Still Picking Over Bush's Vietnam Service -- September 20, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for September 20, 2004

Still Picking Over Bush's Vietnam Service

CBS's big "scoop" about Bush's National Guard duty may have blown up in the network's face (Times reporter Jim Rutenberg says the network may finally admit to being misled) but the Times is still poking around the ashes of the Bush-Vietnam story.

A large front-page story on Monday, "Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time," by Sara Rimer (with reporting from Ralph Blumenthal and Raymond Bonner) begins: "Nineteen seventy-two was the year George W. Bush dropped off the radar screen. He abandoned his once-prized status as a National Guard pilot by failing to appear for a required physical. He sought temporary reassignment from the Texas Air National Guard to an Alabama unit but for six months did not show up for training. He signed on as an official in the losing campaign of a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, and even there he left few impressions other than as an amiable bachelor with a good tennis game and a famous father. 'To say he brought in a bunch of initiatives and bright ideas,' said a fellow campaign worker, Devere McLennan, 'no he didn't.'"

Rimer pushes hard, breezing by the wreckage of CBS News' forged "memos": "This year of inconsequence has grown increasingly consequential for President Bush because of persistent, unanswered questions about his National Guard service--why he failed to take his pilot's physical and whether he fulfilled his commitment to the Guard. If anything, those issues became still murkier this past week, with the controversy over the authenticity of four documents disclosed by CBS News and its program '60 Minutes' purporting to shed light on that Guard record. Still, a wider examination of his life in 1972, based on dozens of interviews and other documents released by the White House over the years, yields a portrait of a young man like many other young men of privilege in that turbulent time--entitled, unanchored and safe from combat, bouncing from a National Guard slot made possible by his family's prominence to a political job arranged through his father. In a speech on Tuesday at a National Guard convention, Mr. Bush said he was 'proud to be one of them,' and in his autobiography he writes that his service taught him respect for the chain of command. But a review of records shows that not only did he miss months of duty in 1972, but that he also may have been improperly awarded credit for service, making possible an early honorable discharge so he could turn his attention to a new interest: Harvard Business School."

Compare the aggression the Times brings to questions about Bush's Vietnam service (a part of his past he has not made part of his campaign) to the paper's treatment of Kerry's Swift Boat controversies, where the Times has spent more energy trying to discredit the "unsubstantiated" accusers than in actually digging out the truth about Kerry's service. This even though Kerry has made his service in Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign for president.

The Times' latest story piles on detail after unsubstantiated detail to little effect: "Payroll records released by the White House show that in addition to being paid for attending a drill in Alabama the last weekend in October, Mr. Bush was also paid for a weekend drill after the Blount election, on Nov. 11 and 12, and for meetings on Nov. 13 and 14. But there are no records from the 187th indicating that Mr. Bush, in fact, appeared on those days in October and November, and more than a dozen members of the unit from that era say they never saw him. The White House said last week that there were no records from the Alabama unit because Mr. Bush was still officially part of the Texas Guard. But Mr. Hodges, the former Texas commander, said the 187th 'should have a record of his drills.'"

At the end the Times brings in retired Army colonel Gerald Lechliter, "who has prepared an extensive analysis of Mr. Bush's National Guard record, described [retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Albert] Lloyd's memorandum as 'seemingly an attempt to whitewash Bush's record.' Mr. Lloyd declined comment last week. Mr. Lechliter, who describes himself as a political independent, also said that Mr. Bush was not entitled to 20 credits he received from Nov. 13, 1972, until July 19, 1973, because the service was being made up improperly. Mr. Lechliter also said that Mr. Bush should not have been paid for these sessions. 'That would appear to be a fraud,' he said in an interview last week."

Here's part of that analysis from "independent" Lechliter: "In 2000, Bush ran on bringing back 'dignity and honor to the White House (WH)' and being a 'compassionate conservative.' Since 9-11, he has wrapped himself in the flag to push forward a domestic agenda that is anything but compassionate and well to the right of center; embarked on a perilous new national security strategy of 'preemptive war' and invaded Iraq; and even has used the uniform to garner political support, the first for a President in my lifetime, although there have been others who had more illustrious military service."

For the rest of Rimer on the Bush-Vietnam controversy, click here.

Softening the Poll Blow for Kerry

The latest CBS/NYT poll shows Bush with a nine-point lead among likely voters, 50-41%. The headline to Saturday's lead story by Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder dutifully concedes Bush's lead, but tries to soften the blow for Kerry supporters: "Bush Opens Lead Despite Unease Voiced In Survey."

The opening lines don't exactly trumpet the news: "Senator John Kerry faces substantial obstacles in his bid to unseat President Bush, with voters saying he has not laid out a case for why he wants to be president and expressing strong concern about his ability to manage an international crisis, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. Less than seven weeks before Election Day, Americans continue to think that the nation is heading in the wrong direction and are distressed about how Mr. Bush has handled the economy. Yet the president, apparently lifted as much by what Mr. Kerry has done wrong as by what Mr. Bush has done right in the campaign, has an eight-point lead among registered voters, the poll found."

