It’s not exactly clear why the school was so successful so quickly, but it may have been the combination of educational and moral rectitude plus a determination to cater to the elites, both intellectually and financially, along with being open—again both intellectually and financially—to those who had promise but could not afford the place. Whatever it was, the school has been a leader in secondary-school education from the start. In 1944, the school’s endowment was $7 million; it is now around $1.1 billion (nearly as much as Exeter’s) to which will be added another $400 million or so, thanks to an ongoing capital campaign based on the concepts of “knowledge” and “goodness” found in Samuel Junior’s constitution.
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IN 1933, CLAUDE FUESS, A BELOVED Andover teacher, became headmaster. Fuess was determined to fight the perception—by then well entrenched—that Andover was a snobby place, solely designed to further promote the advantages of America’s elites and ruling class. Fuess lamented in a well-read essay that Andover and its private-school brethren had graduated “too many of the country club set … who feel they have performed their civic duty when they have grudgingly paid their taxes and when they have damned the Government.” He continued, “If we do not reform ourselves, the state is likely to do it for us … Exclusiveness—at least in a social sense—cannot persist much longer.… The gravest perils to American independent schools will come from snobbishness … bigotry, provincialism, reactionarism, smugness, stupidity, and inertia—the seven deadly sins of our type of education.” Fuess’s other impulses were far less noble. He imposed a quota on the number of Jewish students who could attend Andover each year. Fuess was afraid that if Andover did not have a policy limiting the Jews on campus to around two percent of the school population—around fourteen Jews out of seven hundred students—then they would overrun the place, given their penchant for scholarly aptitude. “It is just too bad about the little Jewish boy,” Fuess wrote in a 1935 letter, “but I can’t very well blame Dean Lynde”—the dean of the academy at the time, in charge of admissions—“for trying to keep our school as predominately Aryan as possible.”
Two national publications—Fortune, in May 1944, and the Saturday Evening Post, in September 1947—visited Andover and tackled the thorny subject of Andover’s ongoing efforts to try to shed its elitist image. It was a tough sell. “It has been said of Andover that it is not a boys’ school,” Fortune began, “but an institution of learning that boys are permitted—reluctantly—to attend,” quickly noting that John Hancock himself had signed its articles of incorporation. Some 75 percent of the boys at Andover came to the school from “solid Republican homes,” according to the Saturday Evening Post; half of the students said that their fathers were “businessmen,” and a third were the sons of “professional” men. “Andover still draws most of its boys, as it has done for decades, from the great mercantile, upper middle classes of New England and New York,” the magazine reported. “Yale, Harvard and Princeton, in that order, are the graduates’ favorite colleges.”
Andover was plenty rigorous: In the 1940s, nearly one-third of the students—some 250—flunked out before graduating. But those who prevailed more often than not seemed to go on to great success, a virtuous circle for the ages. In 1917, Thomas Cochran, Class of 1890, became one of the few partners at J.P. Morgan & Co. “If I ever get any money, it will go to Andover,” he had said at the start of his banking career. He made good on that promise. He gave $100,000 to Andover after World War I. (Upon hearing of that gift, Yale—where Cochran went to college and was a member of Skull and Bones—wanted a slice of his beneficence as well; he responded with a check for $5,000.) “It’s the preparatory school which really shapes the character of a boy,” he continued. “The college can merely build on that. Andover comes first.” Before Cochran’s death, he donated a whopping $11 million to Andover. Cochran, more than any other person, transformed Andover into a school of “physical opulence,” according to the Saturday Evening Post, adding—as have many since—that “[i]n appearance and in fact, it is more like a college than a boys’ school.” A million dollars was set aside to maintain the grounds, and an eighty-nine-acre bird sanctuary and arboretum was created. In 1928, Cochran donated fifty American paintings to the school and called for the creation of an art museum—“to enrich permanently the lives of the students”—that three years later he endowed and named after his late friend, Keturah Addison Cobb, the mother of a woman he admired. The Addison Gallery of American Art opened in May 1931. He also donated the money for what became the Cochran Chapel, the neo-Georgian church that is one of the first, and grandest, buildings to greet visitors to the campus. It was dedicated to Cochran in 1932.
