The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  In the beginning George and his friends were miserable at Andover. His Texas roommate, Clay Johnson, said that he spent his first six months trying to figure out how, without totally disgracing his family, he could get kicked out so he could go back home. “We were in way over our heads in a foreign land,” he said. “We found we had to struggle just to catch up with everybody else . . . George, who is upbeat and energetic and a can-do guy, was challenged as much as the rest of us.”

  “Oh, God,” said Kim Jessup. “Andover was awful. It was like going to college when you were fourteen years old. Actually, the school was so tough that college was easy. After four years at Andover, I was able to sail through my first year at Yale . . . but I still hated Andover. We were not allowed to live in adolescence there. We couldn’t be boys. We were supposed to be ‘men’ who were to become leaders. The Andover motto: Serve others and promote yourself. You became a product of prep-school arrogance because they inculcate you with the belief that you are born to a purpose beyond other people. This produces bizarre behavior on the part of high-WASP types like myself and some elevated Catholics, which is about all there was at Andover in those days.

  “Funny, but we thought we were a diverse group because not all of us were rich. We knew there was a plumber’s son in our class and a few scholarship students, which, I suppose, was the prep-school definition of diversity at that time. Not everyone had a bunch of Roman numerals after his name, but there were guys who talked about their ‘summer place’ and their ‘winter place’ as if they moved into different estates with each season. We certainly weren’t a class of celebrity kids. There were no big-name sons of movie stars or statesmen or tycoons. We didn’t pay attention to anyone’s father then, but our parents did, which is probably why I knew the names of Glenn Greenberg, son of the baseball great Hank Greenberg; Didi Pei, son of the architect I. M. Pei; and Torbert Macdonald, the godson of John F. Kennedy. Torby was probably the biggest deal in a way because JFK was President at the time.”

  Not even a close personal relationship with the President of the United States could bestow a sense of security at Andover. “I felt strange because I came from a working-class town in Massachusetts,” said Torbert Macdonald, whose father was a congressman and one of the President’s best friends. “Georgie, which is what I called him then, felt strange, too, because he was a kid from West Texas and a real outsider in that snooty northeastern prep-school environment. He was not a patrician at all. The two of us felt pretty alienated . . . and now that I read some of the confessions of the rest of our class online, I realize that almost everyone felt that way, but at the time I only knew how I felt and how Georgie felt.”

  Diversity within George’s class of 290 was limited to two African Americans, one Puerto Rican, one Asian, and no more than twenty Jews. “There was a definite Jewish quota,” said Eric Wallach, “but then no serious Jew would have gone to Andover in those days . . . It was Babbitt land. White bread, Protestant, country club, upper Episcopalian. The school was so out of touch that they held a service for Jews on Sunday. [Jewish Sabbath is Saturday.] I was immensely toughened by the experience of going there, but I hated it. We clocked in for everything. The place was run on martinet time.”

  Many from the class of 1964 recalled Andover as austere, dismal, and dispiriting. “Not very many people were happy to be there,” said Peter Pfeifle. “There was a great deal of cynicism and unfriendliness in the air, people putting people down. It was like an old-fashioned English boys’ school where you were watched all the time and weren’t having much fun overall.”

  Enter George W. Bush, the brash up-your-nose and in-your-face prankster. “He used his audacity and chutzpah to entertain us,” said Torbert Macdonald. “He was gregarious, verging on goofiness. Very sarcastic but without malice. He did not mind being the butt of a joke as long as people laughed. He needed an appreciative audience. He did not have a lot of respect for authority, so he was not afraid to mouth off. We called him ‘The Lip’ . . . He was also known as the Bombastic Bushkin . . . There was a small party everywhere he went.

  “Georgie cared mightily about getting on with the jocks because they were the only cool guys on campus. He roomed with John Kidde because John was a football star. You have to understand how important sports were to us in those days. Georgie wasn’t a jock like his father, so he ingratiated himself with the jocks as if the association would confer a kind of jock status . . . and I guess it did in a way, because Georgie was popular.”

