by Kitty Kelley
“We planned to marry the summer before our senior year, and I intended to transfer to Connecticut College. Sometime in the spring of 1967, George called to postpone the wedding. We continued to date through the following year, but went our separate ways after graduating from college in 1968. George returned to Houston from New Haven, and I left for a new job in Washington, D.C.”
When he asked her to spend another summer with the family at Kennebunkport, the popular Rice coed demurred, and George was dumbfounded. “I don’t want to go to Maine, George,” she said. “And I don’t think this is going to work out.” She slipped the engagement ring off her finger and handed it to him.
“I remember a serious discussion in which I said that I wouldn’t be going on the family’s vacation in Maine and that we should call off our engagement,” Cathryn said years later. “Our relationship had gradually cooled during our senior year in college . . . and we had made no specific plans to marry . . . The conversation breaking our engagement was a hard one, and I’m sure we were both upset by it. But I don’t remember any tears or angry exchanges . . . We saw each other again several weeks later when he came to Washington, D.C., to visit his parents. We saw a lot of each other during the week he was in town, but it became clear in my mind that there truly was no future in the relationship . . . We saw each other only once thereafter, several years later, at a party in Houston, and we spoke just briefly.”
George said nothing to his friends at Yale about Cathryn breaking their engagement, other than that his plans had changed.
“It wasn’t that George was hugely popular at Yale,” said Ken White. “He wasn’t the stud jock that everyone liked. But he did have a bad-boy swagger that’s appealing to other guys. He smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes to be macho.”
Part of machismo is never looking weak, especially in front of other males, and whenever George was challenged, his hair-trigger temper flared. “As freshmen on the Old Campus . . . one of the things we would do was throw the football as hard as we could at each other, stand about ten yards away,” said Peter Markle (Yale 1968). “And I spotted George and I threw it at him and he wasn’t ready. He was so mad. He picked up the football, must have come at me a hundred miles an hour. I ducked. But he had a capacity to get mad . . . He had a tough side to him . . . He was very competitive.”
Another classmate remembered a similar run-in. “It was an argument over a parking space,” said Kurt Barnes (Yale 1968). “He won. He got the space and I chalked it up to the fact that in Texas they must learn to drive straight in, and in the East we learn to back in.”
Some who lived in Davenport College with George gave his swagger a wide berth. “He lived upstairs from me two years running,” said George Sullivan (Yale 1968). “I did not know him well—by choice. He was a frat boy. I was not. I was proud of it. And he was proud of being a frat boy . . . Enough said.”
Being members of Delta Kappa Epsilon meant the world to George and his roommates, most of whom had gone to Andover. “George was a slam dunk for Deke,” said Charles Marshall (Yale 1967). “We had to take him because he was a legacy. You never turn down a legacy, especially when the legacy was once president of the fraternity like Daddy Bush was in 1947.
“George was sort of an ordinary guy for our fraternity because he wasn’t an outstanding athlete like Calvin Hill [Yale 1969] or Paul Jones [1968]; he certainly wasn’t an ass man, because George could barely get a date in college. He came from Andover with a lot of influence [friends], so I guess he’d made a big name for himself in a small pond. I thought he was just another rich preppy brat with a big-time Yale grandfather behind him . . . As pledge master, I was prepared to whip his butt. He kind of surprised me when he didn’t wimp out . . . Then he really surprised me when he got himself elected president of the fraternity in his junior year. Being president of DKE takes you to the first pew at Yale. I can’t remember when a Deke president wasn’t tapped for Bones. Without that, George might not have made it into Bones, even with all his family muscle.”
