-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: First Son – George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty Bill Minutaglio©1999 Random House www.randomhouse.com ISBN 0-8129-3139-4 ----- Heard the author the other day on NPR Fresh Air, the author brought up secret societies but the interviewer didn't go there. Om K ----. ----- 6 The Heaviness In November, Bush left Yale for another long weekend home in Houston, and another in the long series of what some people in the family would begin to call Reality Days—those days when the constant, ongoing, horse-race Speculation Days finally ended and the actual votes were counted. Again he took on the job of posting the election returns for his father. At the campaign headquarters on Richmond Avenue, the family was in and out, including his uncle Jonathan Bush, who had only just flown down from New York. Each new return that George W. hung on the oversized board was better than the last.[1] As usual, his Houston friends said he was irrepressible and demanding during even these final campaign moments in the Seventh District. He was frequently that way: quiet in his father's presence, swinging to another extreme when his father was out of distance. His cousin Elsie Walker had seen it all before, his deference to his father, the way he tried to control himself around his father. "Young George-his father's quieter and gentler in a way-sometimes was sort of sensitive to the fact that he was too coarse or, you know, rough-edged for his father," said Walker. For years with his mother, sparring and slinging arrows, he would spin and bounce on his feet, leaning forward, bursting out of his skin to ridicule something, almost to the point of black humor, making a mockery of the fact that her treasured dog had died. "Doggone it!" he would yell and whoop until they both started choking with laughter. His father would be half smiling, rolling his eyes exaggeratedly, making a show of groaning and suffering under the weight of what his son had just said. With his father, the family said, he learned just never to push that far—but he sometimes went twice as far when the elder Bush wasn't there. His father easily defeated Harris County District Attorney Frank Briscoe. The conservative Democratic opponent had decided to play even harder to the barely suppressed racial fears in the white neighborhoods on the west side of the city, and, almost by default, many voters had begun perceiving the affable Bush as the more moderate but somehow still conservative alternative. Briscoe was easy to paint in harsh, definable colors; candidate Bush's stripes were less clear. And Bush campaign media manager Harry Treleaven was exultant at the way his candidate had emerged as a "new" political commodity-how there was potency in the "haziness about exactly where he stood politically."[2] The lessons of that campaignthe way George W.'s father had achieved victory by reworking that initially devastating perception as a "tool of the eastern kingmakers," the way he had somehow snatched victory as the less strident but still conservative option-would serve as a political signpost for the father and his children for the next three decades. Bush returned to Yale knowing that his father was finally following his grandfather to Washington. He left Houston almost reluctantly; he was comfortable there, and his relationship with Cathryn Wolfman was deepening. He was ready for the inalterability of the fraternity he was running, but he confided in friends that there was something out of sync at Yale and in the Northeast, something too closely paralleling the shifts around the country. He later found a name for it: "I saw an intellectual arrogance that I hope I never have."[3] IN DECEMBER, twenty-year-old Bush and a handful of his Yale brothers left campus, and the laughing, loud crew descended on the Christmas-bedecked streets of New Haven. Patrolling downtown, Bush spied a wreath on a storefront and reached out to take it. Almost as soon as he planned his escape, New Haven police officers pulled him over. The newly elected congressman's son was questioned, arrested, and charged with disorderly conduct. Years later he remembered it as a harmless college prank; he "might have had a few beers" and "we didn't make it very far. We probably were making a lot of noise, laughing."[4] The incident served to amplify a feeling that George W. was the untamed one, the resisting one, the Good Time Charlie in an unlikely family. "George was quite outrageous for many years. Pop off, hilarious, imitate people, very, very broad. I mean, he got away with it because he was so funny, but if most people tried what he would try, they would fall flat," remarked Elsie Walker.[5] News of the arrest and the criminal charges filtered through the Bush-Walker clan. So did news that twenty-year-old Bush had decided to become engaged at the same age his father had been engaged. Cathryn Wolfman was entering her junior year at Rice, she was a member of the Elizabeth Baldwin Literary Society, and she and her parents were still embedded in the revolving band of people who attended private school reunions, fund-raisers, lawn parties, and onboard meetings for the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Houston Symphony, and Rice University. She was witty and well read, someone who would fit in well with the extended Bush-Walker clan in spite of the occasional misguided whispers in Houston society circles that the Episcoplian young woman actually came from a family of "merchants"—that thinly veiled reference to the possibility she was Jewish. Some close friends even suggested that the young woman was intellectually much older than her years, that she was a peer of her parents and other adults in Houston. The fact that she was committed to George W. Bush engendered a certain degree of jealousy among other potential suitors in Houston. It was, they said, almost too perfect that Cathryn Wolfman, the star of her class, was with the congressman's son. "She was the pick of the litter. George was really headstrong, and I think that was his thinking there. If George was a trophy hunter and that was his goal, that might have been what he was going for," said Doug Hannah.[6] In the past, his father had liked to suggest dates for his son. But he hadn't suggested Wolfman. She was someone George W. had gravitated to on his own, without his father's input. His parents told people that they loved Cathryn and that they didn't oppose a marriage; in fact, as some people in Houston remarked, it would have been duplicitous for them to resist it. "I don't know how they could have, in good conscience, start preaching to him about getting married in college, which is what they had done," believed Hannah.