The next morning, Bush and Graham went for a walk along the rugged Maine shore, past the Boony Wild Pool where Bush had skinny-dipped as a child. “I knew I was in the presence of a great man …” Bush wrote. “He was like a magnet; I felt drawn to seek something different. He didn’t lecture or admonish; he shared warmth and concern. Billy Graham didn’t make you feel guilty; he made you feel loved.”

“Over the course of that weekend, Reverend Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year,” he continued. “He led me to the path, and I began walking.”

There’s just one problem with Bush’s account of his conversion experience: it’s not true. For one thing, when Billy Graham was asked about the episode by NBC’s Brian Williams, he declined to corroborate Bush’s account. “I’ve heard others say that [I converted Bush], and people have written it, but I cannot say that,” Graham said. “I was with him and I used to teach the Bible at Kennebunkport to the Bush family when he was a younger man, but I never feel that I in any way turned his life around.”

Even if one doesn’t accept Graham’s candid response, there’s another good reason to believe that the account in Bush’s book is fiction. Mickey Herskowitz, a sportswriter for the Houston Chronicle who became close friends with the Bush family and was originally contracted to ghostwrite “A Charge to Keep,” recalled interviewing Bush about it when he was doing research for the book. “I remember asking him about the famous meeting at Kennebunkport with the Reverend Billy Graham….” Herskowitz said. “And you know what? He couldn’t remember a single word that passed between them.”

Herskowitz was so stunned by Bush’s memory lapse that he began prompting him. “It was so unlikely he wouldn’t remember anything Billy Graham said, especially because that was a defining moment in his life. So I asked, ‘Well, Governor, would he have said something like, “Have you gotten right with God?’”

According to Herskowitz, Bush was visibly taken aback and bristled at the suggestion. “No,” Bush replied. “Billy Graham isn’t going to ask you a question like that.”

Herskowitz met with Bush about twenty times for the project and submitted about ten chapters before Bush’s staff, working under director of communications Karen Hughes, took control of it. But when Herskowitz finally read “A Charge to Keep” he was stunned by its contents. “Anyone who is writing a memoir of George Bush for campaign purposes knew you had to have some glimpse of what passed between Bush and Billy Graham,” he said. But Hughes and her team had changed a key part. “It had Graham asking Bush, ‘George, are you right with God?’”

In other words, Herskowitz’s question to Bush was now coming out of Billy Graham’s mouth. “Karen Hughes picked it off the tape,” said Herskowitz.

There is yet another reason why the episode in Maine could not possibly have been the first time George Bush gave his soul to Christ. That’s because Bush had already been born again more than a year earlier, in April 1984 — thanks to an evangelical preacher named Arthur Blessitt.

Whereas Billy Graham was a distinguished public figure whose fame grew out of frequent visits to the Oval Office over several decades, Arthur Blessitt had a very different background. His evangelicalism was rooted in the Jesus movement of the sixties counterculture. To the extent he was famous it was because he had preached at concerts with the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, and others, and had run a “Jesus coffeehouse” called His Place on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip during that turbulent decade. His flock consisted of bikers, druggies, hippies, and two Mafia hit men. The most celebrated ritual at Blessitt’s coffeehouse was the “toilet baptism,” a rite in which hippies announced they were giving up pot and LSD for Jesus, flushed the controlled substances down the toilet, and proclaimed they were “high on the Lord.”

In 1969, however, Blessitt was evicted from his coffeehouse and, in protest, chained himself to a cross in Hollywood and fasted for the next twenty-eight days. Over the next fifteen years, “The Minister of Sunset Strip,” as he was known, transformed himself into “The Man who Carried the Cross Around the World” by lugging a twelve-foot-long cross for Jesus through sixty countries all over the world, on what would become, according to the “Guinness Book of World Records,” the longest walk in human history. Blessitt delivered countless lost souls to Jesus. He went to Jerusalem. He prayed on Mount Sinai. He crossed the Iron Curtain. Finally, in 1984, he came to Midland, Texas, to preach for six nights at the Chaparral Center before thousands of Texans night after night on a “Mission of Love and Joy.” He did not know it, but he was about to bring George W. Bush to Jesus.

Thirty-seven years old when Blessitt came to Midland, Bush had yet to make much of a name for himself and still struggled with the giant shadow cast by his father. The pattern had begun early, when Bush was playing sports in school. “His father had been the captain of the baseball team and star first baseman at Yale,” said Mickey Herskowitz. “He had met Babe Ruth at home plate at the stadium at Yale to accept the manuscript of the Babe’s autobiography. Dad was a star, a scholar, the leader of the team and the captain. And George never got much beyond Little League. He wanted to be a catcher, but one of his coaches said he had an unfortunate flaw — he blinked every time the guy swung the bat.” Whatever he did, his meager achievements were dwarfed by his father’s spectacular résumé.

When he was in his twenties, his alcohol-fueled clashes with his father disturbed his parents so much that they asked friends to rein in their unruly son. In the spring of 1972, the elder Bush, then ambassador to the United Nations, called Jimmy Allison, an old friend from Midland, Texas, who was a political consultant and the owner of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, to ask if George W. could work on a Senate campaign Allison was running in Alabama for Winton “Red” Blount. “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,” Allison’s widow, Linda, told Salon’s Mary Jacoby. “[The Bushes] wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him.”

When the younger Bush got to Alabama, however, he continued drinking, according to Allison, often ambling into work at midday, boasting about how much he’d drunk the night before. One night at a party, she saw George W. urinating on a car in the parking lot. He reportedly shouted obscenities at police officers, and trashed a home he rented, leaving behind broken furniture he refused to pay for. “He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions,” a member of the family who rented the house told the Birmingham News.