The tap from Skull and Bones came to George on the last Thursday night of April 1967, when the tower clock struck eight. He was not the last man tapped like his father, an honor reserved for the most outstanding member of the class, but he became part of the most diverse group ever to be tapped up to that point. For the first time in its history Skull and Bones had opened its Waspy gates to African Americans (one), Muslims (one), and Jews (two): Roy Leslie Austin, Robert Richards Birge, Christopher Walworth Brown, George Walker Bush, Kenneth Saul Cohen, Rex W.F. Cowdry, Donald Etra, G. Gregory Gallico III, Robert Karl Guthrie, Britton Ward Kolar, Robert Davis McCallum Jr., Muhammad Ahmed Saleh, Thomas Carlton Schmidt, Donald Arthur Schollander, and Brinkley Stimpson Thorne.
Each of these men had distinguished himself in some activity at Yale—intellectual, athletic, or social. George’s distinction was, unquestionably, social. Years later many who lived with him in Davenport College were forced to reexamine their cherished belief that hard work triumphs over all. Some sounded cynical as they reappraised the rewards of meritocracy over aristocracy, and a bit of resentment seeped into their recollections of the young man who had skipped studying in favor of socializing and yet ended up with the most powerful job in the world.
“It’s not that anyone is jealous,” said Ken White, “because we’re all at the peak of our careers and doing quite well. It’s just that George . . . from what we knew of him then . . . doesn’t seem to be the . . . a . . . well . . . the best-equipped person to be President of the United States.”
“He never seemed to care about studying,” recalled Thomas Wik (Yale 1968).
“I do not consider him a well-educated man at all,” said Richard Hunter (Yale 1969).
“He put me off because he just didn’t seem like he was working very hard in school,” said John Gorman (Yale 1968). “He would appear in the morning like he’d partied all night . . . He viewed himself as a Texan and did not want to be considered part of the eastern establishment at Yale . . . so he went out of his way to act . . . crude . . . It’s quite amazing that someone you held in low esteem later becomes President.”
The stories of George’s alcoholic escapades at Yale traveled the Andover network. At Harvard, Torbert Macdonald listened sadly to the tales of his old friend, whose politics were as out of sync with the times as his fraternity carousing. “Poor Georgie,” said Macdonald. “He couldn’t even relate to women unless he was loaded . . . There were just too many stories of him turning up dead drunk on dates.”
“Most of the preppies, I’m one, but most of the prep-school crowd hung out in those fraternities,” said Carter Wiseman (Yale 1968), “and their major goal in life was to get drunk as often as possible.”
Drinking, especially at the Deke house, was accepted as a given at Yale, and by 1966 drugs had been thrown into the mix. “Marijuana was already on campus by then,” said Christopher Byron. “Next came drugs of all kinds. They were everywhere.”
In 1967 the Yale Daily News said an article in the New York Post had charged that marijuana was being concealed in the tomb of Skull and Bones. In those days such a story was considered shocking enough to be newsworthy. Harder drugs soon followed, with cocaine becoming the most popular drug on campus. One member of the class of 1968 admitted years later selling cocaine to George W. Bush during their time at Yale. He confided his part of the drug transaction to the writer Erica Jong in 2001; he confirmed that drug buy in 2002 with the caveat of confidentiality.
“You cannot use my name,” he said, “because we’re talking about a felony offense . . . Besides, it was many, many years ago and this guy is now President of the United States.”
Another man, at Yale’s graduate school (MFA 1965), recalled “doing coke” with George, but would not allow his recollections to be used on the record for fear of retribution. This man, independently wealthy and living on the West Coast, said he did not feel right about “blowing George’s cover because I was doing the same thing.” A confirmed D
emocrat, he admitted he could not stand George’s Republican politics but said he liked him as a person. “Besides,” he added, “I don’t need the fallout from our recreational drug use at this point in my life.”
Years later, George’s sister-in-law Sharon Bush alleged that W. had snorted cocaine with one of his brothers at Camp David during the time their father was President of the United States. “Not once,” she said, “but many times.”
