Bush’s troubled history with Yale stems largely from a longstanding grudge. He felt the school had snubbed his father by waiting until 1991 to award him an honorary degree. To make matters worse, the wife of Yale’s president at the time, Helen Whitney, and a small group of academics, had opposed giving Bush Sr. the degree at all. They disagreed with awarding an honorary degree to a sitting president-any sitting president. That distinction was lost on George W. What he remembers is Whitney refusing to have her photo taken with his father at a Yale reception.
On Monday, this President Bush returned to Yale for his honorary degree-and to bury the hatchet. “He was returning to an estranged family,” says Bush’s college pal, Roland Betts. “It’s hard to do. Of course Bush was nervous.” But if there was one guy more nervous than Bush, it was Betts-a Yale trustee who has been the biggest force behind Bush’s rapprochement with his alma mater. Betts brokered the peace talks between candidate Bush and Yale president Richard Levin when Bush’s less-than-stellar transcript leaked out of the Yale Bursar’s Office and into the pages of The New Yorker during the campaign. Levin must have called Bush a dozen times to make amends.
Last month, when The New Yorker, again, ran a short item saying that Bush snubbed an invitation to the university’s 300th birthday bash, Betts took to the phones to set the story straight. Betts insisted, but the president had a scheduling conflict: the Summit of the Americas. Bush had wanted to go and even tried to see if there was a trade meeting or two he could skip. Bush was already looking for a way back into the Yale family, especially since part of his own family was now a student there. Betts counseled Bush’s daughter Barbara through her decision to attend Yale last fall and her trepidation about becoming a fourth generation Bush Bulldog. Not surprisingly, it was Betts who was the driving force behind Bush’s honorary degree and commencement speech. “I was nervous for weeks,” Betts says.
He had reason to be. Bush is not a favorite son of Yale. He had lost the campuswide presidential election not just to Al Gore, but also to Ralph Nader. And Yale students protest something-anything-at every commencement. I know because I vaguely remember wearing something stuck to my mortarboard (was it a “Divest Now!” sticker?) when I graduated from the place. Yale professors are not docile either. About 200 (out of 3,300) faculty members signed a petition stating that Bush hadn’t done enough to merit the degree. They refused to attend the commencement.
As Bush looked out at the students holding yellow placards that read “Execute Justice, Not People” and “Conservation, Not Consumption” he got worried. Of course, this being Yale, the students were polite. They raised their placards mainly when there was applause. The placards themselves were not nasty and some also read “Make Yale Proud.” Bush probably couldn’t see the more sassy stickers that said “Got Arsenic?” or the Forestry School students clever smokestacks atop their mortarboards.
The president pondered last-minute changes to his speech. “Do you think they’ll listen?” Bush asked his friend Betts. At first, it didn’t seem they would. He was booed. Some students turned their backs on him in silence. That must have looked familiar. When he was a student, his classmates had pulled the same stunt on Lady Bird Johnson when she came to campus during the Vietnam War. When Bush opened his remarks by reflecting on receiving his degree 33 years ago, a heckler shouted out: “Just barely!”
Bush plowed ahead. He did exactly what he had done while he was a student at Yale: he won people over with his self-effacing humor. “To the C students,” he said, “I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.” He looked at the Yale president and smirked: “I want to give credit where credit is due. I want the entire world to know this-everything I know about the spoken word, I learned right here at Yale.” Even some of the protestors had to laugh. His light-hearted approach seemed to deflate most of the tension by the end. “He defanged them,” Betts says.
By Monday night, Betts was back home in Manhattan, where he developed and runs Chelsea Piers, a sports complex beside the Hudson River, when the phone rang. It was the nasally voice of the White House operator telling him he had a call from the president. As many times as Betts gets that call, his first instinct is to think it’s a friend playing a practical joke on him. But it was really Bush, who had been whisked off right after the commencement speech and hadn’t had a chance to tell his friend how he felt it went. “He was sky high,” Betts said. Bush told him he “had a great time.”
Most importantly to Bush, his daughter Barbara was liking his alma mater and her privacy was being respected-mostly. (A student newspaper recently got a scolding for reporting that she had ditched her Secret Service detail on the Connecticut Turnpike). “He is reliving his time at Yale through her,” Betts says. “I don’t care what anyone says, he loved Yale when he was there.” And at least for sometime afterward. He sang Yale fight songs to his twin daughters. They must have thought “Boola Boola” was a lullaby.
During the campaign, the story emerged that Bush balked at Yale’s intellectual elitism. But most of that is revisionist history-partly fueled by “the Grudge” and partly by image-making. Being from Midland, Texas, was more saleable for Bush than being from Yale (not to mention Andover and Harvard Business School). The idea that Bush was out of step with Yale, says classmate and writer Ron Rosenbaum, “is retrospective spin to make him look like a Texas sh-kicker against the pointy heads.”
Bush fit right in the Class of 1968-even in his apathy about Vietnam. While other college campuses were literally going up in smoke over the war, Yale was more tepid in its protests. There were “teach-ins” on Beinecke Plaza in the late 1960s. It wasn’t until the 1970s, after Bush graduated, that Bobby Seale’s Black Panther trial really shook the campus. Before then, Yale was more caught up in Motown than Molotov cocktails. “Yale both reflected the extraordinary nature of the times but also somewhat insulated us from them,” Douglas Eakley wrote in the 25th-reunion class book.
Ties and coats were still required at dinner. The school didn’t go co-ed until 1969. Tap night for the secret societies made the front page of The New York Times. “We were the last beer class, the last all-male class, the last traditional Yale class,” says Clay Johnson, one of Bush’s Yale roommates, and currently his director of personnel at the White House. “What does the song say? “The shortest, gladdest years of life?” Well, they really were for George.”
On the way back to Washington from Yale on Monday, Lanny Davis-Clinton’s former aide and also a ‘68er-hitched a ride on Air Force One. He praised Bush for finding the right tone in his speech. “It never surprises me that he can reach out to the people even who disagree with him,” Davis said.
In his speech, Bush said that he was never sure what was meant by the term “Yale man.” But whether he has always liked it or not, he is a fairly typical one. So were all the other Yale men and women holding up signs Monday. And both should be proud that the Yale tradition of protest was honored.
