This story really zeroes in on Bush's failure to take the physical, which as we've noted here from the start, has always been part of the established record, and it raises serious questions in itself:
- Two retired National Guard generals, in interviews yesterday, said they were surprised that Bush -- or any military pilot -- would forgo a required annual flight physical and take no apparent steps to rectify the problem and return to flying. "There is no excuse for that. Aviators just don't miss their flight physicals," said Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr., who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's director of the Air National Guard, in an interview.
Brigadier General David L. McGinnis, a former top aide to the assistant secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, said in an interview that Bush's failure to remain on flying status amounts to a violation of the signed pledge by Bush that he would fly for at least five years after he completed flight school in November 1969.
"Failure to take your flight physical is like a failure to show up for duty. It is an obligation you can't blow off," McGinnis said.
And then, significantly, it points to the real core of the matter:
- The order required Bush to acknowledge the suspension in writing and also said: "The local commander who has authority to convene a Flying Evaluation Board will direct an investigation as to why the individual failed to accomplish the medical examination." After that, the commander had two options -- to convene the Evaluation Board to review Bush's suspension or forward a detailed report on his case up the chain of command.
Either way, officials said yesterday, there should have been a record of the investigation.
Kudos to Robinson, whose reportage provided the genesis for the story back in 2000.
Meanwhile, along a related front, comes this piece from USA Today:
- Ex-officer: Bush file's details caused concern
WASHINGTON -- As Texas Gov. George W. Bush prepared to run for president in the late 1990s, top-ranking Texas National Guard officers and Bush advisers discussed ways to limit the release of potentially embarrassing details from Bush's military records, a former senior officer of the Texas Guard said Wednesday.
A second former Texas Guard official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, was told by a participant that commanders and Bush advisers were particularly worried about mentions in the records of arrests of Bush before he joined the National Guard in 1968, the second official said.
Bill Burkett, then a top adviser to the state Guard commander, said he overheard conversations in which superiors discussed "cleansing" the file of damaging information.
As noted below, Burkett's story could be significant, though it does come with some caveats raised by Kevin Drum. However, Drum went a long way toward resolving some of these issues with his excellent interview with Burkett, which everyone should read.
Finally, an excellent read comes via the Progressive Southerner, about just what George W. Bush was doing in Alabama while skipping out on Guard duty and a flight physical:
Especially noteworthy is this nugget, deep in the story:
- One of Bush's duties as "campaign coordinator," according to his official title in the newspapers, was to stay in contact by phone with campaign managers in Alabama's 67 counties, and to handle the distribution of all campaign materials, Archibald says. That material included a pamphlet accusing Sparkman of being soft on the race issue. It also included a doctored tape from a radio debate distorting Sparkman's position on busing.
Sparkman was forced to deny a series of false charges linking him with McGovern, the South Dakota presidential candidate who became the first in the modern era to be tainted and stomped as a "liberal." The pamphlet distributed to campaign workers and leaked to the press charged Sparkman with favoring drastic defense cuts, big federal spending, abandoning American POWs in Vietnam, a guaranteed wage for every American, relaxing drug laws, amnesty for draft dodgers ? and "forced busing."
The Birmingham News ran the transcript of the doctored radio tape on November 6, the day before the election, which made it appear Sparkman was in favor of busing black and white children miles across towns to "mix" the public schools. The literature of the campaign echoed the winning conservative Senate race of Ed Gurney in Florida, also dreamed up by Allison and company. Blount's campaign, awash in cash with twice the money of Sparkman's, paid for billboards across the state proclaiming: "A vote for Red Blount is a vote against forced busing . . . against coddling criminals . . . against welfare freeloaders."
No wonder Bush and Lee Atwater were such buddies.
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