[7] There was now something else, said friends, in the relationship between the father and the son—the son who was now planning a marriage at the same age and stage of life as his father's marriage. It was something, people close to the family also said, that underscored the generational differences between the Calvinistic father and the leash-tugging first son, something that pointed to an occasional awkwardness in their relationship. Relatives speculated that George W. had spent so much more time with his mother as a young man and that he had absorbed her piercing bluntness, her withering stare, her needling humor, her ability to deliver a crystalline retort. When his mother delivered a sharp line, it was expected; when his father did so, it was almost treasured because it was so unexpected. And, family and friends said, so much of what his father expected from the first son was implicit, assumed, never articulated. Jeb had always suspected, sometimes even seen, the barely hidden pressure for his brother to emulate their father: "There might be more to it for him than the rest of us, because he is the oldest and it is his namesake, and he more directly followed my dad's path. If he was openly honest about it, he might say that it had some effect, that it might define him in some way. I learned a while back, my estimation of my father is so powerful that if I felt like I had to follow his footsteps and follow a path that he has set for me, I would fail. I came to grips with that a while back. A lot of people who have fathers like this, or moms, who have lived such extraordinary lives, feel a sense that they have failed because they haven't reached the same level of just being a human being as their predecessor-and it creates all sorts of pathologies."[8] Jeb and George W. have both always used the same word to describe their father: "beacon." "He was just a beacon that simplified life tremendously, by his actions, not by his words," said Jeb.[9] For George W., it was also more than some stoic ideal, it reinforced his belief that his father was bashful, remote in a way that his first son never was: "By his actions, not by his words." There were things left unspoken, merely an outline of what his father expected of him as an adult, even about the facts of life, about using contraceptives, a "raincoat." "Dad was shy," said George W. "We never had 'the talk.' He never told me to wear a raincoat or anything. I never had any sense of what his ambitions were for me."[10] THE MONTH Bush was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, he returned to a muggy, cold winter in Houston and began shopping for an engagement ring. He took along his friend Doug Hannah, who was home from college in Colorado. The two traveled downtown to hallowed Neiman Marcus, the sine qua non of high-society shopping in Texas. It was the week before Christmas. Hannah knew Bush and Wolfman had been spending a small fortune in long-distance phone bills. He also knew that his friend was plunging ahead, and he understood how serious it was when they stepped past the elegant store's doors. Hannah saw that Bush had brought money and was lingering over "a monster ring." Hannah was flabbergasted. "George, this is absolutely insane!"[11] he blurted. Two weeks later, on New Year's Day, the Houston Chronicle ran a story and announcement by Society Editor Betty Ewing, the sage observer of the dizzying Gordian knot known as Houston high society: "'Cupid Hitched a Ride on Santa's Sleigh': The votes are in and it's Cupid all the way for the title of Man of the Year in these columns. He outran successful political candidates.... George Walker Bush, son of Congressmanelect and Mrs. George H. W., Bush of Houston and Washington will take pretty Cathryn Lee Wolfman as his bride." A veteran photographer was dispatched to shoot the couple as they posed in front of a fireplace with what looked like a ring bearer's pillow between them. No wedding date was announced.[12] The charges against him from the Christmas incident were dismissed, and he returned to New Haven for his spring semester, still placing long-distance calls to Wolfman in Houston and administrating his increasingly ostracized DKE fraternity. In March, the Yale Republican Club announced that it would organize a model GOP National Convention under the guidance of Representative George Bush from Texas and with financial support from Robert Taft and Gerald Ford. But that spring, while the young Yale Republicans were making their plans, Bush was more concerned with the possibility of once again exactly following his father's and grandfather's tradition. He assumed he would be invited to join the exclusive Skull & Bones Society, founded in 1832 and the essence, probably the epitome, of the elaborate secret society system at the university. The university's societies accepted only males and, beginning in the 1950s, only a handful of blacks and Jews. There were seven societies, including Book & Snake, Scroll & Key, Elihu, Berzellus, and Wolf's Head. But the Bonesmen always seemed to lure the biggest, most powerful names over the years: Dean Witter Jr., Henry Luce, Potter Stewart, Alfred Cowles of Cowles Communications, Harold Stanley of Morgan Stanley, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, Henry Stimson, Bush family business partner Averell Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William F. Buckley Jr., and President William Howard Taft. The roster of Bonesmen was a profile in power, with many lesser-known but equally influential members moving on to join the federal intelligence community, or the upper administration of Yale, Capitol Hill, or Wall Street. Skull & Bones, sometimes simply called "The Order," would swear its members to secrecy once they entered the doors of its mausoleum on High Street behind Jonathan Edwards College. Inside were faded, dark portraits of ancient Bonesmen, wooden intaglios with nods to the society's Teutonic heritage, walls covered with dark red velvet, shelves and tabletops adorned with skulls and bones. For years, the chairman of the San Carlos Apache tribe in Arizona would clamor for serious investigations into whether Prescott Bush or some other marauding Bonesman had taken possession of Gerommo's missing skull, maybe Pancho Villa's skull, maybe the skulls of other legendary renegades, and delivered them back to the dark tomb. Each year fifteen new members were admitted-or "tapped"—and each new Bonesman resolutely managed to skirt suggestions that his oath of allegiance had been administered by senior members in skeleton costumes and that the initiates were forced to recline in coffins while reciting their most intimate sexual histories. Too, they had played down the widely held belief that, in the 1960s, each new Bonesman had been awarded $ 15,000 and extended an invitation by the Russell Trust Association, the corporate entity behind the society, to visit the trust's hidden, wooded retreat on Deer Island in the Saint Lawrence River.[13] The initiation into Skull & Bones, sometimes referred to as a process of dying and being reborn, was considered a passport to adult privilege, "converting the idle progeny of the ruling class into morally serious leaders of the establishment."