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Shortly after 6 p.m. two waves of exit polls from the Voter News Service (a consortium set up by the major TV networks and Associated Press) showed the Florida vote going for Democratic candidate Al Gore. John Ellis received a call from the Bush campaign in Austin and told them the bad news. At 7:52 p.m. the major networks, including Fox, called Florida for Gore http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/fox-n17.shtml wanna learn about how they rigged THAT one, try the article at the website.

As to poor Rather, he was royally screwed--as he should have been for broadcasting material that hadn't been properly checked out. That doesn't change what really happened, which many have investigated and one has to choose whether to believe or disbelieve that particular "conspiracy theory". You have to make up your own mind on that one.

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It turned out that George W. Bush, at the time a senior staff member in his father's campaign, had served in the same Houston unit as Lloyd Bentsen III and was recruited the same year by the same man, Colonel Walter "Buck" Staudt. That unit, the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, tasked with defending the Gulf Coast, was well-known as a "champagne unit" because it housed not only Bentsen and Bush but a number of other sons of the Texas elite, such as John Connally III, son of the former Texas governor and Nixon treasury secretary; Al Hill, the grandson of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt; and several members of the Dallas Cowboys.

(T)the timing and circumstances of Bush's entry into the Guard were enough to raise eyebrows. In February 1968, three months before Bush graduated from Yale, the Tet offensive left more than five hundred U.S. soldiers dead in a single week. That same month, Walter Cronkite famously declared the Vietnam War "mired in stalemate" just as President Lyndon Johnson canceled draft deferments for most graduate students. Days before he would become subject to the draft, Bush, whose father was then a U.S. congressman from Houston, won a coveted slot as a pilot in the 147th.

Bush maintains he simply interviewed with Staudt and was accepted on the spot. That may be true, but it would be hard to argue that there weren't more-qualified candidates: Bush received the lowest acceptable score on his pilot aptitude test.

In 1988 Staudt, by most accounts a bullying, cigar-chomping autocrat, told reporters that there had been no "hanky-panky" involved in getting Bush and Bentsen into the Guard, and he repeated that defense in 2000. But suspicion was not unwarranted. There was a long list of men trying to get into the Texas National Guard. And several months after Bush entered, Staudt paid a visit to Washington, D.C., and lobbied the elder Bush for funding for Ellington Air Force Base, in Houston, making sure to update him on how well his son was doing.

(T)he man who would sit at the center of the Guard story, Ben Barnes, then the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, has said he regularly fielded requests for entry into the National Guard, and after assessing the trade-in value of the favor, he would pass them on to Rose to sign off on. It was on Rather's infamous 60 Minutes segment, in 2004, that Barnes first publicly recounted how he had called General Rose on behalf of George W. Bush in the spring of 1968. Barnes claimed he had received a call from Sid Adger, an oilman in Houston who was a close friend of the elder Bush's. As it happened, both of Adger's sons were also in the Air National Guard in Houston, under Staudt's command. Barnes told me that in the late seventies, while he and Adger served on the board of Texas International Airlines, Adger personally thanked him for helping Bush. "We both knew I had done him that favor," he said.

Barnes's story has never been corroborated because both Rose and Adger were dead by the time he first told it publicly. The elder Bush has said he doesn't recall asking Adger for help, and the younger Bush has denied knowledge of it. But during the 1988 campaign, Rose and his son Mark happened to be watching television together when a report came on about the Bush-Quayle campaign's attacks on Bentsen. According to Mark Rose, who has never spoken about it on the record before now, his father admitted to him that he'd helped both Bush and Bentsen into the Guard.

"My dad looked at me and said, 'I signed off on Bentsen's son going into the Guard, and I signed off on Bush's son going into the Guard," said Rose, a former Austin city councilman who is now an energy executive living in Bastrop.

He added, "[George W. Bush] can't say, 'I didn't have any help.' Staudt didn't work that way. My dad didn't work that way."

Bush's onetime expert and advocate on his National Guard service, a former personnel officer named Albert Lloyd, agreed with Rose. In an interview conducted shortly before his death, in March, he said that General Rose, who was Lloyd's direct boss in the sixties, had to have been aware of whose son he was admitting to the Guard - and that Ben Barnes was the likely broker.
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As part of their research, they obtained the most thorough and least redacted copy of Bush's military file that anyone had yet seen. They obtained it not from the Texas National Guard archives, which were then controlled by a Bush appointee, but from the National Guard headquarters, in Arlington, Virginia.

