TIME - How Well Did He Serve?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040223-590683,00.html

Bush said he reported for duty in Alabama, but even with the new documents, the evidence is thin. TIME looks at four key questions

George W. Bush has long had a habit of giving people nicknames—and perhaps that's because he picked up a few along the way himself. Like the one he earned in 1972, when he left his home in Houston to work on the long-shot Senate campaign of Winton M. (Red) Blount in Alabama. Bush, then 26, would often turn up at campaign headquarters in Montgomery around lunchtime, recount his late-night exploits and brag about his political connections, according to a Blount campaign worker. All that made him slow to win over the Alabama crowd, who began to complain that Bush was letting things slide. C. Murphy Archibald, a nephew of Blount's who worked on the campaign that fall, told TIME that Bush "was good at schmoozing the county chairs, but there wasn't a lot of follow-up." Archibald, now a trial attorney in North Carolina, remembers that a group of older Alabama socialites, who were volunteering their time, gave Bush a nickname because they thought he "looked good on the outside but was full of hot air." They called him the Texas Soufflé.

Skimming the surface and skipping over details may be business as usual for a happy-go-lucky 26-year-old, but it's a problem for a President during a winter of discontent. Whether Bush performed his National Guard duties while he was working on the Blount campaign—as well as during much of the year starting in May 1972—was raised in his past campaigns and always fluttered away quickly, an issue regarded as irrelevant after two decades or more. But it has become germane this time in a way it never was before because for the second time in as many months—first on prewar intelligence in Iraq and now on his military record—Bush is caught in a gap between what he has claimed and what he can prove. At the same time, he's gearing up for a fight with a probable Democratic nominee whose record as a Vietnam War hero helps buy him credibility to challenge Bush on his military resume. Bush insists he did his duty in Alabama, but the records—and many memories—don't confirm it. And these days, people are paying a lot closer attention to the President's words.

All week long, the White House tried to complete two contradictory missions: keep Bush's promise to Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press to release all his military records—and change the story line as quickly as possible. First came the Bush pay stubs, which showed he was paid for some work during his Alabama sojourn but didn't prove he did any work. Then came a page of a dental exam, proving that he had at least turned up at an air base to have his teeth checked. And finally, when those documents weren't having the proper impact, the White House released 400 pages of military records on a late Friday afternoon. Those documents didn't solve the puzzle either, but by then the White House hoped that at least no one could accuse the President of hiding anything. "We're going on the offensive on this," says a top official. "The problem with the Democrats is that they always overplay their hand."

It may be that Bush's military service has already passed into the custody of amateur oral historians—those who say he never turned up, and the lone veteran and the ex-girlfriend who say Bush reported for duty in Alabama. But if the stack of papers may someday intrigue his biographers—we learn that Bush had an appendectomy at age 10, that he took a semester of Japanese during his senior year at Yale, that his Air Force minders rated him "a natural leader whom his contemporaries look to"—they also leave many of the central mysteries of his service unsolved. Here are four:

more

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-nybres143670574feb15,0,6023710.column?coll=ny-lipolitics-print

Bush Goal Was Dodging War

<snip>The hack flacks in the White House and the Pekinese of the press are fighting over whether Bush actually did go to the dentist and thus was on duty, or was he missing from a real drill?

His whereabouts have nothing to do with it. What matters only is that Bush was in the National Guard in Texas because he was dodging the war in Vietnam. In those days, if you were in the Guard, you were not called for Vietnam. Some people used college, or marriage, or Conscientious Objector or moving to Canada to evade. Bush used the Guard. Anybody trying that today is in great danger. The Guard units are being called up by the day. But Bush used the Guard when it gave safety. And now, shamelessly, preposterously, he sends people to get killed in Iraq. That he has no right to do so doesn't seem to enter his mind.

In Texas, George Bush might have even had a uniform on. But he was not in Vietnam. And now, today, he is a guy who ducked the war, dodged the war, reneged on any chance to go to war, and yet without even a hint of personal shame sends young people to die in a war that his record shows that he would duck.

What matters to all our senses is that he is a president who struts around as a war hero, who dodged Vietnam and most of the National Guard drills and who with less shame than anybody we have had maybe ever, sends your kids to a war that he ducked as if he was allowed to do it by birth.

more