The Republicans

(5 of 12)

Bush, always on the go, was not remembered for much "dicking," the Andover term for those bull sessions that teenagers engage in when they begin to discover ideas. He remembers even fewer books from Yale than from Andover. When I talked to him about current books, he said, "I said, 'Barbara, now I'm going out with Jimmy Baker to the wilderness' ((their fishing trip during the Democratic convention)), and she said, 'You ought to do something. Don't take any papers -- you ought to read.' And I said ((shrugging)), 'Read? Oh, what am I gonna read?' And so she gave me Tom Wolfe's book, which I ((shudder)) -- too FAT! And I absolutely loved it. I'm almost at the end. I'm on page 500 and something; it is extraordinary." Perhaps it is best that Bush ended this desultory search for remembered book titles by confessing, "But I can't -- Garry, I don't read that much."

The most famous master of Bush's time, Arthur ("Doc") Darling, liked to say that fear was the basis of education, and he took pride in the number of students he flunked, as well as in the school's high rate of expulsions. The code of the school was that self-importance as a group depended on constant self-abasement of the individuals within the group. The privileged class, fearing its children will turn out spoiled, inflict such schools on them as effete cures. Surrogate parents are hired who will be less subject to favoritism in making their children "toe the mark." Further to enforce this general lesson, rich kids are often condemned to summer jobs of grueling if brief exposure to manual work. Bush's ordeal was work at a farm camp run by Coach DiClemente, who still marvels at the way Bush pitched into the most sordid aspects of his assignment -- like shoveling horse manure out of the barn, a task that may have prepared him better than he knew for later assignments.

From glory in war to glory at Yale was another easy step for Bush. He attended the school when God and Man (but not Woman) were regnant in the eyes of everyone but Bush's overlapping Bulldog, William Buckley. Like other veterans, they had undergraduating to catch up on. They were grown men for whom even the silly games of Skull and Bones were serious; in the club's sanctum in a windowless building on High Street, Bush went through the rituals of revealing the intimate secrets of his life and sexual history in a series of secret-society-style encounter sessions known as LH (life history) and CB (connubial bliss).