[14] All the trappings were there: The preppy-voodoo iconography; the clubby Medieval nods to secret meetings, numbers, and names. The Skull & Bones experience added up to a certain muscled-up seriousness for the impressionable people involved, a sense that the Lost Fraternity Boys were growing into Society Men, into Good Men. Skull & Bones literature was filled with news about being a Good Man, that preferred Bush slogan, that Bush measurement. Boni meant "good men" in Latin—"And good men are rare," according to the Bonesmen's mottoes. The whole process, the burnished oddities and lights-out rituals, inspired loyalty, a perfectly codified level of Round Table-Arthurian kinship that settled well with generations of Bushes and Walkers. Prescott Bush George Herbert Walker, Jonathan Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his cousin Ray Walker had been Bonesmen. So had family advisers Nell Mallon, the head of Dresser Industries, and Lud Ashley, the congressman from Ohio. The latter two men were like uncles to George W. Bush. He would frequently say that they were ... Good Men. ROBERT REISNER was a politically minded DKE brother who knew very well that George W.'s father had finally achieved elected office, taking his turn after Prescott Bush had retired. He also knew that George W.'s father had returned to Yale as a bona fide war hero and that, unlike his personable son, he had probably been more focused on keeping his nose to the academic grindstone. George W., thought REISNER, was focused more on his friends than on the grindstone. On the last Thursday night in April, Reisner ran into the young Bush outside the Yale cooperative. It was Tap Day, the famous day on campus when, after the bells in the Harkness Tower rang at 8 Pm., black-suited senior society members, some of them carrying ominous-looking attache cases, would sprint from one residential college to another, summoning—tapping—selected juniors for admission. All week long, the process had been building, with unsubtle hints, phone calls, and solicitations from the societies to the juniors. The campus newspaper was reporting rumors that prominent alumni, from Henry Luce to John Lindsay, were heavily involved in the process. The newspaper had also mentioned that George W.'s father was planning to visit the campus, ostensibly to speak to one of the Yale Republican groups. Reisner, a hardworking student who considered George W. a good friend, stopped to talk outside the cooperative. Bush told him that he was expecting, that night, to be summoned into another society in addition to Skull & Bones. The other society wasn't one of the truly exclusive ones; most people on campus knew it didn't take itself too seriously. And it seemed as if George W. was at a crossroads. Reisner understood the implications for someone like George W. Bush, whose life was constantly being weighed against his father's, his grandfather's, the entire Bush-Walker legacy. "What are you going to do?" asked Reisner, who had heard that the society in question was an "above-ground" society called, of all joke things, Gin & Tonic—a society that operated in the sunshine, that didn't have tombs, thick traditions, a weighty sense of responsibility. George W., told his friend that he was maybe ready to depart from his father's career and the Bush family path, that this was something truly different. As Reisner listened, Bush seemed almost philosophical, affirming that he was going to go his own way but that it was OK, he would be OK with it. "This is what is going to fit me," Reisner heard Bush say. "This is the way it is going to work for me." Reisner knew this was an important moment for his friend, but he didn't know if his fraternity brother was making the best of it or getting comfortable with it. The friends went their separate ways, the hour-long whirlwind of Tap Night ended, and over the next few days, students and Yale faculty began learning the names of the people who had decided to enter the various tombs and secret societies. Reisner and others learned that George W., Bush was going to enter Skull & Bones after all. And a story circulated that at 8 P.M. on Tap Night, at the moment the bells were tolling in Harkness Tower, there was a knock on George W.'s door at his room in Davenport. When he opened it up, his father, the U.S. congressman, was standing outside, asking that his first son do the right thing and join Skull & Bones-become a Good Man. Owing to the surprisingly resilient nature of the secrecy surrounding Skull & Bones, Reisner and other friends never knew exactly who it had been outside their fraternity brother's door that night. For Reisner, the symbolism of the story is what is really important, the very possibility that George W. Bush's father might have personally urged the hesitant first son to stay the Bush-Walker course, not to veer from his legacy, his destiny."To me, that was sort of symbolic-of the tradition and the sense of Walker's Point and the history that he had to live up to in his life. The idea that your father was that kind of presence in your life, as a mentor, as a guide," said Reisner. Reisner knew that George W.'s Yale experience was defined by his father, by his grandfather, by the extended generations in the BushWalker house. In the end, Reisner also speculated, it was his father's lingering presence on campus and in the Yale newspapers that had something to do with the first son's wholesale rejection of political involvement. "The presence of his father is an important factor as to why he might have been understated about that, why he wouldn't have necessarily been a political figure in those days," Reisner said.[15] EVEN As he was ceremoniously escorted through the usually padlocked doors of the Skull & Bones mausoleum and finally inducted into his father's and grandfather's society, it wasn't hard to sense the same rejection, suspicion, and ostracism that he had felt with the fraternity. The day following Tap Day, The New York Times called the Yale secret societies "hotly controversial on the campus"; Chaplain Coffin, who had once been a Bonesman, had told the newspaper, "It's an awful indictment that you have to disappear into a tomb to have a meaningful relationship."[16] Meanwhile, the Yale newspaper reported that "even social prestige is declining as a reason to join a society... [T]he number of undergraduates who regard society members with suspicion rather than fear and admiration has been growing." If the fraternities were considered exclusionary in the late 1960s, the societies—which had always been by definition cryptic, mysterious, closed-were being assailed as antediluvian monstrosities. And now Bush was at his tomb every Thursday and Sunday night. Some fraternity brothers went in with him, including Life magazine cover idol and Olympic swimmer Don Schollander. There were also Gregory Gallico, who would become a nationally known plastic surgeon and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School; future prominent Los Angeles defense attorney, Donald Etra; Muhammed Saleh, a Jordanian student and future vice president for the Timex Corporation, destined to be head of the Yale alumni board; and Rex W. Cowdry, future deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health. On campus there was some parlor game speculation that Skull & Bones was slipping in prestige to Scroll & Key, that it needed a prominent boost-something that adding a congressman's son and an Olympic gold medalist could give. There were two Jewish members and one black student; no women were allowed. All members would remain inflexible about protecting the inner workings of the society. "Well, we generally don't discuss what goes on in there," said Roy Austin, the soccer team captain from St. Vincent who was the only black member of Skull & Bones that year. Bush "certainly never spoke politics," even though Austin also obviously knew that his father was a congressman.