When Bush returned to Washington for Christmas that year, he got drunk with his sixteen-year-old brother Marvin, ran over the neighbor’s garbage cans, and found himself standing unsteadily in the doorway at home, confronting his father. “I hear you’re looking for me,” he said. “You wanna go mano a mano right here?”

The elder George Bush didn’t say a word. “He just looked at him over his glasses that had slid down the end of his nose,” Barbara Bush told a friend of the family. “And he just looked until [George W.] walked away. Everything he needed to communicate was in that glance.”

When young George went off to Harvard Business School in 1974, the differences between him and his father became more clearly defined. Where the older Bush embodied a genial and patrician preppy ethos, the son embraced the iconography of Texas as if determined to eradicate the last vestiges of East Coast elitism in his veins. At Harvard, his classmates “were drinking Chivas Regal, [but] he was drinking Wild Turkey,” April Foley, who dated Bush briefly, told the Washington Post. “They were smoking Benson and Hedges and he’s dipping Copenhagen, and while they were going to the opera he was listening to [country-and-western singer] Johnny Rodriguez over and over and over and over.”

After graduation, rather than join his classmates in the glittering canyons of Wall Street, Bush struck out for Midland’s arid landscape of oil rigs and pump jacks, mesquite trees and horned lizards — where he fit right in. But it was still unclear what he was doing with his life. A 1978 attempt to run for Congress was a disaster. Various stabs at making it in the oil industry — with companies named Arbusto Energy, Spectrum 7, and Harken Energy — failed. Even after marrying Laura Welch in 1977 and becoming the father of twins four years later, Bush’s reputation was that of an aging frat boy who worshipped what he called the four B’s — beer, bourbon, and B&B. Family members still wondered what he was going to be when he grew up.

Meanwhile, oil-rich Midland was going through its own spiritual crisis. When the price of oil soared in the seventies and early eighties, Midland had become a heady boomtown minting a new generation of hard-driving Texas oil barons. Its population exploded from 70,000 in 1980 to 92,000 just three years later. There were shimmering skyscrapers, Lear jets, and Rolls-Royce dealerships.

But in the eighties, as oil plummeted from $40 a barrel to $8, Midland’s boom gave way to unemployment lines, repo signs, and bankruptcies. In 1983, the First National Bank of Midland collapsed. “Fear set in…” said Midland evangelical Mark Leaverton. “Marriages broke up. People started having pretty serious emotional problems… It was a scary time for all of us… People started asking questions.”

By the time Arthur Blessitt came to Midland, several of Bush’s friends had become born-again Christians, including two Midland oilmen named Don Poage and Jim Sale. After preaching one night, Blessitt went over to Sale’s house with Poage and a few other followers. Before Blessitt left, Poage asked if they could pray together. Blessitt anointed him with Mazola oil because the Sales had no olive oil in their kitchen. “I got down on the floor with him and a group of people,” Poage said in the 2004 documentary, “With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right.” “We prayed a very powerful prayer for me. And … I felt big white lightning bolts coming out of my shoulders and even though I was on my knees, I felt like I was about three feet off the ground.”

Baptized as an Episcopalian in Connecticut, Bush had been a regular churchgoer his entire life, but for the most part he had just been going through the motions. As Stephen Mansfield reported in “The Faith of George W. Bush,” when a Midland pastor asked his congregation what a “prophet” was, Bush replied, “That’s when revenues exceed expenditures.” Obvious quips were more important to Bush than spiritual quest. But when Bush heard about Poage’s encounter with Blessitt, he was so interested that a meeting was arranged.

So, on the afternoon of April 3, 1984, Blessitt and Sale went to the coffeeshop in the local Holiday Inn. Bush had already arrived, and got straight to the point. “I didn’t bring up the subject of Jesus,” Blessitt recalled. “He did. That’s his personality.”

“Arthur,” Bush said, “I did not feel comfortable attending the meeting, but I want to talk to you about how to know Jesus Christ and how to follow Him.”

Stunned by Bush’s directness, Blessitt silently prayed, “Oh Jesus put your words in my mouth and lead him to understand and be saved.”

Then he picked up the Bible and leaned forward. “What is your relationship with Jesus?” Blessitt asked.

“I’m not sure,” Bush replied.

“Let me ask you this question. If you died this moment do you have the assurance you would go to heaven?”

“No,” Bush said.

“Then let me explain to you how you can have that assurance and know for sure that you are saved.”

“I like that.”

Blessitt then quoted several verses on sin and salvation — from Matthew, Romans, Mark, and John. “The call of Jesus is for us to repent and believe!” he explained. “The choice is like this. Would you rather live with Jesus in your life or live without Him?”

“With Him,” Bush replied.

“Had you rather spend eternity with Jesus or without Him?”

“With Jesus,” said Bush.

Blessitt told Bush that Jesus wanted to write his name in the Book of Life, and extended his hand. “I want to pray with you now,” he said.

“I’d like that,” Bush replied. He joined hands with Sale and Blessitt. Then, Blessitt prayed a variation on the Sinner’s Prayer aloud, one phrase at a time, with Bush repeating after him:

Dear God, I believe in you and I need you in my life. Have mercy on me as a sinner. Lord Jesus as best as I know how, I want to follow you. Cleanse me from my sins and come into my life as my Savior and Lord. I believe You lived without sin, died on the cross for my sins and arose again on the third day and have now ascended unto the Father. I love you Lord, take control of my life. I believe you hear my prayer. I welcome the Holy Spirit of God to lead me in Your way. I forgive everyone and ask You to fill me with Your Holy Spirit and give me love for all people. Lead me to care for the needs of others. Make my home in Heaven and write my name in Your book in Heaven. I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my Savior and desire to be a true believer in and follower of Jesus. Thank you God for hearing my prayer. In Jesus’ name I pray.

