Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Cocaine, Wrestling & George Bush
In October of 1999, J.H. Hatfield’s biography of George W. Bush, “Fortunate Son” was published by St. Martin’s Press. While the bulk of the book contained nothing new or noteworthy, it was the afterword which packed a powerful punch. Three different sources, unnamed but purportedly close friends of Bush, told Mr. Hatfield that George W. Bush had once been arrested for cocaine possession in Texas in 1972. They also claimed that his father, who was the United States Ambassador at the time under Richard Nixon, was able to get the charges dropped in exchange for a year of community service. That community service was to be with a charity organization that featured George Herbert Walker Bush as its honorary co-chairman.
On October 20, 1999, Charles Kelly and Kris Mayes – writing for The Arizona Republic – wrote a story that refuted those allegations. Oddly enough, the article also relied on three sources. But these sources weren’t unidentified. And one of the sources also happened to be a close friend of Bush.
"If this would have been true, John White would have told me, and John White has gone to his grave and he never told me about it," said Ernie Ladd, co-founder of Project P.U.L.L. (Professionals United For Leadership League) in 1999.
But did John White take the truth with him to his grave?
Or are Ernie Ladd and George W. Bush lying?
Because if it had been true, John White would have never have had to tell Ernie Ladd.
Ernie Ladd would've known. After all, Ernie "Big Cat" Ladd and Dubya's Poppa, George Herbert Walker Bush, had been buddies ever since the late sixties (Sfgate.com).
Why would the 6-foot-9, 320-pound ex-football player and Hall of Fame wrestler lie for the Bushes?
The same boring motives it always winds up being: power and money.
Ernie Ladd’s alibi, along with an article written by Pete Slover of the Dallas Morning News which exposed Mr. Hatfield’s criminal past, helped to discredit the charges, and led to a recall of the book by St. Martin’s Press. All 70,000 copies were turned into “furnace fodder.” The book remained out-of-print until after Bush’s election in 2000, republished by Soft Skull Press, a guerrilla publishing operation founded by Sander Hicks. J.H. Hatfield was found dead of an apparent suicide in July of 2001.
On October 23, 2004 Meg Laughlin wrote an article for the Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “Some Dispute Bush’s Account of ’73 Charity Work.” Some former associates of White, who died in 1988, speaking on the record for the first time, say that Bush wasn't helping to run the program but was instead a volunteer, and that White hadn't asked Bush to come aboard. Instead, the associates said, White told them he agreed to take Bush on as a favor to Bush's father, who was honorary cochairman of the program at the time. They say White, a tight end for the Houston Oilers in the '60s, told them Bush had gotten into some kind of trouble, but White never gave them specifics."
Meg cites more than three sources to back up her claims, five to be exact. But there is one person quoted in the article defending George W. Bush. That person, yet again, is Ernie Ladd: “Ladd says Bush was "an excellent bridge for the kids." "He connected them to the white community on a level they could understand," said Ladd, who's now a minister in Louisiana.”
But Ernie Ladd isn’t just a minister in Louisiana. He also happens to be an executive of a Louisiana based petroleum and chemical firm (Kayfabe). An oil company that has done amazingly well for itself ever since Mr. Ladd spoke out for George W. Bush in 1999.
Operating out of Monroe, Louisiana, Pro Set, Inc., a “leader in the coating and application industry,” is a manufacturer and applicator of polyurea, “a multi-functional industrial coating used to encapsulate, resurface, stabilize or reinforce a multitude of surfaces and substrates.” It’s a high strength, spray-on plastic which is used to prevent corrosion in roofs, walls, truck beds and ship decks.
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