[17] "He was not obsessed by anything, or a cause. He didn't have an agenda, a timetable, a program," said Saleh. "We were in the Vietnam era, it was a big subject, and the big thing about George is that really he was not doctrinaire about anything. You would think, coming from a political family, that he would take strong views."[18] Britt Kolar was one more Good Man, another loyal Skull & Bonesman that year. "Despite the tumultuous times in the sixties when we were in school, not all of us were radicalized by any means. I don't think it changed him at all. I think his values have been consistent from the word go, and these are the values that he learned from his family, that you make your commitments and you keep your commitments. Despite his upbringing, he is, I think, one of the least pretentious people I've ever met," said Kolar. But his friends also thought that being in Skull & Bones, a steady way station in the cusp years, had brought him closer to his father, his grandfather, and all the other Bushes and Walkers who had passed through Yale. "It just kind of crystallized his value system," Kolar added.[19] There was a return favor: Skull & Bones exposed students from more modest backgrounds, such as Austin, to a way of life that had previously been alien. "George, because of what we thought to be his patrician background, was a valuable asset," Bonesman Ken Cohen would later say. "He gave us insights into a way of life to which we'd never been exposed."[20] AFTER THE spring semester in 1967 he was back home in Houston, and by now fourteen-year-old Jeb, especially, was in awe of his unbridled twentyone-year-old brother. Jeb was trying to gauge George W.'s place in time, in the buildup to that famous halcyon summer of love and drugs in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. In a way, the year was the final bridge between the nascent Deep South stirrings over racism and that on going merger of the antiwar and counterculture movements. Rosa Parks's decision not to abandon her bus seat one day in December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, had later segued into the bloody, harrowing Freedom Rides into the South-and the freedom riders began attracting more northerners to the civil rights movement. The Students for a Democratic Society, founded by representatives from eleven colleges at a 1962 meeting in Port Huron, Michigan, had stated its mission in its charter statement: "We are the people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to a world we inherit." On the heels of SDS, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 and the 1965 explosions in Watts pushed the national debates to extraordinary levels. And beyond the pointed protests, there was also a fountain of influential, often-debated social policy taking shape-frequently as a cautionary response from lawmakers to the fledgling "movement." LBJ's War on Poverty, Medicare, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act were all put in motion. Apart from the legislation, there were dozens of groups coalescing and emerging as perennially influential forces, among them the National Organization for Women, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Consumer Federation of America. And on a broader, shifting level, college administrators and faculty were revising curriculums to include dozens of courses on Hispanic or African-American history and culture, women's studies, and pop culture. Jeb was destined for the University of Texas in Austin, the only school he wanted to attend and really the only university and city in Texas where the new political tendencies were openly encouraged. Jeb always felt that his older brother "misbehaved like most people did; it wasn't like he was an angel." Jeb felt that he and his older brother understood the unsubtle cultural shifts in America, but he was sure of something else: "Boy, he wasn't a hippie or anything like that." For Jeb, his older brother was' just funny-the funniest person he knew—"really funny."[21] George W., told his family that being at Yale had reinforced his feeling that if he were ever asked where he was from, he would say Texas instead of Connecticut. "He was always saying, you know, Texans are so friendly and nice, you know. He's very at home there, and he's not at home in the more intellectual, very intellectual ... more intellectual and more cerebral. Texas is more relaxed," said his cousin Elsie Walker.[22] His closest relatives, the ones who knew him best, could tell he had had bitter, unexpected moments at Yale. "It was very uncomfortable for him, as the son of his father, to be at Yale when there was so much antiwar and so much antiestablishment ... and he comes from a very establishment, or we come from quite an establishment family. And his is the most establishment within our family. He felt a real conflict and a real loyalty to his family, and I think it was very hard to come from a prominent Republican family," continued Elsie Walker.[23] Back in Houston, he was clearly at ease. "When he came back to town, it was the signal that the parties began again. People wanted to do things with him. It was worthwhile to spend time with the Bushes, and I think George acknowledged that and knew what a benefit that was," said his friend Doug Hannah.[24] During the day, George W., worked as a $250-a-month bookkeeper for Rauscher, Pierce Securities. In Houston, the college kids who were reassembling for the summer liked going swimming at the Bush house; they'd also take turns sitting in what they assumed was Prescott Bush's old Senate seat, the one he had had shipped down to Houston. Unlike most of his friends' parents, Bush's mother frequently insisted on coming along, especially if golf or tennis were involved. Playing golf one day with his mother and Hannah, George W., started fuming and cursing at the first tee. By the second hole, his mother had had enough. "George, I'm not going to put up with this. Do it again and you are done," a worried Hannah heard her demand. George W., promptly misplayed another stroke on the second hole and immediately starting fuming and cursing again. His mother stared at her oldest son for a moment and then ordered him to sit in the car until she was through playing. When she found out that George W., smoked, she was furious. His father sauntered into the conversation: "Barbara, who are you to tell your son he shouldn't smoke as you so deeply inhale your Newport?"