Go East, Young Man
Child of privilege? Sure, but he left Andover and Yale as a regular guy.
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What Bush was interested in, at that stage, was football, girls, and beer. He got plenty of all three during his sophomore year, when he pledged at a fraternity called Delta Kappa Epsilon, better known as Deke, with Dieter, Johnson, and two other students they roomed with in one of Yale’s residential colleges. The fraternities served as a means to make friends with people from the other colleges. “They had separate parties—better parties,” Johnson remembers. “You had one meal a week over there. You had a bar. I think they probably violated all the liquor laws that Connecticut ever thought about having.” Some fraternities were havens for preppies; Deke was for athletes, wannabe athletes, and sports fans of all stripes. “There was lots of beer drinking and lots of television watching and lots of sports talk,” says Johnson. “It was a very manly existence.”
Bush was elected president of the Dekes the following year. Published reports have suggested that he oversaw controversial hazing rituals such as branding pledges with the Greek letter Delta, but members laugh at the idea. “The night you are inducted—Oh, Lord, it’s so stupid—they put a hood over you and take you around and try to scare you,” says Johnson. “They try to make you think they’re going to brand you, but it never happens.”
“Branding?” asks Alaska governor Tony Knowles, the man Bush named pledge master. “Are you serious?”
The full story is revealed by another Deke, Lanny J. Davis, who recently served as special counsel to Bill Clinton. Davis recalls that after being shown a glowing brand, blindfolded pledges were lightly burned with a blown-out match to spook them, but that no actual branding ever took place.
Bush’s experience as a Deke suggests he was more interested in playing than studying. “People didn’t think of George as an intellectual policy wonk or anything,” says Robert McCallum, a friend from another fraternity. “George spent a lot of time learning from other people. Those who were book-oriented would think he wasn’t a serious student, but he was a serious student of people.” Bush’s partying led him to get carried away at times—that December, for instance. “I’m not saying whether I and a couple of others had a few glasses of Christmas cheer, but we thought we needed a wreath for the Deke house,” he said recently. “And as we were liberating it, some of the local officials questioned us, and we were admonished.” The police booked him on a misdemeanor charge, which was later dropped. What about rumors of a photo that captured him dancing nude on top of a bar? “I don’t think there is one,” he said. “I’m too modest to have danced on a bar naked.” Deke also had a salutary effect on Bush, however, as it broadened his circle. Among those he became close to was Calvin Hill, who would later star as a running back for the Dallas Cowboys. “He was third-generation Yale,” Hill says. “I was first-generation Yale—first-generation college, for that matter. Yet nothing about him suggested he thought he was better than other people. I guess you’d say his mother and his father raised him right.”
During this period, Bush became romantically involved with a Rice University student named Cathryn Wolfman. “It was the pre-coed days, so if you were lucky, you’d see your girlfriend every other weekend,” says Betts. “She was around. I used to see her at Deke.” Over Christmas break Bush popped the question. “He came back from vacation and said, ‘I’m engaged,’” Johnson remembers. “It was only junior year, and for one of us to be engaged was just unbelievable.” Within a few months, though, they ended the relationship. Although the Houston Press speculated that he broke up with Wolfman because she was Jewish, she’s actually Episcopalian. “Once they postponed it, I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t get married,” Betts says. “It didn’t have anything to do with him or with her, it just had to do with being young.”
In the fall of his senior year Bush had his second brush with the authorities. He traveled to Princeton University for the latest installment in the schools’ football rivalry. Yale had not won a game against Princeton for many years, but that day, the Bulldogs managed to trounce the Tigers on their home turf. “I was leaving the field, and when I looked back, George was standing in the middle of the crossbars, helping to bring down the goalposts,” says classmate H. Rey Stroube III. The Princeton campus police quizzed the Yalies involved but brought no charges. “I was escorted to the campus police place, and the guy said, ‘Leave town,’” the governor said. “So I was once in Princeton, New Jersey, and haven’t been back since.”
That was also the year he joined Skull and Bones. Because members of the exclusive secret society are forbidden to discuss what goes on, a certain legend has grown up around the club. The truth is rather mundane: It’s a club of fifteen students who meet regularly to learn more about each other. Surprisingly, the main effect of Bush’s time in it appears to have been to further diversify his circle. “George, because of what we thought to be his patrician background, was a valuable asset,” says Ken Cohen, another member. “He gave us insights into a way of life to which we’d never been exposed. At the same time, he integrated seamlessly with people from all walks of life. There was none of this noblesse oblige baloney.” Other members included Donald Etra, an Orthodox Jew, and Muhammad Saleh, a Jordanian Arab. “It is not about exclusivity,” says McCallum, who was also a member, “although the concept is that you can only get to know a limited number of people extremely well. It’s a much less rewarding experience if the society has guys from the same background.”
Andover and Yale had plugged George the elder into the old-boy network, and they provided George W. with invaluable connections too. But they don’t appear to have rendered him out of touch—at least not in the way his political opponents have routinely suggested. Paradoxically, his free pass into the insular world of the East Coast establishment seems only to have rendered him more of a regular guy. Back in Texas, he frequently railed against “intellectual snobs” (“There’s a West Texas populist streak in me, and it irritates me when these people come out to Midland and look at my friends with just the utmost disdain,” he said in 1994). His own sense that he is “of the people” shaped his conservative philosophy. Perhaps it also blinded him to the extent to which the privileges he has enjoyed have made his life a bit easier. “I always felt that people on the East Coast tended to feel guilty about what they were given,” he said. “Like, ‘I’m rich; they’re poor.’ Or, ‘I went to Andover and got a great education, and they didn’t.’ I was never one to feel guilty. I feel lucky. People who feel guilty react like guilty people: ‘I will solve the problem for you.’ It’s being motivated toward largesse for the wrong reasons. Everybody has been given free will, and everybody has a chance to succeed. If someone has failed economically, that does not mean that the rest of us should be judged differently.”
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