"Jeb Bush shaped by troubled Phillips Academy years; Possible presidential candidate had tumultuous four years at Andover school" by Michael Kranish, Globe Staff February 01, 2015
This Bush almost ran aground in those first, formative prep school days. He bore little resemblance to his father, a star on many fronts at Andover, and might have been an even worse student than brother George. Classmates said he smoked a notable amount of pot — as many did — and sometimes bullied smaller students.
Then he would make a horrible president.
Resolutely apolitical despite his lineage, he refused to join the Progressive Andover Republicans club and often declined even to participate in informal bull sessions with classmates. In a tumultuous season in American life, he seemed to his peers strangely detached and indifferent.
“He was just in a bit of a different world,” said Phil Sylvester, who said he was a Bush roommate. While other students “were constantly arguing about politics and particularly Vietnam, he just wasn’t interested, he didn’t participate, he didn’t care.”
Meanwhile, his grades were so poor that he was in danger of being expelled, which would have been a huge embarrassment to his father, a member of Congress and of the school’s board of trustees.
Jeb Bush, in an interview for this story, recalled it as one of the most difficult times of his life, while acknowledging that he made it harder by initially breaking a series of rules.
“I drank alcohol and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover,” Bush said, both of which could have led to expulsion. “It was pretty common.” He said he had no recollection of bullying and said he was surprised to be perceived that way by some.
Amazing how the elite can commit crimes and no problem.
If the school’s motto proved true — that “The End Depends on the Beginning” — then things weren’t beginning well for Jeb Bush; certainly it wasn’t the path one would expect of a future GOP presidential candidate, as he seems increasingly likely to be.
It would take four years on the campus 24 miles north of Boston for Bush to straighten out. Indeed, for Bush, the story of Andover is how it ended — and it ended very well. But the school was, and is, among the nation’s elite. Established in 1778, it is the nation’s oldest incorporated boarding school. Generations of the nation’s wealthy, as well as those of more common stock, have sent their children to the school.
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Bullying recalled
Their target was a short classmate whom they taunted — sort of a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation, at least as I saw it.”
In that classic novel, assigned to generations of high school students, a group of students is marooned on an island and soon fight among themselves over how they will be governed, descending into tribalism and savagery.
As Gregg Hamilton, who was at Pemberton Cottage with Bush, explained the analogy, “it was a hostile environment in this sense of everybody being typecast. Bush would have been a squad leader, someone setting the agenda, dictating who would eat at the share table and who would eat the scraps, master of the domain. He was physically imposing and just bad enough to be accepted or feared by everybody.”
What are they raising there, Nazis?
A 2001 Vanity Fair profile mentioned in passing that a classmate considered Bush a bully, but these recollections appear to be the first detailed accounting of Bush’s actions.
Other students remember Bush as intimidating, if not exactly a bully. David Cuthell, who thinks well of Bush today, remembers that Bush approached him one day in the school cafeteria, angry and ready to do some damage.
“He sort of lifted me up in the air and I think was going to squash a grapefruit in my face,” said Cuthell, who said he was around 115 pounds at the time. Then a friend who was even stronger than Bush came to the rescue, lifting Bush away from Cuthell.
Sylvester said “the thing that really struck me about Jeb more than anyone I ever met, is he understood that he was from the world that really counted and the rest of us weren’t. It really was quite a waste of his time to engage us. This was kind of his family high school. There wasn’t anything he could do to be kicked out so he was relaxed about rules, doing the work. This was just his family’s place.”
Bush has been blunt, if elliptical, in describing his Andover years, once telling the Miami Herald in an oft-repeated quote, “I was a cynical little turd at a cynical school.”
Asked in the interview what he meant, Bush said, “It was a difficult time for me. I was 14 when I left Houston to go to Andover and it was a very cynical time. The school for all sorts of reasons in the early ’70s was cynical, not the same way it is now. It was a very Darwinian place.”
Only in retrospect would he see that his academic and social struggles would pay off in the long run, proving to himself that he could survive what he called “one of the hardest high schools in the country.”
Students in revolt
As Bush struggled with his studies, and struggled to find his niche, the winds of revolution roiled the campus. In 1969, the midst of his 10th-grade year, students rebelled both against the school administration and the Nixon administration.
At first the fight was over the length of hair, smoking cigarettes, and marijuana. John M. Kemper, a West Point graduate who had long served as Andover’s headmaster, was expected to expel students who were caught smoking pot once or cigarettes on a second offense. It escalated into a conflict over war and peace.
Protests were being held against the Vietnam War, with posters of giant fists thrusting upward appearing on campus. As on many campuses, an antiestablishment agenda was promoted by some students; Bush wanted nothing to do with it. Bush’s father, of course, embodied the establishment; he was pro-war and a leading voice of the Nixon administration....
The student body had shown its anger, too. Students wanted more freedom and more interaction with the girls at nearby Abbot Academy. The student agitation against school administrators came to a head, in more ways than one, when headmaster Kemper declared that he would take on the job of hair “czar,” deciding whose hair would be forcibly trimmed....
Around the same time, a New York Times reporter visited the campus, finding that 90 percent of seniors used marijuana at least once a week, and that townspeople clashed with groups of antiwar students they considered “communists.”
These and other stories prompted parents to inundate the school administration with complaints, raising fears about what was happening to their boys — concerns that certainly reached the ear of trustee Poppy Bush, who checked in regularly on Jeb.
By the time Bush reached his third year, in the fall of 1969, his father was running for the US Senate on a prowar platform even as antiwar protests grew on campus.
By the spring of that academic year, students across the country were rallying against US bombing in Cambodia, including a protest at Kent State in which four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard.