George H. W. Bush, fresh from Greenwich Country Day School, was thirteen years old when he arrived at Andover in September 1937. He got off to a poor start, as teacher Fred Stott noted in his reports home. He was “not well measured in all respects,” Stott wrote, in stark impolitic language. “Parents of wealth and social position”—as if that were unusual at Andover—“cocky and ‘high hat’ … very mediocre performance.” Worse, Bush used an anti-Semitic slur to describe a Jewish friend. He always remembered the incident, felt deeply ashamed by it, and voluntarily revealed it some seven decades later to Jon Meacham, his biographer. “Never forgotten it,” Bush told him. But Bush also stood up for another Jewish boy, Bruce Gelb, who was being bullied, and they became lifelong friends.
The next year, Bush had shown some improvement. “Markedly a gentleman,” his counselor wrote. Bush was peripatetic at Andover: trying out for the baseball team, making friends—he was very popular—and trying to overcome a chronic illness that put him in the infirmary five times in his Upper (third) year at the school. In April 1940, his parents moved him to Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, for a few days after he came down with a staph infection. “Not a strong boy,” one teacher wrote of Bush in his letter of recommendation to Yale. “Serious illness. Nice boy, popular, friendly, gets on well with adults, very polite. Slow but hard worker. Illness put him at a great disadvantage this year. Can analyze well [but] is slow in doing it.… Ambitious and self-confident but perhaps not self-assertive enough. Real interests are athletics … Always a gentleman, responsible, courteous, generous. WATCH: should not attempt too much outside work this year. Not a neat boy.” He was of course admitted to the university.
The attack on Pearl Harbor changed things dramatically for Bush, and for many other Andover students. “I knew what I wanted to do,” he told Meacham. “It was an easy call—no second guessing, no doubts.” He enlisted in the war effort as soon as he possibly could. Both Fuess and alumnus Henry Stimson, who happened then to be Roosevelt’s secretary of war, had argued that the Andover boys should get some college under their belts before enlisting, which would make them “more valuable” to the military effort later on. But Bush was not taking that advice. June 12, 1942, was Bush’s eighteenth birthday and the day he graduated from Andover. Immediately thereafter, he went to Boston and enlisted in the navy, officially a seaman second class, with orders to report, in September, to flight training in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In August, his father accompanied him to Pennsylvania Station in New York City to take the train to North Carolina and then to war. His father was in tears. “So off I went, scared little guy,” Bush told Meacham. “Got on the train, didn’t know anybody.” A little more than two years later, over a remote Japanese island, the enemy shot down the navy plane Bush was piloting. As his plane was descending into the ocean, Bush completed the mission of eliminating a radio tower, parachuted out safely, and, along the way, became a bona fide war hero.
Bush returned often to Andover and was eventually made a lifetime member of the Andover board of trustees. In November 1989, about ten months after he was sworn in as the forty-first president of the United States, he gave a speech at Andover commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of George Washington’s visit to the school. As he noted, “legend had it” that Washington kissed a g
irl at the Andover Inn and that she never washed the cheek again. “I can’t bear living testimony to his visit, but I can speak very briefly of my time here,” he said. “I loved those years. They did, indeed, teach the great end and real business of living. And even now its lessons of honesty, selflessness, faith in God—well, they enrich every day of our lives.”
Three of Bush’s four sons—George W., Jeb, and Marvin—also attended Andover, with two graduating (Marvin was there for two years in the early 1970s before transferring to another school). By the time George W. arrived in September 1961, it was clear that his family connections had been the key to his admission. His father was then a prominent oilman in Texas, although not a particularly successful one. But when George W. applied for admission to St. John’s, supposedly the best private school in Houston, he was rejected. Fortunately for him, he had also applied to Andover.