[25] Through it all, the long Houston summers took on a languid, fluid quality. Hannah said it was a standing arrangement that every weekend Lacey Neuhaus or another friend would have a party. At night at those parties, Bush would sometimes talk to his friends about what he wanted to do after Yale: "He wanted to be rich. He wanted to possibly be a stockbroker, because his great-uncle and uncle were stockbrokers," remembered Hannah. "He wanted to be around people who were important, simply because it was fun. George and I would sit around in the sum mertime, in the evening, and dream about opening up our own stock brokerage firm. We all wanted to be partners."[26] Hannah knew his good friend's background, with all the wealth spread through Wall Street investment houses. He also knew his friend was good at hedging bets, as when he had been talking up the University of Texas in case he didn't get accepted at Yale. Hannah felt that he knew his friend better than most; he felt that George W., always had a "stockbroker's ability."[27] BY EARLY FALL, Bush and Cathryn Wolfman were still engaged, but friends began to wonder if they would ever get married. The Rice student, some friends said, was given to surprising bursts of independence. Some even said she was simply a more serious student than George W., better read, ready to question assumptions. Their friends said that Wolfman wanted to wait until after graduation, maybe even longer. She returned to Rice and her deep interest in art and literature; he returned to Yale. On campus, the political environment continued to heat up, and amid it all there was news that any budding stockbrokers could join a Yale investment club and play the market as a member of something called "The Fund." INTO OCTOBER 1967, the politicization of Yale's campus was still ongoing, sometimes attracting a handful of faculty members and sometimes outpacing other burgeoning campus movements around the country. The War in Vietnam was omnipresent, of course, as was the draft. Strobe Talbott, a classmate of Bush's and future deputy secretary of state, had written in the campus newspaper that "since the war in Vietnam became a killing and dying war for Americans, college students should have faced a new and deceivingly clear-cut responsibility. This responsibility is one of confrontation and self-examination.... [M]uch of the undergraduate sentiment about the draft is still divided between complacency and panic." It was the last year at Yale for an all-male student body. At the impossibly long bar in the DKE house, Bush still avoided any soul-baring chats about the Vietnam War. One fraternity brother remembers one notable departure from Bush's almost apolitical presence at Yale: as he was standing shoulder to shoulder with him at the bar, Bush began railing about how the nation's oilmen were being strangled by some suggested tax-break variances in the oil depletion allowance. The college fraternity brother remembered George W. growing heated as he built his argument in defense of the oilmen in Texas. October was a fitftil month for the defenders of the campus status quo: Phi Gamma Alpha, one of the six Yale fraternities, was slamming shut because of dwindling membership and rising debts, faculty members were accused by concerned alumni of straying away from stringent, conservative politics, and William F. Buckley Jr., who had graduated seventeen years earlier, defiantly -declared that he was running to be elected to the Yale Corporation, the 266-year-old body that governed all of the school's policies, because of "liberal bias" at the university and because "students simply don't have access to the conservative point of view." Buckley, whose father had gone to the University of Texas, testily added that Yale had ceased to be "the kind of place where your family goes for generations. The son of an alumnus, who goes to a private preparatory school, now has less of a chance of getting in than some boy from P.S. 109."[28] University president Kingman Brewster blasted Chaplain Coffin as "strident" for spearheading on-campus draft protests. Finally, that same month, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents began combing through Yale, pinpointing and questioning students who had sent their draft cards to an antiwar protest in Washington, D.C. When military recruiters came to Yale that month, they were met and challenged by antiwar protesters. For some, the all-male 1968 class simply still represented that final link from decades-old traditions to a different, easily more complicated, future. Bob Wei, who had gone to Andover and then to Yale, said, "The tradition was for the freshmen to get the seniors to buy them liquor. By my senior year, the seniors were getting the freshmen to buy them marijuana. We were the last of the preppies."[29] It was something that Bush and the embattled DKE house especially felt. As DKE brother J. P. Goldsmith put it, "We were the last vestiges of the rich man's school. A coat and tie was required for meals. A large percentage of the students were private school graduates. The world was good. We didn't know it, but it was about to get a lot worse."[30] Bush continued to be a fixture in intramural sports. He spent two nights a week meeting in the Skull & Bones tomb. He disliked the direction the Beatles were taking; he had liked the early version with the three-chord beat, the mop-top version that he had imitated so ardently at Andover, but now even that was souring. Later he would say, "The Beatles went through that kind of a weird, psychedelic period, which I particularly didn't care for."[31] At Yale Bush was always uneasy with cultural ambiguity, said his friends. He was, as one friend on the rugby team said, "a good old boy before his time-or out of his time." DKE brother Dan Begel, who sat next to him on the way to the rugby matches, noted, "He was not political, because in that time, to be political meant to protest. I don't know if it was because he was conservative or because he wanted to not jeopardize any future political ambitions."[32] In the fraternity, in Skull & Bones, in his circles- in Davenport College, there was still that increasingly prevailing sense that a Yale era was coming to a fitful close. "It was really the last of those old days. We were right at the end, everything really happened after we left. It was really the end of an era. DYE was stuck in the fifties," remarked Franklin Levy, the DKE house chairman.[33] "It wasn't until senior year that really the world began to intrude in a big way," added Bush's roommate Terry Johnson.