In joining the Texas Air National Guard, Bush had only a remote chance of being called over to Vietnam - only 15,000 of the more than 1 million Guard and reserves members were sent to fight in Southeast Asia during the entire conflict. He denied he joined to dodge the draft, saying he did so to "become a pilot." Yet, the fact remained that when Bush was accepted into the Guard, the waiting list was lengthy. "We were full," said retired Major Gen. Thomas Bishop, Texas' adjutant general in the late 1960s. 1
So how did Bush get around the waiting list? His father simply called Houston oilman and long-time friend Sidney Adger, who called Ben Barnes, the former Texas House speaker. Barnes called Brig. Gen. James Rose, head of the Texas National Guard, and Rose called Brig. Gen. Walter "Buck" Staudt, his commanding officer of the unit at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas. 2
"I was a young, ambitious politician, doing what I thought was acceptable," Barnes said during CBS' "60 Minutes" news program in 2004. "I would describe it as preferential treatment. I was maybe determining life or death, and that's not a power that I want to have. I've thought about it an awful lot. You walk through the Vietnam memorial, and I tell you, you'll think about it a long time." 3
Bush's Guard unit was known as the "Champagne Squad" due to the number of sons of the American elite in it, including the sons of former Texas Gov. John Connally and former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. Several people who knew Bush then said he experimented with marijuana and cocaine during his six-year Guard stint. "You have to remember that George was just living for the moment," said a former girlfriend. "He never dreamed or schemed of running for governor, let alone president." 4
Going AWOL
Bush was supposed to serve six years in the unit, but he didn't meet that obligation, according to his own military records. He performed no service for six months in 1972 and three months in 1973, while receiving a six-month penalty before getting an honorable discharge.
"He broke his contract with the United States government – without any adverse consequences," said ret. U.S. Army Col. Gerald A Lechliter. "And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to happen. He was a pilot. It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard." 5
Bush's last physical with the military was in May 1971, and he failed to show up for a physical the following year. Major Gen. Paul A. Weaver Jr., who once headed the Air National Guard, said, "There is no excuse for that. Aviators just don't miss their flight physicals....It appears that nobody wanted to hold him accountable." 6
As Time Magazine wrote, "Bush insists he did his duty in Alabama, but the records - and many memories - don't confirm it." 7
During part of that missing time in 1972, Bush moved to Alabama to work on the losing U.S. senate campaign of Republican Winton "Red" Blount. About the same time as the Watergate break-in, Bush, whose title was campaign coordinator, performed some dirty political tricks of his own. Among his acts was to distribute campaign materials that included a doctored tape of a radio debate that distorted the Democratic senator's position on bussing, making him look like he favored bussing. He also tried to unfairly link the Democrat to liberal U.S. presidential candidate George McGovern.
Co-workers on the Blount campaign said Bush liked to sneak out of a restaurant and bar in Birmingham for "a joint of marijuana or into the bathroom for a line of cocaine," according to Kitty Kelley. C. Murphy Archibald, Blount's nephew, said Bush would also talk about how as a Yale student, police in New Haven, Conn., stopped him "all the time" for drunk driving but would always let him go once he said his name.
"He would laugh uproariously as though there was something funny about this," Archibald said. "To me, that was pretty memorable because here he is, a number of years out of college, talking about this to people he didn't know. He just struck me as a guy who really had an idea of himself as a child of privilege, that he wasn't operating by the same rules." 8
Bush's nickname at the time was the "Texas Souffle" because many Alabamans thought he "looked good on the outside but was full of hot air," Archibald said. 9
The cocaine rumors plagued Bush even when he entered his 40s, during which he supposedly swore off booze and drugs. Sharon Bush, an ex-wife of W. brother Neil, told Kelley, her book editor, and her publicist that Bush snorted cocaine at Camp David "not once, but many times," while his father was president. While Sharon Bush later denied that, Kelley and her book's officials said Sharon Bush had been pressured to take back her story.
