Male cheerleaders and chicken hawks

The image of disloyal liberals harks back to the national trauma of Vietnam, when a fragment of the broad antiwar movement drew media attention by burning the American flag, carrying the banner of the National Liberation Front, and indulging in random violence. Profoundly infuriating to most Americans, the revolting conduct of a few privileged students was seized upon by the Nixon administration to discredit the completely loyal dissent of mainstream Democrats, Republicans and independents from places like South Dakota, Oregon, Idaho, Texas and New Jersey as well as liberal New York, Massachusetts and California.

In the Nixon White House, a young conservative named Patrick Buchanan penned many of the harshest attacks on the antiwar liberals. Buchanan's aggressive patriotism didn't extend to wearing his country's uniform, however. He had slipped past the District of Columbia draft board with a "bad knee." But he didn't hesitate to question the loyalty of prominent liberals who had worn that uniform with valor -- including heroic veterans and leaders of the liberal opposition to the war such as George McGovern, a bomber pilot who won the Distinguished Service Cross for flying many dangerous missions over Germany, and John Kerry, a decorated Navy captain wounded in Vietnam.

Among prominent conservatives of the Vietnam generation, the kind of hypocritical posturing symbolized by Buchanan and Limbaugh is so widespread that they have acquired a derogatory nickname: "chicken hawks." Right-wing draft evasion first emerged as an embarrassing issue in 1988, when reporters delved into the personal history of the handsome young senator nominated for vice president at the GOP convention. Thanks to the influence of his father, Indiana's most powerful newspaper publisher and an ardent editorial proponent of the war, Dan Quayle had spent the Vietnam years improving his excellent golf swing, while holding down a desk job at Indiana National Guard headquarters. (Among Quayle's contemporaries in the Senate, incidentally, those who had served in active duty during the Vietnam War included two Republicans -- and five Democrats.) The story of Quayle's privileged berth in the National Guard dominated news coverage of his nomination at the New Orleans convention and provoked much commentary in the weeks that followed.

Twelve years later, little attention was paid to the strikingly similar story of George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, a sojourn that had likewise protected him from the Vietnam draft. About to graduate from Yale and lose his student deferment in 1968, he obviously felt no overwhelming urge to fight in the bloody jungle conflict that his father -- then a Republican congressman -- would someday blast Bill Clinton for avoiding.

Ushered into the Texas Air National Guard ahead of hundreds of other young men on the waiting list for a few coveted places, George W. Bush later insisted that he had never received any "special favoritism." Perhaps he only benefited from the ordinary favoritism that the Texas elite enjoyed during the Vietnam War, when the Air National Guard became one of the primary means of escaping the draft. His father was a mere congressman at the time, but that was good enough to get Dubya in despite his low score on the pilot aptitude test. Pushed to the top of the waiting list, he was also awarded a highly unusual promotion to second lieutenant on completing his basic training, despite his lack of qualifications.

Exactly how all this happened remains a matter of dispute. In a civil lawsuit, former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes testified that he received a call from Sid Adger, a socially prominent Houston oilman and friend of the elder Bush. According to Barnes, Adger wanted to ensure that the unit at Ellington Air Force Base would take care of young Bush. (Adger had already obtained Guard slots for two of his own sons.) Barnes also testified that one of his aides forwarded the request to a Guard general. During the 2000 campaign, both Bush and his father denied using any such influence on his behalf. Pleading a bad memory, the elder Bush told reporters that he was "almost positive" he had never spoken with Adger, who died in 1996, about the Guard matter.

Having made a six-year commitment to the Guard, Bush successfully completed the challenging course of training in the F-102 fighter. In his 1999 autobiography, "A Charge to Keep," he offered lyrical memories of his Guard stint. "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years," he wrote. But that simply wasn't true: Lt. Bush never flew another jet after being suspended from flight duty in August 1972 for failing to take a mandated annual physical. That was a fact he simply couldn't remember when asked to account for the discrepancy in 2000. ("A Charge to Keep" also omits his stint as head cheerleader at Phillips Andover, his old prep school.)

Among the most questionable assertions in his book is that he sought to volunteer for service in Vietnam "to relieve active-duty pilots." In a more candid mood in 1998, Bush had told a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "I don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching to war when I wasn't. It was either Canada or the service and I was headed into the service."

Bush also wrote that his military service "gave me respect for the chain of command." Not enough respect, apparently, to report for duty as ordered, since his records show that he ignored two direct orders to do so -- and in fact was absent from duty for a year between May 1972 and May 1973.

By the time he applied to Harvard Business School in 1972, Bush claimed, "I was almost finished with my commitment in the Air National Guard, and was no longer flying because the F-102 jet I had trained in was being replaced by a different fighter." That too was false. According to an interview with his commanding officer that appeared in the Boston Globe, Bush's Guard unit continued to fly the F-102 until 1974, an assertion confirmed by Air Force records. "If he had come back to Houston, I would have kept him flying the 102 until he got out," said retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges.

In 2000 a few journalists asked the Bush campaign to account for his near-total absence from duty during the final two years of the six-year stint he agreed to serve. The Republican candidate and his spokespersons replied that he made up his missed days in an Alabama National Guard unit, but there is scant evidence to confirm that claim. Bush sought a permanent transfer to a "postal unit" in Alabama that didn't require weekend drills or active duty, which was approved by his Texas superiors. In May 1972, National Guard headquarters denied his request -- which would have amounted to a permanent vacation from duty. The following autumn, he was assigned instead to temporary "alternative" training at the 187th Squadron in Montgomery, Ala.