[34] Except for a survey course on "Japanese literature in translation," his senior year work centered on the requirements for his history major. His transcript shows History 39a, listed in the Yale course catalog as "the history and practice of American oratory from John Edwards through FDR; analysis of oratory and instruction on speaking." His transcript also shows History 85, "Problems in Eighteenth-Century American History"; History 56b, "Germany 1871-1961"; History 36b, "The Antebellum South and the Civil War 1815-1865." BUSH ALSO again devoted his time to his secret society and his fraternity—it was time to prepare for the new pledges—and he was instantly at the center of a controversy that found him defending his fraternity against stories that first appeared in the campus newspaper and that would eventually spread to The New York Times. The first Friday in November, the Yak Daily News published a special supplement charging the handful of fraternities with widespread physical and psychological abuse. The paper noted that school officials had sought to outlaw onerous hazing, but that the fraternities, especially Delta Kappa Epsilon, were guilty of excesses: "Despite Yale's Ivy sophistication, pledging a fraternity at Yale is often a degrading, sadistic and obscene process."[35] The newspaper alleged that the DYE house hazing lasted a week and culminated in burning a half-inch-long Delta insignia onto a pledge's back. For some, after the beating that had gone before, the branding was almost a relief. "By that time," one pledge says, "my body was so numb that the iron felt good—like a match being held close to my body." On that final night, each pledge was forced to sit with his head between his legs, motionless, for two to five hours. If F. coughed, raised his head or talked he was kicked by an older brother. The room was completely dark. Noise from the more violent parts of the DYE rites penetrated into the Drama School Theatre, where the audience was watching the second act of "'Tis Pity She's A Whore." A sophomore, walking past DKE after the play, heard through a window someone yelling, "The poor baby. He's crying. Let's leave him alone." Much of the rest of the DKE initiation is degrading, but not violent. One pledge who dropped out recalls, "Guys would tell me to get them seconds in the dining hall. If I didn't, it was understood that I'd get beaten up in the next meeting. "[36] The allegations were picked up by The New York Times on November 8 in a story headlined "Branding Rite Laid to Yale Fraternity." It apparently marked the first time the younger Bush's name appeared in the newspaper: "George Bush, a Yale Senior, said that the resulting wound is 'only a cigarette burn.' "[37] The newspaper's disclosures appeared on the same day as front-page stories about dramatic election results around the country, including the groundbreaking victory of the first black mayor in a major city, when Carl Stokes was elected in Cleveland, Ohio. The Hartford Courant, Connecticut's largest newspaper, ran a story about the fraternity allegations on the front page alongside the other swirling news events of the day: Three American prisoners of war had been released by the Viet Cong after "sincere repentance"; Muhammad All had come to the state to give a speech about black nationalism; in North Carolina, 1,200 armed troops had been called out following the worst racial disturbances in the state's history. On campus, emergency meetings were held between Yale's deans and fraternity leaders to discuss the well-publicized charges against DKE. Some Yale students said the DKE house was using heated-up coat hangers to brand people. The next Tuesday, there was another article in the campus newspaper. The congressman's son and his roommates had decided they would be the ones to publicly defend the fraternity against the allegations: George W., Bush, 1968, the past president of DKE, called the branding "insignificant." Stating that there is little pain, Bush said, "there's no scarring mark, physically or mentally. I can't understand how the authors of the Friday article can assume that Yale has to be so haughty not to allow this type of pledging to go on at Yale."[38] His roommate Terry Johnson, someone who would later ask Bush to serve as his child's godfather, also wrote a defiant letter to the student newspaper: Threats of beating are so much hot air. There just is simply very little paddling. Hot air never hurt anybody. The News can print pictures of my backside all day if it wants to, and will find no mark or scar attesting to my undying and lifelong allegiance to DKE or any other such nonsense. "Branding" at DKE is equivalent to a mild cigarette burn. The backs of this year's DKE pledges will be no different from mine in a month from now. The rest of DKE's initiation is personal, and I do not care to discuss it. But I can assure you one thing: after coming out of the initiation I was mentally, not physically, exhausted.[39] Seven days later there was another set of high-profile stories saying that Yale's fraternity-governing board had unanimously voted to fine two unnamed fraternity houses an undisclosed sum of money. "All types of initiations which ... might be detrimental to the best interests of the fraternities or of Yale are strictly forbidden," the governing body said in its official statement. Reverend William Sloane Coffin, for one, was watching the backlash against the fraternity system. "E. B. White was asked, 'What's the opposite of a fraternity?' He answered, 'Fraternity.' To take an illiberal student and put him in a fraternity is like taking a wino and putting him in a wine cellar," said Coffin many years later.[40] A WEEK after the fraternity was penalized and he was defending the DKEs in print, Bush was again picked up by the police, this time by law enforcement officials in Princeton, New Jersey. He had traveled there with his fraternity brothers for the Yale-Princeton Ivy League championship football game on Novem ber 18. Yale had been ahead the entire game and finally won 2 9-7. Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill, loyal DKEs, had had their usual stellar day on the field. just as the game ended, a fractious crowd gathered at one end of the field. Photographs in the Daily Princetonian show a throng on the field reducing the venerable wooden goalposts to, as the paper described it, "a twisted wreck."[41] The police quickly moved in to control the scene, to make sure that there were no fistfights, no further violence or property destruction. Newspapers reported scuffles, and there was at least one report of someone allegedly being assaulted and having his clothing stolen. According to Princeton police records, Bush was detained, questioned, and issued a warning. Information about the case was turned over to school authorities for any future investigation.[42] "Somehow they picked him out," said Donald Ensenat, a best friend and a loyal fraternity brother from New Orleans. "The police came along, and somehow he got collared. I think I've learned since that the record reflects that he was told to leave Princeton. He had until sundown to leave campus."[43] IN THE SPRING of 1968, the political fervor and the pitch of the intellectual arguments over racism, the war, and economic disparities had reached levels unprecedented in the history of the school. Yale's Black Student Alliance made national newspaper headlines by embarking on a two-day boycott of classes "to express our feelings of alienation from Yale, and of outrage and anger at the treatment routinely meted out to black people in this city."