"This denial has already been utterly discredited by a third party to the meeting at which Mrs. Bush made the statements," officials with Kelley's publisher, Doubleday, said in a statement. "Doubleday and Kitty Kelley, author of The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, firmly uphold the accuracy and veracity of reporting on this topic. Further, Doubleday and Ms. Kelley affirm that Mrs. Bush was read her comments on the day following the meeting in a telephone conversation, lasting over an hour, that was witnessed by Random House Vice President Peter Gethers - that those comments included her remarks on cocaine use at Camp David - and that she once again agreed that these comments were true." 10
And while the Bush White House and others resorted to more dirty tricks to attack Kelley and her book after it came out in 2004, even spreading undocumented rumors that she had a "relationship" with her publicist, many writers and reviewers vouched for Kelley's credibility. Ted Widmer of the New York Times Book Review wrote that the book had "weight, in every sense, which is why she is feared by her subjects." David Talbot of Salon said the book was "more heavily researched and documented than Bush advocates allege." Lou Dobbs of CNN called it "an extraordinary read....great history and a great story told."
Drinking and driving
During his younger adult days, Bush was known to not only drink and take drugs but encourage underage youth to partake. One woman said in an email interview that he tried to get her to drink beer while at the Hemisfair festival in 1968 in San Antonio when she was only 16. Another time in 1972, Bush drank with his then 15-year-old brother, Marvin, and crashed his car into a neighbor's garbage can, noisily dragging it down the street. He then engaged in a shouting match with his father, and the two had to be separated by Barbara Bush.
And in 1976, after Bush took another underage family member, sister Dorothy, who was only 17, on a drinking binge, he was arrested for drunk driving near the family compound in Kennebunkport. One source said he was snorting cocaine at the time, as well.
There were even reports that Bush impregnated at least one woman during his single days, and his family paid to have an abortion for her. Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt said on CNN's Crossfire that he had four affidavits from friends of the woman, and she had married an FBI agent who zealously protected her. The abortion at Twelve Oaks Medical Center in Houston was executed before the passage of Roe v. Wade and thus was a crime, Flynt said. 11
A Texas attorney, who met Bush, said he was "known to be into drugs" and related a telling meeting in a Midland bar in 1973. "George was staggering drunk and asked my [female] friend to fly to Ruidosa with him," the attorney wrote in an email. "My friend replied to him, 'No, thank you.' George stuck his chest out and said, 'Do you know who I am?' To which my friend replied, 'No, should I?' He smirked and said as he walked off, 'It's your fucking loss, babe.' After W. left the table I told her who he was and she said, 'What a jerk!' And I guess that summed up my thoughts of him."
When the attorney first heard Bush was thinking about running for president, he laughed. "I never dreamed that with his record as governor here in Texas, his crooked business dealings, his inability to even run a business, and his record of drinking and drugs in his past he would even become a presidential candidate," he said. "I still see him as a spoiled kid who has to have his way and is not above deception and manipulation to gain what he wants."
After Bush failed to get accepted into the University of Texas at Austin law school, he was successful in obtaining entrance into Harvard to work on a master's in business administration in 1973. Harvard macroeconomics professor Yoshi Tsurumi said Bush told him he had "lots of help" to get accepted to Harvard. Tsurumi also said Bush told him, "My dad fixed it so that I got into the Guard. I got an early discharge to come here." 12
Rove finds way around Vietnam
Even though Rove did not openly oppose the Vietnam War, he somehow didn't find it over to Vietnam himself. Fellow high school debate team member Mark Gustavson, who later became a Salt Lake City attorney, said Rove's opposition to the war was mostly over tactics, as he considered it a "political skirmish that was not being properly administered." Others said Rove opposed the government dictating that young people had to perform military service. 13
While he registered for Selective Service as a senior at Olympus High, Rove used student deferments to avoid being drafted like many of his peers. He was first classified as 1S-H, which got him out of military service due to being in high school. Rove drew the number 84 in the draft lottery after graduating from high school in 1969 and received a student deferment when he enrolled at the University of Utah that fall.
While at the Utah college, where he joined a fraternity and volunteered for the Republican Party, Rove impressed J.D. Williams, dean of the political science department, as passionate and sharp. But Williams later noted Rove's mean-spirited, underhanded methods, such as painting Democrats as undemocratic simply for disagreeing with Republicans. "The issue that has permeated [Rove's] whole career has been his ethical standards in his use of political power," Williams said. 14
Rove could not be ethical about abiding by the rules of his deferment, which stipulated that college students had to remain full-time students. He somehow kept his deferment for part of 1971 as a part-time student. But he could not fool draft officials for too long. In the fall of 1971, after Rove transferred to the University of Maryland in College Park, he was notified by the Salt Lake draft board that his student deferment had been revoked because he did not notify the board of the transfer.