  Upon graduation George W. Bush had not racked up the page of yearbook honors that his father had earned. Nor was Georgie voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” “Best Liked,” or “Ladies’ Man,” but he did place second as “Big Man on Campus,” and he came in third for “Wit.”

  Andover stressed athletics as part of its regimen. “Sports was mandatory,” recalled Conway “Doc” Downing. “There were seventeen teams and you had to go out for everything whether you were good or not—basketball, baseball, football, rugby, winter track, spring track, lacrosse, wrestling, swimming, hockey, skiing, crew, rifle, sailing—you name it. Georgie and I played junior varsity basketball together and spent a lot of time warming the bench. He could only dribble with his right hand, so he was useless on the court and I wasn’t much better. The only time he ever started in a game was when a regular got sick and the coach put George in. He only lasted about a minute and a half before he lost his temper and smashed the ball in a guy’s face. The coach yanked him, and that was the end of ole George’s basketball career . . . As a baseball player, he wasn’t much better. Unlike his father, George always seemed to have his foot in the bucket . . . and football . . . well, forget it.

  “Since he couldn’t be a jock, George became head cheerleader so he could sit on the Athletic Advisory Board, which was comprised of all the team captains. Being a jock or associating with jocks was the only way to be accepted at Andover. The only way.”

  Head cheerleader was considered a leadership position at Andover, but it was not something George bragged about back home. “Uh . . . no,” said one childhood friend with a laugh. “Going to an all-boy school was already suspect enough. Back home they called Andover ‘Bend over.’” Randall Roden, another friend from Midland, who went to Andover, said: “They would’ve had a field day with George had they known he was head cheerleader. In Texas a cheerleader is a girl with big hair, a twirly skirt, and pretty legs.”

  When Barbara Bush visited Andover to attend a game, she helped her son lead the cheers. “She was the original soccer mom,” said Kim Jessup. “She came to a varsity game on the same weekend my mother was visiting. It was three games before the end of the season and George was a cheerleader. The stands were filled and there’s George and his mama on the megaphone and she’s yelling the cheers alongside him. My mother, who I’ll admit was quite the snob, was horrified. She said Barbara Bush was a loudmouthed boor. Thoroughly uncouth.”

  Unable to live up to his father’s legacy as one of Andover’s most outstanding athletes, George played his own kind of sports. “Pig ball was one of his favorite games,” recalled Jessup. “You’d huddle, throw the football as high as you could, and call out a guy’s name as ‘pig.’ Then you forgot about the football and beat the hell out of the pig. It was a dumb-ass game, but bullyboys like George loved it . . . He also loved stickball, which is baseball played with a broomstick and a tennis ball and funny hats. George made himself the High Commissioner of Stickball, which was a joke job. He organized campus teams into a league and gave all the teams dirty names like ‘Crotch Rots.’ He named one team ‘Trojans’ so we’d all cheer for condoms and ‘Nads,’ so we would all yell ‘Go Nads.’ Everyone associates George with stickball at Andover, but to me he is the epitome of pig ball . . .

  “Just par for a bullyboy who happened to become President of the United States. My roommate poured gasoline on a guy, and my roommate ended up being head of St. Mark’s. Maybe it’s all part of prep-school bullying . . . We could pummel each other, but
God help us if we ever struck a teacher. Legend has it that Humphrey Bogart got expelled from Andover for ‘incontrollably high spirits’ because he threw a master into Rabbit’s Pond. None of us, not even George, would’ve had the balls to do that . . . we would’ve been too scared.”

  Fistfights were kept to a minimum, despite the high level of teenage testosterone. “It must have been all those hard-time athletics, plus we were convinced that they put saltpeter in our food,” said Torbert Macdonald. “I only remember one incident of violence and that was when we got the news of President Kennedy’s assassination. I was devastated because I knew what it would do to my father. Everyone was stunned. The only guy in our class who was insensitive and started taunting me was Dick Wolf. He never got his degree from Andover, but he managed to become a success as the executive producer of Law and Order on NBC-TV. He was a real shithead—nasty and mean—and I remember smashing my arm into his big fat gut when he started in about Kennedy minutes after the assassination.”

