Decision Points

could smell insecurity, and he did not believe in quiet counseling. On one of my first flights, he suddenly grabbed the yoke, pulled back as hard as he could, and stalled the aircraft. The nose went up, and the plane shuddered. He then shoved the stick forward, and down went the nose. The plane recovered. The trainer had shown me my first stall recovery maneuver. He looked at me and said, “Boy, if you want to be a pilot, you must control this machine and not let it control you.”
    I took his advice seriously. I mastered the basics of flying, including loops, barrel rolls, and instruments. When Dad came to pin on my wings, I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment. After flight school, I moved to Houston, where I learned to fly a fighter jet called the F-102 at Ellington Air Force Base. The F-102 was a single-seat, single-engine air interceptor. When you taxied to the end of the runway, put the throttle in afterburner, and felt the engine kick in, it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, you had better pay attention to the moment.

    During my service in the Air National Guard.
    I loved flying, but by 1972, I was getting restless. I was logging my flight hours during the evening or on weekends, and working during the days at an agribusiness. My duties at the office included conducting a study of the mushroom industry in Pennsylvania and visiting plant nurseries that the company had acquired. It was not exactly captivating work.
    One day, I got a call from my friend Jimmy Allison, a Midland political operative who had run Dad’s successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966. He told me about an opportunity on Red Blount ’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. It sounded interesting, and I was ready to move.
    My commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, approved my transfer to Alabama on the understanding that I would put in my required hours there. I informed the Alabama Guard commanders that I would have to miss several meetings during the campaign. They told me I could make them up after the election, which I did. I didn’t think much about it for another few decades.
    Unfortunately, the record keeping was shoddy, and the documentation of my attendance was not clear. When I entered politics, opponents used the gaps in the system to claim I had not fulfilled my duty. In the late 1990s, I asked a trusted aide, Dan Bartlett , to dig through my records. They showed that I had fulfilled my responsibilities. In 2004, Dan discovered some dental records proving I had been examined at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery, Alabama, during the time critics alleged I was absent. If my teeth were at the base, he wisecracked to the press, they could be pretty sure the rest of my body was, too.
    I thought the issue was behind us. But as I was landing in Marine One on the South Lawn late one evening in September 2004, I saw Dan’s silhouette in the Diplomatic Reception Room. As a general rule, when a senior adviser is waiting to meet the president’s chopper, it is not to deliver good news. Dan handed me a piece of paper. It was a typewritten memo on National Guard stationery alleging that I had not performed up to standards in 1972. It was signed by my old commander, Jerry Killian. Dan told me CBS newsman Dan Rather was going to run a bombshell report on
60 Minutes
based on the document.
    Bartlett asked if I remembered the memo. I told him I had no recollection of it and asked him to check it out. The next morning, Dan walked into the Oval Office looking relieved. He told me there were indications that the document had been forged. The typeface came from a modern computer font that didn’t exist in the early 1970s. Within a few days, the evidence was conclusive: The memo was phony.
    I was amazed and disgusted. Dan Rather had aired a report influencing a presidential election based on a fake document. Before long, he was out of a job. So was his producer. After years of false allegations, the Guard questions finally began to abate.
    I will always be proud of my time in the Guard. I learned a lot, made lifelong friends, and was honored to wear our country’s uniform. Iadmire and respect those who deployed to Vietnam. Nearly sixty thousand of them never came home. My service was nothing compared to theirs.

    In 1970, Dad decided to run for the Senate again. We felt good about his chances in a rematch against Ralph Yarborough . But Senator Yarborough had become so