Littwin's Dallas lawyers recruited a local Air Force veteran to interpret the file. He was an expert in the military jargon of the time. "I was stunned at what I saw," explained the man, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. "It was full of inconsistencies." As compensation, the man asked Littwin's lawyers if he could keep a photocopy of Bush's record, then made an appointment to go see someone at the Dallas bureau of CBS News. That person was Mary Mapes.

It would take her four years of obsessive pursuit - "myopic zeal," as the special CBS panel would later describe it - to get a story on the air, but this was the exact moment when Rather's destiny was set in motion.
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What followed was a painstaking investigation by the Boston Globe, unrivaled in its detail, which put the Bush campaign on the defensive and inspired other reporters to focus on Bush's "lost year."

After training at Moody Air Force Base, in Georgia - from which a military aircraft once ferried him to Washington for a date with Tricia Nixon - Bush was assigned in 1970 to flying duty as a pilot of the F-102 jet fighter at Ellington Air Force Base, in Houston. He had an apartment at the Chateau Dijon complex, an enclave of affluence where he played volleyball, barbecued, drank beer, and chased girls among the city's oil-industry elite. He drove a Triumph sports car, his buzz cut and flight jacket obscuring his Andover-to-Yale background. An aide who worked with Bush in later years recalled his simply saying, "I was a badass back then."

But after receiving relatively high marks as a pilot of the F-102, Bush suddenly stopped flying in the spring of 1972. Despite the declaration in his 1999 memoir, A Charge to Keep, that he flew jets for "several years" starting in 1970, his flying career actually ended two years later. That was the year he left Houston to work on the long-shot Senate bid of Winton "Red" Blount, a candidate from Alabama whose campaign manager, Jimmy Allison, was an old Bush family friend. Bush had committed to continuing his Guard service with a unit based in Montgomery, but nobody from that unit remembered seeing him, including the commander of the base. As the Globe story reported, Bush's next documented duty in the National Guard was a year later, back in Houston. It seemed that not only had Bush avoided Vietnam by entering the Guard, but he may have simply disappeared for a spell, failing to fulfill his duty to fly planes for a full six years.

The Globe story whipped the national media into a frenzy. The gaps that it revealed in Bush's record - and his campaign's inconsistent and sometimes discredited explanations for those gaps - prompted persistent questions about whether he had gone AWOL or even deserted the military for a time. In particular, reporters zeroed in on a document showing that Bush had lost his flight status in August 1972 for failing to take a flight physical, a serious offense.

As it happened, another pilot listed on the same document also lost his right to fly for the same reason and at around the same time. That name was initially redacted on copies of Bush's military record released by the Texas National Guard, even though a dozen other names on the document were not. When a clean copy turned up, the name that had been blacked out was revealed to be that of James R. Bath, a close pal of Bush's who would later become a business adviser to the bin Laden family in Texas as well as Bush's business partner in his failed oil venture, Arbusto Energy.

Campaign spokesman Dan Bartlett explained that the reason Bush stopped flying in 1972 was that he was in Alabama and his family doctor wasn't available to give him a physical. When it was pointed out that only a military physician could perform a pilot's flight physical, Bartlett's story shifted. He said the Guard was phasing out the F-102 on which Bush had trained, and therefore Bush had opted out of flying altogether. Reporters countered that the plane continued to fly at Ellington Air Force Base until 1974. The Bush campaign tweaked the explanation yet again, saying that the Air National Guard in Alabama didn't have the F-102, so he saw no reason to maintain his flight status during his transfer.

These shifting explanations only intensified the scrutiny and led to questions about what else could have caused Bush's loss of flight status. One possible answer was offered much later, in 2004, by a woman named Janet Linke. After Bush left for Alabama, her husband, Jan Peter Linke, was transferred to Houston to replace him on the F-102, which apparently still needed pilots, despite the phaseout. While the Linkes were there, Bush's former commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, allegedly told them that Bush had stopped flying because he became afraid to land the plane. "He was mucking up bad, Killian told us," Janet said to a Florida newspaper. (Jan Peter died in a car accident in 1973.)

But by the time Linke went public with her allegation, the press had already abandoned the Bush National Guard story for the Dan Rather controversy. Also ignored was some possible corroborating evidence: an Associated Press investigation uncovered Bush's original flight logs, which showed that after flying for hundreds of hours on the F-102, Bush suddenly began flying a two-seat T-33 training jet and spent more time in a flight simulator in the months preceding his departure for Alabama. The logs also showed instances of his having to make multiple passes at the landing strip.

The White House said that Bush was trying to rack up required flight hours in advance of his absence in Alabama. But the flight entries in question precede Bush's application for a transfer to Alabama.

