George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Japan surrendered in August. That fall, George and Barbara Bush moved to New Haven
where Bush entered Yale University. He and Barbara moved into an apartment at 37
Hillhouse Avenue, across the street from Yale President Charles Seymour.
College life was good to George, what he saw of it. A college career usually occupies
four years. But we know that George Bush is a rapidly moving man. Thus he was pleased
with the special arrangement made for veterans, by which Yale allowed him to get his
degree after attending classes for only two and a half years.
Bush and his friends remember it all fondly, as representatives of the Fashionable Set:
``[M]embers of [Bush's] class have since sighed with nostalgia for those days of the late
1940s.... Trolley cars still rumbled along the New Haven streets. On autumn afternoons
they would be crowded with students going out to football games at the Yale Bowl,
scattering pennies along the way and shouting `scramble' to the street kids diving for
them''[emphasis added].@s3
In 1947, Barbara gave birth to George W. Bush, the President's namesake.
By the time of his 1948 graduation, he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, an honor
traditionally associated with academic achievement. A great deal is known about George
Bush's career at Yale, except the part about books and studies. Unfortunately for those
who would wish to consider his intellectual accomplishment, everything about that has
been sealed shut and is top secret. The Yale administration says they have turned over to
the FBI custody of all of Bush's academic records, allegedly because the FBI needs such
access to check the resume@eacute; of important office holders.
From all available testimony, his mental life before college was anything but outstanding.
His campaign literature claims that, as a veteran, Bush was ``serious'' at Yale. But we
cannot check exactly how he achieved election to Phi Beta Kappa, in his abbreviated
college experience. Without top secret clearance, we cannot consult his test results, read
his essays, or learn much about his performance in class. We know that his father was a
trustee of the university, in charge of ``developmental'' fundraising. And his family
friends were in control of the U.S. secret services.
A great deal is known, however, about George Bush's status at Yale.
His fellow student John H. Chafee, later a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island and Secretary
of the Navy, declared: ``We didn't see much of him because he was married, but I guess
my first impression was that he was--and I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion--in the
inner set, the movers and shakers, the establishment. I don't mean he put on airs or
anything, but ... just everybody knew him.''
Chafee, like Bush, and Dan Quayle, was in the important national fraternity, Delta Kappa
Epsilon (DKE or the ``Dekes''). But Chafee says, ``I never remember seeing him there.
He wasn't one to hang around with the fellows.''@s4