By December 1971, Rove was classified as 1-A, which meant he was prime draft material. But he was never called, and in April 1972, Rove was reclassified as 1-H, which effectively got him off the hook. "That classification was granted to a lot of people at the wind-down of the Vietnam War," Selective Service spokesman Pat Schuback told The Salt Lake Tribune. "Large numbers of people were reclassified." 15
Later after getting married, Rove divorced his first wife, Valerie Wainwright, a Houston socialite, which broke the Republican "family values" code of honor. That it occurred a mere three years after their marriage in the late 1970s was even more horrendous in the eyes of the right-wing.
There were reports that Rove cheated on her, and it was a loveless union. During a counseling session, Wainwright suddenly stood and said before leaving, "I never loved you." 16
Cheney dodges Vietnam
Between 1963 and 1966, Cheney somehow obtained five deferments to keep from serving in Vietnam, though he later had no problem sending other men to similar wars. Some deferments were due to education, and one was related to the birth of a daughter. Each time it looked like Cheney had a better chance of being drafted, he did something to lower the odds, such as enroll in graduate school, get married, and father a child.
The latter child, Elizabeth, came exactly nine months and two days after the Selective Service revamped rules that protected married men without children from the draft, wrote author John Nichols. "Dick Cheney left nothing to chance," Nichols wrote. "He applied for 3A status [which protected married men with dependents from the draft] immediately, receiving it on January 19, 1966, when [wife] Lynne was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy." 17
When Cheney turned 26 in 1967 and was safe from the draft, he stopped pursuing graduate studies to focus on a political career. Cheney later told a Washington Post reporter, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." Yet, in 1989, Cheney lied and cheated in a Senate confirmation hearing after H.W. Bush named him secretary of defense by saying he would have been happy to serve if he had only been called, but for some reason, the draft board never called him. He repeated the lie to the Post reporter. "I don't regret the decisions I made," Cheney said. "I complied fully with all the requirements of the statutes, registered with the draft when I turned 18. Had I been drafted, I would have been happy to serve." 18
Among Cheney's priorities in the 1960s was amassing political power for selfish gain through underhanded ways. One way he accomplished the goal was kissing the butt of Rumsfeld, who was then considered a more up-and-coming politician in Republican circles than Cheney. After Nixon appointed Rumsfeld to lead the Office of Economic Opportunity and become a presidential assistant with a White House office in 1969, Cheney seized the day. As an aide to Wisconsin congressman Bill Steiger, Cheney rifled through Steiger's papers to find a note from Rumsfeld asking for advice in his new position. Cheney wrote a memo to Steiger on how to run a federal agency, and Steiger passed it on to Rumsfeld. A few weeks later, Rumsfeld offered Cheney a job as his special assistant. 19
During Watergate, Cheney and Rumsfeld publicly distanced themselves from Nixon, while secretly offering support. Rumsfeld offered to become a foot soldier to back Nixon. Cheney and Bruce Bradley, who gave Cheney a job at his investment firm after Watergate, debated the issue, with Bradley believing that Nixon violated laws and Cheney thinking otherwise. "He claimed it was just a political ploy by the president's enemies," Bradley said. 20
Rumsfeld and Cheney avoided Watergate fallout and became key players in Gerald Ford's administration, with Rumsfeld chief of staff and Cheney deputy chief of staff. They worked to turn Ford "into their instrument" and "staged a palace coup," according to a Rolling Stone article. "They pushed Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to look for another job, and remove Henry Kissinger from his post as national security adviser," wrote T.D. Allman. 21
Cheney and Rumsfeld undermined Kissinger by trying to inflate relatively minor incidents into crises, such as criticizing Kissinger's handling of the Vietnam withdrawal. Cheney got into shouting matches with Rockefeller and undermined him with reports to Ford that Rockefeller was driving voters to support Reagan for president in 1976. Cheney even played petty tricks on Rockefeller, such as getting sound technicians to turn down amplifiers when Rockefeller spoke at some Republican events. 22