The three men smiled. “It was a happy and glorious time,” said Blessitt. He explained to Bush exactly what had just happened. “Jesus has come to live within your heart,” he told Bush. “Your sins are forgiven … You are saved … You have received eternal life … You are now the Child of God … The Holy Spirit abides within you … You have become a new person.”

Jim Sale was present during the entire discourse. “You can never tell what goes on in a man’s heart and soul,” he said. “But the question was asked and answered.” George W. Bush had invited Christ into his life. “Why God chose to move in our president’s heart at that time, I don’t know,” Sale said. “I’m just glad he did.”

“A good and powerful day,” Blessit wrote in his diary. “Led Vice President Bush’s son to Jesus today. George Bush Jr.! This is great! Glory to God.”

One way of examining the growing crisis could be found in the prism of the elder Bush’s relationship with his son, a relationship fraught with ancient conflicts, ideological differences, and their profound failure to communicate with each other. On many levels, the two men were polar opposites with completely different belief systems. An old-line Episcopalian, Bush 41 had forged an alliance with Christian evangelicals during the 1988 presidential campaign because it was vital to winning the White House. But the truth was that real evangelicals had always regarded him with suspicion — and he had returned the sentiment.

But Bush 43 was different. A genuine born-again Christian himself, he had given hundreds of evangelicals key positions in the White House, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and various federal agencies. How had it come to pass that after four generations of Bushes at Yale, the family name now meant that progress, science, and evolution were out and stopping embryonic stem cell research was in? Why was his son turning back the hands of time to the days when Creationism held sway?

But this was nothing compared to the Iraq War and the men behind it. George H.W. Bush was a genial man with few bitter enemies, but his son had managed to appoint, as secretary of defense no less, one of the very few who fit the bill — Donald Rumsfeld. Once Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney took office, the latter supposedly a loyal friend, they had brought in one neoconservative policy maker after another to the Pentagon, the vice president’s office, and the National Security Council. In some cases, these were the same men who had battled the elder Bush when he was head of the CIA in 1976. These were the same men who fought him when he decided not to take down Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War. Their goal in life seemed to be to dismantle his legacy.

Which was exactly what was happening — with his son playing the starring role. A year earlier, President George W. Bush, clad in fighter-pilot regalia, strode triumphantly across the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, a “Mission Accomplished” banner at his back — the Iraq War presumably won. But the giddy triumphalism of Operation Shock and Awe had quickly faded. America had failed to form a stable Iraqi government. With Baghdad out of control, sectarian violence was on the rise. U.S. soldiers were becoming occupiers rather than liberators. Coalition forces were torturing prisoners. As for Saddam’s vast stash of weapons of mass destruction — the stated reason for the invasion — none had been found.

Bush 41 had always told his son that it was fine to take different political positions than he had held. If you have to run away from me, he said, I’ll understand. Few things upset him. But there were limits. He was especially proud of his accomplishments during the 1991 Gulf War, none more so than his decision, after defeating Saddam in Kuwait, to refrain from marching on Baghdad to overthrow the brutal Iraqi dictator. Afterward, he wrote about it with coauthor Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, in “A World Transformed,” asserting that taking Baghdad would have incurred “incalculable human and political costs,” alienated allies, and transformed Americans from liberators into a hostile occupying power, forced to rule Iraq with no exit strategy. His own son’s folly had confirmed his wisdom, he felt.

But now his son had not only reversed his policies, he had taken things a step further. “The stakes are high …” the younger Bush told reporters on April 21. “And the Iraqi people are looking — they’re looking at America and saying, are we going to cut and run again?”

The unspoken etiquette of the Oval Office was that sitting and former presidents did not attack one another. “Cut and run” was precisely the phrase Bush 43 used to taunt his Democratic foes, but this time he had used it to take a swipe at his old man. Having returned recently from the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, the elder Bush was eagerly looking forward to his celebrity-studded birthday bash in June. But, to his dismay, the media didn’t miss his son’s slight of him. On CNN, White House correspondent John King characterized the president’s speech as an apparent “criticism of his father’s choice at the end of the first Gulf War.” Thanks to a raft of election season books, the press was asking questions about whether there was a rift between father and son.

So on that brisk spring day, a friend of Bush 41′s dropped by the Memorial Drive offices and asked the former president how he felt about his son’s controversial remarks. The elder Bush was stoic and taciturn as usual. But it was clear that he was not merely insulted or offended — his son’s remark had struck at the very heart of his pride. “I don’t know what the hell that’s about,” George H.W. Bush said, “but I’m going to find out. Scowcroft is calling him right now.”

The battle lines between father and son had been drawn even before the Iraq War started — a discreet, sub-rosa conflict that was both deeply personal and profoundly political. In the balance hung policies that would kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people, create millions of refugees, destabilize a volatile region that contained the largest energy deposits on the planet, and change the geostrategic balance of power for years to come.

Ultimately, it was the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history — one that could result in the end of American global supremacy.

The two men shared overlapping résumés — schooling at Andover and Yale, membership in Skull and Bones, and an affinity for Texas and the oil business. But that’s about where the similarities end. From the privileged confines of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he was raised, to Walker’s Point, the Bush family summer compound in Kennebunkport where his family golfed and ate lobster on the rugged Maine coast, to the posh River Oaks section of Houston after they settled in Texas, George H.W. Bush epitomized a blue-blooded, old money, Eastern establishment ethos that was abhorrent to the Bible Belt. By contrast, his son had been a fish out of water among the Andover and Yale elite, and scurried back to the West Texas town of Midland after graduating from the Harvard Business School. Nothing made him happier than clearing brush off the Texas plains.

