Alabama Getaway

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What Dubya was doing when he was supposed to be serving in the National Guard

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6487413?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1095900209875&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1040

One day in the late fall of 1972, James Pryor Smith walked into the roomy two-bedroom house that belonged to his aunt, Elizabeth Dickerson, an elderly woman who was confined to a nursing home, and he could hardly believe his eyes. Located in the heart of Cloverdale - an exclusive, old-money neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama - the house, his son Neil remembers now, "was a total wreck." A chandelier was badly damaged, there were holes in the wall and the place was full of empty liquor bottles. "The cleaning bill alone was $900," Neil Smith says, "which was no small thing in 1972." One detail about the mess stood out. "The bedding had to be hauled out into the street," says Jackson Stell, a friend of Pryor Smith. "Pryor said there must have been no sheets on the bed, the mattress was so horribly soiled."

"The trash and damage clearly came from drunken partying," says Mary Smith, who was married to Pryor at the time. "Pryor was very specific that this was related to booze."
Pryor Smith was livid. He had rented out his aunt's house in May as a favor to a family friend who knew Winton "Red" Blount, a construction magnate who became one the richest men in Alabama before being appointed postmaster general by President Nixon. The twenty-six-year-old tenant - his name was George W. Bush - had sounded like a reliable young man. He was a Yale graduate who came from a good family. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, had been a United States senator from Connecticut. His father, George H.W. Bush, was a former congressman from Houston who had gotten rich in the Texas oil business. Young Bush was coming to Montgomery to serve as the state organizational director of Blount's United States Senate campaign. After Pryor Smith had the house cleaned and repaired, he sent a bill to Bush - twice. Bush never responded.

The period from may 1972 until May 1973 would come to be called Bush's "missing year." But the only thing Bush appeared to be missing during that year was his National Guard duty. He was, at that point, a twenty-six-year-old college graduate still searching for something to do with his life. An idle young man such as himself might have seemed like an ideal candidate for conscription - after all, when Bush had graduated from Yale four years before, more than 500,000 young American men were serving in Vietnam.

more....

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1. ...

Another snippet:

"George had one story he told a lot," Archibald says, "and the story was about how he was always getting picked up by the police in New Haven during his time at Yale, and how they would always let him go when they found out his grandfather was Prescott Bush. When he told this story, George would always laugh as if it was the funniest joke. The first time I heard it, I said, 'Who's Prescott Bush?' And he said, 'My grandfather - the United States senator from Connecticut.' I thought it was stunning. He knew he was bulletproof because of his family. I had never seen someone with such a well-defined sense of being 'above it.' And it was not so much because of his money as his family."

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2. This is a great article - Rolling Stone n/t

:kick:

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3. Too bad they didn't save that mattress

Imagine what it would go for today on eBay.