[44] There were an estimated ninety African Americans among the four thousand students at Yale. Author Daniel Yergin, one of Bush's classmates, would later write about 1968 as a time when "an alienation and suspicion of American purpose in the world had become common in our generation."" Students in the class of 1968 were obviously going through changes; future filmmaker Oliver Stone had already dropped out and would serve in Vietnam. And the outside events that spring were watershed moments in American history. It began with the militarily debilitating and psychologically unhinging terror of the Viet Cong's Tet offensive in February. It culminated in a fateful seven-day span in April that began with President Johnson's stunning decision to abandon Washington for the Texas Hill Country and his televised announcement that "I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Johnson's additional declaration to the 70 million viewers that he was halting the bombing of North Vietnam added up to a wild leap in the stock market and almost a collective sigh of relief around campuses, corporations, and households. A few days later, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis and the United States was almost instantly engulfed in the most violent, chaotic racial outbursts in its history. Washington was rocked to its core, with Stokely Carmichael and other black activists appearing in the impoverished neighborhoods ringing the seats of power and threatening revenge on "white America": "Go home and get your guns ... when the white man comes he is coming to kill you." An order was quickly handed down to have squads of federal troops, many of them wielding rifles and bayonets, dispatched to guard the White House grounds. Other troops set up a machine-gun post to stave off any attackers who might storm up the steps of the Capitol. There were troop callouts, riots, or fires in 130 American cities; there were at least 20,000 arrests, and almost 70,000 military personnel activated to confront the domestic disturbances. There were more than a few people at Yale who felt that the entire scope of the cultural and political departures was somehow aimed squarely at what Yale embodied. William Sloane Coffin Jr. was going to trial, along with Andover and Yale graduate Dr. Benjamin Spock, in Boston's Federal Court Building on charges of conspiring to "counsel, aid and abet" young men interested in defying Selective Service laws. During the trial, Yale reappointed Coffin to the post of university chaplain. Elsewhere in New Haven, there were also stirrings-signs of Bobby Seale's strategy to expand the Black Panther Party from five to forty-five chapters across the country. Finally, all semester, the members of the last all-male class at Yale were busy exploring, debating their ominous postcollege options, including the fact that student deferments were about to expire. For many, the obvious bottom line was avoiding going overseas. "Everybody did something: medical school, Naval Officer Candidate School. You either got drafted or flunked your physical," said Bush's classmate J. P. Goldsmith.[46] His other friends at Yale wondered if Vietnam was on Bush's mind at all, since he hardly ever spoke about it. He rarely talked about the nuances of the war, the stances his father and grandfather were taking, the military strategies, the rolling student protests, the way it was all rattling the highest levels of government around the world. Around him, his fraternity brothers were constantly debating-and the debates usually centered on the fact that so many of them, like Bush, had parents and grandparents who had had distinguished military careers. "Our parents had been in the military, and it was just somet hing that was accepted," said James Lockhart III, the DKE brother who would later head the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation in the Bush administration. "The Army was not the spot to end up.... The general opinion was to get into a branch of the service that if you'd be sent to Vietnam you had to volunteer to get there rather than just be sent."[47] Even Bush's fellow Bonesman, world record swimmer Don Schollander, had announced that he was opposed to the war and to the draft, but that "I'll serve if I'm called." Bush had registered with Texas Local Board No. 62 in the Selective Service System's Federal Building in downtown Houston and was still classified II-S, "registrant deferred because of activity in study."[48] In a rare expression of his feelings, he told one fraternity brother that he had been upset by what he thought was knee-jerk opposition to the American military's arrival in Southeast Asia: "He was upset by unthinking opposition to the war, just for its own sake," said Robert Beebe.[49] Back in Houston, Bush had also talked briefly with his summertime friends about the alternatives after his student deferment would expire. "George and I used to talk all the time that there has to be a better alternative than being a lieutenant in the Army. We didn't know people who were killed in Vietnam. We lost far more friends to motorcycle accidents than we ever did to Vietnam," said Doug Hannah.[50] There was also speculation among Bush's closest friends about what the congressman's son would do-for himself, his family's reputation, his father's obvious designs on the Senate and the White House. In the end, it was another decision made as much for his father as for himself "He felt that in order not to derail his father's political career he had to be in military service of some kind," said Roland Betts, one of his most faithful colleagues from the DKE house.[51] In Houston, the sons of the most powerful political families in the state-the Connallys, the Bentsens, and the Bushes-were learning about precious slots available in the National Guard. Bush met with a Texas Air National Guard commander from Houston and enlisted twelve days before graduation, ensuring that he would return to Texas once his student deferment was taken away. "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. I decided to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes," said Bush.[52] "I don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching when I wasn't. It was either Canada or the service and I was headed into the service. Somebody said the Guard was looking for pilots. All I know is there weren't that many people trying to be pilots."[53] ON JUNE 9—three days after Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, a week after thousands streamed into Washington for the Poor People's March, a month after 720 student activists had been arrested in the takeover of Columbia University's administration building—Yale President Kingman Brewste Jr. gave the annual baccalaureate address to history major George W. Bush and the other 954 seniors assembled in Woolsey Hall. Brewster's oldest son had recently received a draft exemption as a conscientious objector. Brewster dedicated much of his speech to what was on his son's mind, what was on the minds of almost every student. The draft system, he said, had created a "cynical, evasive gamesmanship.... [M]any feel that they have no choice other than to approach the problem of military service in much the same spirit as a tax lawyer. They are left to weave their way down the narrow line which divides proper avoidance from improper evasion."