People who knew both men tended to favor the father. “Bush senior finds it impossible to strut, and Bush junior finds it impossible not to,” said Bob Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who served as ambassador to Moscow under Bush 41 and remained a loyal friend. “That’s the big difference between the two of them.”

More profoundly, they epitomized two diametrically opposed forces. On one side was the father, George H.W. Bush, a realist and a pragmatist whose domestic and foreign policies fit comfortably within the age-old American traditions of Jeffersonian democracy. On the other was his son George W. Bush, a radical evangelical poised to enact a vision of American exceptionalism shared by the Christian Right, who saw American destiny as ordained by God, and by neoconservative ideologues, who believed that America’s “greatness” was founded on “universal principles” that applied to all men and all nations — and gave America the right to change the world.

And so an extraordinary constrained nonconversation of sorts between father and son had ensued. Real content was expressed only via surrogates. In August 2002, more than seven months before the start of the Iraq War, Brent Scowcroft, a man of modest demeanor but of great intellectual resolve, was the first to speak out. At seventy-seven, Scowcroft conducted himself with a self-effacing manner that belied his considerable achievements. Ever the loyal retainer, he was the public voice of Bush 41, which meant he had the tacit approval of the former president. “They are two old friends who talk every day,” says Bob Strauss. “Scowcroft knew it wouldn’t terribly displease his friend.”

Well aware that war was afoot, Scowcroft had tried to head it off with an August 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal op-ed piece titled “Don’t Attack Saddam” and TV interviews. As a purveyor of the realist school of foreign policy, and as a protégé of Henry Kissinger, Scowcroft believed that idealism should take a backseat to America’s strategic self-interest, and his case was simple. “There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations,” he wrote, “and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks.” To attack Iraq, while ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, “could turn the whole region into a cauldron and, thus, destroy the war on terrorism.” A few days later, former secretary of state James Baker, who had carefully assembled the massive coalition for the Gulf War in 1991, joined in, warning the Bush administration that if it were to attack Saddam, it should not go it alone.

On one side, aligned with Bush 41, were pragmatic moderates who had served at the highest levels of the national security apparatus — Scowcroft, Baker, former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, and Colin Powell, with only Powell, as the sitting secretary of state, having a seat at the table in the new administration. On the other side, under the younger George Bush, were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Advisory Board Committee — all far more hawkish and ideological than their rivals.

Of course, both Scowcroft and Baker would have preferred to give their advice to the young president directly rather than through the media, and as close friends to Bush senior for more than thirty years, that should not have been difficult. After all, Scowcroft’s best friend was the president’s father, his close friend Dick Cheney was vice president, and Scowcroft counted National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley among his protégés. And James Baker had an even more storied history with the Bushes.

“Am I happy at not being closer to the White House?” Scowcroft asked. “No. I would prefer to be closer. I like George Bush personally, and he is the son of a man I’m just crazy about.”

But in the wake of Scowcroft’s piece in the Journal, both men were denied access to the White House. When the elder Bush tried to intercede on Scowcroft’s behalf, he met with no success. “There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren’t conducive to talking about substantive issues,” a Scowcroft confidant told The New Yorker.

Meanwhile, Bush senior did not dare tell his son that he shared Scowcroft’s views. According to the Bushes’ conservative biographers, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, family members could see his torment. When his sister, Nancy Ellis, asked him what he thought about his son’s plan for the war, Bush 41 replied, “But do they have an exit strategy?”

In direct talks between father and son, however, such vital policy issues were verboten. “[Bush senior is] so careful about his son’s prerogatives that I don’t think he would tell him his own views,” a former aide to the elder Bush told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. When the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward told Bush 43 that it was hard to believe he had not asked his father for advice about Iraq, the president insisted the war was never discussed. “If it wouldn’t be credible,” Bush added, “I guess I better make something up.”

Likewise, friends who saw them together found that they had absolutely nothing to say to each other on matters of vital national importance. “I was curious to see how they related to one another, and I’ll be damned,” said Bob Strauss, who shared an intimate dinner with them in the White House. “They never discussed the war, never discussed politics. We talked about social things, friendships, what was going on back in Texas. It was like a couple of old friends just gossiping about the past.”

Right. It is highly unlikely, of course, that Moore’s new movie will ever be shown in the repressive Saudi kingdom that is the guardian of Wahhabi Islam, but Tuesday a serious question arose as to exactly when and if it will be shown in the United States after the Walt Disney Co. announced that it was blocking distribution of Moore’s film.

The announcement was the latest skirmish in an ongoing series of media battles that has seen the Sinclair Broadcast Group ban ABC’s “Nightline” homage to the Americans who have died in Iraq and Clear Channel remove shock jock Howard Stern, a recently converted critic of President Bush, from its radio stations.

The reasons behind Disney’s decision are not hard to fathom — they have to do with politics and money. In “Fahrenheit 911,” Moore takes a critical look at President Bush’s actions before and after 9/11 and examines the president’s ties to prominent Saudis, including both the royal family and the bin Ladens. According to Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel, Disney fears that if it distributes the anti-Bush movie, Jeb Bush, the Florida governor and the president’s brother, might withdraw tax breaks that Disney gets in Florida for its theme park and hotels. Disney CEO Michael Eisner “definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation,” Emanuel told the New York Times. “He didn’t want a Disney company involved.”

Moore said in response, “At some point the question has to be asked, Should this be happening in a free and open society where the monied interests essentially call the shots regarding the information that the public is allowed to see?”