Ford also replaced Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger with Rumsfeld at the latter's urging, and Cheney became chief of staff. In a 1975 meeting, Cheney supported an FBI investigation into New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who had written about U.S. submarines spying in Soviet waters. He also wanted Hersh's "apartment" searched. Government intelligence on Hersh was so bad that they weren't aware he owned a house. At the same meeting, some rightly worried about whether they would "get hit with violating the First Amendment to the Constitution." 23
Cheney, H.W. Bush, and Rumsfeld were among those cited in documents that Ford authorized or considered illegal wiretaps of U.S. citizens. The situation led to Congress passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. Bush, then director of the CIA, complained in a 1976 memo that some major communications companies were unwilling to install the wiretaps without a judge's approval. The refusal "seriously affects the capabilities of the intelligence community," Bush wrote. Rumsfeld and Cheney also opposed judges' oversight in the matter. 24
Cheney became campaign manager for Ford's 1976 presidential campaign, and Republican insiders blamed Cheney for blunders like dumping Rockefeller that they thought cost Ford the election. In 1978, Cheney carpet-bagged back to Wyoming and was elected to a U.S. House of Representatives seat to replace resigning Teno Roncalio. Cheney was not above faking a campaign committee called Cardiacs for Cheney to gain sympathy votes after he had a heart attack. Cheney claimed to write a letter to supporters from his sickbed that he was giving up smoking and would continue the campaign because it gave him a "sense of purpose." 25
In his five terms in Congress, Cheney amassed one of the most far-right voting records, voting against making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday, against extending the Civil Rights Act, against the creation of the U.S. Department of Education, against funding Head Start and the Veterans Administration, against the Safe Drinking Water Act. He also supported Reagan's veto of a bill to impose economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa, opposed releasing Nelson Mandela from jail, and was the Reagan-Bush administration's chief defender in Congress of the illegal Iran-contra scheme. Cheney even voted to keep special bullets that more easily wounded police officers legal.
Former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth called him "the most partisan politician I've ever met." Cheney's ugly votes against civil rights and the environment were "parts of complex deals aimed at enhancing his own power," said John Perry Barlow, who campaigned for Cheney in Wyoming. 26
Bush cheats investors
After obtaining his MBA from Harvard, W. Bush returned to Texas and started his own oil company, Arbusto Energy, in 1977. He attracted many relatives and family friends to invest but produced little in return.
Arbusto almost went bust in the early 1980s and was only kept afloat by a $1 million cash infusion by family friend Philip Uzielli, the college roommate of H.W. Bush political aide James Baker III. Uzielli received 10 percent of the stock of Arbusto, and the company was soon renamed Bush Exploration to attempt to capitalize on the Bush name. But by 1984, Arbusto-Bush Exploration had raised $47 million from investors and only returned $1.5 million, according to federal records. 27
In effect, Bush had cheated investors. One family friend, Ina Schnell said the Bush's were "real hustlers." 28
W.'s company was bought in 1984 by another Texas energy company, Spectrum 7 Energy Corp., owned by Cincinnati investors and Republican players William O. DeWitt Jr. and Mercer Reynolds III. DeWitt, another Yale alum, and Reynolds later helped Bush attract the group of investors that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989. The president of Spectrum - yet another Bush friend named Paul Rea - later admitted that Spectrum was more interested in Bush's "name recognition" than his company and thought he was someone who "immediately gets in the door to talk to investors." 29
Once again, Bush was not being rewarded for his business expertise, but for his family name that had little to do with him.
In 1986, after Spectrum floundered again under CEO Bush, Dallas-based Harken Energy Corp. purchased Spectrum 7 and hired Bush, who became a member of the board of directors with a consultant’s annual salary of about $100,000, with more than $500,000 worth of stock. This led to several obvious cases of business cheating.
Between 1986 and 1993, Bush made four illegal stock trades that were not reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as required by law. The biggest came in 1990, after Bush learned in a board meeting that Harken was having some financial problems and was about to restate its earnings. Bush used this inside information to illegally sell 60 percent of his Harken stock, making $848,560. Just one week later, Harken posted a quarterly loss of more than $23 million, and the stock slid. Bush did not report his stock sale until eight months after it was due.
