Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Flatiron Books ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this ebook to you for your personal use only. You may not make this ebook publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
TO QUENTIN, DEB, AND TEDDY
In most lives there’s a moment when people strip away all the branding and status symbols, all the prestige that goes with having gone to a certain school or been born into a certain family. They leap out beyond the utilitarian logic and crash through the barriers of their fears.
—DAVID BROOKS
Please remember that our time on this Earth is not guaranteed. Please tell those you love that you do. Right now. This very minute.
—SOPHIA BUSH
Not for Oneself
ONLY ONE AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL has produced two presidents of the United States: Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, known simply as Andover. It was no surprise, really, that people emerged from Andover thinking they could do, or be, anything they wanted. That idea that we really were “la crème de la crème de la jeunesse américaine,” as we were told regularly, or that we were part of some kind of young and invincible Delta Force, was intoxicating. The message seeped into our DNA whether we realized it or not.
Just like George H. W. Bush (Class of 1942) and George W. Bush (Class of 1964) before him, my Andover classmate Bruce MacWilliams (Class of 1977) wanted to be president of the United States. Bruce was tall, handsome, and outgoing. He was an athlete—he was on the varsity cross-country team, the cross-country ski team, and the lacrosse team—and was a fine photographer. He had fair skin, long wavy hair parted down the middle, and a vague aura of constantly being in a drug-induced state whether true or not. You know the type: All the Andover boys wanted to be like him and all the Andover girls wanted to sleep with him. “He was pretty cocky,” remembered Hugh Jones, a friend of Bruce’s from Cornell. “Bruce was pretty much the man and he pretty much was sure of that.” Of course, this being Andover, Bruce had some serious competition on campus on the Big Dick Energy front. The late 1970s was when John F. Kennedy Jr.—the glamorous future “Sexiest Man Alive” with unassailable presidential DNA—was also a student at Andover.
MacWilliams’s Andover pedigree went back to his great-grandfather Mabie Crouse Klock (Class of 1899). Mabie Crouse Klock came from wealth and made more. He was an avid yachtsman and once owned a steamer that caught the attention of a young John Jacob Astor, who promptly bought the boat from him. Klock was also one of the early financial benefactors of what became the Crouse-Irving Hospital, in his native Syracuse, New York. “My great-grandfather was like the Great Gatsby of Syracuse,” Bruce remembered.
Klock’s grandson—Bruce’s father—John J. MacWilliams also went to Andover (Class of 1947). He later joined the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, in Hartford, where Bruce and his three siblings spent part of their childhood. In 1968, when Bruce was in fourth grade, his father was offered the opportunity to run the Colonial Penn Group, a floundering life insurance company based in Philadelphia. Colonial Penn was about to go bankrupt. MacWilliams took the job. “My dad said, ‘What the hell, I’m gonna give it a shot,’ and went down there and turned the company around,” Bruce said. “Within like six, seven years, he made it a Fortune 500 company. He was on the cover of all the magazines, and he was kind of a darling for a while because he made a lot of money.” There were private planes, fancy country clubs, soirees with Republican politicians, and lofty dreams.
It was the late Mad Men era, and the MacWilliamses took to it. “They would put on their designer suits, and they would look really great,” Bruce explained. And they loved to drink. “Our parents were all getting bombed at lunch, and having martini lunches, and my dad was a CEO,” he continued. “He was a successful guy, and he looked fantastic. My mom looked fantastic, too. But they would go out to parties and they would have cocktail hour, and they would drink a lot. It was the way they grew up, and they inherited it from their parents.” As had generations of MacWilliamses before him, Bruce said he inherited from his parents the notion of drinking as a glamorous activity. In the years before Bruce alighted at Andover, his father would encourage the family to have wine with dinner, just as he found his business acquaintances did with their families in Italy, where John MacWilliams often traveled. “He expressed that that was a way to grow up fast, and to learn how to drink responsibly,” Bruce said.
Andover was a family tradition. Two of Bruce’s three siblings attended the school. At Andover, Bruce and I were in Nathan Hale House together, and I remember him well: his hair, his infectious demeanor, the time he spent palling around with the other hipster guys, Jamie Clark from Texas and two guys from New York City, Will Iselin, a descendant of John Jay, and Will Daniel, whose grandfather was Harry Truman. They were all my dorm mates, it’s true, but we traveled in different circles. Nathan Hale West was part of Rabbit Pond cluster, one of six clusters comprising various student dorms and historic homes (where students also lived) that made it easier for Andover to feel like it was a manageable size, even with its twelve hundred students. Each cluster had a dean, responsible for administering discipline, among other duties. John “Jack” Richards II was the Rabbit Pond cluster dean. Richards, a history teacher, epitomized the WASPy Andover administrator. We referred to him, mostly affectionately, as “Jack Dick.”