But exactly what is in the movie that could so alienate the first family? I have some idea because Moore interviewed me for the movie for several hours, both in front of the Saudi Embassy and on the roof of the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, with the White House in the background. Moore had been among the first to assert in the press that a large-scale evacuation of prominent Saudis from the United States began shortly after 9/11 — for which he was derided by critics as a conspiratorialist.

As it happens, my research for “House of Bush, House of Saud” backed up his charges. As I told him during the interview for the movie, denials from the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and the White House itself notwithstanding, I had found a total of eight planes stopping in 12 American cities, picking up over 140 passengers, including more than two dozen members of the bin Laden family. I recounted the story of how two young Saudi billionaires, Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz, had journeyed to Houston in the ’70s and become friendly with James Bath, a friend of George W. Bush’s in the Texas Air National Guard. And I told of how the Saudis had put more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts into companies tied to the Bushes and their close associates.

Of course, Disney’s refusal to distribute the movie does not mean another distributor won’t be found. As the controversy broke into the open, Moore was busily readying his movie to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival next week. And in a message on his Web site he seemed optimistic that the movie would be seen this summer:

“For nearly a year, this struggle has been a lesson in just how difficult it is in this country to create a piece of art that might upset those in charge (well, OK, sorry — it WILL upset them … big time. Did I mention it’s a comedy?). All I can say is, thank God for Harvey Weinstein and Miramax who have stood by me during the entire production of this movie … I will tell you this: Some people may be afraid of this movie because of what it will show. But there’s nothing they can do about it now because it’s done, it’s awesome, and if I have anything to say about it, you’ll see it this summer — because, after all, it is a free country.”

The document that raises that question is dated Sept. 29, 1972, and notes that 1st Lt. George W. Bush was suspended from flying because of his “failure to accomplish [his] annual medical examination.” Since he had just received hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of training as a jet fighter pilot, the fact that Bush let his medical certification lapse raises a troubling matter. Why did he allow himself to become ineligible to fly when he still had two years of service left? Given that random drug testing by the military had just started, some have suggested that Bush had not yet given up his partying ways and may have begged off because he had a substance abuse problem.

The records released by the White House last month fail to answer that question, but they do add one compelling fact to the story — namely, that Bush was not the only man in his unit to be suspended for failing to take the physical, and that someone else at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston was suspended for exactly the same reason at almost the same time. However, in the documents, the second man’s name was inexplicably redacted — raising new questions.

Throughout the reams of documents released by the administration, standard practice was to allow each National Guardsman’s name to be printed in full. Why did the White House make an exception in this case? Why would the Bush administration want to make sure this name in particular did not make it into the public eye?

The White House declined to answer these questions. However, the same document that was redacted by the White House had been the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Marty Heldt, who was investigating the story before the 2000 presidential election. In the same document that the White House selectively censored for release to the public, the name of the man who was also suspended with Bush is clearly printed. His name: James R. Bath.

Reached at his home near Houston, Bath, who has been a business associate and friend of George W. Bush’s for about 30 years, acknowledged to Salon that he was the man in question, but he dismissed the suspensions as trivial. “It happens all the time, especially in the Guard,” he said. “In a regular squadron it is real easy to get your physical, but in a Guard unit, it is a different kettle of fish because the flight surgeon is also a civilian.”

Bath, who referred to Bush as “Geo” because his first name appeared in that abbreviated form on his National Guard uniform, said that “the base is a ghost town except when the whole unit is there. When you fall out of requirements, it is no big deal; you are simply not able to be on the flying schedule. That is it, full stop.”

Bath asserted that allegations that Bush had been using drugs are a “bogus issue,” but declined to answer precisely why he and Bush failed to undergo their physicals. “I’m telling you that it [drug use] did not happen. It is beyond laughable. I wasn’t with him 24/7, but Geo did not use drugs. Geo did not use drugs, and I really know the facts.”

In addition to those still unanswered questions, there is now the issue of why the White House redacted Bath’s name, an issue that has been absent from the mainstream media but that has been debated on weblogs such as Calpundit and Code Name: Monkey.

As it happens, when I interviewed Bath for my recently published book, “House of Bush, House of Saud,” I discovered that the White House may not want to reveal his name because Bath, a Houston businessman who became friends with George W. Bush in the ’70s, is the middleman in a story Bush doesn’t particularly want told — the saga of how the richest family in the world, the House of Saud, and its surrogates courted the Bush family. Bath was present at the birth of a relationship that would bring more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts from the House of Saud to the House of Bush over more than 20 years. The blotting out of Bath’s name indicates President Bush’s extreme sensitivity about his family’s extensive connections with the Saudis.

About 6 feet tall, trim and balding, Bath mingles a wry, folksy Texas charm with the machismo of a veteran jet fighter pilot. It is a combination that has served him well in cultivating relationships with the greatest Texas power brokers of the last generation — from former Gov. John Connally to the Bush family.

A native of Natchitoches, La., Bath moved to Houston in 1965 at age 29 to join the Texas Air National Guard. In 1968, he was hired by Atlantic Aviation, a Delaware company that sells business aircraft, to open an office in Houston. He went on to become an airplane broker on his own. Sometime around 1974 — Bath doesn’t recall the exact date — he was trying to sell an F-27 turboprop when he received a phone call that changed his life.

The man on the phone was Salem bin Laden, heir to the great Saudi Binladin Group fortune. Then only about 25, Salem was also the older brother of Osama bin Laden, then 17.

