons of the Texas elite, such as John Connally III, son of the former Texas governor and Nixon treasury secretary; Al Hill, the grandson of oil tycoon H. L. Hunt; and several members of the Dallas Cowboys.
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Sununu’s attacks died after Bentsen and Staudt denied the allegations, but the issue had been introduced, and the timing and circumstances of Bush’s entry into the Guard were enough to raise eyebrows. In February 1968, three months before Bush graduated from Yale, the Tet offensive left more than five hundred U.S. soldiers dead in a single week. That same month, Walter Cronkite famously declared the Vietnam War “mired in stalemate” just as President Lyndon Johnson canceled draft deferments for most graduate students. Days before he would become subject to the draft, Bush, whose father was then a U.S. congressman from Houston, won a coveted slot as a pilot in the 147th.
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Bush maintains he simply interviewed with Staudt and was accepted on the spot. That may be true, but it would be hard to argue that there weren’t more-qualified candidates: Bush received the lowest acceptable score on his pilot aptitude test…
As some disappointed commentors have pointed out, there’s nothing really “new” in this story — not even the slapstick sideshow explaining how Harriet Miers made her bones with the Bush crime family — but it’s a nice tight summary of the whole shameful saga. Word is the story goes behind a paywall shortly, so catch it before the Bush minions cripple the website while it’s still available.
The prophet Nostradumbass
How long have we been in Afghanistan now, 11 years?
Yutsano
@The prophet Nostradumbass: With no one with the huevos to take on the Cronkite role here.
Sly
@Yutsano:
Cronkite wasn’t telling his audience anything they didn’t already know. A majority of Americans believed Vietnam was a mistake by the time Tet happened.
Though Vietnam was fought disproportionately by the poor and the non-white, it did have a sizable and negative impact on the consciousness of the white middle-class. And that impact steadily increased after Tet, when it became more and more difficult for them to get their sons out of serving through educational deferments.
That impact has been conspicuously absent with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq. We are not, in any appreciable sense, a people who are “at war” with anyone. War has been sanitized and segregated into invisibility for the vast majority of Americans.
Martin
@Sly:
Invisible? Fuck, I got 11 tax cuts out of it! War is awesome!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin:
Yes, but did you go shopping?
Martin
@BillinGlendaleCA: Oh, yeah! I got to keep enough of my income to not settle for an American made car, but bought a foreign-made one instead!
Another Halocene Human
Fake memos faxed, fake memos xeroxed, and the usually Bush family trail of dead witnesses.
But the statement in the first part more or less says it all: he aimed for the King and missed.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: A ferin car? Just stay on your side of the Orange Curtain, Commie.
Cacti
Pitiful to think that if Harriet Miers performed better in her meet and greet with congressional repukes, she’d be sitting on SCOTUS.
Narcissus
Ya oughta repost this during the day, AL. It really deserves to be widely read, not just for what it says about Bush, but for what it says about the whole politico-economic elite society.
Steeplejack
That was a good, if long-winded, recap of the whole affair.
The thing that struck me was the extremely casual attitude of the Bush apologists/explainers about military regulations and protocol, like they were talking about some pesky but minor paperwork for a New School continuing-education class.
Dubya lost his flight status in August 1972 for failing to take a flight physical (a serious infraction)?
Dubya “opted out”? “Saw no reason” to maintain his flight status? That’s not the country club Air Force I remember. Okay, it was the National Guard, but still.
And:
Jeez, pilots hate paperwork, so God forbid that we should bother them with any.
Reading this story yesterday got me wound up again about all the Bush era bullshit and how so little of it ever stuck to the bastard. I was even reminded again of another sore point for me that I had managed to repress–that whole issue about how White House e-mail was being run off GOP servers and how the Bushies deleted, or did not preserve, the e-mail archives–in defiance of federal law. That’s another thing that I hoped would get investigated, but it, too, dropped into the black hole of history.
joel hanes
It ain’t me
It ain’t me
I ain’t no Senator’s son. No.
Egg Berry
Shorter of the whole tale via Driftglass: There is a club. You aren’t in it.
Southern Beale
Heh indeedy. I’ve posted a picture of a 19-year-old Mitt Romney at Stanford University, protesting FOR the war and the draft! Since he was protesting FOR the war and the draft, surely he served, right? C’mon, be serious! He tool his Mormon missionary deferment and went to France for 2 years while his peers were shipped off to war in Vietnam.