At Andover, George W. Bush seemed to be immensely popular, providing ample evidence of his future political skills to those who would come looking for them later. In his senior year, he was head cheerleader and led his fellow cheerleaders in a drag skit making fun of Andover’s rivals. (There are pictures.) He had lots of friends. But there were also those people who found him arrogant and condescending. “Governor Bush’s student days were in most respects supremely undistinguished, and anyone hoping to find reassurance about his candidacy through signs of great intellect or gravitas in those years will be disappointed,” Nicholas Kristof wrote years later in the New York Times. “There were many other students then who seemed far more likely to emerge as political leaders.… In an institution that respected brains and brawn, George seemed to overflow with neither. He was a mediocre student and no more than a decent athlete, and he paled in comparison with his father and namesake”—here Kristof engaged in more than a bit of revisionist history—“who had been brilliant at everything he did.”
In fact, like his father, George W. had a tough time adjusting to Andover’s academic rigor. On his first essay at Andover—about his sister’s death from leukemia, at age seven—he reportedly received a grade of zero. The teacher had written, in red ink, the word “disgraceful” on the paper. (I was not aware that a grade of “zero” at Andover was even possible.) According to Clay Johnson, a fellow Texan who was also in Bush’s Andover class (and whom George would appoint as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget), the Texans were having trouble coping with the Andover academics. “It was a shocking experience,” Johnson said. “It was far away from home and rigorous, and scary and demanding. The buildings looked different, and the days were shorter. We went from being at the top of our classes academically to struggling to catch up. We were so much less prepared than kids coming from Massachusetts or New York.” But Bush’s gregariousness and sense of humor were a winning combination. Donald Vermeil, his Andover roommate, recalled his year with Bush as “probably the funniest year of my life.” Bush, he said, had a way of “keeping everything light and entertaining without offending people or getting out of line.” Also like his father, George W. was messy. “School rules required boys to wear [a] jacket and tie during meals and classes,” Kristof wrote. “He tested these rules by frequently wearing sneakers (without socks), ancient pants, a wrinkled shirt, a disastrously knotted tie and sometimes an army jacket. Friends say his aim was not just to rebel but also to remind everyone that he was a Texan, not a preppy.”
After perusing his transcript and his test scores, the dean of students at Andover urged Bush to apply to the University of Texas. He had never made the honor roll at Andover. His College Board scores were 566 verbal, 640 math. He, of course, got into Yale. Kristof asked William Semple, one of Bush’s Andover classmates, what would have been students’ reaction in 1964 to the idea that thirty-six years later Bush would be a serious candidate for president of the United States. “The reaction,” he said, “would have been gales of laughter.”
In October 1962, Time magazine put Andover headmaster John Kemper on the cover. By then, Andover’s endowment was $25 million. There were 841 boys enrolled from forty-four different states. Of the 208 graduating seniors, Harvard accepted 42 and Yale accepted 39. The curriculum was relentless. Four years of English, with an emphasis on writing. Three years of math. Three years of a foreign language, where no English was to be spoken in class; and lots of science, history, art, and music. The electives ranged from Russian to anthropology. “All this bespeaks the enduring Andover,” Time gushed, “which is run on nothing more complicated than the primitive idea of ordeal. But the ordeal is far different from the one old grads remember.” In 1962, a jock also had to be a good student. “The balanced hero is in,” the magazine continued. “The snob is out.” Compulsory daily chapel at 7:30 a.m. remained a fixture of the school, as did the dress code of jacket, tie, button-down shirt, plus “wrinkled khakis” and loafers or “ragged sneakers.” There were no cars allowed, no bicycles allowed, and, of course, no liquor allowed. Seniors and Uppers could smoke cigarettes; others who smoked got “posted” and were confined to campus. “Otherwise rules are sparse,” the story continued. “A boy can go for days without making his bed.” (Samuel Phillips Sr. would not have been pleased.)
Independence, up to a point, seemed to be the mantra—along with hard work, discipline, and entrance to an Ivy League college. According to Time, “They work, work, work. The irony is that Andover’s soaring standards may encourage the widespread notion summed up by one senior: ‘We get good grades so we can get into a good college—a prestige college. That’s why we’re here.’”
