http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1146119,00.htmlOn May 2 1973, Richard Nixon was still reeling from the Watergate scandal. American troops were on their way home from Vietnam. And outside Houston, in Texas, a 26-year-old named George Bush, a lieutenant in the National Guard, reported for drill duty as usual at Ellington air force base.
That, at any rate, is the impression given by military payroll records released by the Bush administration on Tuesday. Apparently, however, Lt Bush's superiors at Ellington didn't see it that way. In an annual evaluation of his performance - dated, coincidentally, the very same day, May 2 - they conceded that they couldn't actually evaluate his performance, because they hadn't seen him for months.
Ii is hard to escape the suspicion that Bush got an easy ride through the guard. At the time he did his years in uniform, his father was a prominent Texas congressman, a fact not lost on his commanding officers, who seemed, in the latter years of his service, disinclined to demand regular attendance. "I'd have to have been an idiot not to know about
," says Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Lloyd Jr, a retired personnel officer whose signature is on documents released by the White House this week apparently confirming Bush's service. "Bush is sworn into the National Guard and there is his father, Congressman Bush, standing beside him. It was a good chance for unit publicity."
However rosy the future president's situation, though, the second half of 1972 marked the beginning of a black hole in his life. It was a period marinated in alcohol, and apparently as hazy to Bush at the time as it would prove to reporters who later tried to reconstruct it. In December that year, according to many reports, he took his 16-year-old brother Marvin drinking, prompting an aggressive confrontation in which George Jr famously offered to fight his father "mano a mano". (In 1976, he was convicted of drunk driving.) There have long been rumours of drugs: the president has never admitted taking them, but his carefully worded denials have never encompassed the years before 1976. "When I was young and irresponsible," the candidate often recited during the 2000 campaign, "I was young and irresponsible." And when it came to his military service, according to National Guard records that are not clearly refuted by this week's White House releases, Bush simply fell off the radar.
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