Yale days shaped paths for Bush & Kerry

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Both were big men on campus, tapped for membership in the same elite secret society. Both partied hard and had minor brushes with the law. Both were destined for high office.

The Yale men vying for the presidency this year, John Kerry and George W. Bush, led parallel lives in college, at a time when Vietnam loomed and America and the campus were poised for sweeping change.

But their personalities led them down different paths, in ways that now define the choice facing voters.

President Bush distinguished himself as a people person, mindful of his father's long shadow but comfortable with his own youthful aimlessness. The future Texas governor became president of his fraternity, a cut-up and the life of any party. He disdained snobbery and elitism and detached from the erupting foment of the era.

Mr. Kerry graduated two years earlier, in 1966. He stood out as unusually serious, ahead of his peers on the big issues of the day, preoccupied with Vietnam and politically ambitious from the outset. Like Mr. Bush, he has confessed to drinking copious amounts of beer, though unlike Mr. Bush, his pals had to find the parties.

Both came of age before the '60s counterculture arose. In any case, Mr. Bush steered clear of politics. And Mr. Kerry's Yale was still very buttoned-down.

"If we had been there two years later, we probably would have come out as different people," said one of Mr. Kerry's roommates, Harvey Bundy. "People went to ROTC. We didn't participate in peace rallies."

The rivals arrived at Yale with remarkably similar backgrounds. Both were preppies and legacies – offspring of Yale men and the Eastern establishment.

Mr. Bush is third-generation Yale, and daughter Barbara continues the line when she graduates on Monday. (He and the first lady will skip the ceremony to avoid disrupting it but plan a private dinner with Barbara on Sunday night.)

He prepped at Andover. But having grown up in West Texas, where his parents had moved to seek their fortune in the oil patch, he always felt somewhat apart at Yale.

Mr. Kerry also had a daughter follow in his footsteps – Vanessa graduated from Yale in 1999. They can trace their line to Boston's Brahmins, New England's early ruling class of traders.

Mr. Kerry prepped at St. Paul in Concord, N.H., after boarding schools in Switzerland and New England. He took instantly to the place.

A new president, Kingman Brewster, took over in 1963. He changed policies to make admission to Yale more merit-based. The right family and prep school would no longer be enough.

The freshman class after Mr. Bush's was the first in which most students had attended public school. The year after that, the campus went coed.

But as Mr. Kerry arrived in 1962, Yale was still a place for bright young men in coats and ties and short hair.

He played varsity sports, joined a drinking society and a dining club, and immersed himself in competitive debating, which was pretty much his natural state.

He was on the soccer field the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when news came that President Kennedy had been shot. Mr. Kerry glued himself to television for days, mourning and naming Cabinet members and congressmen as they flashed across the screen.

Mr. Bundy, his future wife, Blake, and others would later joke about the Cabinet jobs they'd get in a Kerry administration. "We always knew he was going to run for president," said Mr. Bundy, now an investor adviser in Chicago."He had the charisma. He had the leadership. ... He certainly had the desire."

Gaddis Smith, who taught both candidates in his popular diplomatic history course (Mr. Bush earned a C-minus, according to a transcript that surfaced in 2000; Mr. Kerry's grades have not come to light), remembers Mr. Kerry as a standout orator. In the halls of Ivy, his style was a winner.

Highlights punctuate yearbooks from the era. One entry dubbed him the "mesmeric John Kerry." He became president of the Yale Political Union, the elite debate club.

His focus on Vietnam was intense. He would engage fellow students in endless hours of conversation, including roommate Bundy, whose uncles William and McGeorge were key architects of Vietnam policy under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

William Bundy spoke on campus, visiting their room afterward and drinking beer late into the night with talk of communist dominoes and the duty of bright young men to serve their country. It struck a chord for Mr. Kerry, whose father, like Mr. Bush's, had been a pilot in World War II. He volunteered for Navy officer training during his senior year.

Yet long-held doubts about the war persisted. When he was chosen to give the senior class oration, he devoted it to a scathing critique. "We have not really lost the desire to serve. We question the very roots of what we are serving," he said.

The perception of Vietnam as a turning point struck friends as yet another sign Mr. Kerry was headed for high office.

"John was ahead of his time," said friend Alan Cross, a pediatrics professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "It was clear from the outset that he had political ambitions."

Dr. Cross was one of 15 seniors tapped with Mr. Kerry for Skull and Bones, the elite secret society that Mr. Bush also joined his senior year.

Mr. Kerry later married the twin sister of another Bonesman, David Thorne, a friend since freshman soccer.

