The Family (34 page)

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 week. 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.”

“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.”