By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A01

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- On an early summer day in 2000, in the manicured back yard of Sen. Richard C. Shelby's Tuscaloosa home, the moneyed elite of Republican Alabama clustered around the man they hoped would become the next president of the United States: George W. Bush.

They were packed too tightly for talk of private matters, so Bush leaned forward and whispered in the ear of an old friend, Winton Blount III. Bush had a problem: News reports were questioning whether he had fulfilled his National Guard obligations in 1972 when he was temporarily assigned to a unit in Montgomery.

"Go find Emily Marks," Bush told Blount. "She knows I served."

Blount did what he was told. He tracked down Marks -- now Emily Marks Curtis -- and even though she was jittery about talking to the media, he arranged an interview with a small Alabama newspaper, the Decatur Daily. Marks Curtis told the paper that she had dated Bush while they both worked on the 1972 Senate campaign of Blount's father, Winton "Red" Blount, and that Bush had talked of going to Guard duty on the weekends.

Blount was so pleased that he encouraged the reporter who wrote the story to offer the piece to the Associated Press. "We told him," Blount recalled, " 'This is a big story.' "

Marks Curtis's recollection of her long-ago friendship with the young Bush is once again relevant, as the president's military record has come under renewed scrutiny because of unexplained gaps in the documents. But even the woman Bush solicited to defend his record has no firsthand knowledge of his service in the Alabama National Guard, and relies, she said, on what she heard from the 26-year-old Bush.

Trying to quell a growing political storm, President Bush on Friday evening released all his military records to counter Democrats' suggestions that he shirked his duty in the Air National Guard at the height of the Vietnam War.

But the hundreds of pages of documents did little to answer questions about Bush's military history. Why, for example, is there no definitive documentation -- except a single dental exam -- that places Bush at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in 1972-73 and shows how he performed his temporary duty in the Alabama Guard?

The flap over Bush's Guard service arcs back to an aimless time in Bush's life that he has referred to as his "nomadic years" -- a post-college search for a career and purpose as he drifted from opportunity to opportunity, job to job.

Bush was unquestionably out of step with his generation and, as his mother has said, a late bloomer. While many of his 1960s contemporaries were openly challenging authority and convention, Bush held on to his father's values and ambitions, but with little success at the time. He partied and drank, clashing with his father after a night of carousing in 1972, and supported a war that many of his peers reviled.

But Bush never went to Vietnam. He instead enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard 12 days before he was to lose his student deferment in 1968, and committed to flying fighter jets part time at home. Four years later, after long periods of unemployment, a family friend took Bush under his wing.

Alabama was a logical place to park the young Bush while he sorted out his life. His father, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had befriended Red Blount years earlier in Washington.

Blount had been President Richard M. Nixon's postmaster general and controlled a fortune generated by one of Alabama's leading construction firms. The elder Bush had been an ambitious congressman with southern bona fides. The Blount family still proudly displays a photograph of Blount and Bush leaping into the air, rackets in hand, at the White House tennis court.

The younger Bush's move to Alabama was arranged by a Midland, Tex., newspaper publisher named Jimmy Allison, a family loyalist who served as a kind of mentor. Allison was running Blount's campaign against popular incumbent Sen. John Sparkman (D).

Bush was taken into the folds of the extended Blount family. He was given an upstairs bedroom to use whenever he liked in the Birmingham home of Red Blount's brother, Houston Blount, and his wife, Frances. The 26-year-old Bush charmed the Blount family, clearing his dishes and heaping attention on their 14-year-old daughter, Franny, Frances Blount recalled.

Bush also rented a house in Montgomery, a place he essentially had to himself, because his roommate was usually traveling, friends say.

Although a relative newcomer to political campaigns, Bush was given a title -- assistant campaign manager -- and responsibility. He was charged with developing county organizations, particularly in the hilly northern part of the state, and he impressed people with his energy.

Bush was soon dating Emily Marks, considered one of the most beautiful young women in the campaign. "We went to dinner; we went to the movies; we played tennis," she said in an interview from her home in suburban New Orleans. "Back then, we called that a date. But we were just friends."

But while Bush made a lasting impression on the Montgomery Republican establishment, he was virtually invisible to the Alabama National Guard, where he was on temporary assignment.

Documents in Bush's Guard file show that initially he asked for and received permission to fulfill his obligation at a nonactive reserve unit in Alabama. But a couple of months later -- after he was already in Alabama -- he received a letter from Guard personnel headquarters in Denver informing him that he still had a "military obligation" and would have to do his duty at a "Ready Reserve" unit comparable to his unit in Houston. He received permission to join the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group based at Dannelly field in 1972.

He would not be flying in Alabama, because he was not trained on the aircraft at that base. Still, around the same time, records indicate that Bush declined to undergo a physical exam -- a requirement to maintain his flying status. By August, he was suspended from flying and never again took a military physical or flew for the Guard.