Bath not only had a buyer for a plane no one else wanted but also had stumbled upon an extraordinary source of wealth and power. Bath ended up befriending both Salem bin Laden and his close associate, Khalid bin Mahfouz, then also about 25 and heir to the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, the biggest banking empire in the kingdom. Bath immediately took to the two men. “I like the Saudi mentality. They like guns, horses, aviation, the outdoors,” he told me. “We had a lot in common.”

In many ways, bin Mahfouz and bin Laden were Saudi versions of the well-heeled good old boys Bath knew so well. “In Texas, you’ll find the rich carrying on about being just being poor country boys,” he says. “Well, these guys were masters of playing the poor, simple Bedouin kid.”

In fact, they were anything but poor. The Saudi Binladin Group was on its way to becoming the Saudi equivalent of Bechtel, the huge California construction and engineering firm. Likewise, bin Mahfouz had begun to build the National Commercial Bank into the Saudi version of Citibank, paving the way for it to enter the era of globalization.

Already close to the royal family in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden and bin Mahfouz sought to develop similar relationships in the United States. With Bath tutoring them in the ways of the West, they started coming to Houston regularly in the mid-’70s. Salem came first, buying planes and construction equipment for his family’s company. He bought houses in Marble Falls on Lake Travis in central Texas’ hill country and near Orlando, Fla. He started an aircraft services company in San Antonio, Binladen Aviation, largely to manage his small fleet of planes. He converted a BAC-111 for his personal use. For fun, he flew Lear jets, ultralights and other planes around central Texas. “He loved to fly, and spent more time trying to entertain himself than anyone I know,” says Dee Howard, a San Antonio engineer who converted several aircraft for bin Laden.

Westerners who knew the family found them irresistible. “Salem was a crazy bastard — and a delightful guy,” says Terry Bennett, a doctor who attended the bin Ladens in Saudi Arabia. “All the bin Ladens filled the room. It was like being in the room with Bill Clinton or someone — you were aware that they were there.”

As the Saudis became entrenched in Texas in the ’70s, bin Mahfouz bought an enormous, rambling $3.5 million faux chateau, later known as Houston’s Versailles, in the posh River Oaks section of Houston. He also purchased a 4,000-acre ranch in Liberty County on the Trinity River near James Bath’s ranch. “They loved the ranch and they loved the country life,” says Bath. “There was a real affinity between Texas and life in the kingdom. Khalid would come out to the ranch with the family and the kids, to ride horses, shoot guns, [watch] fireworks. They’d been going to England forever. But Texas — there was the novelty.”

In the ’70s, wealthy Saudis courted Democrats through prominent figures such as former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, a Washington super-lawyer, and Bert Lance, head of the Office of Management and Budget under Jimmy Carter. On the GOP side, they went to James Bath. Bath did not have nearly the stature that Clifford had. Nevertheless, he counted among his friends and business associates no fewer than five Texans who at one time or another would be considered presidential candidates.

Bath was friendly with the family of Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic senator who was the vice-presidential candidate in 1988 and became secretary of the Treasury. He was a partner of one of the senator’s sons, Lan Bentsen, in a small real estate firm. While he served in the Texas Air National Guard, Bath also became friendly with George W. Bush, who had begun training in 1970 as a pilot of F-102 fighters at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston. They were members of the “Champagne Unit” of the National Guard, so called as the vehicle through which the sons of Houston society escaped serving in the Vietnam War.

In the mid-’70s, the young Bush introduced Bath to his father, George H.W. Bush, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee and, under President Ford, chief plenipotentiary of the U.S. mission to China. There was also Bath’s duck-hunting buddy, James A. Baker III, then in his mid-40s, one of Houston’s most powerful corporate attorneys and a true Texas patrician as a member of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the city. Finally, there was John Connally, the former Democratic Texas governor who became secretary of the Treasury under Nixon in 1971 and had switched to the Republican Party.

By 1976, bin Laden had appointed Bath to be his American business representative. Bin Mahfouz drew up a similar arrangement with him. Bath was more than simply someone who could provide the Saudis with an entree to political power brokers. But exactly what he did beyond that, in the intelligence world and elsewhere, is shrouded in mystery. When asked about his career, Bath downplays his importance. By his account, he is merely “a small, obscure businessman.” It has often been said that he was in the CIA, but Bath denied that to Time magazine. Later, he equivocated. “There’s all sorts of degrees of civilian participation [in the CIA],” he told me. “It runs the whole spectrum, [from] maybe passing on relevant data to more substantive things. The people who are called on by their government and serve — I don’t think you’re going to find them talking about it. Were that the case with me, I’m almost certain you wouldn’t find me talking about it.”

Bath’s role in investing for the Saudis took various forms. “The investments were sometimes in my name as trustee, sometimes offshore corporations and sometimes in the name of a law firm,” he says. “It would vary.”

Bath generally received a 5 percent interest as his fee and was sometimes listed as a trustee in related corporate documents.

On behalf of Salem bin Laden, Bath purchased the Houston Gulf Airport, a small, private facility in League City, Texas, 25 miles east of Houston. He also became the sole director of Skyway Aircraft Leasing in the Cayman Islands, which was owned by bin Mahfouz.

Through Skyway, Bath brokered about $150 million worth of private aircraft deals to major stockholders in the Middle Eastern Bank of Credit and Commerce International, such as Ghaith Pharaon, a Saudi billionaire, and Sheik Zayed bin Sultan an-Nahayan, president of the United Arab Emirates. To incorporate his companies in the Cayman Islands, Bath used the same firm that set up a money-collecting front for Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. He also served as an intermediary between the Saudis and Connally, who, having served as Nixon’s Treasury secretary, began to position himself for a shot at the White House in 1980.

