Birmingham, Ala. ? A Republican official who worked with George W. Bush in 1972 during an Alabama campaign said Thursday she recalled him talking about his National Guard duty and seeing him in uniform before the election that year.

Jean Sullivan, an Alabama GOP leader who worked with Bush in the Senate campaign of Winton “Red” Blount in 1972, said she recalled even then hearing rumors about whether Bush was fulfilling his Guard obligations.

She blamed those rumblings on some within the Alabama Guard who were resentful because Bush was from Texas and was spending only the minimum amount of required time on duty.

“It was just some idiots,” said Sullivan, who is about 70 but wouldn’t give her exact age. “He didn’t do anything wrong,” said Sullivan, a former Republican national committeewoman from Selma, as the election-year flap about Bush’s Vietnam-era service persisted.

Sullivan said she was so upset at the time that she called an Alabama Guard commander — she couldn’t recall his name — to explain that Bush was doing all he could while working “like a dog” on the campaign.

“The man called me back and apologized. I thought it was gone forever,” Sullivan said. “And then I started hearing all this stuff a couple of weeks ago.”

Democrats, trying to turn Bush’s record into a campaign issue, have suggested he shirked his duty. The Democratic National Committee brushed aside a White House attempt to quell the controversy this week by releasing records of a dental examination done on an Alabama National Guard base in January 1973 — after Bush was said to have returned to Texas.

“As we sift through the wreckage of George W. Bush’s credibility, we’re left with looking at dental records and ironically they raise more questions than answers,” DNC communications director Debra DeShong said. “Why was the president in Alabama getting his teeth checked when we were told he was in Texas at that time? And where are the rest of the records the president promised the American people, from the Oval Office, that he would release?”

The White House said the dental record was evidence that he was with the Guard in Alabama.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush returned to Texas after Blount lost the election but later came back to Alabama.

Bush has said that he performed the duty with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Alabama but that he cannot recall exactly what he did.