6. EXCLUSIVE: Bush's Tactical Lying by Jim Moore
by Jim Moore on October 30, 2004 - 12:24pm.
Democrats.com EXCLUSIVE
Bush's Tactical Lying
By James C. Moore
Author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush
Presidential

Being wrong is not very gratifying. Still, I had hoped I was mistaken
about George W. Bush. But all of the evidence indicated my president was
a liar, a man skilled at deception and changing the evidence to
construct alternate realities.
I had been interviewing and writing about Mr. Bush consistently for over
15 years and had spoken with him on the record many times prior to his
political ascension. I gave him the benefit of believing what he told
me. This is what journalists do.
But they also verify. And when I began the business of corroborating and
trying to check out George W. Bush and his various narratives, I began
to have grave doubts. I wrote about them in two books: Bush's Brain: How
Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, and Bush's War for
Re-election: Iraq, the White House, and the People. I had evidence,
documentation, interviews, narratives, and everything a writer needs to
construct a story line. But no one who knew the exact truth from the
Bush perspective, including Mr. Bush, ever agreed to go on the record.
My work, as a result, was often dismissed by the Bush team as "leftist,"
and a specious political attack, even though I had been working in
mainstream journalism for over 25 years.
My doubts are gone now, and yours should be, too, as a result of a fine
piece of journalism by my indefatigable friend Russ Baker. Baker, who
writes frequently for various national publications, landed a long
interview with Mickey Herskowitz, originally retained by Mr. Bush to
write the pre-presidential biography in 1999. Herskowitz, a long time
friend of the Bush family, built a successful career as a ghostwriter
for the famous. And it is Herskowitz who got the unvarnished truth from
George W. Bush during a series of long interviews.
Recently, Russ Baker got Herskowitz to sit down to a taped interview and
talk about what Bush had related when they began work on the Bush
biography in 1999. And, according to Herskowitz, almost everything the
public thinks it knows about Bush is wrong.
For 10 years, I have been trying to prove Mr. Bush has been lying and
obfuscating about his time in the Texas and Alabama Air National Guard.
Russ Baker's interview with Herskowitz proved I was right. As I traveled
on the 2000 presidential campaign, I grew weary of hearing Mr. Bush
claim that he had reported for duty in Alabama and then, in his
biography, A Charge to Keep, he claimed he continued to fly with his
Texas unit for many years.
Unless our president is pathological, he knew this was not true. I never
found a record to prove Lt. Bush ever reported to duty in Alabama, yet
the magnificent research work of Paul Lukasiak proved that Mr. Bush got
paid. In fact, the director of human resources for the Alabama National
Guard, Kenneth Lott, admitted to the Los Angeles Times that he
never processed paperwork for Lt. Bush, which meant the Texas transfer
pilot never did a day of duty. Further complicating the story, Bush's
commander in Houston, Rufus Martin told the paper he had "no personnel
contact" for the Alabama unit Lt. Bush was supposed to join.
Lukasiak's work, a significant public service, shows that Martin should
have never signed pay vouchers for Lt. Bush without approved paperwork
from Alabama. But he did. And Lt. Bush got paid. This is particularly
surprising given what Mr. Bush told Herskowitz, and what Russ Baker
reported. He said he left Houston's guard unit under "murky
circumstances" and never flew again.
I had made this assertion many times, but never had proof until Baker's
reporting confirmed what the missing and available records had been
telling me. My own research and writing indicated the future president
was given a free pass to simply leave for Alabama and not report to any
kind of duty ever again. And that's precisely how Mr. Bush related the
story to Herskowitz back in 1999.
During the campaign in 2000, a number of reporters on the press plane
were given shoddy documentation, torn and annotated with hand-written
notes, as an attempt to prove Mr. Bush reported for duty in Alabama. His
own memory, though, was faulty. He said he showed up for training a few
times and made up some days.
There was, however, never a solitary soul who was able to claim they saw
the Lt. at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. No wonder. After
hearing what Mr. Bush told Hersokowitz, there's no doubt he never did
anything more in Alabama beyond party and show up late for work with a
hangover at the campaign headquarters of Winton Blount.
Through Baker, Herskowitz has verified what a number of sources told me
off the record in Alabama: Bush never talked about the guard and brought
neither uniforms nor equipment of any kind with him for his time in
Montgomery. The guard was no longer a part of his life. I wrote in
various essays and my books that Lt. Bush never did another day of duty,
much less spend time flying, after he left Texas for Alabama in May of
1972. Herskowitz's testimony to Baker corroborates what I reported from
the files available in the Bush Military Personnel Records Jacket.
