While many other prominent Democrats are angular and reserved in their posture and their positions—Senator Kerry, he of the long, elegant suits and well-modulated speech, comes to mind—Dean cannot be anything but the exuberant, stocky ex-high school wrestling captain, a guy whose neck—what there is of it—strains over his collar. But the portrait of Dean as scrappy outsider is incomplete. Rather, he combines the sense of entitlement afforded by a childhood of extreme wealth with the moral certitude gained by his decision not to merely live off—or, for that matter, maximize—that wealth. Instead, Dean got a medical degree, which gave him confidence, a comfort in his own skin. In that sense—and in some others—Dean, who has been compared so often to George McGovern and Ralph Nader, is far more like ... George W. Bush.

Howard Dean is the firstborn son of the aforementioned Andree (who can trace her family back to Richard Maitland, born in Scotland circa 1234) and Howard Brush Dean Jr. Like his own father and grandfather, Dean's dad made a living—a very, very good living—on Wall Street, retiring as a top executive of Dean Witter Reynolds. His four sons grew up mostly in East Hampton, where in the mid-'50s the family built a house on Hook Pond, among the oldest-money addresses in the nation. The Deans—who were, of course, Republicans—belonged to the superexclusive Maidstone golf club, which for decades had no minority or Jewish members.

Howard III was born in 1948. He and his three younger brothers spent a great deal of time outdoors, which would later help Dean connect to voters in a rural state. (Today Dean's gubernatorial portrait in the Montpelier statehouse shows him clutching a canoe paddle—a rustic pose even for Vermont.) For a while, the boys shuttled among the big house in East Hampton, the Browning School in New York City and an apartment on Park Avenue, where Dean still stays when in New York City. But the parents felt that the boys needed even more time outside, so they sent them to St. George's in Middletown, R.I., a boarding school that today costs $30,000 a year and maintains its own 69-ft. sloop for student boating.

	DEAN'S STRAIGHT TALK CAN LURCH FROM ANGER TO HUMOR, FROM CONVICTION TO WAFFLE, IN QUICK SUCCESSION

Earlier this year Dean told the Nation that his favorite novel is Sometimes a Great Notion, by countercultural guru Ken Kesey. Dean now has a more politically genial list of favorites, including All the King's Men and Truman, but his fondness for the Kesey book is revealing, since one of its central relationships pits an outsize father against the son trying to live up to him.

Dean calls his father "a Gargantuan figure. As we say in politics, he took all the oxygen out of the room." Because he had had diphtheria, Howard Dean Jr. couldn't serve in World War II when he was in his 20s. But he wasn't content to stay home. So he worked for Pan Am Airways in Africa and then, in 1943, joined the China National Aviation Corp. CNAC flew some of the most crucial supply routes for Chinese and U.S. forces in Asia. Dean, an operations man, didn't fly, but he "was the best manager we ever had," says pilot Fletcher Hanks.

Three decades later, Dean's second-born son Charles also sought adventure in Asia. In 1974 Charlie was traveling with a friend and ended up in Laos. He had worked for the McGovern campaign two years before, and the Laos trip may have been a way for him to connect antiwar politics with the real lives of Southeast Asians. Or he may have been working for the CIA. (The agency won't discuss the rumor, and family members say they aren't sure.) Whatever the case, Charlie was killed around December 1974 by members of the Pathet Lao, the communist group that won a long civil war to control Laos. The family was devastated; Andree Dean says her husband "just would never discuss it." But her boys rallied around one another. To this day, Dean wears his brother's belt, a hippie-ish job with large metal eyelets that looks strange against Dean's usual pinstripes.

Charlie's death has been called the "defining crisis" in Dean's life, the impulse that focused him. But it's a little more complicated. Even before his brother's death, Dean had sought a world beyond the moneyed Atlantic coastline. As a senior at St. George's, Dean requested that Yale—where he enrolled in 1967, when Bush was beginning his senior year—pair him with black roommates to give him another view of the world. He got two African-American roommates and one from rural Pennsylvania. "I had known people of different kinds before," Dean says, "but I had never lived with people that were so different, and it was wonderful."

Though he says he "didn't do much protesting," Dean opposed the Vietnam War. So it was fortunate that officials at the U.S. Army garrison at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn gave him a deferment because of a minor back problem. Dean has an unfused vertebra that keeps him from running long distances and occasionally leads to discomfort. But after graduating from Yale in 1971, Dean—who didn't want to follow his friends to law school—spent a year skiing and bumming around Aspen, Colo. He hit the slopes, tried pot, washed dishes, poured concrete and drank impressive amounts of beer.

Being a burnout got old after a year, and Dean decided his life could take one of three paths. He could teach, as he had done for three months at a junior high school in inner-city New Haven, Conn., near Yale. He could be a doctor. Or he could take "the path of least resistance" and go to Wall Street. He quickly dismissed teaching as "too hard ... There were a lot of kids with enormous numbers of needs, and I couldn't meet them all." Medical school would require enrolling in difficult premed classes, since he had done little science at Yale. So he became a stockbroker.

"He liked Wall Street," says Andree Dean, "but he wasn't doing anything to help people." Howard had "always had a feeling for—I don't want to say the underdog, but he's always wanted to help people." Still, she was surprised to run into her son one day at Columbia, where she was getting her art degree. "He was secretly going to premed classes without telling us," she says, with a reminiscent smile. Dean was nervous when his parents found out. He describes his father as "a strict disciplinarian," and he was sure the old man would think leaving finance for medical school "was crazy. But he never said one word about it. I would have done it anyway, but it just would have been harder ... In some ways that was the best thing he ever did."

From then on, his life took a different path from what one might expect of a Dean or a Maitland. He chose Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, a school known for its hands-on, community-based approach to teaching medicine. It was at Einstein that Dean met Judith Steinberg, a studious Princeton grad from Roslyn, N.Y., a precinct of Long Island somewhat less tony than the ones Dean knew well. After a long courtship, he and Steinberg were married by a judge at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan on a winter night in 1981.

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