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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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During George W. Bush's time on the national stage, people both inside and outside the Yale commuity have tried to reconcile the popular caricature of the president as an intellectual lightweight with the fact that he holds a degree from Yale (not to mention Harvard). Writers in our pages and elsewhere have dissected Bush’s Yale experience in search of clues about him and about the institution in his time.
“I don't remember any protests at Yale, any big stuff. … I didn't pay attention. I guess there were some people who paid attention, some of whom you've obviously been talking to. But I didn't want to be friends with these people who felt superior.”
[Classmate Roland Betts says,] “I don't care what anyone says, he loved Yale when he was there.” And at least for sometime afterward. He sang Yale fight songs to his twin daughters. They must have thought “Boola Boola” was a lullaby. … “We were the last beer class, the last all-male class, the last traditional Yale class,” says Clay Johnson, one of Bush’s Yale roommates, and currently his director of personnel at the White House. “What does the song say? “The shortest, gladdest years of life?” Well, they really were for George.”
Powerful as the external currents of change were, they hardly engulfed the more traditional Yale of which George W. Bush was so much a part. It was a Yale still more firmly represented by his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE), than it was by the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.).
My recollections of those times differ. During Bush’s years at Yale, the University was in the early stages of making the transition from a somewhat insular finishing school of higher learning to a creative, urban University that questioned many of the core premises of society. Yale deserves credit for its role in being the first Ivy League college to actively engage the issues of civil rights and race, as well as the first to have an organized movement challenging the Vietnam War (Americans for the Reappraisal of Far Eastern Policy).
Bush never felt he belonged at Yale.… A C student…, Bush later said he “didn't learn a damn thing” at Yale. The reason was that he didn't try.… Outside of class, Bush staggered in his father’s footsteps. Where George H. W. strived and excelled, George W. lazed and flopped.
I don't suggest that Bush entered the Guard to avoid Vietnam service, but I do suggest that in the late 1960s, there was huge demand for scarce positions in the National Guard. It was a time when people did not get into the Guard by remaining “above the fray” and letting things happen; it took very good luck or very hard work on someone’s part. I would thus like to have heard “the rest of the story” about the future commander-in-chief's becoming a Guardsman.
More notorious is the statement which [chaplain William Sloane] Coffin reportedly made to George W. Bush after his father lost an election for U.S. senator from Texas: “Frankly, the better man won.” This was a disrespectful remark that seared the younger Bush and may have set him more determinedly upon a conservative political course.
I knew Bill Coffin and doubt he said that. According to Marc D. Charney’s April 13 obituary article in the New York Times, Coffin himself “disputed the anecdote.”
Look, when you’re coming from Texas to some of these schools up there, there’s a—you know, I can’t point to a particular person, but there’s that sense of, you know: “Well, maybe these boys from Texas aren't quite bright enough to be here. I guess it’s geographic distribution that got him here.”
There are many smart people, intellectually smart as well as street smart, who don't have the energy or motivation at times to act smart, but that doesn’t mean they’re not smart. There are times when George coasted through Yale courses or through exams or seemed overly facetious. But don't mistake that for not being intellectually acute. My memory of George—and I've no reason to say nice things about him, because I hope he loses—is that he was an astute observer of people and had an incredible talent for getting along with people.
Cartoonist Garry Trudeau '70 said he thinks a little-known fact about President George W. Bush '68’s past—that … as former president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter at Yale, Bush defended the fraternity’s practice of branding its pledges with a red-hot coat hanger—deserves more national attention. … “[T]his is part of a larger picture of this administration’s belief that the ends justify the means,” Trudeau said. “I don't think [Bush] gives much thought to what it means to torture people or how it makes us look in the eyes of the world.”
I can’t understand how the authors of the Friday article can assume that Yale has to be so haughty not to allow this type of pledging to go on at Yale.
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