Some accused Bush of insider trading, but the timing was good for such a move by Bush since his father happened to be president of the U.S. by that time. The SEC, chaired by Richard Breeden, a former aide to H.W. Bush appointed to that position by the latter, did not even question W. Bush in its investigation and let him off the hook without as much as a token fine. But someone at the SEC had some misgivings, as the 1993 report on the investigation concluded that the lack of a fine should not be "construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated." 30
Questions were also later raised about the deal Bush brokered to buy the Texas Rangers. For one, Bush used Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberrote to bring in Texas businessmen Richard Rainwater and Edward Rose III, who essentially bought the team. Bush's stake in the Rangers was a mere 1.8 percent, or $606,000, most of which he borrowed from a local bank. The rest of the $86 million purchase price was put up by Rainwater, Rose, and others.
The $191 million Ballpark in Arlington deal in the early 1990s was another questionable scheme that at least bordered on cheating. For every dollar Bush and his partners put into the ballpark they took out more than $2 from local taxpayers, and the private owners eventually owned the park through a sweetheart deal that had them paying far less than what the stadium was worth. The new development around the complex Bush and others promised had not materialized a decade after the ballpark opened. 31
But Bush and friends made out like bandits when they sold the team to Bush family donor Tom Hicks. Bush himself turned his $606,000, mostly-borrowed investment into $15 million. And he later rewarded former Arlington Mayor Richard Greene, who helped pass the ballpark taxpayers scam, by appointing him as an EPA administrator. Greene, of course, knew little about environmental policies and mainly worked to get rid of regulations that protected against pollution.
Another cheating aspect of the ballpark case was how Bush & Co. took people's land through court battles involving the legal concept of eminent domain to build adjacent parking lots. Bucky Fanning, who lost a 10-acre farm that way, said Bush "stole my property....All Bush cared about was the money." His mother, Maree Fanning, put it this way, "If I saw him today, I'd say, 'Bite my ass.'" Bush had the audacity to claim he brokered the deal so he could say he "delivered something" when he ran for governor of Texas. 32
A more humorous example of Bush misrepresenting himself was how he ordered baseball cards with his photo placed on them as if he was an actual ballplayer. He often passed them out at games, and many would wind up on the floor of ballpark restrooms.
During his time as part owner to the Rangers in the early 1990s, Bush was placed on the board of Caterair, an airline food company owned by the Carlyle Group. Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein said in a speech to the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association in 2003 that Bush did little but tell dirty jokes during board meetings. Rubenstein added that Bush wouldn't make a list of the top 25 million people he would have suggested for U.S. president. 33
Laura not even ticketed after running stop sign and killing boyfriend
In 1977, Bush met Laura Welch in Midland, marrying her only three months after their first meeting. A librarian and only daughter of a prosperous businessman, Welch was also used to not being held accountable for her actions.
At the age of 17, a few weeks before John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Welch ran a stop sign and struck the vehicle driven by 17-year-old Michael Douglas, killing her reported "boyfriend" instantly. Despite running through a stop sign and striking Douglas' car at 50 miles per hour, charges were not filed against the future First Lady. She was not even given a ticket, and parts of the police report were blacked out. The police investigation was promptly closed, despite that being the second fatal accident at that intersection in the previous year. 34
Welch apparently wasn't above breaking a few rules in her youth. At SMU, she not only smoked marijuana but "sold dope," Robert Nash, a public relations executive, told Kelley. Nash later told The New York Times he was only repeating a rumor and had no first-hand knowledge of the dealing. Others confirmed Laura at least smoked pot at times. 35
Soon after marrying, the Bush's honeymoon was spent on the campaign trail as W. ran for Congress to represent a West Texas district. Among his dirty tricks was to claim that Social Security would be "bankrupt in 10 years," even though he gave no sound economic research to back up the claim. That issue would come to the forefront continually as Bush thought Social Security was a government giveaway that harmed wealthy people. 36
After one speech on the campaign trail, Laura Bush told her new spouse that it was lacking. Bush became so mad he risked injury to them both and violated laws against reckless driving by slamming the car into the garage wall. His wife got the message: Don't criticize me, just be a good Stepford wife. 37