"He was different. He was very focused and kind of driven in those days. He thought he was setting out to achieve stuff in the world," said Mr. Thorne, a publisher of holistic health books and magazines.

But Mr. Kerry had a lighter side. He slacked off senior year and took flying lessons. He got a parakeet his junior year and spent hours teaching it phrases in three languages. "John really liked this bird," Mr. Bundy recalled, and he let it nest in his hair "wiggling back and forth."

The pet led to a brush with the law. New Haven officers were dubious when they found Mr. Kerry up a tree trying to retrieve it.

He was born in New Haven the summer after his father's freshman year. George Herbert Walker Bush (Class of '48) was already a war hero, soon to be the ultimate big man on campus – captain of the baseball team and Phi Beta Kappa. Grandfather Prescott Bush had served Connecticut as a senator and Yale as a trustee. Uncles were prominent alumni.

Mr. Bush toyed with enrolling at the University of Texas. Almost from the outset, Yale left a bad taste.

A couple of months into freshman year, Mr. Bush's father lost a Texas Senate bid to incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough. The race was closely watched nationally as a test between liberals and the nascent Southern GOP.

The younger Bush returned to campus dejected. He bumped into Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. and introduced himself. Mr. Coffin was a Bonesman, class of 1949 – the group chosen by the elder Bush and his classmates for membership. But instead of sympathy, the chaplain told him his father "was beaten by a better man."

The encounter left Mr. Bush bitter for decades; he has often spoken of the "intellectually superior" snobs he met at Yale. Eventually, his feelings would soften. Last year, he hosted his 35th class reunion at the White House.

Mr. Bush kept his politics mostly to himself. And he did not even try to match his father's achievements in sports and academics.

"More than anything, George was a student of people, not subjects," recalled classmate and fellow Bonesman Robert McCallum in The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. His three-room suite, which he shared with fellow Texan Clay Johnson – a boarding school pal he kept at his side in Austin and the White House – became a social hub.

One oft-told story from sophomore year involved a hazing ritual at Delta Kappa Epsilon, the closest thing on campus to Animal House, with the wildest parties in New Haven. When pledges were forced to name their classmates, most struggled to get past a handful. Mr. Bush rattled off four dozen names, everyone in the room – a feat that would live in DKE lore and catapult him to the fraternity's presidency.

As for politics, Mr. Bush's father won a Houston congressional seat in 1966, but his eldest son shunned the Young Republicans and other political groups at Yale. Instead, he became captain of the dorm football team and a champion at "crew racing," in which six-man teams competed at beer chugging.

In his junior year, he was detained for disorderly conduct when he and others on a self-appointed fraternity "decorating committee" snatched a Christmas wreath from a hotel. Years later, long after swearing off alcohol, Mr. Bush called it a "not-so-proud moment."

"We apologized, and the charges were dropped," he wrote in his campaign autobiography.

Senior year brimmed with ominous events. In January 1968, Mr. Coffin, a leading anti-war figure, was arrested for encouraging draft resisters. (The conviction was later overturned.) The next month, President Lyndon B. Johnson ended deferments for graduate school students. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in April.

At the end of May, just before graduation, Mr. Bush joined the Texas National Guard.

Mr. Bush has described his senior year as "a very placid period. ... There wasn't a lot of protest at Yale in '68," he told The New York Times four years ago. "I don't remember that."

Yet there was upheaval that year – race riots in New Haven, students burning draft cards, Lady Bird Johnson greeted by 1,200 protesters. But most civil rights and antiwar activity occurred off campus.

As a 1968 yearbook essay put it, "no matter how deep the agony is over the war or the cities, the Yale student is still essentially a voyeur."

"Mr. Kerry also had a daughter follow in his footsteps – Vanessa graduated from Yale in 1999. They can trace their line to Boston's Brahmins, New England's early ruling class of traders."

Specifically, Opium Traders.

3 posted on 05/22/2004 11:52:31 AM PDT by Redcoat LI (You Can Trust Me , I'm Not Like The Others.....)

I was in awe of the history teacher who described Kerry as a great orator. duh, what happened?

Also the nasty chaplain who told Dubya that his father had been beaten by "a better man." What kind of grown man would make a remark like that to a young boy about his father? I guess the kind who would later be arrested for encouraging draft dodgers. But a chaplain????

BTW, I know Ralph Yarborough and he WAS NOT the better man.

"What kind of grown man would make a remark like that to a young boy about his father?"

A Liberal.

5 posted on 05/22/2004 12:23:57 PM PDT by Redcoat LI (You Can Trust Me , I'm Not Like The Others.....)

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