October 10, 2004
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Posted on Sun, Oct. 10, 2004
Learning to lead: Bush’s knack
FUN-LOVING PRANKSTER SHOWED POLITICIAN’S MEMORY FOR PEOPLE
Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON – Tom Seligson remembered a more innocent time after he watched President Bush rally people with a bullhorn from atop the mound of rubble where the World Trade Center used to be.
“When I saw him after 9/11 with the bullhorn, it fit,” said Seligson, who attended prep school with Bush. “His response to terrorism was grabbing a bullhorn at ground zero, basically challenging us to rise above it. This was no different from the George — the cheerleader with a megaphone at Andover — of 40 years ago.”
But the Bush known then by his classmates at the exclusive prep school and at Yale University and the Bush known now around the world are two distinct figures — one seemingly carefree and privileged, the other burdened by the pressures of the Oval Office.
Yet those early years — from Bush’s entry into Andover in 1961 to his graduation from Yale in 1968 — did much to shape his character and form beliefs that many said he took to the White House.
“Andover and Yale, in many ways, have a greater import in shaping the core personality of Bush than any other period,” said Bill Minutaglio, the author of “First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. “It not only shaped his worldview as an adult and his public policy as a politician. If Bush’s policy is about going it alone, defining the world in black and white, you could say it started back then.”
Nicknamed `Lip’
George W. Bush was called many things during his high school and collegiate days, but “future president of the United States” wasn’t one of them.
He was nicknamed “Lip” by Andover classmates for his wisecracking ways at the then-all-boys Massachusetts boarding school. He dubbed himself “Tweeds Bush” — after the infamous Boss Tweed of New York Tammany Hall fame — while others called him the “High Commissioner of Stickball” for organizing teams to play rollicking games on the usually staid campus.
His teachers called him an earnest but unspectacular student; he earned a zero on the first paper he wrote at Andover, for using a word that appalled the professor.
Despite his family’s political pedigree, few people saw any sign in young George of an ambition to end up in the White House. What they saw was a fun-loving fraternity prankster more interested in partying than politics, and a person eager to shed the shadow of his father.
Some Bush friends think that’s overly simplistic. They say his affability overshadowed his intelligence and obscured the budding political skills that he employs today: an ability to get people to like and support him, a knack for organization and a fierce determination to stand firm in his beliefs.
“He’s very street-smart, and people always underestimate him,” said Lanny Davis, a Yale fraternity brother of Bush’s who went on to help President Clinton through several White House scandals. “He was one of the friendliest, most down-to-earth, unpretentious people at Yale,” said Davis, who likes Bush personally but loathes his policies.
Bush’s path from adolescence to adulthood began in the same place as his father’s: Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. The elder George Bush was a campus legend: senior class president, captain of the baseball team and a student who bucked the advice of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Andover’s 1942 commencement speaker, and put off college to enlist in the Navy and enter World War II.
Bush the father was a man of New England, the son of Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut. Though George W. Bush also was born in Connecticut, he was very much a child of Texas, having been raised in Midland and Houston.
When the 15-year-old Bush arrived at Phillips in 1961, he found the transition from Texas to New England daunting in terms of climate and attitude.
`A long way from home’
“Andover was cold and distant and difficult,” Bush wrote in his political biography, “A Charge to Keep.” “In every way, I was a long way from home.”
Bush said he had to adjust from the “happy chaos” of the Bush household in Texas to Andover’s discipline.
“We wore coats and ties to class,” he wrote. “We went to chapel every day, except Wednesday and Saturday. There were no girls. Life was regimented. . . . I missed my parents and brothers and sister. It was a shock to my system.”
Bush also was struggling in class. For his first essay — on emotions — he wanted to impress his “Eastern professors” by using “big, impressive words.” Looking for a way to describe “tears” running down his face, he consulted the Roget’s Thesaurus that his mother had given him. He replaced “tears” with the word “lacerates.”
The teacher marked the paper with a zero so bold that “it left an impression all the way through the back of the blue book,” Bush wrote.
Tom Lyons, who taught history and was one of Bush’s favorite teachers at Andover, said Bush tried hard in class but struggled to keep up at the academically formidable school.
“He did not stand out,” said Lyons, who retired in 1999 after 35 years at Andover. “He was just a solid kid who worked hard and did average work.”
Yale wasn’t the comfortable cocoon for Bush that Andover had been, several of his friends and classmates said. The Vietnam War and America’s domestic strife were spilling onto college campuses. Bush, by his own admission, was not an active participant in the social changes swirling around him.