Even after his supposed halt to drinking in 1986, Bush still did drugs on occasion, according to Sharon Bush, the ex-wife of Neil Bush. George W. and Marvin "did coke at Camp David when the father was president and not just once, either," Sharon Bush told author Kitty Kelley. 38
On a tape by a Christian advisor, Doug Wead, Bush all-but admitted to smoking marijuana, saying he wouldn't answer the marijuana questions "because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried." He also said he hadn't denied doing cocaine. 39
And as president, many noticed that Bush seemed like he was on something. Reporting on a rare Bush press conference in 2003, Washington Post media critic Tom Shales wrote, "The president may have been ever so slightly medicated." 40
Reports on extramarital affairs
Through the years of his marriage to Laura, some reports cropped up about extramarital affairs. During Bush's 1994 campaign for Texas governor, a woman appeared in Austin saying she slept with George W. in Midland. Peck Young, an Austin political consultant, said some "intelligence types" convinced the woman that "it was better to turn tricks in Midland than to stop breathing....She left town abruptly." Bush "seemed to be protected by some invisible mechanism....and the speculation has been for years that that mechanism was daddy's old retainers from the [CIA]," Peck added. 41
During the 2000 presidential campaign, the National Enquirer reported how a 30-something health club partner and former Playboy model, Tammy Phillips, was shopping a story about having an affair with Bush when he was governor in the late 1990s. In a story in which even that tabloid acted like it didn't believe her, Phillips termed the liaisons "simply sex....It was the cheapest relationship you can imagine." Phillips, however, stuck by her story, even filing a lawsuit against the Enquirer for publishing the story despite an apparent agreement to get her written permission. 42
Once in the White House, Bush was accused by some of inappropriate behavior that approached infidelity. Linden von Eichel told Kelley that Bush was "hitting" on her and the wife of John Kluge, Metromedia's chairman, during a Library of Congress event. Von Eichel revealed more incidents of cheating, saying Bush told her that his wife read a poem during a library event that she claimed was written by W. about missing her during her trip to France. Bush admitted he didn’t write it. 43
Then, the author was the last writer to interview Margie Schoedinger, a Texas woman who filed a sexual assault lawsuit against George W. Bush in December 2002 before she turned up dead less than a year later. "I am still trying to prosecute [the lawsuit]," Schoedinger, a 38-year-old African-American woman who lived in the Houston suburb of Missouri City, told me in July 2003. "I want to get this matter settled and go on with my life."
Schoedinger said she was surprised the case wasn't covered more because "it is true......People have to be accountable for what they do, and that's why I'm pursuing it."
To be sure, Schoedinger's accusations - which include being drugged and sexually assaulted numerous times by Bush and other men purporting to be FBI agents - were bizarre and hard for most people to believe. But her story fit in with those told by a growing number of people who say they were used as guinea pigs or whatever by members of the CIA or another U.S. agency that wanted to test out the latest mind-controlling drug or just have a strange form of release.
However, the case terminated in September 2003, when Schoedinger was found dead in her home. The Houston Chronicle wrote a bare-bones obituary that stated only that Schoedinger "expired" on Sept. 22, 2003, and her burial was at Houston Memorial Gardens. This writer called the Harris County Medical Examiner's office, and a clerk said the cause of death was a "suicide" by a "gunshot wound to the head."
Using a gun to commit suicide is predominantly executed by males, according to psychiatrists and other sources like pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co. Women are more likely to kill themselves by overdosing on drugs, although the number of gunshot suicides among women increased during the 1990s. One of Schoedinger's sisters, Ella Wilson of Houston, told another writer that she didn't believe the death was due to suicide.
Two months after her death, a local paper got around to covering the story and reported, "At the time of her death, Ms. Schoedinger had not been seen by or had any contact with her family for about a week. Her sister and a local real estate agent called law enforcement personnel to her home. The officer searched the home, finding Schoedinger's purse and other personal property in her vehicle in the garage. The officer found the master bedroom door locked. The officer's report reflects that inside the master bedroom he located Margie D. Schoedinger. She was lying on the bed, having sustained a single gunshot wound to the head." 44
Many unanswered questions remained, such as: Where was Schoedinger's husband during this time? Why didn't he find her? Did anyone ever see Schoedinger and Bush together? The national media ignored such lingering questions. This writer ran into dead ends pursuing the queries.