In August 1977, Connally and Bath teamed up with bin Mahfouz and his friend Pharaon to buy the Main Bank of Houston, a small community bank with about $70 million in assets.

Through Main Bank, the young Saudis had established ties to Connally. They were now in business with a legitimate presidential contender who seemed well positioned for the 1980 campaign. Having business partnerships with an American presidential candidate elevated them enormously in the eyes of Saudis back home, especially the royal family.

At the time, Connally had only one serious political rival in Texas — George H.W. Bush, a man with little of Connally’s charisma. A Connecticut Yankee who constantly had to prove his Texas bona fides, Bush had a somewhat understated style that only accentuated his upper-class New England background. Connally was unabashed about being the biggest lawyer for Arab money in Texas. Bush kept his distance. Next to Connally, he seemed bland indeed. Nevertheless, within a few years, Saudis seeking access to the highest levels of American power soon forgot Lance, Clifford and Connally, realizing that Bush was the man to see.

Bath denies that money went from bin Mahfouz and bin Laden through him into Arbusto Energy, the first oil company started by George W. Bush. Bath had fronted for the two Saudi billionaires on other deals, but in this case, he says, “100 percent of those funds were mine. It was a purely personal investment.” Bin Laden and bin Mahfouz, he insists, had nothing to do with either the elder Bush or his son. “They never met Bush — ever,” Bath says. “And there was no reason to. At that point, Bush was a young guy just out of Yale, a struggling young entrepreneur trying to get a drilling fund.”

No evidence has emerged to contradict Bath. But in 1982, bin Mahfouz helped develop a 75-story skyscraper for the Texas Commerce Bank, which had been founded by Baker’s family. That investment meant that the young Saudi now had shared business interests with the chief of staff to President Reagan.

Later in the ’80s, bin Mahfouz’s associates came to the rescue of Harken Energy, a struggling Dallas oil company of which George W. Bush was a director. And both the bin Mahfouz family and the bin Ladens participated in the Carlyle Group, the giant Washington private equity firm in which Bush Sr. and Baker were major figures. Over the next generation, more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts went from the Saudis to these companies that were so close to the Bushes.

In the end, we may never know why both Bush and Bath failed to have their medical exams and lost their eligibility to fly in the National Guard. During the 2000 presidential campaign, a Bush spokesman said that Bush did not take the exam because he was in Alabama at the time, while his personal physician was back in Texas. That answer did not hold up under scrutiny, however, because only flight surgeons perform the physicals. When the same question arose this year, White House communications director Dan Bartlett had a different response. He said Bush did not undergo the physical because he knew he would be on a nonflying status in Alabama.

Why Bath’s name was blotted out in the records of Bush’s military service is an entirely different question. But it leads to a story that figures even more prominently in the headlines today. After all, he was present at the birth of the Bush-Saudi relationship.

The relationship between Baker and the elder Bush had been frayed as a result of the failed reelection campaign of 1992, but the two longtime friends had patched things up as the presidency of George W. Bush became increasingly probable. When he arrived in Austin, Texas, on Election Day, Baker went to Dick and Lynne Cheney’s hotel suite to listen to the results. However, by the next morning, Wednesday, Nov. 8, Al Gore was contesting the Florida vote, so Baker was enlisted to lead the legal battle to win the presidency for Bush. As a result, both he and Cheney skipped the European hunting trip.

But the lavish gathering went on as planned. On Thursday, Nov. 9, a private chartered plane from Evansville, Ind., picked up former president Bush in Washington en route to Madrid, where the hunting trip was to begin. Already on board was a contingent from Indiana. One member was Bobby Knight, the highly successful but extraordinarily temperamental basketball coach who had just been fired from Indiana University. Other hunters on the trip were powerful coal industry executives from the Midwest — Irl Engelhardt, the chairman and CEO of St. Louis’s Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company; and Steven Chancellor, Daniel Hermann and Eugene Aimone, three top executives of Black Beauty Coal, a Peabody subsidiary headquartered in Evansville.

During the campaign, Bush had proposed caps on the carbon dioxide emissions that scientists believe cause global warming, a regulatory measure that coal executives had not welcomed. But among them, the coal executives had contributed more than $700,000 to Bush and the Republicans. They still had high hopes of participating in energy policy in a Bush administration and loosening the regulatory reins around the industry. Even though the recount battle was just getting under way in Florida, the Bush family was back in action, mixing private pleasure and public policy.

Once in Spain, Bush, Knight and the executives were joined by Norman Schwarzkopf and proceeded to a private estate in Pinos Altos, about 60 kilometers from Madrid, to shoot red-legged partridges, the fastest game birds in the world. Bush impressed the hunting party as a fine wing shot and a gentleman — the 76-year-old former president was not above offering to clean mud off the boots of his fellow hunters. Throughout the trip, Bush kept in touch with the election developments via e-mail. By Saturday, Nov. 11, a machine recount had shrunk his son’s lead in Florida to a minuscule 327 votes. “I kind of wish I was in the U.S. so I could help prevent the Democrats from working their mischief,” he told another hunter in his party.

On Tuesday, November 14, Bush and Schwarzkopf arrived in England, where Brent Scowcroft joined them and they continued their game hunting on Bandar’s estate. They kept a close eye on the zigs and zags of the recount battle. As a power play to demonstrate his confidence to the media, the Democratic Party, and the American populace, George W. Bush announced the members of his White House transition team even before the Florida vote-count battle was over.

Bandar eagerly anticipated seeing the Bush family back in Washington. Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld were men Bandar already knew quite well. Others who would have access to a new President Bush — his father, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft — were also old friends.

