Former Bush family confidant tells tales

1.00pm - By ANDREW GUMBEL

LOS ANGELES - The controversy over John Kerry's Vietnam War record looked set to escalate into an out-and-out duel between the two competing presidential campaigns, as new, unflattering details emerged yesterday about George W. Bush's own much questioned National Guard service in Texas and Alabama in 1971-72.

The widow of one of the Bush family's closest confidants of the period alleged that the reason the young Mr Bush was transferred to Alabama was that his drunken, boorish behaviour was becoming a political liability for his father, then US ambassador to the United Nations, and the family was keen to get him out of Texas.

Linda Allison said she never once saw him in uniform in Alabama, despite the Bush family's protestations to the contrary. Instead, he was attached to the Republican Senate campaign her husband Jimmy was running.

Corroborating earlier first-hand accounts, she said George W. would sleep in late after all-night benders, come into the office around noon and leave early.

On election night, when it became clear that the campaign to unseat incumbent Democratic Senator John Sparkman failed, Ms Allison said she encountered George W. urinating on a car in the campaign parking lot. She later heard he had yelled obscenities at police officers that night.

Ms Allison's account, which she gave to the online magazine Salon.com, was one of a number of indications of a backlash against the President following weeks of attacks on Senator Kerry's Vietnam War record by a group of ardent pro-Bush Republicans calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In television adverts, the Swift Boat veterans - none of whom served alongside Mr Kerry -- have accused the Democratic candidate of lying about his activities on the Mekong river, suggesting that he exaggerated his heroics and the wounds that won him a slew of medals.

Buoyed by evidence that the attacks have hurt Mr Kerry in the polls, several hundred delegates at this week's Republican Convention in New York have sported small Band-Aid plasters adorned with a Purple Heart - implying Mr Kerry won his honours with no more than scratches.

Outrage at such smear tactics has been steadily growing, however, and not just among Kerry partisans.

Aside from Ms Allison, the former lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, has come forward to describe how he pulled strings to get the young Mr Bush out of combat duty and into the state Air National Guard - something Mr Barnes now says is a source of personal shame.

Despite being fiercely attacked by the Bush family - George Sr has called his version a "total lie" - Mr Barnes has given an interview to the prestigious television news programme Sixty Minutes, which will be broadcast next Wednesday.

There was no immediate response yesterday to Ms Allison's charges, but she is likely to be accused of sour grapes because she and her husband were unceremoniously dropped from the Bush entourage around 1973.

Ms Allison addressed the rift at length in her interview with Salon.com, but insisted she was merely telling it how it was.

Of the request to have George W. work with her husband in Alabama, she said: "The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing. And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal."

After about a month, Ms Allison asked her husband what Mr Bush's job was because she "never saw him do anything".

Asked if she ever saw him in uniform, she answered: "Good Lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way."