The War of Wars

[Chiwas]

War Stories

PAST AS PROLOGUE: Iraq fills the headlines, but for President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry, Vietnam may be the crucible that matters more. How two sons of privilege confronted the conflict—and the ways those choices have colored their divergent paths


Paths of privilege: Subtle differences in circumstance led Bush (left) to the Texas Air National Guard and Kerry (right) to Vietnam

By Evan Thomas
Newsweek

Feb. 23 issue - John Kerry did not have to think all that hard about joining the military and going to Vietnam. He had doubts about the wisdom of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which was rapidly escalating during 1965-66, his senior year at Yale. But Yale leaders were expected to serve, as the school song went, "for God, for Country, and for Yale." His closest friends in Skull and Bones, the Yale senior society for the best and the brightest, were signing up. Fred Smith, who would go on to found Federal Express, was joining the Marines. So was Dick Pershing, grandson of World War I Gen. "Black Jack" Pershing. There wasn't a lot of anguished debate, recalls Kerry's fellow Bonesman David Thorne, who, like Kerry, joined the Navy. But, he added, "if it had been '68, we might have made a different decision."

What a difference two years makes: 1968 was the year George W. Bush graduated from Yale. By then, virtually no Yale graduates were going into the military, if they could possibly avoid it. The war and the counterculture it spawned had transformed Yale. Preppy boys in coat and tie were rapidly giving way to long hair and angry protesters. The prom was canceled for lack of interest; marijuana was replacing beer. A throwback, good-time frat brother, young Bush had little use for the antiwar movement. On the other hand, he didn't want to go to Vietnam. Draft deferments for graduate school were ending that spring of 1968. The Texas Air National Guard offered another way. "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada," Bush explained to The Dallas Morning News back in 1990. "So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

The two men were still fighting the Vietnam War last week. Kerry was defending himself from conservative radio talk-show hosts who accused him of siding with "Hanoi Jane" Fonda to undermine the war effort when he came home as an angry vet. The White House was showering reporters with documents attempting to show that Bush had not gone AWOL from the National Guard, as some Democrats allege. But flaps were mostly side-shows based on sketchy facts (Kerry barely met Fonda; Bush apparently did his time in the Guard, if a bit sporadically). The Vietnam era was critically important in the lives of both men. But the vastly different outcomes for the two men were the product of a subtle interplay of class and character and of small but critical differences in time and place.

It is a curiosity of the 2004 presidential race that both candidates, barring some major surprise, will be Yale graduates and members of Skull and Bones. Both Bush and Kerry are, by American standards, bluebloods with roots in old-money aristocracy. Yet the two men, so close in age and background (Bush is 58, Kerry is 60), stand on opposite sides of the ideological and cultural divide that splits America today. Kerry, urbane and liberal, is pure Blue State. Bush, with his cowboy twang and disdain for the Eastern elitist press, is the champion of the Red States. How did two sons of privilege come to represent such different worlds?

Preparing for Power

Despite their status as insiders, both Kerry and Bush saw themselves, at important moments, as outsiders. Their sense of rejection and isolation served as a powerful motivation. Kerry, in particular, was driven to show up his detractors, to excel no matter what others said about him.

Kerry's lineage, on his mother's side, includes some old New England names, including the Winthrop family, perhaps the purest of Brahmin stock. As a boy, Kerry played on the rolling greenswards of Winthrop estates outside Boston. His father, however, was a somewhat threadbare and gloomy Foreign Service officer who kept uncomfortable secrets. His own parents had been Jewish; they had changed their names from Kohn to Kerry before emigrating from Austria to America and converting to Roman Catholicism. Kerry's grandfather, in debt, had shot himself in a Boston hotel.

It is not clear how much of his family history Kerry knew. He claimed to be surprised when he was told the details by Boston Globe reporters just a few years ago. He was, in any case, a stiff and somewhat joyless boy when he arrived at St. Paul's, the most exclusive of the New England prep schools, in Concord, N.H., in 1957. "He was born old," says his one true friend at school, Danny Barbiero. Neither Barbiero, an Italian-American from New York's Long Island, nor Kerry fit in at St. Paul's. As a Catholic at an Episcopal church school, dominated by a huge Gothic chapel, Kerry had to take a cab into town to mass on Sunday. Barbiero recalls sitting with Kerry in the study of the school chaplain, painfully talking about what it was like "to be excluded by the in crowd."


'Born old:' Kerry was an unhappy outsider at St. Paul's

At St. Paul's, a "reg"—regular guy—would never show off his ambition. Kerry exuded desire to get ahead. His hero and model was John F. Kennedy. Most St. Paul's boys, echoing their Republican parents, regarded JFK as an Irish parvenu. Kerry was thrilled to court Janet Auchincloss, Jackie Kennedy's niece. He was even more excited to be invited to go sailing with his hero, President Kennedy himself, in Newport in 1962, the summer he graduated from St. Paul's. Kerry was teased by his schoolmates about his initials (JFK), but he wanted Kennedy's voice and accent and haircut, too.

George W. Bush was also an outsider when he arrived at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., from Houston, in 1961. He came as a 10th grader, a year later than most boys, and his Texas education left him another step behind. But Andover was a more democratic school than St. Paul's, and Bush had a quality prized by Andover boys of that era: sarcastic humor. Everyone had a nickname at Andover; Bush's was "Lip." Bush felt the pressure to live up to his father, who had been a great student-athlete at the school. Bush was neither. But he could capture an audience of jaded schoolboys. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK during the 2000 campaign, Bush recalled the moment he realized he had true political gifts: when he stood up at morning assembly at Andover to announce, with a series of japes and jokes and props, the formation of a stickball league. Bush even named the teams (like the Nads, so that fans could cheer, "Go Nads!"). Bush was the class cutup, but he was learning a style of leadership and cajolery—bestowing nicknames, mugging for the crowd, knowing how to tease but not too harshly—that he would use to disarm reporters and win over reluctant moneymen and legislators in later years.

Kerry was dead serious when he walked around the campus his first day at Yale with his St. Paul's friend and now freshman roommate, Barbiero. Kerry looked up at the gargoyles atop Harkness bell tower, totems to the qualities Yalies were supposed to strive for: Pen Wielding, Proficient Athlete, Tea-Drinking Socialite and Diligent Student. Kerry announced that he would be all four. At Yale Kerry was "the definition of a Big Man on Campus," recalls retired professor and Yale historian Gaddis Smith. He played soccer and JV hockey and ran the Yale Political Union. He was, inevitably, tapped by Skull and Bones.

Ostentatiously secret (its members were supposed to leave the room at the mere mention of its name), Skull and Bones claimed to be—and to a remarkable degree was—an incubator for future leaders. At the time, two Bonesmen were acting as architects of America's role in the Vietnam War. McGeorge Bundy, the national-security adviser, and his brother, Bill, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia, were pushing a policy of gradual escalation. Kerry happened to be rooming with their nephew Harvey Bundy. From time to time, on visits to New Haven, Conn., Bill Bundy would go to their dorm room to drink beer and talk. The boys had a duty to serve, the elder Bundy told Kerry and his roommates. Their country needed them. "It was pretty heady," Thorne recalls.

In his class-day oration in June 1966, Kerry criticized American intervention in Vietnam. But, Kerry emphasized, "we have not really lost the desire to serve," and no one recalls that the speech caused much of a stir. Kerry was regarded as sober and responsible by the faculty. When Yale made a promotional film, entitled "To Be a Man" (coeducation was still three years away), it showed Kerry earnestly discussing the meaning of commitment with a professor.

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