Like so many of the Andover students at the time, Bruce smoked a lot of marijuana. There was a famous cartoon in the Pot Pourri, the student yearbook, about how one Andover student was explaining to another that there was no drug problem at Andover: “We can get anything we want.” Bruce and his Nathan Hale friends spent a lot of time together smoking pot. Two of his friends were expelled. “They caught them and threw them out, but they didn’t catch me,” MacWilliams recalled, “and Jack Richards brought me in and read me the riot act, said, ‘Hey, listen, we haven’t caught you yet, but we know you’re doing it, and if we catch you, you’re out, so shape up.’” After Richards spared MacWilliams, he claimed to have reformed his behavior.
In his senior year at Andover, MacWilliams served as the president of Rabbit Pond cluster (defeating me in the election) and ended up working closely with Richards. All these years later, I still remember the contours of the race between us. Alan Cantor, one of my closest friends at Andover, was the incumbent cluster president; he not only encouraged me to run for the position but also did his best imitation of making an inchoate political endorsement of my candidacy. By then, Bruce was living with his buddies in one of the small stately homes around the periphery of Rabbit Pond cluster, doing whatever cool guys did back then. We had little interaction with each other by that point in our Andover careers but we were always friendly enough when we bumped into each other on the campus pathways. Like almost everyone at Andover, I liked the guy. I was then living in the west side of Alfred E. Stearns House (named after a former headmaster), a late-1950s brick structure with an oddly Soviet countenance. We always thought Stearns was the locus of power in Rabbit Pond cluster given both its central location and the fact that many of the school leaders lived in the dorm. With my friend Alan’s endorsement and a modest amount of
retail campaigning on my part, I thought for sure I would win the election. Although the vote was close, I had miscalculated the appeal of Bruce’s magnetic personality and his abundant charm.
Bruce found Andover to be seminal. “I absolutely loved Andover,” he said. “I thought it was the best. It was like a party mixed up with friends, and I was learning a lot, and I became proud of myself because I was going to the best secondary school in the country. There was just so much that was really fantastic about it. I felt so lucky to be there, and to be given that opportunity, and to be able to turn it into something.”
One thing Bruce hoped might come from his Andover experience was a political career. It was not a crazy thought. Andover had produced Henry Stimson (Class of 1883), Roosevelt’s secretary of war, who held many other cabinet positions over the years. JFK’s son was a fellow student, as was Harry Truman’s grandson. George H. W. Bush was, at that time, both an Andover trustee and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. If you thought about it, the MacWilliamses of Gladwyne were not terribly unlike the Bushes of Kennebunkport or even the Kennedys of Hyannis Port. And Bruce was not particularly shy about sharing the thought that if things had turned out a little differently, his father might also have been president of the United States, instead of the CEO of a somewhat predatory insurance company. He had the looks. He had the brains. He had the money, and he had the connections. (He also thought his older brother, John, a former Wall Street banker, should have been Obama’s secretary of state or chief of staff. “He’s a guy you want behind you when you go out into battle,” he said.)
When Bruce ran for Rabbit Pond cluster president, and won, he began to think the dream might be possible. “I even got sucked into that whole thing because I found out how easy it was,” he said. “It’s like, Oh wow, you just need to show up and say a few kind words and get voted in, and you got a job.” One minor hiccup for him came with the election of Andover school president, a school-wide ballot comprising the six cluster presidents. Bruce slept through the assembly where the candidates made their pitches. He still came in second.
The ambition persisted. When Bruce told his father he wanted to be president of the United States, he wasn’t joking. “I said, ‘Look at Andover. I’ve just been hanging out with John Kennedy, man.’ I had tea with Jacqueline Onassis and John Kennedy at the Andover Inn. And Jacqueline Onassis leaned over and said, ‘Oh, John, you know who your friend Bruce reminds me of? He reminds me of your father.’ And I almost fell out of my chair.”
He had come by his friendship with John Kennedy Jr. through his role as cluster president. For some odd reason, part of the role was to represent fellow students who lived in your cluster through a disciplinary procedure. The Secret Service decided that John Kennedy Jr. should be placed in Stearns House West (my dorm for my third and fourth years at Andover) because it was right next to the Andover Inn. John was an Upper when Bruce was a senior and the cluster president. John always liked to push the disciplinary envelope at Andover, if in a charming way. He didn’t intentionally flaunt the rules as much as sort of pretend they never really existed in the first place, since it was pretty clear from his own experiences in life that the rules of the road would never apply to him anyway. Whether it was staying out on campus beyond the 10 p.m. curfew, or getting high, or having girls in his room outside regular parietal hours, John brought a sly, infectious attitude toward his nocturnal activities. Who wouldn’t want to be part of them, if invited?
On one of those occasions when John was out late, roaming the campus, he got caught. It fell to Bruce to defend him before the Andover disciplinary authorities. At first, Bruce wasn’t so sure he felt comfortable representing the young prince, since at that point he didn’t really like him. They were two alpha males competing over the same territory, particularly for the affections of the Andover women. Bruce thought, as a senior and the cluster president, he would be the Big Man on Campus. “I saw all the girls flock around this guy—‘Who’s this guy?’” Bruce remembered. “And then I saw the initials on his shirt, and it said JFK, and it wasn’t even JFK JUNIOR. It was like one of his dad’s shirts that he had kept. And I go, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to be able to compete with this guy.’” But the more he got to know John, the more Bruce liked him. And then he went to bat for John. “They wanted to throw the book at him,” Bruce said. “And I said, ‘Listen, you can’t do that, because you’re making an example out of him.’ They said, ‘We’ve got to make an example out of him.’ I said, ‘Yeah. You make him an example by not making an example. You have to treat him just like you treat everybody else; otherwise, you’re giving him special attention. You can’t do that. He’s just a student, and any other student, you wouldn’t do this to him, because he’s not John Kennedy. So treat him just like you would every other student.’ And they said, ‘Bruce, you’d make a great lawyer.’ But I got him off the hook, and they bought my argument, and then we became friends.”