While Bush, his handlers, and Houston-area authorities didn't respond to questions about the case, they sure were interested in closing the matter. A few months after Schoedinger's death, Samuel Longoria, an assistant U.S. attorney in Houston, petitioned the court to formally terminate the lawsuit "on the grounds that the plaintiff is deceased, as attested by the attached obituary, and death certificate." Judge Susan Lowery, who had ordered mediation in the case a year earlier, dismissed the case without comment. 45
Other Bush reported affairs, including 'very unusual' incidents in Asia
The affairs ran in the family with reports that most every male participated, from grandfather Prescott to brother Jeb. Barbara Bush tolerated the reported affairs of H.W. because he never "humiliated her," Kitty Kelley wrote.
The one with his personal secretary, Jennifer Fitzgerald, started in the 1970s. Even Nancy Reagan spoke about that one, as at one time she "gleefully related every salacious morsel" of Bush's affair with Fitzgerald. During a March 1981 dinner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant, then Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Attorney General French Smith were called away and returned 45 minutes later laughing. They said they had to "bail out George Bush" who was in a traffic accident with Fitzgerald in the car and did not want it to appear in police records. 46
The stories were so numerous about Fitzgerald and Bush during the 1988 presidential campaign that the "campaign enforcer" even issued a statement to reporters that "the answer to the Big A question is N-O." Still, W. Bush once replied to a question on what he and his father talked about with a blunt one word: "Pussy."
Another time, H.W. Bush was with a woman at the Chinese embassy when a fire broke out, according to Kelley. Bush secret service agents made firemen wait until Bush left out the back door before allowing them in the building. When Bush was RNC chairman, a North Dakota woman divorced her husband and moved to D.C. to be closer to Bush. And during the 1980 campaign, Bush had "an intense relationship" with a woman photographer assigned to the campaign, according to reports. 47
The womanizing reports bordered on sexual harassment after H.W. Bush put a male fertility figure that he received from the president of Mozambique in his Oval Office bathroom. The only roll of toilet paper in the bathroom was on the extended male organ of the three-foot wooden statue. Bush reportedly got a kick out of telling female visitors to go into the bathroom. Those included Alice Glenn, a 20-something deputy press secretary, who emerged "red-faced." 48
W. Bush's brother, Neil, had an affair with a woman who worked for his mother, his former wife said. "The Bush's knew about the affair before I did," Sharon Bush said. "They even entertained the woman in their home.....They encouraged their own son's adultery.....What kind of family values is that? You'd think after all the infidelity [Barbara Bush has] had to put up with in her own marriage, she'd be more sympathetic to me, but she isn't." 49 Neil also had sex with prostitutes during trips to Hong Kong and Thailand and acquired a sexually transmitted disease, Sharon Bush said. During a deposition taken by Sharon Bush's lawyers in 2003, Neil Bush spoke about the prostitutes and a deal with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a company backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, that would pay Bush $2 million in stock over five years.
Bush said the Asian women simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, and he let them in and had sex with him. But Bush claimed he did not know if they were prostitutes because they did not ask for money and he did not pay them – a business associate there reportedly made the payments.
This raised the eyebrows of Marshall Davis Brown, a lawyer for Sharon Bush, who told Neil Bush during the deposition: "Mr. Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," Brown said.
"It was very unusual," replied Bush. 50
Another Bush brother, Marvin, obtained illegal prescribed drugs as late as 2003, according to reports. The cheating in the family extended to Bush Jr. daughters Jenna and Barbara, who obtained fake IDs to buy alcohol as minors. 51
Still other reports detailed an affair between Rove and Texas lobbyist Karen Johnson, who Bush appointed to a seat on his Transportation Department transition team in 2000, enabling Johnson to personally benefit by obtaining more business clients. Some said that report could have been started by Rove himself as another trick to smear any unflattering report about him, a trick that has also become a trend with this gang. 52
Footnotes
1. J.H. Hatfield. Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001, p. 38.
2. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 294.