  On that afternoon, November 22, 1963, the Andover swimming coach, Reagh Wetmore, reacted by immediately calling his broker. The chorus instructor, William Schneider, called off practice by hanging a sign on his door: “I don’t feel like singing.” Randy Hobler, one of George’s classmates, wrote in his diary: “President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas, Texas today during parade. Everybody here at school shocked. Free cut from English ’cause of it . . . still can’t believe what happened to Kennedy. Horrible.” Classes were canceled, and the flag on campus was lowered to half-staff.

  The class of 1964 had watched a dizzying swirl of history: Roger Maris hitting his sixty-first home run on October 1, 1961; John Glenn’s three-orbit space mission in Mercury Friendship on February 20, 1962; the Cuban missile crisis eight months later; Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in April 1963; and the U.S. arrival of the mop-top Beatles in February 1964.

  “If I had to come up with one sweet memory of Andover, it would be the last three weeks in May,” said Kim Jessup, “because the weather was finally warm then and the pressure of finals was off. But the last May before graduation was hell because of George’s damned drinking.”

  Alcohol was absolutely forbidden on or off campus, but the High Commissioner of Stickball had figured out a way to beat the system. He had designed an official stickball membership card that seemed to carry the imprimatur of Andover. He distributed the cards and said they could double as fake IDs. In Gothic script, the card stated: “Officially Certified Andover Stickball League Identification Credential.” There was room for the team name, the boy’s Social Security number, and all the requisite information of a driver’s license. At the bottom, the card carried the signature of the High Commissioner, who had given himself the nickname “Tweeds Bush,” after the political legend Boss Tweed. George also included the signatures of the “League Psychiatrist,” “Chief Umpire,” and “Official Scribe.”

  “People took the cards and started slipping off campus to go to Boston so they could drink and get drunk,” said Kim Jessup. “All of the class was drinking heavily by senior year, except for me and my roommate, who were so straight we didn’t go off campus. We were dummies. A few weeks prior to graduation we got cornered in the gym by the trainer and forced to give up the names of seniors who had been drinking. I got hazed for the last three weeks of school, and George retaliated later by taking me off the DKE rolls at Yale.”

  Having made it through Andover without flunking, George felt he had earned the right to go to Yale. Despite what Andover officially called his “unremarkable” record, and an SAT score of 1206, he became the beneficiary of his family’s connections. He was accepted at Yale with the class of 1968, and he made no apologies for his good fortune. In fact, he bridled at the “intellectual arrogance” of those who denigrated him as a legacy kid. He told his classmate Robert Birge that what irritated him most about “Ivy League liberals” was their sense of guilt about being born to privilege. As an Andover graduate and a member of an established Yale family, George W. Bush headed for New Haven, where his peers perceived him as part of the ruling class on campus.

  “The school was still pretty preppy then,” said Richard Lee Williams, “and there wasn’t much of a public-school presence . . . Everyone knew that George had a bunch of blood relatives who had paved the way for him to get in . . . That was well known . . . and, of course, he was from Andover.” That Andover was the ne plus ultra of prep schools did not have to be explained.

  “The conspicuous Bush at Yale at that time was Prescott,” said David Roe (Yale 1969), who had graduated from Andover. “George being related to Prescott was a big deal.”

  “George’s father was a nobody then,” said Christopher Byron (Yale 1968), “but everyone knew his grandfather had been the senator from Connecticut. Prescott was huge at Yale. So George had a name behind him when he arrived, but there were much bigger names on that campus. Anybody who showed up in New Haven with the name Sterling was much more important . . . Every third building on the Yale campus is the Sterling this or the Sterling that. Sterling was definitely a good name to have then . . . There are no Bush buildings on campus—no Bush library, no Bush chapel, no Bush towers. Still, the fact that George was a prep-school graduate and came from a big Yale family counted for a lot in those days.”

  “Preppy culture really ruled then,” said Ron Rosenbaum (Yale 1968). “I was a Jewish kid from a public school, and for me going to Yale was like entering an alien culture.”