According to two former officers in that Alabama Guard unit, however, Bush never showed up. Retired Gen. William Turnipseed, the unit's former commander, said he was certain that Bush did not report to him, although the young reserve airman was specifically required to do so. The orders dated Sept. 15, 1972, were clear. "Lieutenant Bush should report to Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, DCO, to perform equivalent training."

Bush has insisted, usually through a spokesman, that he did report for duty in Alabama, although his campaign could offer no proof. In late 2000 a group of Alabama Vietnam veterans offered $3,500 to anyone who could verify Bush's claim that he performed service at a Montgomery, Ala., National Guard unit in 1972. No one ever claimed that reward. Nor could his campaign produce a single witness who confirmed that Bush had attended any Guard drills in Houston after he returned from Alabama in late 1972.

According to the Boston Globe, Bush's discharge papers list his service and duty station for each of his first four years in the Air National Guard. After May 1972, there was no record of training on those forms and "no mention of any service in Alabama." The supervising pilots at Ellington Air Force Base wrongly believed that Bush was serving in Alabama. In a report dated May 2, 1973, they explained that they were unable to rate his efficiency because "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of report. A civilian occupation made it necessary for him to move to Montgomery, Alabama. He cleared this base on 15 May 1972 and has been performing equivalent training in a non-flying status with the 187 Tac Recon Gp, Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama."

As for Bush's curious failure to take his Air Force physical in July 1972, his only excuse is that because he was then in Alabama working on a Republican Senate campaign, he was unable to return to Houston for a checkup by his personal physician. That too was untrue. A pilot's physical, required to continue flying, can only be performed by a certified Air Force flight surgeon (as Bush must have known, since he had undergone at least three such exams). An investigation of Bush's military career published in June 2000 by the Times of London noted that the Air Force had instituted rigorous drug testing a few months before he failed to show up for the medical exam.

The commander in chief's official National Guard record shows no evidence of service between May 1972 and May 1973. Although he was certainly in Houston during most of that period, he didn't return to duty at Ellington until the spring of 1973. The records show that he spent 36 days in drills (though not flying) from May through June 1973, apparently to compensate for all the months he had been absent. By then he was preparing to attend Harvard Business School. His final day in uniform was July 30, 1973, and he was officially released from active duty the following October -- eight months before he would have finished his original six-year commitment to the Guard.

The next time Bush strapped himself into a fighter cockpit would be 30 years later, when he was flown to the deck of the USS Lincoln for a triumphal speech marking the American victory over Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Privately, Republican media advisers admitted that they were likely to use the "Top Gun" videotape of the president strutting across the carrier deck in his flight suit for campaign commercials in 2004.

Despite all the remarkable contradictions between his military record and his self-serving stories, and despite the plentiful evidence that he had shirked a year of his service and then lied about it, the "liberal media" never subjected Bush to the searing interrogations inflicted on Quayle in 1988 and Clinton in 1992. Only the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, and a Democratic Web site bothered to explore the curious absences and lapses of duty that resulted in Bush's grounding after two years of fighter training. Nobody insisted that he hold press conferences to explain himself. Pundits dismissed the issue when they mentioned it at all. The cultural assumption that Republicans are paragons of flag-saluting martial virtue is rarely challenged, regardless of reality.

Yet the startling fact is that liberal Democratic politicians are at least as likely to have done military service as their Republican opponents and critics. Among the U.S. senators in the 107th Congress, the percentage of veterans was slightly higher among Democrats than among Republicans (if service in the Vietnam-era National Guard is excluded). That sort of statistic wouldn't matter so much if not for the right's continuing indulgence in venomous attacks on the patriotism of liberals and Democrats. Lining up the conservative civilians alongside the liberal veterans is an unpleasant but necessary exercise in an era when right-wingers and Republicans are inclined to exploit patriotism for partisan advantage.

The long, distinguished list of Republican tough guys who never served descends from Vice President Dick Cheney, who has explained that he had "other priorities" during Vietnam, all the way down to Rush Limbaugh, who frequently impugns the patriotism of liberal veterans like Tom Daschle. It includes former Majority Leader Lott; former Speaker Newt Gingrich and his successor, Denny Hastert; the two Texans who actually ran the House after Gingrich's departure, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey; White House political advisor Karl Rove; and Phil Gramm, the senior senator from Texas who retired in 2002.

John Ashcroft would have been subject to the Vietnam draft when he graduated from law school in 1967, but a family friend swiftly set him up in a job teaching business law to undergraduates at a Springfield, Mo., college. The local draft board deemed this job "essential" and awarded him an occupational deferment, one of eight deferments he received between 1963 and 1969. As attorney general, Ashcroft has been quick to question the patriotism of anyone who protests his evisceration of basic liberties.

Not everyone excused from service was a chicken hawk, but every chicken hawk has an excuse. Few were ever as creatively comical as Tom DeLay, a belligerent politician who loudly maligns the patriotism of his betters. At the Republican Convention in 1988, he explained to reporters that there had been no space in the Army for "patriotic folks" like himself and Dan Quayle during the Vietnam War -- because too many minority youths had joined the service to earn money and escape the ghetto.

His own failure to serve only seems to have made the former exterminator more vociferously obnoxious to those who did. When retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft cautioned against a precipitous invasion of Iraq during the summer of 2002, DeLay denounced such warnings as "a campaign driven by a congenital mistrust of American principles and consistent hostility to American action." Later that year, during an especially shrill appearance on CNN, he insisted that congressional Democrats who dared to raise questions about national security "don't want to protect the American people ... They will do anything, spend all the time and resources they can, to avoid confronting evil." DeLay is simply a cowardly thug in a business suit who abuses patriotic rhetoric to stifle debate.

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