'04 Campaign: An Absence In Alabama

When George W. Bush was running for President four years ago, stories raising questions about his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard never got much traction. In the Republican primaries, John McCain forbid his staff to exploit the fact that while their guy was being beaten senseless in the Hanoi Hilton, Bush was safe at home, protecting Houston from foreign attack. Al Gore steered clear too. It was not until a week before Election Day in November 2000 that Gore surrogates accused Bush of having gone AWOL--absent without leave--for an entire year while in the Guard. But few journalists, and fewer voters, paid much attention.

Now, thanks to the convergence of a prolonged war in Iraq, a presumptive Democratic nominee with a chestful of Vietnam combat medals and the eagerness of anti-Bush critics to sling accusations at the President, Bush's National Guard record is under scrutiny. It began with Michael Moore, the flamethrowing documentary filmmaker, labeling Bush a "deserter." Then Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party chairman, leveled the less serious AWOL charge.

Citing Bush's honorable discharge, military legal experts dismiss the two accusations as rhetoric. "No military lawyer would say what's being alleged here is either desertion or AWOL," says Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. But Bush's Guard record is nevertheless emerging as a Rorschach test in the 2004 campaign. Supporters cite the record as evidence of the Commander in Chief's military background and skill: he did well on an officer-qualification test, won praise from fellow pilots for his flying prowess and received an honorable discharge. Opponents see it as a laundry list of how a well-connected Texas scion pulled strings to avoid going to Vietnam, then failed to complete the scant service he signed up for--and now sends tens of thousands of U.S. troops to a war that has lost some of its rationale.

From the start, Bush's military record shows evidence of favoritism, beginning with the way he won a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard in May 1968--a time when nearly 300 Americans a week were coming home in body bags. "I'm saying to myself, 'What do I want to do?'" Bush told a Texas interviewer in 1989. "I think I don't want to be an infantry guy as a private in Vietnam. What I do decide to want to do is learn to fly."