White House communications director Dan Bartlett said that Bush declined to take a physical because he was not flying in Alabama and that when he returned to Houston, his unit was phasing out the F-102s that Bush flew.

Although documents released last week show that Bush performed some Guard duties in October and November of 1972, a time he was in Alabama, and dental exams show he was on the base in January 1973, none of the documents shows where on the base he worked or what his tasks were.

Only one person has vivid recollections of serving with Bush at Dannelly field. John B. "Bill" Calhoun, 69 -- whose name was provided by a Republican ally of Bush's -- said he saw Bush sign in at the 187th eight to 10 times for about eight hours each from May to October 1972.

But Calhoun remembers seeing Bush at Dannelly at times in mid-1972 when the White House acknowledges Bush was not pulling Guard duty in Alabama yet; his first drills were in October, according to the White House. White House press secretary Scott McClellan on Friday was at a loss to reconcile the discrepancy.

Other recollections are anecdotal. Marks Curtis and Nee Bear, who also worked with Bush on the Blount campaign, remember Bush mentioning National Guard duties while they were in Alabama, though it was not a big topic of conversation. "He told us that he had Guard duty and that he would be unable to do some things, from time to time, in the campaign," Bear said.

Marks Curtis says her memories are vague, but she believes she can pinpoint the dates of Bush's Guard duty by process of elimination. She remembers Bush staying in Montgomery after Sparkman defeated Blount in the November 1972 election, which could account for records showing he performed Guard service in mid-November.

Marks Curtis's timeline jibes with the memories of Joe Holcombe, a Blount campaign office manager, who remembers Bush renting a truck in November 1972 to pick up furniture. Holcombe and Jean Sullivan, a former Republican national committeewoman, say it was well-known that Bush was enlisted in the National Guard.

But Sullivan, now 70, said Friday that she remembers hearing grumbles in 1972 about Bush not showing up at Dannelly field for Guard duty. She was so angry, she said, that she called a Guard commander to say that Bush was in fact participating in Guard duties, but was spending most of his time on the Blount campaign.

"He didn't come to Montgomery to serve in the Guard; he came to work in the campaign," Sullivan said. "He was there just in case [the Guard] ever needed him."

Few others have any recollection of Bush participating in Guard drills. Winton Blount and his brother, Sam, who also worked on the campaign, do not remember Bush saying anything about Guard duty -- otherwise, they would have been more than happy to come to his defense themselves when his record was questioned, the brothers said in interviews.

Jim Hart, a major in charge of public affairs for the base at the time, said Dannelly field was unusually busy in the early 1970s because the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group was one of the first Guard units in the country to receive the F-4 Phantom fighter jets. Along with the new equipment in Montgomery came a rush of hundreds of new Guardsmen in 1972 and 1973, many of whom would report for monthly weekend duty shifts and would rarely be seen otherwise.

"It's ludicrous to say that if he wasn't seen, he wasn't there," said Hart, 68, of Bascom, Fla. "The base, then, was open seven days a week, four weekends a month. There were 900 to 1,000 people coming and going. Do I remember seeing a lieutenant by the name of George Bush? I couldn't say that I never saw him."

The Guard officer to whom Bush was ordered to report -- retired Brig. Gen. William Turnipseed -- has said repeatedly that he has no recollection of Bush. But Turnipseed, a Republican, wavered this week after a fellow member of the 187th, Joe LeFevers, said that he remembered meeting Bush in the unit's offices. "I'm beginning to have doubts," said Turnipseed, now 74.

Outside the base, the Senate campaign was generating big headlines. What started as a mostly civil contest turned ugly when the Blount campaign edited a Sparkman radio interview to make it appear that he favored mandatory busing, an explosive tactic in a state still struggling with great racial divides and the legacy of segregation. The Democrat's campaign team eventually found an unedited version of the interview and used it in the race's final days against Blount.

When the votes were counted, Sparkman had captured nearly two-thirds of the electorate, and the young George Bush had received a lesson in defeat.

It was time to go home.

Bush eventually went back to Texas in early 1973, and started dating Bear. She has pictures of their time together -- riding horses and mugging for the camera -- but she keeps them locked up, despite media requests to release them. "I couldn't do that to Laura," she said.

One night in December 1972 in Washington, while staying with his parents for the holidays, Bush went carousing with his 16-year-old brother, Marvin. He ran over a neighbor's garbage cans on the way home, and when their father, then ambassador to the United Nations, confronted them, Bush challenged him to go "mano a mano." Within a month, the elder Bush had found a job for his son at an inner-city youth program in Houston. In the spring of 1973, the younger Bush was accepted to Harvard Business School, quickly finished up his Guard requirements and asked for an early discharge.

The young man finally had a plan.

Romano reported from Tulsa. Staff writers Mike Allen, Josh White and George Lardner Jr., and researcher Lucy Shackelford, contributed to this report.