The controversy over the records of President Bush’s service in the Air National Guard brings to light the question of why so few documented accounts of his misspent youth have surfaced. A long-ago experience I had in China might help explain it.
In 1980, when I was doing research in Beijing, an American friend in his late 30s came to me with the kind of problem someone who is undergoing a “late adolescence” sometimes has. He had fallen in love with a 16-year-old girl, and, he confided, the Chinese authorities had this ridiculous law saying that she was too young to get married. I pointed out to my friend, who years afterward became a professor at an Ivy League university, that we had similar rules in the U.S. But he was not to be deterred. He knew I had friends, and these friends had a father with contacts at the highest level of the Chinese government. He wanted me to pull some strings. I refused.
But that night I went to dinner at the old man’s house. About 30 or 40 far-flung members of the clan sat around a long banquet table. The old man was parked at the head. I sat near his kids, then all in their 30s and 40s, at the other end of the table.
Being a gossip, I began to tell my friends about the predicament of my American pal. Like me, they were outraged, as I knew they’d be, although to my surprise their concern was less with my friend’s morals than with the scheming, low-class tramp trying to entrap the American professor.
Then the old man interrupted. In spite of his advanced age and the many conversations going on at the table, he had managed to pick up a muted discussion at the other end of the room. “Love,” he explained to my astonishment, “is blind. If your friend really wants to do this, then `X’ over here can fix it.”
He pointed to a cousin sitting to his right, a man I had not met or noticed.
“He works at the central bureau. Tomorrow when he goes into work, he’ll just pull the girl’s birth certificate. She can become 21.”
I was dumbfounded.
I had studied China long enough to know that it was common practice to alter records and change pictures, but I’d never before realized how easy it was. Only in China, I thought.
The question I now ask myself is if it is also that easy in the United States? Could Bush’s highly placed contacts have done a disappearing job on his records?
We have pictures of Sen. John Kerry on his swift boat in the obscure reaches of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. We have testimony about his actions at the time from just about every member of his boat, and even from people on other boats.
Although recollections of various events differ, everyone remembers Kerry as having been in Vietnam. The same can be said of the service of former President George H.W. Bush in the Pacific in World War II.
But what about the current President Bush? Where are the definitive records of his service? Where are the people who served with him in Alabama, which is right here in the United States? For that matter, as filmmaker Michael Moore asked, where are his Texas driving records?
And what about his “youth”? He has admitted that he stopped drinking alcohol the year he turned 40 but refuses to be candid about any drug use. Why isn’t there even much eyewitness testimony about his behavior from that time?
And, you are wondering, what happened to my friend the professor? He, too, reformed when he hit 40. He is married to someone at least a few years older than his former girlfriend. And I doubt he tells people about the time he was in his late 30s, when he used to spend his evenings with a 16-year-old girl. But there are still people like me who remember and can’t resist talking about what he once did. Where are those old “friends” of the president?