  When the class of 1968 arrived on the Old Campus, where they lived their freshman year, they were addressed by the president of Yale. “We were told that we thousand men, and I emphasize men, had been chosen by Yale to basically lead the country,” recalled one member of the class. “And we were privileged to be there. It was a great honor and we ought to allow Yale to educate us so that we would be ready to lead.”

  Such were the expectations for the class of 1968. Yet none of them anticipated that years after graduation they would be considered one of Yale’s most outstanding classes. Every class at Yale has its stars, but this particular class seemed to produce a cornucopia of success that touched almost every facet of American society. Performing above and beyond expectations, the class of 1968 produced a Pulitzer Prize–winning author (Daniel H. Yergin), a famous Hollywood director (Oliver Stone), a Rhodes scholar and Deputy Secretary of State (Strobe Talbott), an Olympic swimmer (Don Schollander), governors (Anthony “Tony” Knowles and George W. Bush), ambassadors (Derek Shearer and Clark T. Randt Jr.), and, in 2000, the forty-third President of the United States.

  “We’re all still scratching our heads about George,” said Ken White (Yale 1968 and DKE) in 2003. “Especially those of us who were in the fraternity with him. He just was the last guy you’d ever expect to see in the White House . . . Maybe Strobe Talbott or John Kerry, who was a couple of years ahead of us, even Joe Lieberman, who was the class of 1964. But not George. Not ever. My wife remembers him roaring drunk one night at a DKE party without a date doing the Alligator; that was some sort of dance back then when you fell to the floor on all fours and started rolling around. It’s hard to see a guy like that holding down the highest office in the land.”

  George had pledged Delta Kappa Epsilon in his sophomore year, and “the drinking jock house,” as the fraternity was known, became the center of his collegiate universe. At that time only 15 percent of the student body took part in fraternity life, and fewer than four hundred out of George’s class of one thousand chose to go through rush.

  “Only a small fraction of the university cared about fraternities,” said David Roe, “but George was part of that dying subculture.”

  “Fraternities were definitely on the decline by the time George and I joined Deke,” said Joseph Howerton (Yale 1968), “because they were fairly expensive on a campus where almost 50 percent of the students were on some kind of financial aid. Dekes had to pay four hundred dollars a year in social fees, plus you had to eat there at least once a w
eek. We lived in Davenport College our last three years, but we went to the Deke house to drink and party on the weekends . . . It was like a private club . . . we brought in terrific bands for dances after football games . . . and the camaraderie was great.”

  For those big football weekends George frequently invited Cathryn Lee Wolfman, his Houston girlfriend. “It was the pre-coed days, so if you were lucky, you’d see your girlfriend every other weekend,” said Roland “Bowly” Betts (Yale 1968). “Cathy was around. I used to see her at Deke.”

  During Christmas break of his junior year, George bought Cathryn a diamond ring at Neiman Marcus. He was determined to marry his beautiful blond fiancée his senior year and live off campus, exactly as his father had done. “Cathryn was the pick of the litter,” said Doug Hannah, George’s friend from Houston who had accompanied him to choose the ring. “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.”

  Their engagement was announced on the society page of The Houston Chronicle—“Congressman’s Son to Wed Cathy Wolfman”—where it was noted that Cathryn’s stepfather owned a fashionable women’s clothing store. “That was the part that rankled Barbara,” said Cody Shearer, a former journalist and onetime close family friend. “She couldn’t abide the fact that Cathryn’s stepfather was Jewish . . . ‘There’ll be no Jews in our family,’ she said.”

  Cathryn Wolfman reflected on her relationship with George many years later with nothing but fondness. “My experience with the entire Bush family was wonderful,” she said. “George and I met through mutual friends when we were eighteen and parted company when we were twenty. During that time I attended Rice University in Houston, while George was at Yale in New Haven. For the most part, we saw each other only while on vacation from school. We had a lot of fun together, along with our friends in Houston, and led quite privileged, sheltered, and innocent lives.”