ustxtxb_obs_2000_02_18_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

FEATURE Knee Deep in Eufaula BY MICHAEL KING As I was walking on the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that he would go away! o, not John McCain. James Howard Hatfield is back. Hat field, the author of Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President, raised a momen tary ruckus in the Bush presidential campaign last October, when the first edition of his book alleged that young George W. Bush had once been arrested in Harris County for possession of cocaine, only to have the record expunged by a friendly Houston judge at the behest of George’s father, then-Congressman Bush. Hatfield’s allegations went down in flames at first metaphorically, when the Bush campaign and reporters pointed out inconsistencies in Hatfield’s tale; and then literally, when revelations about Hatfield’s own criminal past \(including a conviction for solicitation call the book and turn it, in their words, into “furnace fodder.” But late in January, under the heading “The Book They Burned is Back!”, Fortunate Son was reissued in paperback by Soft Skull Press of New York, with a new Foreword by Hatfield acknowledging at length his criminal history and describing in some detail the furor over the book. Moreover, the new edition contains more startling allegations likely to grab a day’s headlines. According to the introduction by Toby Rogers and Nick Mamatas, in 1998 Michael Dannenhauer, then chief of staff to former President Bush, told Rogers that in the seventies George W. Bush had been “out of control since college. There was cocaine use, lots of women, but the drinking was the worst.” Rogers adds that Dannenhauer said he was told by the former President that during George W.’s wild youth, there were some “lost weekends” in Mexico. As evidence, Rogers offers his own recollections and a couple of bad photographs \(one poorly reproduced in the book, the other available at the Soft Skull website,