By Thomas Lang
Sometimes if you sit on the beach and focus your gaze on the middle distance, you can detect the swell of a wave about to crest. Yesterday, one came along that even a child could have spotted. In the past 24 hours, the Boston Globe, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, the Associated Press, and “60 Minutes II” all piled onto a story that most of them had left dormant last spring after a few desultory inquiries: the details of President Bush’s service in the Air National Guard.
It’s as if after the Republican convention, editors all over snapped out of their summer trance and said to themselves, “Hey — we left a lot of strings untied on that story that we poked around at last April. It’s time for a revisit.”
The Boston Globe started the big splash yesterday morning with a multi-bylined piece edited and authored by Walter Robinson, the reporter who first raised questions in 2000 about President Bush’s National Guard record in Alabama over 30 years ago. “A Globe reexamination of the records,” Robinson wrote yesterday, “found that Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation” on two separate occasions during his term of service. The Globe turned to two routine documents that Bush signed, one in 1968 when he first joined and another in 1973, as he was set to begin Harvard business school, each of which codified Bush’s commitment to perform certain duties. Based on military records, the Globe contends that Bush failed to fulfill his duties “for one six-month period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months in 1973.”
Alas, the Globe does little to explain why these revelations are coming to light now. The explanation offered in the piece states “The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice.” And yesterday when asked by Editor and Publisher why the story was published in September when these documents were available in February, Robinson replied, “We publish as soon as we have the story, irrespective of what it is. If we had this in June, we would have published in June.” Robinson added that hundreds of documents had been released last February and that it took time to comb through them and parse the military-speak in which they were written.
Yesterday morning the Globe’s big sister, the New York Times, also addressed the subject, via a Nicholas Kristof column. Kristof related an interview with Bob Mintz, a commercial pilot who served in the military from 1959 to 1984 and also a member of the Alabama guard unit that Bush requested a transfer to in 1972. In sum, Mintz told Kristof that after hearing about Bush’s impending arrival he went out of his way to look for him because he thought they could party together. Despite a resolute search, he never spotted the elusive Bush on the premises, he said.
Kristof asked Mintz why he chose now to give his first ever interview with a national news organization. Mintz replied, “After a lot of soul-searching, I just feel it’s my duty to stand up and do the right thing.” However, as the Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum pointed out yesterday, Mintz’s story was first reported last February by the Memphis Flyer‘s Jason Baker. More to the point, what Kristof did not tell his readers yesterday (although the Times did so today) is that Mintz is the featured character in a new attack ad, produced by a group of Democrats, Texans for Truth, that is to begin airing Monday in five swing states that have lost high numbers of soldiers in Iraq. In that ad, Mintz repeats his charges that then-Lieutenant Bush was the Nowhere Man at the Alabama air base in the early 1970’s.
Then, last night, 60 Minutes II joined the fray, with testimony from another actor in the drama who had previously been notoriously press-shy. That would be Ben Barnes, former Texas speaker of the house, Democrat, and Kerry fundraiser, who spoke out about his long-ago efforts to secure President Bush a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard, bumping him ahead a waiting list that the New York Times once said had as many as 100,000 names on it. Barnes apologized for his actions, telling Dan Rather, “I was a young, ambitious politician doing what I thought that was acceptable, that was important to make friends.”
To begin the interview, Barnes offered his own version of better-late-than-never: “I’ve had hundreds of phone calls of people wanting to know the story. I’ve been quoted and misquoted. And the reason I’m here today, I really want to tell the story, and I want to tell it one time and get it behind us.” Barnes had previously provided this account in a sworn deposition in 1999. Because of this, the real news made last night by “60 Minutes II” was the revelation of personal memos kept by one Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush’s squadron commander in Texas. These memos painted a picture of a military man under pressure at the time to “sugarcoat” Bush’s records. Furthermore, in one instance, Killian wrote that he suspended Bush from flight status for his “failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standard” and his failure to take an annual physical. The White House previously stated that Bush was suspended only because of his failure to take the annual physical.
Following the “60 Minutes II” interview, the White House provided copies of two of the documents shown on the broadcast.
While all those stories depended on “news” unearthed from boxes of records in possession of the news organizations or interviews secured by their reporters, the Associated Press has spent the week reporting a spate of documents released (or not released) by the Department of Defense under a Freedom of Information Act and subsequent lawsuit filed by the AP. On Sunday, the AP’s Matt Kelley filed a story based on discussions with outside experts and a study of National Guard regulations. According to that article, missing from Bush’s official military record are five separate reports on Bush’s service, including mandatory investigations that followed anytime a serviceman missed a medical examination. Then Tuesday, out of nowhere, the Pentagon “belatedly uncovered” 17 previously unreleased documents in Bush’s file. For the most part these documents did not move the story; however, the new records did confirm that Bush missed duty in 1972. (Despite the dump, none of the documents, as the AP pointed out, were the on the AP’s list of the missing five.)
Today, several papers were quick to credit the press with, as the Los Angeles Times wrote, “put[ting] the White House on the defensive in a campaign that previously focused on Kerry’s service in Vietnam and his subsequent antiwar activities” None that we read asked the more pertinent question of themselves or their colleagues.
Why the reawakening? To be frank, we don’t know. But our educated guess is that part of may be the reflexive post-Labor Day Syndrome that always grips the press in a Campaign year — “O-kay, summer’s over, there’s just 8 weeks until election day, let’s get serious.” And part of it may be remorse over the press’ failure to promptly get to the bottom of the August controversy that swirled about the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Stay tuned, dear readers. Tracking the press performance on this story in days to come will be as interesting as tracking way the politics of it all unfolds.
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.