3. Dan Rather, "Transcript: Barnes on Bush." 60 Minutes, CBS. Sept. 8, 2004.
4. J.H. Hatfield. Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001, p. 48.
5. Neil Mackay, "Unmasked: The George W. Bush the President Doesn't Want the World To See." Sunday Herald, September 12, 2004.
6. Ibid, Sunday Herald.
7. Michael Duffy, "How Well Did He Serve?" Time Magazine, Feb. 23, 2004.
8. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 304.
9. Michael Duffy, "How Well Did He Serve?" Time Magazine, Feb. 23, 2004.
10. Doubleday statement, Sept. 13, 2004.
11. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 599.
12. Ibid., p. 310.
13. Rebecca Walsh, "Did Karl Rove dodge the draft? Rove got deferments from draft." The Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 18, 2004.
14. Matt Canham and Thomas Burr, "Rove: Ex-Utahn in crisis; Unethical revenge would not surprise his U. poli-sci prof, Rove known as a fierce competitor." The Salt Lake Tribune. November 6, 2005
15. Rebecca Walsh, "Did Karl Rove dodge the draft? Rove got deferments from draft." The Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 18, 2004.
16. James Moore and Wayne Slater. Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2003, p. 143.
17. John Nichols, Dick: The Man Who is President. New York: The New Press, 2004, p. 37.
18. George C. Wilson, "Cheney Believes Gorbachev Sincere; But Defense Chief Says Cutting West’s Forces Would Be Premature." The Washington Post, April 5, 1989.
19. John Nichols, Dick: The Man Who is President. New York: The New Press, 2004, p. 49.
20. T.D. Allman, "The Curse of Dick Cheney." Rolling Stone, Aug. 25, 2004.
21. Ibid.
22. John Nichols, Dick: The Man Who is President. New York: The New Press, 2004, p. 71.
23. Margaret Ebrahim, "Snooping Docs During Ford's Administration Released." The Associated Press, Feb. 3, 2006.
24. Ibid.
25. John Nichols, Dick: The Man Who is President. New York: The New Press, 2004, p. 83.
26. T.D. Allman, "The Curse of Dick Cheney." Rolling Stone, Aug. 25, 2004.
27. J.H. Hatfield. Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001, p. 68.
28. Kitty Kelley, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 423.
29. J.H. Hatfield. Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001, p. 69.
30. Robert Trigaux, "Bush built success on Harken sale." St. Petersburg [Fla.] Times, July 21, 2002.
31. John Dean. Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. New York: Little, Brown & Co. 2004, p. 29, 31.
32. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 538.
33. David Rubenstein, speech to the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association, Progressive Review, April 2003.
34. Edward Wyatt, "Drug Accusation in Bush Book Is Out of Context, Source Says." The New York Times, Sept. 22, 2004; Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 575.
35. Jim Vertuno, "Report: Laura Bush in 1963 Car Wreck." The Associated Press, May 3, 2000; Michael Shelden, "The Accidents that Made a First Lady." The Daily Telegraph [London], Jan. 13, 2004.
36. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 545.
37. Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. New York: Times Books, 1999, p. 186.
38. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. XXVI.
39. David D. Kirkpatrick, "In Secretly Taped Conversations, Glimpses of the Future President." The New York Times, Feb. 20, 2005.
40. Tom Shales, "Bush's Wake-Up Call Was a Snooze Alarm." The Washington Post, March 7, 2003.
41. Kitty Kelley, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 551.
42. Antigone Barton, "Woman sues tabloid over story tied to George W. Bush." Palm Beach Post, May 23, 2000; David Wright, "George W. Bush smeared in adultery scandal." National Enquirer, September 1, 2000.
43. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, pp. 619-620.
44. Barbara Fulenwider, "Woman who filed lawsuit found dead." Fort Bend Star, Dec. 24, 2003.
45. Judge Susan Lowery, "Order of Dismissal," Margie Schoedinger v. George W. Bush. Fort Bend County, Texas, Civil Court at Law, No. 3, May 24, 2004.
46. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 327, 375.
47. Ibid., pp. 376-377.
48. Ibid., pp. 481-82.
49. Ibid., p. XXVI.
50. "Bush brother's divorce reveals sex romps." Reuters, Nov. 25, 2003.
51. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 302.
52. Markos Moulitsas, "Rove's secret affair." Daily Kos, July 26,2005.
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