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September 3, 2004
Where Was W?
...from an interesting article in yesterday's Guardian, via salon:
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
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."
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.
Posted by Turfdigger at September 3, 2004 8:11 PM
This entry has been posted to: Politics