Point of View
The latest issue of the Yale Alumni magazine has an article on Yalies who have made names for themselves on the national political scene, a long and greatly varied list that includes not only Samuel Tilden (who lost the stolen election of 1876 to Rutherford B. Hayes), William Howard Taft, Sargent Shriver, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman, and Dick Cheney (dropout), but also Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, and Pat Robertson!
I had thought, of course, that George W. Bush would be rated as the least prepossessing of this group in his undergraduate years, but was surprised to learn that Kerry ("too preoccupied with getting ahead") also had, to some extent, wasted his time.
"It's evident," said Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate and a member of the alumni magazine's board of directors, "that Kerry was a 'good student,' but in the damning sense of one who pulls good grades by avoiding difficult courses and subjects."
Bush (two years behind Kerry, in the class of 1968) was said by Weisberg to have arrived "at a moment when what Nicholas Lemann calls the 'episcopacy' was giving way to a meritocracy. . . . He found that simply doing the done thing was no longer sufficient. A C student [and a poli sci major, like Kerry], Bush later said he 'didn't learn a damn thing' at Yale. The reason was that he didn't try."
Still, I'll give my nod to Kerry, inasmuch as he was a champion debater who won prizes for oratory and was the president of the Political Union, while Bush's claim to campus fame lay in the fact that he was president of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Deke), the jock fraternity.
Both were tapped by the revered senior secret society, Skull and Bones, housed in a forbidding brown windowless tomb, making this presidential race almost incestuous. (By the way, should they debate, ancient protocol requires that both must leave the room should someone utter their secret society's name.)
It was said that Bush would have preferred "the more party-oriented Scroll and Key [whose creative pantheon includes Cole Porter, Garry Trudeau, Austin Pendleton, Robert Grossman, Peter Beard, and the Firesign Theater's Phil Proctor], "but joined Bones, where no alcohol was served, under family pressure."
Good riddance, say I.
Footnote: My father, who thought Yale was overrated, on hearing I'd been tapped by Scroll and Key, in 1962, said that my fortune was made.
It was, alas, one of the few times I remember him being wrong.
Jack Graves
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