George never denied buying, selling, or using illegal drugs. In 1999 he swore to key political supporters that he had never used “hard drugs,” by which he meant that he had never shot up heroin. When he was accused of being born with a silver spoon up his nose, he admitted to “youthful mistakes.” Running for national office, he carefully crafted his response to fall within the federal guidelines for public officials. “As I understand it,” he told The Dallas Morning News in 1999, “the current FBI form asks the question, ‘Did somebody use drugs within the last seven years?’ and I will be glad to answer that question, and the answer is ‘No.’” He refused to answer any more questions.
“Hell, it’s not George’s substance abuse that bothers me as much as his lack of substance,” said Tom Wilner (Yale 1966 and DKE). “That he coasted on his family name is understandable. Lots of guys do that. But Georgie, as we called him then, has absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn’t interested in ideas or books or causes. He didn’t travel; he didn’t read the newspapers; he didn’t watch the news; he didn’t even go to movies . . . How anyone ever got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me. This guy has no concept of complex issues . . . He’s a simpleminded zealot and—God help us all—he’s now the guy with his finger on the button.”
Yale had not been an easy ride for young George, even as an Andover graduate, a fraternity man, and a member of Skull and Bones. Ordinarily, those credentials would have allowed him to rule the campus, but as George told one of his Yale advisers, he felt his childhood in Texas set him apart socially from the more polished easterners who had similar résumés. He felt he was looked down upon by “snobs” and “elitists.” He also felt alienated on the liberal campus, because of his father’s conservative politics. In fact, he came to despise what he called “arrogant liberal intellectuals.”
“George was definitely not on the popular side of the war issue, but he stood his ground,” said Robert J. Dieter, a Yale roommate for four years. “Saying someone was conservative back then almost had a moral sting. I remember him coming back to the room and telling me that someone had been in his face about his father’s position. There was a certain arrogance that the left conveyed back then. It was hurtful.”
As a result, George spent most of his time carousing at the DKE house. Some classmates remember him as a “hard-drinking good-time guy” and “a jock sniffer” who “loved to raise hell.” Russ Walker, a friend from Oklahoma City, recalled returning from a party with George one night when the inebriated Bush dropped to the ground and started rolling in the middle of the street. “He literally rolled back to the dorm,” said Walker. “It was raucous teenage stuff that perhaps he grew out of later rather than sooner.”
George’s drinking occasionally brought him to the attention of law enforcement. In November 1967 he was arrested for pulling down a goalpost at Princeton while celebrating a Yale football victory. “The game ended and we all poured out and George was on the goalpost,” recalled Clay Johnson. “We tore that sucker down and the campus police said, ‘You all are coming with us.’ So we went marching over to the campus police station and they said, ‘You’ve got ten minutes to get out of town.’”
The year before, George had been caught with friends stealing a Christmas wreath from a store door in New Haven to hang on the front door of the fraternity house. He was arrested for disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped.
His third arrest occurred eight years after graduation, in the summer of 1976, for driving under the influence in Kennebunkport.
Despite memorable drinking bouts with his DKE brothers, George said he could hardly wait to leave Yale and its “intellectual snobbery.” Once he left, he never looked back. He would not attend class reunions; he would not contribute money; he would not share reminiscences in the alumni magazine. The fourth-generation legacy student would have nothing to do with Yale.
“There was a liberal orthodoxy that pervaded Yale, and if you challenged that, it wasn’t that you had a point of view but that you were dumb,” recalled Collister “Terry” Johnson Jr., another of George’s roommates.
George did not realize it at the time, but his class was one sweep in front of the dustpan. The class of 1968 was the last legacy class in which the sons of alumni were almost automatically accepted, thereby rewarding those with the most advantages. After 1968, admissions to Yale were to be based on merit. No more preferences for private schools; no more Social Register requirements. No more quotas for Jews.
The year after George’s graduation the freshman class had more students from public and parochial schools than private schools for the first time in Yale’s history. Women were admitted (“That’s when Yale really started going down hill,” said George W. without a trace of humor); the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps was banished from campus; the dress code of jackets and ties was abolished. Fraternities, which the class yearbook described as a “benign irrelevancy,” soon disappeared, and even the secret societies lost some of their allure as more and more students began turning down taps, even from Skull and Bones.