One time they spent the weekend in Boston and were having a beer together at a little bar around the corner from the downtown bus station. They were playing backgammon, passing the time. When it occurred to Bruce that they’d best return to Andover, he said, “John, we better get back, man. You’re going to get back in trouble again, and I’m cluster president, I’m going to get in trouble.” Kennedy told him not to worry so much. “I have a car.”
“You have a car?” Bruce asked. “You dog. How’d you end up getting a car on campus? Where’s the car?”
“Don’t worry,” John said. “Wait right here.”
Suddenly a car pulled up, and out jumped two Secret Service agents. “We hop in the damn car and drive back to Andover and I thought to myself, Oh yeah, I forgot who this guy is.”
When Jackie Onassis told him he reminded her of John’s father, Bruce said, “It’s like someone whispering in your ear and telling you, ‘Yeah, you should maybe give this a shot.’” He thought, Hey I can do it, because my dad has the connections. Jackie O was telling him he reminded her of JFK. Why not give it a shot? “Andover really is a factory for making presidents, if you look at it,” he said. “It’s so right for it, because it’s ‘the Best and the Brightest.’ You’ve got an opportunity. You’ve got the intelligence. You’ve got the confidence. And then you’ve got the Non Sibi—Not For Oneself—so what are you going to do? You’re going to go help everybody. And how are you going to help each other?” Well, if you were at Andover, among the best and the brightest, and you emerged relatively unscathed from it and from your wealthy, well-connected political family, then the logical thing to consider, if you were Bruce MacWilliams, was becoming president of the United States.
But sometimes things don’t always work out as planned.
* * *
BRUCE GOT IN EARLY DECISION to the Cornell School of Architecture. There isn’t a specific curriculum for how to become president of the United States, so in the meantime he decided to pursue one of his avocations. He had been interested in drawing at Andover, was captivated by architecture, and had enjoyed his one summer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In fact, a Harvard dean declared his summer project a “genius design” and had recommended him for the architecture school at Cornell. “For guys like me, who loved architecture and thought it was really neat, but wasn’t totally committed to necessarily being an architect for the rest of my life, it was a little bit intimidating,” he said. “They were expecting you to spend all-nighters in the studio, designing masterpieces.” Politics, and a high-sloped political career, remained his primary ambition.
At Cornell, Bruce decided to room with David Buck, a classmate from Andover who was also in the architecture school. David grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts, near Boston. His father, Dudley Buck, a famous scientist at MIT, was part of the team that worked on designing and building the first computers. He was once featured in Life magazine (among many other publications) for developing the cryotron, a tiny switch that briefly seemed like it might be a quantum leap forward in comp
uter development. (It was not to be, and then silicon came along and changed everything.) When David was three months old, his father died suddenly after handling some poisonous chemicals in his MIT lab. The papers disguised his mysterious death as due to a virulent form of pneumonia. But others, including his wife and David’s older brother, thought the Russians deliberately poisoned him as part of the ongoing Cold War. Very few of us at Andover—and certainly not me—knew anything about David’s father, or that he had died under mysterious circumstances, or that David was the product of a single-parent family. These were topics that simply weren’t discussed.
But there was no missing David Buck at Andover. He wasn’t an athlete, or a student leader, or a standout academically, or the most handsome or most likely to succeed. What I remember most about him was his magnetic and gregarious personality. His strawberry-blond hair, face full of freckles, and perpetual smile made him universally liked. One of our classmates, Richard Riker (whose family once owned what is now Rikers Island in New York Harbor), showed me a picture he had taken of David during a trip he and a bunch of his Andover friends took to Hollywood, Florida, during spring break of our senior year. They were staying at the modest Holly Hill Motel and having a blast. “I remember drinking a lot of Busch beer,” Riker recalled. David, his hair still wet from a swim and a cheap towel wrapped around his shoulders, was on the phone making some arrangements. He looked slight and elegant but determined. He was a guy who got things done.
In the picture, as usual, Buck was wearing a starched red-striped Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, more or less matching his hair. It was his signature look. “Dave would always have that same uniform on,” Bruce remembered. “He had seven Brooks Brothers shirts, and I can even see them right now. He had them all pressed, and he always pressed the shirts so that they were doubly pressed. Make them stiff so they’ll stand up in the corner by themselves. And then he had like four pairs of khakis, and he would just wear those over and over again, one belt, one pair of shoes, two pair of shoes, and he wore that outfit every single day.”
Four Friends Page 1