“I was not part of the flower-child revolution,” he told Knight Ridder in 1999. “I was concerned, but I wasn’t marching in the streets. I didn’t go to Woodstock.”
Minutaglio said Bush “chose to isolate himself from the very complex issues of the day. It seems he deliberately, almost defiantly, withdrew into a world he was most comfortable with, almost a 1950s world.”
Bush embraced the traditional college life — with gusto. He joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and, like his father, was initiated into Skull and Bones, a secretive, high-status campus social club.
Bush was arrested in 1966 on disorderly-conduct charges arising from the theft of a Christmas wreath from a storefront to decorate the fraternity house. The charges later were dropped.
DKE had a reputation for hearty partying, and Bush was its president in 1966-67.
“There was a `draft Bush’ movement because it was a job of being socially comfortable and attracting the best women on campus,” Davis said. “He succeeded. DKE had the best parties.”
Politician’s knack
Bush became known for an ability to move effortlessly among the different groups on campus. He began displaying a politician’s knack for remembering names, faces and events that would enable him to talk to people he had met months before as if it were only yesterday.
“I thought I was outgoing, knowing 65-70 people,” said Livingston Miller, a Yale friend of Bush’s. “Bush knew 700. He knew their names, their relationships and their pasts. He was good at connecting people to events. It’s prodigious.”
Though he praises Bush’s partying skills at Yale, Davis said it was a mistake to think of Bush back then as strictly a good-time Charlie. He said Bush was gifted with “analytical people skills” that allowed him to sum up someone quickly.
Bush also was sensitive. Davis recalled sitting with Bush and some other schoolmates in their dorm talking about people when one of them began razzing a male student, who he thought was gay, as he walked by.
“Someone made a snickering comment and used the word `queer,’ ” Davis said. “Bush turned and told the guy who made the remark, `Look at walking in the other guy’s shoes.’ I’ll never forget that.”
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Posted on Sun, Oct. 10, 2004
Learning to lead: Kerry’s ambitions
FROM THE BEGINNING, DRIVE FOR PUBLIC OFFICE SET HIM APART
Knight Ridder
CONCORD, N.H. – At the posh and proper St. Paul’s School, set amid pine woods and deep blue ponds, the ultra-ambitious John Forbes Kerry initially rubbed people the wrong way.
In a culture that prizes effortless achievement, or at least the appearance of it, he was too much of a striver. At the hockey-mad school, “Hog the Puck” Kerry loathed passing on the ice. It seemed common knowledge that he wanted to be president, to follow in the footsteps of the other JFK whom he idolized, John F. Kennedy.
That was all a bit much for many of the rich young preppies who dominated the English-style brick boarding school in 1957-62, when Kerry attended, and for whom so much came easily.
“He was a little different from the average then,” said Herbert Church Jr., who taught at St. Paul’s for 27 years and remembers Kerry well. “Most had as their No. 1 objective getting into Harvard or Yale, then getting some blockbuster job on Wall Street, then leading themselves a nice, comfortable upper-class life. . . . I did have the feeling he was interested in making a public mark.”
Kerry was a young man of unusual seriousness and drive. He had an early intellectual awakening at St. Paul’s, one of New England’s most prestigious prep schools, and he excelled at Yale University from 1962 to 1966, which nurtured rather than scorned his open ambition.
But his journey through high school wasn’t easy; it was there that he first earned a reputation for overweening ambition that sticks with him to this day. It’s a straight line from the boy called “Hog the Puck” Kerry to the pol derided by some in Boston as “Live Shot” Kerry for his eagerness to appear before television cameras.
Influences of family
Kerry derived much of his ambition from his father, a diplomat who had descended from an immigrant Austrian Jew. A reserved and worldly man, he wasn’t especially warm to his children, Kerry’s friends say. Kerry endured frequent moves because of his father’s work, which also can drive a child toward introversion.
Kerry’s mother was a Forbes, a notable New England family whose money was nearly as old as the United States (indeed, on one side, she was a Winthrop, whose money was even older than the United States). As a boy, Kerry sometimes vacationed at a Forbes family estate, called Les Essarts, on the Brittany coast of northern France, and at craggy Naushon Island, a private Forbes family reserve off Cape Cod, with about 30 houses clustered around a private ferry dock and miles of trails for horseback riding and hiking.
Kerry attended a series of boarding schools beginning at age 11, including one in Switzerland, before he arrived at St. Paul’s.
