vry interesting

The break happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for
Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John
Sparkman.

Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers
encountering George W Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and
hearing later about how he'd yelled obscenities at police officers
that night.

Bush left a house he'd rented in Montgomery trashed - the furniture
broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News
reported in February.

"He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people's
possessions," Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house,
told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was
never paid.

And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents' home in
Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go "mano a mano,"
as has often been reported.


From The Guardian, 9/2/04:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/salon/0,14779,1295936,00.html

George W Bush's missing year

'Who was this guy who came in late and left early?'

After thirty years of silence, Mary Jacoby finds out what the future
President really did in 1972

Thursday September 2, 2004

Before Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family's
political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign
consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison.

In the spring of 1972, George HW Bush phoned his friend and asked a
favour:

Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in
Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W Bush?

"The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in
Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just
really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing,"
Allison's widow, Linda, told me.

"And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal."

Linda Allison's story, never before published, contradicts the Bush
campaign's assertion that George W Bush transferred from the Texas Air
National Guard to the Alabama National Guard in 1972 because he
received an irresistible offer to gain high-level experience on the
campaign of Bush family friend Winton "Red" Blount.

In fact, according to what Allison says her late husband told her, the
younger Bush had become a political liability for his father, who was
then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and the
family wanted him out of Texas.

"I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him,"
Linda Allison said.

After more than three decades of silence, Allison spoke with Salon
over several days before and during the Republican National Convention
this week - motivated, as she acknowledged, by a complex mixture of
emotions.

They include pride in her late husband's accomplishments, a desire to
see him remembered, and concern about the apparent double standard in
Bush surrogates attacking John Kerry's Vietnam War record while
ignoring the president's irresponsible conduct during the war.

She also admits to bewilderment and hurt over the rupture her husband
experienced in his friendship with George and Barbara Bush.

To this day, Allison is unsure what caused the break, though she
suspects it had something to do with her husband's opposition to the
elder Bush becoming chairman of the Republican National Committee
under President Nixon.

"Something happened that I don't know about. But I do know that Jimmy
didn't expect it, and it broke his heart," she said, describing a
ruthless side to the genial Bush clan of which few outsiders are
aware.

Personal history aside, Allison's recollections of the young George
Bush in Alabama in 1972 are relevant as a contrast to the medals for
valour and bravery that Kerry won in Vietnam in the same era.

An apparent front group for the Bush campaign, Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth, has attacked Kerry in television ads as a liar and traitor to
veterans for later opposing a war that cost 58,000 American lives.

Bush, who has resisted calls from former Vietnam War POW John McCain,
R-Ariz, to repudiate the Swift Boat ads, has said he served honourably
in the National Guard.

Allison's account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in
February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the
Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a
lack of documentary evidence.

Asked if she'd ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said:

"Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in
his life in any way."

Allison also confirmed previously published accounts that Bush often
showed up in the Blount campaign offices around noon, boasting about
how much alcohol he had consumed the night before.

(Bush has admitted that he was a heavy drinker in those years, but he
has refused to say whether he also used drugs).

"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," Allison said.

C Murphy Archibald, a nephew of Red Blount by marriage and a Vietnam
veteran who volunteered on the campaign from September 1972 until
election night, corroborated Allison's recollections, though he
doesn't recall that the Bush name carried much cachet in Alabama at
the time.

"I say that because the scuttlebutt on the campaign was that Allison
was very sharp and might actually be able to pull off this difficult
race" against the incumbent Democrat, Sen John Sparkman, Archibald
said.

"But then no one understood why he brought this young guy from Texas
along. It was like, 'Who was this guy who comes in late and leaves
early? And why would Jimmy Allison, who was so impressive, bring him
on?'"

Bush, who had a paid slot as Allison's deputy in a campaign staffed
largely by volunteers, sat in a little office next to Allison's, said
Archibald, a workers compensation lawyer in Charlotte, NC.

Indeed, when Bush was actually there, he did make phone calls to
county chairmen.

But he neglected his other duty: the mundane but important task of
mailing out campaign materials to the county campaign chairs.
Archibald took up the slack, at Allison's request.

"Jimmy didn't say anything about George. He just said, 'These
materials are not getting out. It's causing the candidate problems.
Will you take it over?'"

While Kerry earned a Silver Star and a Bronze Star after saving a
crewmate's life under fire on the Mekong River in Vietnam, by
contrast, the Georgie that Allison knew was a young man whose parents
did not allow him to live with the consequences of his own mistakes.

His powerful father - whom the son seemed to both idolise and resent -
was a lifeline for Bush out of predicaments.

After Bush graduated from Yale in 1968, his slot in the Texas Air
National Guard allowed him to avoid active duty service in Vietnam.

