Bush and his friends remember it all fondly, as representatives of the Fashionable Set:
`[M]embers of [Bush's] class have since sighed with nostalgia for those days of the late 1940s.... Trolley cars still rumbled along the New Haven streets. On autumn afternoons they would be crowded with students going out to football games at the Yale Bowl, scattering pennies along the way and shoutingscramble' to the street kids diving for
them''[emphasis added].@s3
In 1947, Barbara gave birth to George W. Bush, the President's namesake.
By the time of his 1948 graduation, he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, an honor
traditionally associated with academic achievement. A great deal is known about George
Bush's career at Yale, except the part about books and studies. Unfortunately for those
who would wish to consider his intellectual accomplishment, everything about that has
been sealed shut and is top secret. The Yale administration says they have turned over to
the FBI custody of all of Bush's academic records, allegedly because the FBI needs such
access to check the resume@eacute; of important office holders.
From all available testimony, his mental life before college was anything but outstanding.
His campaign literature claims that, as a veteran, Bush was serious'' at Yale. But we cannot check exactly how he achieved election to Phi Beta Kappa, in his abbreviated college experience. Without top secret clearance, we cannot consult his test results, read his essays, or learn much about his performance in class. We know that his father was a trustee of the university, in charge ofdevelopmental'' fundraising. And his family
friends were in control of the U.S. secret services.
A great deal is known, however, about George Bush's status at Yale.
His fellow student John H. Chafee, later a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island and Secretary
of the Navy, declared: ``We didn't see much of him because he was married, but I guess
my first impression was that he was--and I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion--in the
inner set, the movers and shakers, the establishment. I don't mean he put on airs or
anything, but ... just everybody knew him.''
Chafee, like Bush, and Dan Quayle, was in the important national fraternity, Delta Kappa
Epsilon (DKE or the Dekes''). But Chafee says,I never remember seeing him there.
He wasn't one to hang around with the fellows.''@s4
The Tomb
George Bush, in fact, passed his most important days and nights at Yale in the strange
companionship of the senior-year Skull and Bones Society.@s5
Out of those few who were chosen for Bones membership, George was the last one to be
notified of his selection--this honor is traditionally reserved for the highest of the high
and mighty.