Moreover, a Bush restoration would also strengthen Bandar’s position in Saudi Arabia. During the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush era, Bandar had enjoyed unique powers — partly because of his close relationship to Bush, partly because he always had King Fahd’s ear. But during the Clinton era, Bandar had lost clout. Never an insider in the Clinton White House, he had disliked what he called the “weak-dicked” foreign policy team of the Clinton administration. Bandar had also lost ground in Riyadh because Crown Prince Abdullah, who had effectively replaced the ailing King Fahd, had never been particularly fond of Bandar. But now, on his estate in England, Bandar was once again wired into the real powers that be, and assuming that Bush won, he would be back in a position that no other prominent foreign official could come close to.

The anticipatory mood of the Bush-Bandar hunting trip contrasted sharply with what was going on in the White House, where, during the last days of the Clinton administration, the central figures in the battle against terrorism were frustrated beyond all measure. In the wake of the bombing of the USS Cole just a few weeks earlier, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke — officially, head of the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council — felt acutely that the threat of Islamist terror was greater than ever. But since the Clinton administration was leaving office, it was unclear what he would be able to do about it.

A civil servant who had ascended to the highest levels of policy making, Clarke was a true Washington rarity. As characterized in Steven Simon and Dan Benjamin’s “The Age of Sacred Terror,” he broke all the rules. He refused to attend regular National Security Council staff meetings, sent insulting emails to his colleagues, and regularly worked outside normal bureaucratic channels. Beholden to neither Republicans nor Democrats, the crew-cut, white-haired Clarke was one of two senior directors from the administration of the elder George Bush who were kept on by Bill Clinton, and abrasive as he was, he had continued to rise because of his genius for knowing when and how to push the levers of power.

Obsessed with the fear that Osama bin Laden’s next strike would take place on American soil, after the USS Cole bombing Clarke had prepared a proposal for a massive attack on bin Laden and al-Qaida in Afghanistan. But Clarke’s plan faced one major obstacle. On Tuesday, Dec. 12, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 5 to 4 that the recount of the disputed votes in Florida could not continue. In effect, it had awarded the presidency of the United States to George W. Bush.

Eight days later, on Dec. 20, Clarke presented his plan to his boss, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and other principals on the National Security Council. But with only a month left in the Clinton administration, Berger felt it would be ill-advised to initiate military action just as the reins of power were being handed over to Bush.

At the same time, Berger was obligated to make clear to the Bush team that bin Laden and al-Qaida posed a national security threat that required urgent and aggressive action. As a result, in the early days of January 2001, Berger scheduled no fewer than 10 briefings by his staff for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley. Berger decided that it was not necessary for him to go to most of the briefings, but he made a point of attending one he felt was absolutely crucial. “I’m coming to this briefing to underscore how important I think this subject is,” he told Rice. At that meeting Clarke presented the incoming Bush team with an aggressive plan to attack al-Qaida.

The meeting began at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2001, in Room 302 of the Old Executive Office Building, a room full of maps and charts that had become home base for Clarke and his chief of staff, Roger Cressey. With Rice present, Clarke launched into a PowerPoint presentation on his offensive against al-Qaida. Bush administration officials have denied being given a formal plan to take action against al-Qaida. But the heading on slide 14 belies that denial. It read, “Response to al-Qaida: Roll back.” Specifically, that meant attacking al-Qaida’s cells, freezing its assets, stopping the flow of money from Wahhabi charities and breaking up al-Qaida’s financial network. It meant giving financial aid to countries fighting al-Qaida such as Uzbekistan, Yemen and the Philippines. It called for air strikes in Afghanistan and Special Forces operations. The Taliban had been in power in Afghanistan since 1996, and because they were providing a haven for and being supported by Osama bin Laden, Clarke proposed massive aid to the Northern Alliance, the last resistance forces against them.

Most significantly of all, Clarke called for covert operations “to eliminate the sanctuary” in Afghanistan where the Taliban was protecting bin Laden and his terrorist training camps. The idea was to force terrorist recruits to fight and die for the Taliban in Afghanistan, rather than to allow them to initiate terrorist acts all over the world. The plan was budgeted at several hundred million dollars, and Time reported, according to one senior Bush official, it amounted to “everything we’ve done since 9/11.”

After the session, Berger underscored the challenge the next administration faced. “I believe that the Bush administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaida specifically, than any other subject,” he told Rice.

It seems fair to say that until this point Condoleezza Rice had not taken Islamist terrorism seriously as a threat. Less than a year earlier, in a lengthy article in Foreign Affairs, Rice had voiced her contempt for the Clinton administration’s foreign policies, and expressed her views on America’s strategic foreign policy concerns. Her brief references to terrorism in the article suggest she saw it as a threat only in terms of the state-sponsored terrorism of Iran, Iraq, Libya and other countries that predated the transnational jihad of bin Laden and al-Qaida. And in her speech before the Republican National Convention, Rice had not mentioned terrorism at all. Rather she had suggested that America’s most difficult foreign policy challenges would come from China.

After the briefing, Rice, who was about to become Clarke’s boss, admitted to him that the dangers from al-Qaida appeared to be greater than she had realized. Then she asked him, “What are you going to do about it?” According to Clarke, “She wanted an organized strategy review.” But she did not give Clarke a specific tasking.

During the changeover from an old administration to a new one, incoming officials frequently fall victim to “death by briefing” by each component of the government. Thus well-intentioned, carefully prepared plans from one administration may be sacrificed in turf wars or be lost in transition as a new administration takes office. Some members of the Bush team saw setting up a new missile defense system as their highest priority. For his part, incoming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to overhaul the entire structure of the military. As a result, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld all wanted to go after Iraq. Clarke’s proposal sat there and sat there and sat there.

Nothing happened.