So kinda makes you wonder what he was protesting for then, hmm? Guess wars are just for the plebes to fight.
arguingwithsignposts
@Southern Beale: While I agree Romney’s actions are deplorable, I just don’t see avoiding military service in Vietnam as resonating with any noticeable percentage of voters. The last two presidents before Obama dodged the draft, and beat out war veterans in general elections. Obama overtook a torture victim to win the office, or so I hear anyway.
As one more pebble on the wall of fakery that is Mittbot rev3.253232434, it’s something. But not that much.
Kirbster
Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets is a fascinating, in-depth account of the Bush Dynasty. The Bushes are one of the most well-connected families in the nation and they have never been shy about using their influence to gain power and wealth. The career of “Poppy” Bush gets far less scrutiny than it deserves because he was far more subtle than his wastrel son.
Narcissus
This article also reminded me of the whole “land-on-aircraft-carrier-give-speech” thing. I mean not that I forgot it happened. I don’t think that’s possible. But I’d forgotten how insane and surreal it was from my point of view and how everybody else seemed to take it seriously.
Now I’m all pissed off all over again.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Kirbster:
cf. “The Divine Right of Kings”
Comrade Scrutinizer
But, but, the kerning!
Jerzy Russian
@Steeplejack:
Dammit, I had suppressed that as well, and you brought it up to the surface again. It seems like any outrage that existed about this at the time was also run off of private servers and has since been deleted.
double nickel
“And it’s 1, 2, 3 what are we fighting for?”
Raven
@Jerzy Russian: When are you guys going to get over Vietnam?
kdaug
@double nickel:
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Ash Can
Like I said when I saw this story yesterday morning, I will never, and I do mean never, forgive the GOP for foisting this fuck-up on the nation and the world. That’s a special kind of sociopathy.
Southern Beale
@arguingwithsignposts:
If you don’t see the incredible hypocrisy of protesting FOR the war and the draft while refusing to serve yourself, instead skedaddling off to fucking FRANCE, and you don’t think this will be a liability for a candidate already labeled a flip-flopper, you’re a fucking moron.
mai naem
I remember around the 2004 election, talking with this old guy who was a world war 11 vet who had served under Patton who was going on and on about how Patton would not have run the Iraq war the way they were running it. Anyway, the tv was on and the swiftboat stuff came on and he turned to me and started bitching about can you believe this, the guy who served is getting criticized by the chickenhawk. This guy just went off on a rant about Bush. I was just shocked because I had just assumed he was a right winger. The Kerry part of this story actually made me feel a little better because it sounds like Kerry did try and do something about it.
Elizabelle
Lord, did they have a puff piece on the real Mitt Romney, the finest guy you’d ever want to meet, on CBS’s morning show. The private Mitt Romney.
Unfortunately, that’s not the Romney we see. We get the one out there lying about Obama and everything else.
Gayle King brought up something about what’s wrong with being successful? That he worked really, really hard for it. (Memo to Gayle: He ain’t Oprah.)
And this was the “smarter” alternative morning show.
(Report by Arman Kitayen, however you spell it.)
gene108
Makes the swiftboating of Kerry all the more shameful. Kerry was a rich kid, who could’ve opted out of Vietnam. He’d already served in the Navy on conventional big boats that were relatively out of harms way and therefore would be exempt from the draft. Kerry re-inlisted to serve in Vietnam. He didn’t have to.
arguingwithsignposts
@Southern Beale: Maybe you should go back and read my comment again. “Deplorable” is an apt description. As for hypocrisy, what surprises anyone about that? IIRC, there were a helluva lot of Republican college boys who supported the war and stayed on deferments to get out of service. George the Lesser and Dick Cheney just for starters.
In the grand scheme of flip-floppery, it’s a liability, but not as big a one as you seem to think.
gene108
@Southern Beale:
I wonder what the rate of success he had in France in getting converts to Mormonism. I think that should be a serious question. Did he really go to France on a mission to do good works or was he just hanging out for a couple of years.
How many French people did he convert to a religion that forbids the consumption of alcohol and caffeine?
I don’t know much about France, but from what I gather wine and coffee are sort of a big deal over there.
Raven
@gene108: He didn’t re-up he volunteered for brown water service after he had been in the blue water Navy.
Randy P
One of our local wingnuts, Veritas, is fond of cackling over how there’s all this $$$ flowing into the GOP side and how money trumps an actual candidate.