The landing issue remains mired in ambiguous records and the selective memory of people who were there. What's clear, however, is that Bush's superiors made it unusually easy for him to quit flying and leave Houston. They first attempted to sign him up for a postal unit in Alabama that met once a month. (The commander of the outfit told Bush he couldn't guarantee that the group would even exist in three months but added, "We're glad to have you!") When Bush was informed that he couldn't fulfill his duty by doing that, he sent a letter requesting "equivalent duty" with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group, at Dannelly Air Base, in Montgomery. The unit commander, in official memos, said Bush could start by attending two drills in September 1972. He didn't show up for the drills.

When Bush lost his flight status, in August 1972, the official military protocol of the Texas Air National Guard was to open an internal investigation and review why the pilot didn't show up for his physical. It says so on Bush's own documents. That never happened.

Throughout 2000, the Bush campaign sought to settle the matter of his time in Alabama, but it struggled to provide reporters with anyone who could remember seeing him there. While Bush managed to find two ex-girlfriends who would vouch for him, neither saw him in uniform, and both said that they knew of his duty only because he told them.

One man from the Montgomery unit remembered seeing Bush, but he was a political supporter in Georgia who had his details mangled, recalling Bush sightings months before Bush claims to have served there. A $50,000 reward by a nonprofit group called Texans for Truth seeking anyone who could prove Bush fulfilled his Guard duty in Alabama was never collected (nor was cartoonist Garry Trudeau's $10,000 reward for the same information). No paper records exist in the National Guard archives in Texas or Alabama that corroborate Bush's service in Montgomery, and the personnel officer in Alabama at the time said it was up to his counterparts in Texas to keep track of Bush. Judging by his military files, they didn't.

In 2004, Althia Turner, one of several people who had worked at PULL while Bush was there, fearful of telling what she knew, agreed to an interview only after a call to her pastor. She said Bush had come to the program because he had been in "trouble," a fact she learned as the secretary to John White, the program's founder, who died in 1988. "We didn't know what kind of trouble he'd been in, only that he'd done something that required him to put in the time," she said, later adding that Bush had to sign in and out of PULL offices so White could keep a tally of his hours.

Regardless of the motives behind Bush's volunteer work, however, there is a problem with this time line. His military file shows that he didn't return to the National Guard base in Houston until May 1973, four months after he'd supposedly started working for PULL, in January. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Killian, signed off on a May 2, 1973, report that said Bush hadn't been seen for a full year: "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of the report. . . . He cleared this base on 15 May 1972."

Under pressure in 2004 to explain the gap, the White House produced as evidence of Bush's service a military dental exam from January 6, 1973 - in Montgomery, not Houston. It also released a computerized summary of his pay records from the period (discovered in a Denver repository after the Bush campaign had previously declared them lost in a fire), and the dates showed that Bush was paid for attending drills in Alabama in January and again in April of 1973.

Apparently, while he was volunteering in the Third Ward in Houston, he was also pulling Guard duty six hundred miles away, in Montgomery - or at least getting paid for it - despite the fact that his home base, Ellington, was right across town.

Compounding the mystery, one of Bush's ex-girlfriends, Nee Bear, who worked on the Blount campaign and later moved to Houston and dated Bush in the summer of 1973, said she never saw him in Alabama after the election. She claims she would have been aware had he returned. "We would have all known about it," said Bear. "We all kept in touch."
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But the CBS episode wasn't quite the end of the Guard story. There was a bizarre postscript: the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. One year after the fateful 60 Minutes segment aired, two FBI agents paid a visit to the Manhattan apartment of Larry Littwin, the former Lottery Commission executive director. If he were cleared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the agents asked, what might he say about Miers's involvement with GTECH during her time as chair of the commission? According to Jerome Corsi, who had resurfaced, post-Kerry, as one of Miers's fiercest critics, what Littwin proposed to allege was quite a lot: that more than $160,000 in legal fees Miers collected from Bush in the nineties were a de facto payoff for maintaining the quid pro quo agreement with Ben Barnes and GTECH. http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/10976-focus-dan-rather-
was-right-about-george-w-bush are excerpts from a very long article detailing the whole chronology of evenuts surrounding Bush's National Guard story, GTECH, the Texas Lottery and more. It's an interesting read, and obviously a lot of time and effort was put into ferriting out the details of each issue. Politics, power, money and government being what they are, we'll probably never know the truth. Rather was wrong to report a story that hadn't been properly authenticated, but that doesn't mean the story itself was false.