Trying to live up to his distant father affected the way he socialized, friends say.
“I think his father was very polished and very at ease in social circles,” said Daniel Barbiero, who met Kerry at St. Paul’s and roomed with him at Yale. “John wasn’t so much, and tried hard to be good at everything.”
Kerry excelled at St. Paul’s. He played hockey, lacrosse and soccer, joined several academic clubs and played bass guitar in a rock band called the Electras, which performed at tea dances with guests from girls’ schools.
His interest in current events already was apparent; he founded a club called the John Winant Society, named for a former New Hampshire governor, to debate issues of the day. He wrote earnest essays for the school’s literary magazine on issues such as public funding for education. He loved oratory and debate at a school that stressed both, and he won the school’s most prestigious award for public speaking.
Not rich like others
Among his peers, by most accounts, Kerry wasn’t popular at St. Paul’s.
Partly that was because even though he moved among elites, he wasn’t wholly of them. His mother had the prominent Forbes family name, but not its extraordinary wealth, unlike many St. Paul’s families. A generous aunt paid for Kerry’s education. While Kerry had access to Forbes family estates, he also sold encyclopedias door to door one summer.
Those distinctions mattered at St. Paul’s.
One alumnus of Kerry’s era described the status-conscious environment as “ `Lord of the Flies’ goes to boarding school;” several others called the dominant cliques of privileged young men “nasty.”
Then too, Kerry’s incessant résumé-building made him work harder than was considered cool. His earnestness flew in the face of the affected sarcasm that colored the campus style.
“St. Paul’s was a place where you weren’t supposed to let them see you sweat,” said Livingston Miller, who was at St. Paul’s and Yale with Kerry. “John went totally against that grain.”
Kerry took his seriousness to Yale in the fall of 1962. Many vividly remember him as almost always wearing a tweed jacket and seldom, if ever, gathering in the residence hall common room to watch the TV series “The Fugitive,” a favorite pastime of young Yalies.
“He was driven to be a leader, to make an impact,” said Cary Koplin, a classmate at Yale. “John was looking beyond the weekend road trip to Vassar, or the mixer, or `What am I going to do to avoid military service?’ ”
In previous generations, such seriousness would have been as frowned on in the Ivy League as it had been at the prep schools that fed them. But Yale was in the midst of huge changes that helped Kerry fit in.
Many in the Class of ’66 remember being told repeatedly that theirs was the first Yale class in which public-school graduates outnumbered preppies. The meritocracy had arrived at Yale, after decades in which breeding was at least as important as talent in winning admission.
“There was an egalitarian spirit,” said Tedwilliam Theodore, a member of the Class of 1966 who had attended public high school. “There would be a Goodyear or a Vanderbilt or whatever, but for the most part it didn’t seem to matter.”
Kerry reveled in Yale’s atmosphere of achievement. Amid the school’s Gothic stone arches and sparkling green quads, he evolved from an awkward teenage striver into a prominent young man whom many saw as destined for great things.
He was one of those campus figures people knew of, even if they didn’t know him personally. He headed the Yale Political Union, which sponsored debates and brought public figures to campus for speeches. He was part of a powerhouse two-man debate squad. He lettered in soccer, scoring three goals against rival Harvard his senior year.
Sign of accomplishment
In the most telling sign of accomplishment — and acceptance — in Yale’s social order, Kerry was tapped to join the most prestigious of the university’s many secret societies: Skull and Bones. The group, housed in a windowless stone building on a New Haven street, chooses 15 students a year out of a rising senior class of about 1,000; typically they’re the students of greatest promise. President Bush, also a Yale graduate, was tapped for Skull and Bones, too, in 1968.
Barbiero said Kerry also could be fun-loving. Barbiero recalled bombing around New England in Kerry’s blue Volkswagen Beetle, and a Kerry-piloted plane ride down the Hudson River when Kerry barely withstood the temptation to fly under the George Washington Bridge.
With military service and Vietnam looming, Barbiero said, there were few conversations about the future beyond New Haven. But many of Kerry’s classmates said there was little doubt that he knew where his future lay and had geared himself toward becoming “a Yale man who was famous,” as Barbiero put it.
During a college break, Barbiero took Kerry home to meet his parents on Long Island. He told his mother, a staunch Republican, that one day Kerry would be president.
“Well, John, if you ever run, I’ll vote for you,” Lydia Barbiero told Kerry.
This fall, her son said, Lydia Barbiero, now 88, will keep her promise.
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