But by the end of the 1960s, old verities seemed to be breaking down fast. A June 1969 article in the New York Times featured the “news” that Andover students had elected three “Negro” classmates “from the ghettos of Chicago and Oakland” to be class presidents for the following school year—the first two black students at Andover had arrived in the 1850s, and in 1865, Richard Greener became the first black student to graduate—and that unnamed “sources” in the Class of 1969 said that “at least 90 percent of the seniors use marijuana at least twice a week.” The article also pointed out that over the Memorial Day weekend, Andover students “wearing antiwar armbands” had “clashed” with townspeople, who “denounced them as Communists.” The Andover students, and their newly elected leaders, were also intent upon doing away with compulsory chapel services, the requirement of having to wear a coat and tie, and restrictions on the length of a student’s hair. The so-called hair proposal, if approved by the faculty, would have banned beards and would have allowed Kemper to “rule” whether any student’s sideburns or hair “appeared too long for proper decorum.” This just wasn’t going to fly anymore, and it didn’t. Kemper’s hair proposal was defeated.
In 1971, Kemper was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes. Two months later, he was dead. He was fifty-nine years old. In 1972, Theodore Sizer, the progressive dean of the Harvard School of Education, was selected to replace Kemper. Sizer has been described as the John F. Kennedy of Andover: handsome, smart, ambitious, and visionary. He inspired years of Andover students. He was the kind of educator who would think nothing of quoting Tu Fu, a Chinese poet who lived during the Tang dynasty, in the school yearbook, or of chiding students about having too much fun the night before without making it into a disciplinary matter. Sizer’s youthful, infectious energy was a breath of fresh air after years of Kemper’s military rigor, and you could almost feel the school settling down and embracing, in its way, the liberalism that the 1960s unleashed but that places as conservative and “Establishment” as Andover had trouble processing, or comprehending.
Sizer changed Andover dramatically. He ratified the merger with Abbot Academy, a prestigious girls’ boarding school founded fifty years after Andover—and down the hill from it—that made the school fully coeducational for the first time. Combining Andover and Abbot was a material step forward in the school’s development and its ongoing appeal. The dress code was thrown out. There was no longer any compulsory
chapel. Nobody said a peep about the length of someone’s hair. There was a surprising amount of tolerance around the use—and misuse—of drugs and alcohol. Sizer seemed to strike the right balance between permissiveness and personal accountability at the very moment when a new paradigm was required. There was even a pub on campus for those seniors who were eighteen years old, then the legal drinking age. Indeed, my first cousin Bobby Cohan said the Andover that I entered in the fall of 1973 could not have been more different from the one that he had graduated from in 1967. “In six years the whole thing changed,” he said. “That’s like, not even close to where I went. I went to a completely different school than you.”
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I WAS BORN AND RAISED IN WORCESTER, Massachusetts, fifty miles and a world away from Andover. Worcester, the second largest city in New England, was—and remains—an amalgam of tight-knit neighborhoods of WASPs, Jews, and Italian, Portuguese, Irish, and other immigrants. It was always a city that seemed on the precipice of becoming something grander than it was but never quite made it. Maybe the new airport—atop one of Worcester’s seven hills—would draw traffic away from Boston’s overcrowded Logan Airport and revitalize the city? Nope. Maybe the Centrum, the civic center built in the 1970s, would draw new and diverse forms of culture to Worcester? Nada. Maybe the shopping mall—the Galleria, complete with a curved glass roof similar to one in Milan—would draw people downtown? Not really. The big hope for Worcester these days is the arrival of the WooSox—the Boston Red Sox farm team that the city managed to lure away from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. We’ll see. Worcester was the kind of place that couldn’t even retain its best asset: the El Morocco, a tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant, at 73 Wall Street, started by immigrants from Syria, which served the best salads, shish kebab, and rice pilaf this side of Damascus. It got mobbed up, moved to a big, expensive new site at 100 Wall Street, and promptly went out of business. (The new building has since been torn down. Worcester.)
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