2 people, 2 stories on Bush's service in the National Guard
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/shared/news/politics/stories/09/12guard.htmlBy Ken Herman
Cox News Service
Friday, September 10, 2004
WASHINGTON — One is a former wunderkind of Texas politics, suddenly eager to talk about how he helped get young George W. Bush into the National Guard in 1968.
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Helping 'Georgie'
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She told a story of two families – the Bushes and the Allisons – that once were close but drifted apart. She suspects it was because her late husband, Midland newspaper publisher and political consultant Jimmy Allison, did not support the elder George Bush's 1972 bid for chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mrs. Allison also told a story of a young man who seemed to have been shipped to Alabama to get straightened out.
Mrs. Allison told Salon.com that in the spring of 1972, the elder Bush, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called her husband about finding a place for George W. Bush in the Alabama Senate campaign of Bush family friend Winton "Red" Blount. Jimmy Allison was managing Blount's unsuccessful campaign against incumbent John Sparkman. The Allisons and Bushes were close because Jimmy Allison also served as publisher of the Midland Reporter Telegram, a newspaper in the West Texas city where the elder George Bush moved his family.
Mrs. Allison's version of how Bush wound up in Alabama differs from Bush's long-held assertion that he went to Alabama to get valuable political experience."I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him," she told Salon.com.
Mrs. Allison also said she never saw Bush in uniform."Good lord no," she said. "I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way."
"After about a month I asked Jimmy what was Georgie's job because I couldn't figure it out. I never saw him do anything. He told me it basically consisted of him contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support," Mrs. Allison said.C. Murphy Archibald, a Blount nephew who worked at the campaign, told the Austin American-Statesman that back then Bush talked a lot more about drinking than about the National Guard.
"I asked George about his being in the Guard but he just changed the subject," said Archibald, a Vietnam veteran and Charlotte, N.C., lawyer. "He wouldn't talk about it.""George would come in and I recall virtually every morning he would talk about the amount of drinking he had done the night before, with certain variations on it," Archibald recalled. "He gave the impression he thought that was something other people might be interested in because he would tell us in some detail he had spend a hard night drinking."
Archibald also said Bush liked to talk about how police in New Haven, where he attended Yale, would stop him for what Archibald interpreted as "basically being rowdy," but would release him when they determined he was the grandson of Connecticut Sen. Prescott Bush."Every time he told the story he would laugh as if it was a very funny joke," said Archibald.
you gotta read this article.................
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