George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Gene Pulliam died, his last word was not "Rosebud" but "Goldwater," scratched onto a
pad just before he expired.
Old Gene was a firm opponent of racial integration. When Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated in 1968, Gene Pulliam sent a note to the editors of his papers in Indianapolis,
Indiana ordering them not to give the King tragedy "much exposure" because he
considered the civil rights leader a "rabble rouser." He instructed that the news of King's
death be summarized in as few words as possible and relegated to the bottom of the front
page.
The Bush-Quayle alliance thus reposed first of all on a shared premiss of racism.
Old man Pulliam also had a vendetta against the Kennedy family. During the 1968
primaries, he sent a memo to his editors instructing them: "Give Sen. [Eugene] McCarthy
full coverage, but this does not apply to a man named Kennedy." Pulliam was supporting
Tricky Dick. Bobby Kennedy also held the Pulliam chain in contempt. Once when he
came to Indianapolis he found that he was being refused a permit to hold a rally
downtown. When when of his supporters urged him to go ahead and have the rally
without the permit, Kennedy retorted that he couldn't think of a worse fate than having to
spend the night in the Marion County Jail and having nothing to read but the Indianapolis
Star, the Pulliam paper.
Dan Quayle had been a mediocre student at DePauw University, where he managed to
graduate with a 2.4 grade point average. He was a party boy, and received numerous Ds
in his political science major. Quayle lived at the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (the
same fraternity of which Bush had been a member at Yale.) During the fall of 1968, the
DKE house, according to one account, "unleashed a party without a house mother for the
first time and sponsored a frat party known as 'The Trip.'" According to some, this
actually was a party at which the hallucingoen LSD was dispensed. According to one
published account, a photograph of J. Danforth Quayle that appears in the DePauw
University yearbook has a caption which reads: "'The Trip' is a colorful psychedelic
journey into the wild sights and sounds produiced by LSD." [fn 40]
Quayle is known to the vast majority of the American public as a virtual cretin. Quayle is
the first representative of the post-war Baby Boom to advance to national elective office.
Unfortunately, he seems to exhibit some of the mental impairment that is known to
overtake long-term, habitual marijuana users.
Quayle was admitted by the University of Indiana Law School in violation of that
school's usual policy of rejecting all applicants with an academic average of less than 2.6.
He wanted to be a lawyer because he had heard that "lawyers make lots of money and do
little," as he told his fraternity brothers at De Pauw. As it turned out, the dean of
admissions at the University of Indiana Law School was one G. Kent Frandsen, who was
a Republican city judge in Lebanon, Indiana, a town where the Pulliam family controls
the local newspaper. He had always been endorsed by the Pulliam interests. Two years
later, Frandsen would officiate at the marriage of J. Danforth Quayle to Marilyn Tucker.