[54] Brewster conferred various undergraduate awards, including the Snow Prize to Strobe Talbott for doing "the most for Yale by inspiring in his-classmates a love for the traditions of high scholarship." (Years later, Bush would harshly criticize Talbott on national TV, accusing him of being part of a conspiracy in the national media to keep his father from the presidency.) The day after the baccalaureate ceremony formal graduation exercises were held under a slate gray sky. It was "a solemn outdoor ceremony heavily laced with reminders of the war in Vietnam."[55] There were 2,402 degrees to be conferred, including 14 honorary doctorates given to, among others, Cyrus Vance, then the deputy chief of the American delegation to the preliminary Vietnam peace talks in Paris; Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna Freud; Robert Lowell, the poet who had been jailed for refusing to be drafted during World War II; Chester Bowles, ambassador to India; and Robert Lehman, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That day freshly printed copies of an antiwar petition circulated. It was signed by 3 12 of the 95 5 graduating seniors and outlined, in part, "opposition to our nation's unjust and destructive policies in Vietnam." Bush had not signed the petition. At Yale, he had aggressively avoided the weight, the intellectual gravity, the ambiguity unfolding before him-all those questions being asked about hazing, about women being admitted, about fraternities, secret societies, jocks, Vietnam, the government, big business. Years later, he was certain about his aversion to all of it: "I don't remember any kind of heaviness ruining my time at Yale."[56] There was no commencement address. In the invocation given by Right Reverend Paul Moore Jr., a Yale trustee, he prayed for Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, the man George W. had unhappily encountered his first year on campus and who was now in Boston and still on trial for helping draft resisters. It was Coffin, more than anyone else, who symbolized for him the way Yale was changing-all that strangling, cultural kudzu that he could see blanketing what the school once stood for. "We pray for Yale's chaplain in the vocation of service which keeps him from us today," said the Yale trustee who was giving the invocation. During graduation, Bush's friends were shocked to see his father, the U.S. congressman, on campus. He was rarely spotted, except when his name was on the front page of the student newspaper. He stayed for two hours, said a friend of George W.'s, and then left. And after his father was gone, Bush spent the rest of graduation weekend with roommate Clay Johnson's family, as if, said a friend, they were his surrogate parents. "My father doesn't have a normal life. I don't have a normal father," Johnson heard Bush say. Johnson looked at his old Andover classmate and Yale roommate. He knew and he could see that Bush felt that he didn't have "normal access" to his father-but that he wished he had.[57] pps. 98-117 --[notes]— 6: THE HEAVINESS 1. Herbert Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New York: Scribner's, 1997), p. 121. 2. Ibid., p. 119. 3. "George Bush, Too," D, April 1992. 4. "Bush Admits Being Caught with Wreath in '66 Prank," The Dallas Morning News, September 6, 1998. 5. Author interview with Elsie Walker, February 22, 1999. 6. Author interview with Doug Hannah, September 3, 1998. 7. Ibid. 8. Author interview with Jeb Bush, January 26, 1999. 9. Ibid. 10. "In the Fish Bowl with Little George," Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1992. 11. Author interview with Doug Hannah, September 3, 1998. 12. "Cupid Hitched a Ride on Santa's Sleigh," Houston Chronicle, January 1, 1967. 13. Ron Rosenbaum, "An Elegy for Mumbo Jumbo," Esquire, September 1977. Rosenbaum graduated with George W. Bush in the Yale Class of 1968. 14. Ibid. 15. Author interview with Robert Reisner, October 1998. 16. "Bones and Keys Rattle in the Night at Yale," The NeW York Times, April 29, 1967. 17. Author interview with Roy Austin, October 1998. 18. Author interview with Muhammed Saleh, October 1998. 19. Author interview with Britt Kolar, October 1998. 20. "Go East, Young Man,"- Texas Monthly, June 1999. 2 1. Author inter-view with Jeb Bush, January 2 6, 1999. 22. Author inter-view with Elsie Walker, February 22, 1999. 23. Ibid. 24. Author interview with Doug Hannah, September 3, 1998. 25. Donnie Radcliffe, Simply Barbara Bush (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 130. 26. Author interview with Doug Hannah, September 3, 1998. 27. Ibid. 28. Yale Daily News, October 1967. 29. Author interviews with Bob Wei, September 1998. 30. Author inter-view with J. P. Goldsmith, November 8, 1998. 31. Robert Draper, "Favorite Son," GQ, September 1998. 32. Author interview with Dan Begel, September 18, 1998. 33. Author interview with Franklin Levy, September 1998. 34. Author interviews with Collister "Terry" Johnson, September 1998 and May 1 999. 35. Yale Daily News, November 3, 1967. 36. Ibid. 37. "Branding Rite Laid to Fraternity," The New York Times, November 8, 1967. 38. "No Intervention for Fraternities," Yale Daily News, November 7, 1967. 39. "Defends DYE," Letter to Editor, Yale Daily News, November 7, 1967. 40. Author inter-view with William Sloane Coffin, December 1998. 41. "Yale Topples Tigers," Daily Princetonian, November 20, 1967; "Charlie Loses Spirit; Library Loses Lights; Princeton Loses Big," Daily Princetonian, Novemb er 10, 1967. 42. Author interviews with Princeton police officials, June and July 1998. 43. Author interview with Donald Ensenat, September 14, 1998. 44. "Negro Group Boycotts Yale Classes," The New York Times, March 14, 1968. 45. "Class of '68: Time to Take Stock," The New York Times, May 30, 1993. 46. Author interview with J. P. Goldsmith, November 8, 1998. 47. Author interview with James Lockhart III, September 8, 1998. 48. Selective Service System Classification Records, Year of Birth 1946—Bush, George Walker Bush. 49. Author interview with Robert Beebe, October 1, 1998. 50. Author interview with Doug Hannah, September 3, 1998. 51. "Junior Is His Own Bush Now," Time, July 31, 1989. 52. "George W. Bush: Politics, Baseball and Life in the Shadow of the White House," The Dallas Morning News, February 2 5, 1990. 53. "Evidence Doesn't Indicate Bush Got Help Joining Guard," Fort Worth Star Telegram, November 29, 1998. 54. "Brewster of Yale Says Draft Stirs 'Cynical Gamesmanship,' " The New York Times, June 10, 1968. 55. "Yale Awards 2,042 Degrees and Honors 14 at Commencement," The New York Times, June 11, 1968. 56. Draper, "Favorite Son." 57. Author interview with Clay Johnson, July 1998. ------ Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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