'Truth' Recalls a Lost Opportunity to Hold George Bush Accountable

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

30 October 15

On the story of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' pursuit of the 43rd president's National Guard records, and a parallel—and more successful—effort at The Boston Globe.

indly Doc Maddow had Dan Rather on her show on Thursday to talk about the new movie, Truth, which depicts the events surrounding the 60 Minutes II investigation into George W. Bush's still-largely-vaporous service in the Texas Air National Guard. According to people I know who have seen it, the movie portrays both Rather and producer Mary Mapes (played by Cate Blanchett) as people who got the story right, but got the details just wrong enough to leave the door open for attacks on their credibility from Republican ratfckers. The attacks were so virulent that CBS caved completely, Mapes and Rather wound up losing their jobs, and the story fairly well disappeared from the news, even though there is a wealth of other detail to suggest that C-Plus Augustus ducked out of his sworn duty—including Garry Trudeau's bounty of 10K to anyone who can prove C+A made it to Alabama, which, as far as I know, remains uncollected.

As kindly Doc Maddow pointed out, CBS was far from the only news organization to question Bush's devotion to duty. In September of 2004, The Boston Globe ran a story in which the newspaper proved fairly convincingly that, at least twice, Bush clearly shirked his obligations. One of these episodes should have gotten him a round-trip ticket to Tan Son Nhut Airbase as punishment but, curiously, it did not. The story was written by Walter Robinson, and reported out by the Globe's crack Spotlight team. I mention all of this because the two stories are about to collide at a multiplex near you. At about the same time that Truth opens, a movie called Spotlight also will be released, and it depicts the battle that the Globe undertook to bring the scandal of clerical sex-abuse in the Boston Archdiocese to light. A lot of the same people, including Robinson, Sasha Pfeiffer, Steve Kurkjian, and my old pal Mike Rezendes, who are portrayed in Spotlight, shared a by-line on the Bush story 11 years ago. These were great reporters then, and they were great reporters when they cracked the Church story, and they are still great reporters today. And C-Plus Augustus dodged a 50-caliber shell when the attack on CBS killed this story for good.