The former speaker of the Texas state House, Democrat Ben Barnes, now
admits he pulled strings to get Bush his coveted guard slot, and says
he's "ashamed" of the deed.

"60 Minutes" will air an interview with Barnes next Wednesday, but
George HW Bush denounced Barnes' claims in an interview aired on CBS.

"They keep saying that and it's a lie, a total lie. Nobody's come up
with any evidence, and yet it's repeated all the time," the former
president said, in what could just as well describe the playbook for
the Swift Boat Veterans ads.

Yet, after receiving unusual permission to transfer to the Alabama
Guard from Texas, Bush has produced no evidence he showed up for
service for anything other than a dental exam.

Later, Bush would trade on his father's connections to enter the oil
business, and when his ventures failed, trade on more connections to
find investors to bail him out.

Linda Allison's story fills in the details about a missing chapter in
the story of how George Bush Sr's friends helped his wastrel son.

The Bush campaign, decamped to New York for the convention, did not
return a phone call by late Wednesday.

A graceful blonde with a Texas drawl, Linda Allison now lives on the
Upper East Side of Manhattan, in an apartment decorated in the dusky
tones of Tuscany with a magnificent view of the high-rises framing
Central Park.

I visited her there Monday on the opening night of the Republican
National Convention as she related publicly for the first time her
long and ultimately painful history with the Bush family.

On the table between us were two photographs of her late husband -- an
elfin man with curly hair, shown in animated conversation.

From her drawers she pulled out old letters and notes from Barbara
Bush, George HW Bush and even one from George W Bush, written to Jimmy
in 1978 as he was dying of cancer.

Jimmy Allison's family owned the Midland Reporter-Telegram and other
small-town newspapers, and they were part of the establishment in the
West Texas oil town where Bush senior made his fortune and Bush junior
grew up.

Still, Allison has been almost completely forgotten in the
semi-official stories of the Bush dynasty's rise; his role as
political fixer and family friend has been airbrushed out of Barbara
Bush's autobiography and other accounts.

But he was one of the originators of what evolved into the GOP's
"Southern strategy," helping George HW Bush win election to Congress
in 1966 at a time when Republicans in Texas were virtually unheard of.

The Blount Senate campaign he ran against the Democrat, Sparkman, in
1972 was notable for a dirty racial trick:

The Blount side edited a transcript of a radio interview Sparkman had
given to make it appear he supported busing, a poison position at that
time in the South.

When Sparkman found an unedited script and exposed the trick, the
Blount campaign was finished.

But it was an early introduction for Bush to the kinds of tricks that
later Republican strategists associated with the Bush political
machine would use against Democrats, often to victorious effect.

After Bush won a House seat in 1966, Allison followed his patron to
Washington as the top staffer in his congressional office and served
as deputy director of the Republican National Committee in 1969 and
1970 under President Nixon.

It was Allison who advised George W Bush to return to Midland after
Harvard Business School to seek his business fortune in the booming
oil industry, advice that Bush recalled fondly in a 2001 speech in
Midland.

When Allison died at age 46, after an agonising battle with lymphoma,
both George HW Bush and George W Bush served as pallbearers.

"Aide, confidant, campaign manager, source of joke material, alter ego
- Allison and Bush were bonded by an uncommon loyalty," former Reagan
White House deputy press secretary Peter Roussel, who got his start in
politics when Allison invited him to work for Bush's 1968
congressional reelection campaign, wrote in a 1988 newspaper column
dedicated to Allison.

Linda, too, had a long, though not as close, relationship with the
Bushes.

She remembers watching Bush in 1964 at a campaign appearance at the
Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, when she was 32 years old and he was running
for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate.

"He was so appealing to me. He said all the things that I believed in,
and he wasn't like all the other Republicans running in Texas at that
time, who were real right-wingers. He had a bigger vision of what the
Republican Party could be. I volunteered for his campaign that day,
and that's how I ended up being his Dallas County headquarters
chairman."

Over the years, Linda kept volunteering with the local Republican
Party.

"And they gave me bigger and bigger things to do. They appreciated me.
And I felt like I belonged to something," she said.

But it was also this sense of being connected to a larger, more
powerful force that seduced the Allisons - a trap that many aides and
friends of important politicians fall into.

The dynamic allowed the Bushes -- Barbara especially, Allison said --
to manipulate the friends and supporters they needed to further their
ambitions, a lesson she says could not have been lost on the young
George.

"They had a way of anointing you, then pushing you out," she said.

"It was like a mind game. It was very subtle, very hard to describe.
But when you were out, you wanted desperately to be let back in."

It was how she and Jimmy felt when, in 1973, they experienced a
strange and, to Allison, never fully explained rupture with the
Bushes, which took place against the backdrop of boorish behaviour by
their son that persisted during the time he was nominally under the
Allisons' care.

The break happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for
Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John
Sparkman.

Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers
encountering George W Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and
hearing later about how he'd yelled obscenities at police officers
that night.

Bush left a house he'd rented in Montgomery trashed - the furniture
broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News
reported in February.

"He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people's
possessions," Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house,
told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was
never paid.

And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents' home in
Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go "mano a mano,"
as has often been reported.

Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met
up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla.

Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents.

Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed
to lunch at the local beach club.

Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the
car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along.

"He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his
balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn't get past,"
Allison recalled.

"He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was
furious at him, too." Jimmy, meanwhile, had larger issues on his mind.

According to Linda, he was hoping to use the visit in Florida to
convince Bush to turn down the chairmanship of the Republican National
Committee because he didn't trust Nixon or his palace guard.

"He had been so appalled at the Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Colson group,
and he thought they'd sacrifice George. He just wanted to warn him, as
a friend," Allison told me.

Apparently, Jimmy Allison's advice was not appreciated. In Hobe Sound,
Bush senior kept trying to avoid talking with Jimmy about the RNC,
Allison said.

Then later, as the Allisons took their leave, Barbara "thanked" them
for their Christmas present with unexpected cruelty.

"She said, 'I'm so sorry, but we've been so busy this year that we
didn't have time to do anything for our political acquaintances.' I
swear to God, I'll never forget those two words as long as I live. For
her to say that was absolutely appalling. Mind you, Jimmy was an old,
old friend.

And I had stayed as a houseguest with the Bushes, been invited in my
pyjamas into their bedroom to read the papers and drink coffee while
Bar rode her exercise bicycle.

"Big George was just stricken by this," Allison continued.

"There was a wet bar in the hall on the way to the front door. He
grabbed this mouldy bottle of Mai Tai that he said had been given to
him by the president of China, and he said we just had to have it.
Then he plucked this ostrich egg in a beaded bag from a shelf that he
said had been given to him by the ambassador to the UN from Nigeria or
someplace, and gave it to us. Can you imagine how embarrassing that
was?"

The Allisons found they were no longer being invited to the Sunday
cookouts the Bushes held to chew over the week's political events.

And though Jimmy had once been deputy chairman of the RNC, when Bush
chaired the committee, he "couldn't even get invited to a cocktail
party there," Allison said.

The freeze-out was subtle and surgical.

"It took us some time to realise we'd been lopped off," she said.

At home, the Allisons once decided to try that dusty bottle of Mai Tai
from China that Bush had thrust into their hands in Hobe Sound.

They were unable to drink the liquor.

"It was so foul. The smell that came out of that thing! We just looked
at each other," Allison said.

By 1978, Jimmy was dying.

Whether out of guilt, genuine affection for old times or a desire to
maintain appearances with a revered member of the Midland
establishment, the Bushes responded with warmth. Jimmy's heart soared,
Allison said.

George W Bush, then running unsuccessfully for Congress, wrote his old
mentor a letter.

"Every person I see in Midland asks about you and sends their
regards," Bush wrote.

"Like a younger brother, I have treasured your advice, your guidance
and most importantly your never selfish friendship."

And shortly before he died, George HW Bush - by then an executive at a
bank in Houston after having served as head of the Central
Intelligence Agency - invited Jimmy back to his home.

Elated, Jimmy persuaded the doctors to discharge him for the visit,
Linda said.

But Linda, who was not consulted, was incensed.

Though she drove him to the Bushes, she refused to go in.

"I was so furious. I had no way to take care of him. He was so weak,
and they had taken him off the morphine, and he was in great pain,"
she said.

In a letter to the editor of Allison's newspaper in Midland after his
death, Bush recalled that day:

"He swam and relaxed. He was very weak but the warm water soothed him.
He gave us hope. 'I'm going to make it,' he said."

But soon after Linda picked him up, Jimmy crashed.

"He was in so much pain. It was unreal."

At the emergency room, he waited 10 hours for medical attention.

"I begged them to do something. I begged," she said, wiping tears from
her eyes.

"He was in so much pain. I was so angry." Jimmy died about a week
later.

More than a quarter century later, George W Bush is running for
reelection as a "war" president.

At the Republican Convention, delegates pass out Purple Heart stickers
mocking Kerry's Vietnam wounds as "a self-inflicted scratch," and
George HW Bush, speaking on CNN, lauds the Swift Boat Veterans' claims
against Kerry as "rather compelling."

Karl Rove tells the Associated Press that Kerry's opposition to a war
that Bush avoided had served to "tarnish the records and service of
people who were defending our country and fighting communism."

Barbara Bush tells USA Today:

"I die over every untruth that I hear about George - I mean, every
one."

Linda Allison watches it all from her New York apartment.

About George W Bush's disputed sojourn in Alabama, she asks simply:
"Can we all be lying?"

_______________________________________________________________

Harry