Nagourney and Elder find a reason behind Bush's rise: "Mr. Kerry's problems have apparently been deepened by the relentless attacks on his Vietnam War record by a group of Vietnam veterans supported by backers of Mr. Bush. Three-quarters of respondents said they were aware of the advertisements produced by the group, many of which involved accusations unsupported by official records; of those, 33 percent called the accusations 'mostly true.'

And is the Times trying to wean its reporters from using "unsubstantiated" to refer to the Swift Boat Veterans? Evidence is indirectly offered by the early version of that paragraph that appeared in the International Herald Tribune (the paper's international edition), which featured the "U" word: "The poll findings suggest that Kerry has suffered considerable damage after a summer in which he was the subject of mostly unsubstantiated attacks on his Vietnam war record…."

Notice that in the New York Times story itself, the word "unsubstantiated" is removed and replaced by a long phrase ("many of which involved accusations unsupported by official records") with a similar meaning.

For the rest of the poll analysis from Nagourney and Elder, click here.

LeDuff on Rodney King:
"Even Good Guys Make Mistakes."

For some reason, California-based reporter Charlie LeDuff profiles Rodney King, whose videotaped beating led to the trial and subsequent acquittal of the four police officers involved, a verdict that set off the 1992 Los Angeles riots that left 55 dead.

In LeDuff's sympathetic Sunday telling, Rodney King comes off as more like Martin Luther King: "By virtue of his troubled life and a single decent gesture, he is embedded in the American conscience….Even the most cynical observer had to pity him when he said that he, Rodney King, felt responsible for the riot; that he was the gas can that caused the deaths, the accelerant for the rage that engulfed Los Angeles when the white police officers were acquitted of his beating."

Almost halfway into the story, LeDuff notes King has been in and out of jail since the beating, but couches those arrests in a strange passive tense, as if King had little control over the forces that led him to jail: "Over the years, it has been a string of jail, rehab, hangers-on and lawyers. Mr. King lives with his brother and his adult daughter, and is close to his mother and his manager. It's an insular life. Mr. King, 39, has tried to stay out of the public eye, finding it difficult to live with the title of human punching bag. Still, he often finds himself the leading man of the police blotter. He has been arrested 11 times, for, among other things, spousal abuse, hit-and-run driving and being under the influence of PCP. He was also arrested for indecent exposure after parkgoers complained about a naked man jumping up and down on an ice chest."

LeDuff even asks King his opinion of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: "The man whose name is synonymous with police brutality was asked about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. 'That's brutality,' he said, pulling his cap over his eyes. 'That was cruel. But that's not what we stand for. I don't believe that's what we are. I know our past says different and it's been a struggle to get this far. But that kind of stuff takes us back.'"

LeDuff concludes: "There is a saying that carries through the jail cells of America: Every man has committed a felony. The difference between a good life and a wasted one can be attributed to luck and timing. And so Rodney King does not ask for sympathy, but for understanding. Even good guys make mistakes."

Eleven of them being arrest-worthy, apparently.

For the rest of LeDuff on Rodney King, click here.

• Abu Ghraib | Rodney King | Charlie LeDuff | Los Angeles Riots

"Tendentious" Fact-Checking at the Times

Monday's edition features an apparent first for the Times: A "Fact Check" feature on the campaign from David Rosenbaum. The first entry in this apparent series defends Kerry (no surprise) from an attack by Bush.

Under the headline "A Closer Look at Kerry's Record on Taxes," Rosenbaum notes: "At almost every campaign stop, President Bush accuses Senator John Kerry of having voted repeatedly for higher taxes on the middle class and of proposing more than $2 trillion in spending the country cannot afford. There is a kernel of truth in both statements. But like many charges the candidates exchange, they are exaggerated to the point of distortion."

After quoting Bush at an Ohio rally accusing Kerry of voting for higher taxes on income and Social Security for two decades, the Times runs its rebuttal under the presumptuous heading "The Facts."

Among some of Rosenbaum's apparently incontrovertible facts: "Mr. Kerry is less devoted to tax cuts than the president, and the Democrat has proposed a raft of new spending without showing explicitly how he would pay for it. But Mr. Bush exaggerates both points….Mr. Kerry could not support those elements without voting for the entire bill. He opposed the overall legislation, which awarded about 40 percent of the total tax cuts to the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers."

Even if true, that's a misleading way to look at tax cuts--any cut in the tax rate is going to return more dollars to the wealthy, since they pay far more dollars in taxes in the first place.

As of Monday morning, the online version of Rosenbaum's "fact check" included an amusing gaffe, apparently an editorial note that wasn't supposed to be published. It's italicized in the excerpt below:

"Mr. Furman said the rest of the new spending Mr. Kerry envisioned would be offset by spending reductions. Some of these savings are rather vague, like money saved from reducing corporate welfare tax cuts, OK? ‘corporate welfare’ sounds kinda tendentious closing tax loopholes and improving government efficiency. As a consequence, the president is probably justified in saying that all told, Mr. Kerry’s spending would exceed the revenues and spending cuts."

"Tendentious" is defined as "written or said to promote a cause; not impartial." Either Rosenbaum or the Times copy desk took that advice and changed the sentence in the final version, which reads: "Some of these savings are rather vague, like money saved from reducing corporate tax cuts, closing tax loopholes and improving government efficiency."

For the rest of Rosenbaum's "fact check" of Bush, click here.

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org