Up to a point, W validates that viewpoint. Two memories stand out. The first is the 2000 campaign, when I heard there was this guy setting fund raising records before he even started campaigning, before anybody ever saw him, based on his last name.
The other was watching the steady slide downward in W’s poll numbers from 2001 to June of 2004. Then they threw a lot of money at the public and the numbers edged up, just enough.
I’m not that concerned this time. Obama is a money raising powerhouse himself, and it’s money from actual breathing humans. Plus there isn’t enough money in the universe to overcome Romney’s negatives. But money does make SOMe difference. We got W because Big Oil wanted us to.
ericblair
@gene108:
What’s wrong with you people. Rmoney bravely packed his bags and volunteered to help the French Resistance! Okay, he was a bit late and most of the heavy lifting had been done, but still. And the meanies probably picked on him too, since he speaks French exactly how you’d figure an uptight android would speak French. So leave Willard ALOONE.
Shari
@gene108:
He converted 2 people in 2 years.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/14/mitt-romney-s-life-as-a-missionary-nearly-killed-in-a-car-accident.html
gene108
@Raven:
One of Kerry’s bigger flaws as a candidate was failing to explain his military service. I initially thought he’d spent 6 months in the Navy, because all that was talked about was his 6 months in ‘Nam. I didn’t realize he’d spent years in the Nave before volunteering for Swiftboat service.
I guess I still don’t know the particulars of his time in uniform.
FridayNext
Concentrating on one candidate or candidate’s son in this story is missing the forest for the trees. Truth is, damn few politicians at any level sent their sons to Vietnam from either party. To the best of my recollection of all the congressmen and senators to serve during the conflict only one lost a son, Mac Mathias. (Looking for confirmation of that. Correct if wrong)
Of all the offensive things from Bush biography and all the reasons I think he was a disastrous president, weaseling out of Vietnam is the least of it. It just made him one of the rich, politically connected crowd.
FridayNext
@gene108:
Mishandling that issue was possibly the biggest mistake the Kerry campaign made and may have cost him the election. However, before that even I didn’t think the Republicans would stoop so low as to denigrate the service of a veteran. That taught me better and I think it did for a lot of others as well. It was a lesson the Dems and the country needed to learn.
rlrr
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
I’m convinced Afghanistan and certainly Iraq would have been a hard sell to the American people if there was a draft…
rlrr
@Southern Beale:
What about about Obama? He avoided service in Vietnam by arranging to be born in 1961. Why isn’t anyone looking into this?
Ash Can
@FridayNext: The linked story itself details not just how W dodged the draft, but how badly he fucked up once he was in the Air National Guard. It basically criticizes Rather not for going to press with his story of W as military fuck-up, but for doing it before he had all the information, thus making him vulnerable to the attack that followed.
rlrr
@Southern Beale:
IOKIYA
Villago Delenda Est
What’s been missed is there’s a reason why I call the 43rd President of the United States a deserting coward.
He couldn’t even bother to show up for duty in Alabama, or later on, when he was attending Harvard for his MBA, Massachusetts.
When you sign up, regardless of active duty or reserves, it’s for six years. The deserting coward didn’t bother to fucking show up for drills. He wasn’t AWOL…he deserted. If you’re gone for more than 30 days, it’s desertion. That’s how it works.
He was an officer. If nothing else, he set a very bad example. That was never followed up on.
Nutella
@rlrr:
That’s one of the reasons why we should have a draft. If we’re going to have a war, we should have the draft to staff it with everyone’s kids.
Wars would be much harder to start and the military’s goals would be much closer aligned to the citizens’ goals.
That’s why it will never happen. The PTB don’t want either of those things to ever happen.
Karl The Crap Blog Detective
@Southern Beale: I think you mean it should be a liability. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
SiubhanDuinne
@rlrr:
Silly you. Citizens of Kenyastan aren’t subject to US military service.
Catsy
@Randy P:
I think this understates just how bad of a candidate Romney really is. Romney is a stiff, unlikable candidate who radiates entitlement and privilege every time he speaks. His favorability is underwater and his negatives keep rising.
Not only am I not worried about the flood of CU-funded ads on his behalf, I think such a deluge would work to our benefit by annoying voters and raising Romney’s visibility. Since the more regular people see of Romney the less they like him, raising his visibility is not going to raise his favorables, and a flood of negative ads against Obama will only drive up his negatives further.
Birthmarker
Anne I am a bit late to this thread but I did read this interesting link. The main issue to me has been whether Bush got paid for unperformed duty. It seems that he did. Why is this not fraud?