At Andover, hundreds of students massed at Samuel Phillips Hall, hoisting placards with the word “Strike.” As students marched on the campus wearing black armbands, administrators canceled regular classes, hoping to cool tensions.
Campus leaders tried to make it a teachable moment, inviting students to a series of discussions about the history of Vietnam and US involvement. To this day, some students say those sessions were among the most memorable of their time at Andover.
Bush, meanwhile, was missing in action. It was an awkward time. His father had visited the troops in Vietnam and strongly backed the policy of President Richard M. Nixon. But Bush wanted nothing to do with politics. Finch, a leader of the protests, said Bush “was as far away from the political activism from that time as if he was standing on the moon.”
Indeed, Bush wanted to get away from campus. In the fall of 1970, he enrolled in a class called Man and Society, which featured seminars on “poverty, conflicts (violence) and power structure,” according to an account in the school newspaper.
One of the main readings was “Beyond the Melting Pot,” by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which argued that many immigrant and other ethnic groups closely held their group identity, contrary to the idea that everyone would meld into the proverbial American stew.
At the conclusion of the course, students were given the option of spending the winter trimester either in South Boston or central Mexico. Bush chose the warmer locale.
It was a decision that would change his life.
It's where he would meet his wife and fall in love with the “the only girl he had ever dated.”
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The campus during Bush’s senior year seemed on two tracks: sports and antiwar protests. Much attention was lavished on the football team, which was on its way to the New England prep school championship.
(The team included a center named Bill Belichick, now head coach of the New England Patriots. Belichick and his Andover classmate, Patriots director of football research Ernie Adams, declined to comment as they tried to steer their team to the NFL championship.)
Bush, meanwhile, was a Big Man on Campus in more ways than one. He was captain of the tennis team, towering over his teammates and leading them to a 7-2 record in his senior year. “Captain Jeb Bush had a fine season” against “strong competition,” wrote a reporter for The Phillipian.
But sports faded into the background as new rounds of protests erupted on campus. Tension escalated further in February 1971, when a makeshift bomb was found in the Memorial Bell Tower. The 5-inch by 12-inch device included a cannister wired to a board, but officials determined the bombmakers “didn’t quite know what they were doing” and it was incapable of exploding.
Amid news of this unnerving event, students took buses to Boston and Washington to participate in antiwar rallies, where they listened to John Kerry, the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
More Kerry-Bush connections.
Bush’s father, who had lost his Senate bid, was appointed US ambassador to the United Nations, where he would continue to argue for Nixon’s war policies — a fact that merited a front-page story in The Phillipian, which noted parenthetically that Jeb Bush was a senior.
Meanwhile, Bush, even as he faced the potential of being drafted, wasn’t interested in participating in protest or politics....
Bush today considers Andover the defining educational experience of his life. The student who once nearly flunked out said he made the honor roll in the final trimester of his senior year....
Bush’s transformation surprised some of those whose initial perception had been negative.
“He matured,” said Hamilton, the classmate who initially viewed Bush in the harsh context of “Lord of the Flies.” “He had gone from being an antiestablishment force to being a member of an establishment dynasty. He really blossomed.”
Deferments limited
As Bush imagined a new life with Columba, the potential grew that he might have to go to Vietnam. Bush’s brother, George, had enlisted in the National Guard and never saw military action.
For years, students entering college could count on getting a deferment from military service until they graduated.
But after complaints that too many college students were able to avoid serving, Nixon signed a law that changed the Selective Service policy so that students entering college in the fall of 1971 — which would include Bush — could not count on getting an educational deferment from the draft. They could be plucked out of college as soon as an academic term was over.
A few weeks after graduation, on July 16, 1971, Bush filled out an index card on which he registered for the draft. (A copy of the card was obtained by the Globe under the Freedom of Information Act.) On the line requesting a contact, he listed his father, who continued to serve as Nixon’s United Nations ambassador: “Amb. George H. W. Bush, Waldorf Towers . . . New York City.”
Bush received a draft number of 26 on a calendar-based scale that went to 365, earning him a “1A” classification that meant he probably would have been drafted if the war continued at full pace.
But he avoided such a fate because the war was winding down — a fact for which some credit was due those of his generation who participated in protests that he had refused to join.
Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, once told United Press International that Jeb had considered declaring himself a conscientious objector, adding that the family would have backed such a decision.
Bush said in the interview that he was “ambivalent” about the Vietnam War, and stood by a previous comment that he was “probably against” it, a view that he noted was shared by many of his peers. But he said he never considered being a conscientious objector.
“I registered. . . . I would have gone, I got the physical. I was declared 1A, and the draft was eliminated,” Bush said. Asked how voters considering him as a potential commander-in-chief might view his less-than-enthusiastic view of serving in Vietnam, Bush urged that it be seen in the context of that war and that time. “I was 18,” he said. “I’m 61 years old now.”
Unlike his brother George, who was a member of the National Guard from 1968 to 1974, Bush didn’t volunteer for any kind of military service. Nor did Bush follow his father and brother’s footsteps by going to Yale....
He left Phillips Academy far behind.
It took years for Bush to return, at least in any manner that drew attention....
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Well, now that Romney is out who is left to check Bush?
"Christie returns to familiar city that isn’t so familiar with him" by Michael Barbaro, New York Times February 02, 2015
LONDON — The Republican governor arrived Sunday for a three-day tour of the United Kingdom to build up his foreign policy credentials and gain exposure to the leaders of the American ally ahead of a possible presidential campaign in 2016.
His official purpose was to promote New Jersey trade, but it was also a test of Chris Christie’s skill on the world stage, but at the frigid Emirates Stadium on Sunday, fans generally seemed unaware of Christie’s presence in the stands, not to mention his very existence....
Not much of an endorsement.
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Anyone else?
