BUSH HIT BY CLAIMS OF 'LOST WEEKENDS' IN MEXICO

A BOOK to be published this week about George W Bush, the Republican
frontrunner, claims his father's chief of staff admitted in 1998 that
the candidate had taken cocaine during the 1970s.

Michael Dannenhauer, chief of staff to former president George Bush,
is said to have told Toby Rogers, a journalist with the Houston Public
News, a newspaper in Texas (where Bush Jr is governor), that the
politician was "out of control" from the time he attended Yale University.

"There was cocaine use, lots of women, but the drinking was the
worst," the aide is alleged to have said.

Dannenhauer purportedly also told Rogers of an admission by the former
president that his son experienced "lost weekends in Mexico".

Rumours of drug abuse have plagued Bush Jr for months since he
declared himself a candidate in the presidential race. Since character
is an important election issue, the latest claims are bound to
rekindle interest in Bush's past. He has admitted to a "misspent
youth", but has repeatedly evaded questions about cocaine.

The claims will come under intense scrutiny. They were never published
by the Houston newspaper, which has since closed.

The story was briefly aired on September 13 last year by The Greenwich
Village Gazette, an internet magazine in New York, but was pulled from
its website. The publisher was concerned about legal action and the
absence of any second source to support the allegation that Bush had
started to use cocaine "some time before 1977".

In a taped conversation with Rogers, Dannenhauer subsequently called
the allegations a "total lie". He initially denied they had met, then
claimed the interview had taken place years earlier.

Rogers, now a freelance contributor to various publications including
The Village Voice, the respected liberal paper in New York, claims a
photograph apparently showing the two men together was taken on April
21, 1998. The allegations appear in the introduction to a revised
biography of Bush by J H Hatfield, a Texan writer.

The first imprint of his book, Fortunate Son, published in October
last year, was withdrawn from shops after it emerged that Hatfield had
served a five-year prison sentence for soliciting the attempted murder
of his boss at a finance company in 1987.

The book, with additional material from Rogers, is now being reissued
by Soft Skull, a radical publishing company based in New York.

It retains hotly disputed accusations made in the earlier version,
which cited claims by three anonymous sources - one of them identified
as a former Bush contemporary at Yale and another said to be an
unofficial political adviser - that Bush was arrested in 1972 for
cocaine possession.

The book alleges that the record was expunged by a friendly judge as a
favour to Bush Sr.

Both father and son strenuously deny the claims. Last night Scott
McClellan, the Bush presidential campaign spokesman, said: "This book
belongs to science fiction. All allegations in it are ridiculous,
false and libellous."

Hatfield alleges that in return for a clean slate the judge ordered
Bush to perform community service as a youth counsellor at the
Professionals United for Leadership League (Pull), an urban poverty
programme in Houston.

The former president, however, has said he referred his son to the
youth centre after an incident in which Bush drove drunk with his
brother as a passenger.

Sixty Minutes, the CBS documentary show, is due to broadcast an
interview with Hatfield next month, raising the prospect that his
allegations will attract further attention as the primaries get under
way.