George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

many of them Episcopalians. And Andover was, in certain strange ways, the most
exclusive of them all.
A 1980 campaign biography prepared by Bush's own staff concedes that `` it was to New
England that they returned to be educated at select schools that produce leaders with a
patrician or aristocratic stamp--adjectives, incidentally, which cause a collective wince
among the Bushes.... At the close of the 1930s ... these schools ... brought the famous
`old-boy networks' to the peak of their power. ''@s1@s2
These American institutions have been consciously modeled on England's elite private
schools (confusingly called `` public '' schools because they were open to all English boys
with sufficient money). The philosophy inculcated into the son of a British Lord Admiral
or South African police chief, was to be imbibed by sons of the American republic.
George made some decisive moral choices about himself in these first years away from
home. The institution which guided these choices, and helped shape the peculiar
obsessions of the 41st President, was a pit of Anglophile aristocratic racialism when
George Bush came on the scene.
`` Andover was ... less dedicated to `elitism' than some [schools].... There were even a
couple of blacks in the classes, tokens of course, but this at a time when a black student at
almost any other Northeastern prep school would have been unthinkable. ''@s1@s3
Andover had a vaunted `` tradition, '' intermingled with the proud bloodlines of its
students and alumni, that was supposed to reach back to the school's founding in 1778.
But a closer examination reveals this `` tradition '' to be a fraud. It is part of a larger,
highly significant historical fallacy perpetrated by the Anglo-Americans--and curiously
stressed by Bush's agents in foreign countries.
Thomas Cochran, a partner of the J.P. Morgan banking firm, donated considerable sums
to construct swanky new Andover buildings in the 1920s. Among these were George
Washington Hall and Paul Revere Hall, named for leaders of the American Revolution
against the British Empire. These and similar `` patriotic '' trappings, with the alumni's
old school-affiliated genealogies, might seem to indicate an unbroken line of racial
imperialists like Cochran and his circle, reaching back to the heroes of the Revolution!
Let us briefly tour Andover's history, and then ponder whether General Washington
would want to be identified with Poppy Bush's school.
Thirty years after Samuel Phillips founded the Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, the
quiet little school became embroiled in a violent controversy. On one side were certain
diehard pro-British families, known as Boston Brahmins, who had prospered in the ship
transportation of rum and black slaves. They had regained power in Boston since their
allies had lost the 1775-83 American Revolution.