Upon graduation, George was eager to sever all relations with Yale, except for a few friendships with his fraternity brothers. He dismissed everyone else as “liberal pussies.” His animus toward the college was such that he did not submit more than his name and a post office box for his twenty-fifth reunion class book. In a letter his father commended him for his attitude: “Thank God, George, you got the best from Yale, but you retained a fundamental conviction that a lot of good happens for America south and west of Woolsey Hall,” one of the main student centers on the Yale campus.
During the next decade, George’s best friend from DKE, Bowly Betts, intervened to mend the frayed school ties.
“Bowly is a bazillionaire from New York City—he developed Chelsea Piers—and he sits on the Yale Development Board,” said a fraternity brother. “He got Richard Levin, the president of Yale, together with Georgie right after the inauguration in Washington, and helped engineer Bush’s honorary degree during the first year of his presidency. That’s how Bowly got Georgie to drop his hard-on against the school.”
As part of his rapprochement with Yale, George invited the class of 1968 to the White House on May 29, 2003, for a picnic before their thirty-fifth reunion in New Haven.
Garry Trudeau (Yale 1970) skewered the event with a week of Doonesbury strips. In one scene, he drew the President as an empty-headed Roman centurion welcoming “all my classmates” to the White House: “Even the hippie snobs who used to sit around having heavy, boring talks about Vietnam. But especially the guys I came of age with, who always had my back—my college roomies. Stinky! Gopher! Kegger! Droopy! You’re the Best!”
“Can you believe our rush chairman invaded Iraq?” bleats a drunken Old Blue in another day’s strip. Informed that his fraternity brothers have arrived at the White House, the President in imperial headgear tells an aide, “Cordon them off. I’ll be right there.”
In the next day’s strip, the class representative commends the five hundred members of the class who have shown up with their wives. “I know coming here posed a dilemma for some of you. On the one hand, it’s very exciting to be invited to the White House . . . On the other hand, Junior here, has done more harm to our economy, environment and standing in the world than any president in memory! Talk about a TOUGH call. Ha. Ha. Ha. But seriously . . .”
“Have him sent to Asia Minor,” snaps the centurion headgear.
“Done sire,” says the centurion’s gof
er.
Trudeau had captured the turmoil surrounding the evening and the soul-searching many experienced upon receiving their invitations. More than a few members of the class stayed away in private protest against the war in Iraq. Others accepted, despite their opposition.
“I’m a member of the Yale class of ’68 who won’t be attending the reunion event at the White House because of revulsion toward Bush’s policies,” said Jacques Leslie. “The war in Iraq was unwarranted and promoted deceptively, his environmental policies are disastrous, and his attack on legal rights and constitutional rights is frightening. I would not be able to shake his hand without showing hostility.”
Another classmate, who met Deng Xiaoping during a visit to China, said he had shaken the hand of the “Butcher of Tiananmen Square,” so shaking George Bush’s hand couldn’t take him any lower.
“There’s enough spirit of ’68-ness, you might say, still in me to be disturbed by the rush to ‘kiss the ass of the ruling class’ (as they used to say),” said Ron Rosenbaum. “Indeed, one of the reasons I think the invitation is distasteful is that it will inevitably be spun as the final surrender of the spirit of ’68 to the establishment.”
Mark Soler said he stayed away from the White House part of the reunion because he profoundly disapproved of George W. Bush’s presidency. “When we were in college, we thought we would change things for the better when it came time for our generation to step forward,” he said. “We thought nobody among us could ever make the mistake of getting stuck in a ground war with no exit strategy and no clearly defined goals. We thought that would be impossible because we, the class of 1968, had learned the lessons of Vietnam . . . Now look what’s happening in Iraq . . . and to think it was brought on by one of our own . . . Supposedly George was a history major; he should have learned at the very least that ‘the past is prologue.’”