I don’t know what the president was thinking, of course, when, with a characteristic frown and bite of the cheek, he noted that “evidently some of the world don’t view Saddam Hussein as a risk to peace. I respectfully disagree.” But I’ve covered Bush long enough to make an educated guess.
Here it is. Shaped by the Yale of the ’60s and by his own father’s career, the president views the demonstrators as weak-willed moral relativists, afraid to take on–as only faith-filled and freedom-loving leaders can–forces of evil on earth.
The president’s stark, black-and-white outlook stems from many sources, among them his Bible-centered faith, his success at quitting drinking “cold turkey,” his upbringing on the playgrounds of West Texas and the fierce sense of mission he found on the morning of 9/11/01.
But his view of the wider world was shaped as much by Yale as by anything else. The New Haven of the mid-’60s was divided into two cultural worlds, and Bush knew only one of them. He was a fraternity man–a fraternity leader, in fact–who had little sympathy or contact with the “other side” of the campus, the portion then helping to nurture a radical “Black Power” crusade and the potent antiwar student protests of the late Vietnam years.
Bush was a loyal son (his dad was a prowar member of Congress), a defender of the Old Social Order at Yale (though Bush himself was utterly without its preppy snobbery, racism or anti-Semitism) and a proud DKE who saw the increasingly dominant liberals on campus as pretentious hypocrites (because, he said, many “radicals” had trust funds). Above all, they were that species most despised by the frat house world: intellectual show-offs.
When, at the White House the other day, Bush got a TV glimpse of antiwar demonstrators in the streets and at their podiums, I’m sure he flashed back to the previous generation he’d seen. Here, on TV, was a global version of that Other Yale. The president was, and is, a stranger to those people on the march. More important, he is proud of that fact.
The antagonism dates from 1964, when Bush was a freshman. In November of that year, his father lost a U.S. Senate race in Texas to Ralph Yarborough, a famed liberal. After Election Day, Bush the Younger chanced to meet William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain who was on his way to becoming a leading opponent of the Vietnam War. Coffin exulted in Yarborough’s victory, declaring that Bush Senior had “lost to the better man.”
Bush wasn’t oblivious to social change. DKE was open to blacks and Jews, and the future president was aware of–and not afraid of–the thickening ethnic mix around him. Lanny Davis, a Yale friend (and Democratic political antagonist), tells a story that makes the point. A resident in their dorm was an immigrant from India. He wore weird outfits and was generally viewed as an exotic, even pathetic, character. One day in the dorm lounge, the outcast walked by a cluster that included Bush and some friends. “Why do they even let in somebody like that?” someone asked aloud. “It’s a waste of money trying to educate him.” Bush angrily turned on the questioner. “Don’t you ever say something like that in my presence again,” he snapped. “He’s got as much right to be here as you do.”
It would be nice to say that Bush, his cross-cultural curiosity awakened, became fast friends with the fellow–that he plunged into the study of the history of India, its cultures and religions, that he traveled to the subcontinent to see it all for himself. Of course it didn’t happen; Bush entered the White House one of the least-traveled presidents in modern history.
He wanted to be a gentleman, but that didn’t mean he really had to get to know the guy.