Baker's interview also corroborates my own investigation of the run up
to the war with Iraq. In both of my books, I used all available evidence
to make the case that the Bush administration, indeed, the Bush
campaign, had been thinking about Iraq long before 9/11. Bush's chief
political advisor Karl Rove, along with Vice President Dick Cheney and
the now-household names of Wolfowitz and Perle and Rumsfeld, had all
been lusting after Iraqi oil since the 1994 essay published by the
Project for the New American Century. They wanted to project American
power into the Middle East; and toppling Saddam, beyond acquiring Iraq's
oil reserves, also provided a number of domestic political positives for
Mr. Bush. Herskowitz told Baker that Bush was interested in a war
because it would help him politically and that he would use that
political capital to win passage of his legislative agenda.
Herskowitz's words prove that our president is a reckless cowboy - a man
who views war and conflict as a great game and does not think of the
families he has destroyed to acquire "political capital." During the
course of interviewing and doing research, I spent several days talking
to Wade Lieseke of Tonopah, Nevada, whose adopted son was killed in the
opening days of the Iraqi invasion at the Battle of Al Nasiriyah.
Lieske, who was a door gunner for two tours of duty in Vietnam, told me,
"The elitists who start these wars don't give a damn about those of us
who have to fight them. We're just cannon fodder. And all they do is lie
to us. It's just about greed and power and ego." I thought Lieseke was a
bit cynical but I understood his anger after losing a son he loved in a
meaningless, hopeless endeavor. After reading what Herskowitz told Russ
Baker, I think Wade Lieseke was restrained and I was, at age 52,
strangely naïve.
The Herskowitz interview with Baker is more evidence that the Bush
organization is willing to recreate history, alter evidence, destroy
documentation, and mislead anyone who is seeking the facts about their
power. When Lt. Col. Bill Burkett told me that he had witnessed the Bush
guard files being purged at Camp Mabry in Austin, I had a great deal of
difficulty giving his narrative any credence. However, when I began
calling his associates to inquire about Burkett's character, they all
flattered him with compliments for integrity and honesty, including his
commanding officer Gen. Danny James. James later called Burkett a liar
after I related the story of the purging. I included Burkett's narrative
in my second book because it fit with the facts of what I was able to
prove through my own research. Documents, both missing and available,
pointed toward corroboration of Burkett's claims. After reading
Herskowitz's quotes in Russ Baker's piece, it becomes abundantly clear
that the Bush dynasty is willing to do whatever is necessary to
reconstruct a more favorable history. They give credibility to
conspiracy theorists.
The way Herskowitz was treated for trying to write the truth comports
with what Col. Burkett told me about the National Guard file cleansing.
Karen Hughes, a Bush confidant and counselor, told lies about
Herskowitz, claiming he had habits that interfered with his writing and
that he had missed deadlines. Neither was true. According to what he
told Baker, he'd already written six chapters and had the finish line in
sight. Hughes, though, knows how to reconstruct facts to suit her hero.
She was, after all, part of the plan Col. Burkett overheard presented to
Gen. Danny James by then-Gov. Bush's Chief of Staff Joe Allbaugh. The
goal was to "remove embarrassments" from the Governor's file. What Mr.
Bush told Herskowitz was another embarrassment when it was written, so
Herskowitz was fired because he was unwilling to help the Bush cronies
build their false reality.
Our default position as Americans is to trust our president.
Unfortunately, we cannot do this any longer. The administration of
George W. Bush proves we must be skeptical. Our president looked us in
the eye on national television and told us that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction and was a grave and gathering threat; and he
did this as though it had just occurred to him to confront the Iraqi
dictator. We saw a man acting out a charade, a president who has a
facility for a selective recall of his own past and the necessary
psychological tricks to convince himself it was okay to lie to us
because he was lying for a good reason. Russ Baker's fine journalism has
done us all a great favor by getting as close to Mr. Bush's thinking as
anyone has ever done.
Nonetheless, we failed in our responsibilities as citizens. We let Mr.
Bush get away with this. And we ought to be ashamed. Now, we need to do
something about our own mistakes.

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In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the
silence of our friends.
- Martin Luther King Jr.